Book Review: David Pepper’s "Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines"
Most Americans lack the time to look beyond what the national media are covering. David Pepper’s book Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines focuses on the statehouses, revealing how much Americans are missing in local politics and state government, and how these matters influence national trends.
The book starts by explaining the famous phrase “laboratories of democracy,” coined by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. It was meant to express an optimistic view of federalism: one state might try out a new public policy, and other states could assess its results and decide whether to do the same. But Pepper flips this notion on its head, showing how the laboratories can lead to bad experiments – especially when corrupt and problematic local figures pursue harmful ideas that affect national policies.
Pepper is a political veteran who has served in elected positions, run for statewide office in Ohio, and recently finished serving as chairman of Ohio’s Democratic Party. He walks the reader through his experiences and shows how the political nuances of Ohio are relevant to the issues that people see nationally. Regardless of whether one agrees with his political leanings, Pepper asks provocative questions about the disjuncture between state and federal politics.
One point with national implication: the “Republican trifecta.” Across the country, states that elect Republicans to control both state chambers and the governorship tend to enact similar conservative agendas. Pepper reasons that national conservative groups are more likely to gain compliance from state officials when the trifecta is in place. He argues that because Republicans failed to repeat their 2016 success in 2020, conservative leaders are pursuing measures to restrict access to the ballot box and draw district boundaries that heavily favor Republican candidates.
To counter these efforts, Pepper recommends that Democrats adopt a three-tiered approach. Nationally, Democrats and their allies ought to provide protections for voters by passing a national voting rights bill like H.R. 1/S. 1, which Democrats have been trying to enact since Joe Biden was elected president. On the state level, Democrats need to be engaged in every race, in every state. Because state legislatures have certain powers over elections – specifically, the power to govern “times, places and manner of holding elections” – Republican-controlled legislatures will continue problematic election policies until defeated, he says. Finally, Pepper calls for greater activism, whether via political protests, voter-registration efforts, or the like.
These are the policy prescriptions of a seasoned Democrat politician and strategist, to be sure – but readers should respect the depth of reflection and personal insight Pepper brings to this book. Much of Republicans’ success over the last decade has come from the emphasis given to state and local elections. If you’re a Democrat, you should want the party to listen to Pepper’s advice on achieving greater success at the state level. If you’re a Republican, you might still appreciate how Pepper demonstrates the importance of state and local elections, a major blind spot in establishment media’s coverage of politics.
One limitation of the book is Pepper’s reluctance to show Democrats engaging in unscrupulous policymaking. He says that Ohio has Republicans to thank for corruption, gerrymandering, and entrenched interests from problematic industries, and goes to great lengths to prove the point. And though he points out the poisonous effects of gerrymandering in Democrat-dominated Illinois, Rhode Island, New York, and California, Pepper could have done more with these examples to demonstrate how both sides misuse power.
Another problem: Pepper attributes much of Republicans’ electoral success in 2016 to voting policies that suppressed voter turnout, particularly among members of the Obama coalition. But 2020 brought record turnout nationwide. In Ohio, about 400,000 more voters came out. With this increased turnout, Donald Trump received a greater share of the vote than 2016 and won Ohio by a similar margin as 2016. Election law is an insufficient explanation for the political reality of Ohio – not to mention that of Iowa and Missouri, and even Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of which shifted Republican in 2016 and 2020, as compared with previous cycles. To suggest otherwise is not so different from the behavior of some Republicans who claim that Trump lost Georgia and Arizona solely because of election policies.
Pepper’s faith that these problems can be remedied by passing H.R. 1 / S.1 legislation is somewhat naïve, since he fails to consider the corollary: if Democrats can pass national rules on voting, so can Republicans. Who can forget how Democrats repealed part of the filibuster for judicial nominees in 2013, only to see Republicans take the next step in 2017, repealing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees?
These shortcomings, however, are outweighed by the breadth of Pepper’s insights, his probing look at the inner workings of state and local politics, and the sincerity of his concern for American democracy. It’s a pleasure to read a book that pays close, thoughtful attention to critical issues often ignored by national media.
Todd Carney is a writer based in Washington, DC. The views in this piece are his alone and do not reflect the views of his employer.
