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governments reported “engaging in nearly
twice as many civic acts compared to pri-
vate-sector workers,” Hertel-Fernandez
writes; after it was enacted, participation
fell by nearly a third. This hurt the Demo-
cratic Party at the voting booth, enabling
the GOP to further consolidate its hold
on power.S
o what is to be done? Professional-
izing state legislatures—turning them
into full-time governmental bodies
filled with well-compensated law-
makers and adequate staffs—could
reduce the need for the troika’s offerings.
Democrats also need to go back to basics.
Conservatives haven’t just been smart about
building a state-level policy infrastructure;
they’ve also concentrated on winning elec-
tions and flipping legislatures, which has
paid off for them, given that legislatures
under full Republican control are more
than twice as likely to enact ALEC’s model
legislation.
But the key, Hertel-Fernandez writes,
is “investing in the creation of cross-state
networks that can counter the troika on its
own terrain.” Just as ALEC was founded
in the 1970s in response to the National
Education Association’s success, progres-
sives need to mount their own coordinated,
sustained counterattack. Hertel-Fernandez
argues that the left already has more re-
sources available than the right; the prob-
lem is that it so rarely directs them to state-
level campaigns. “Between large center-left
foundations, unions, and wealthy individu-
al donors,” he writes, “all the liberal groups
had a pool of resources just under $4 bil-
lion” in 2014, compared with $2 billion
total for conservative groups. More of that
$4 billion needs to be put to work at the
state level.
With the 2020 elections looming, State
Capture serves as a powerful warning that
Democrats will have to do more than
just win the White House again. The
party did make some progress in the 2018
midterms—seizing control of seven state
legislative chambers, flipping seven gov-
ernorships, and winning the trifecta in 14
states versus its earlier eight—but there is
much more work to be done.
“If progressives are going to build sus-
tained cross-state power, then they need to
pay attention to the states even when they
have control of the federal government,”
Hertel-Fernandez argues. “Otherwise, they
will be forced to start all over again the next
time that they inevitably lose a chamber of
Congress or the White House.” QA
few months back, I sat with my moth-
er in a hotel room and asked her to
tell me about how her family had
left Vietnam. I knew only the barest
outlines of their passage—the airlift
out of the country, the refugee camps in
the Philippines, their move to Arkansas
and then Washington. I knew small details,
taken out of context—the beautiful silk
jacket with the broken zipper that turned
out to be a discarded polyester lining, the
first time she and her sisters ate soft pretzels.But I didn’t know the larger story of how
they’d come here or what they’d left behind.
I knew the distances she had traveled but
had no map for my own mother’s emo-
tional experience—settled and assimilated in
America, we hardly ever spoke of what had
brought her here in the first place.
These gaps in a family story are the
secrets that one is initiated into only when
much older. The Unpassing, Chia-Chia Lin’s
debut novel, is concerned with those empty
spaces. Narrated by Gavin, a slight, nervous
10-year-old, the second-eldest child in a
Taiwanese immigrant family living in rural
Alaska, The Unpassing illuminates these un-
spoken, shadowy moments of childhood.
Tiny, dreamlike events, like conversationsLarissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn.
Her essays have appeared in The Paris Review,
Guernica, Bookforum, Art in America, and
elsewhere.FAMILY MATTERS
by LARISSA PHAM
Chia-Chia Lin’s dreamlike immigrant novel