In Arkansas, a Vision of Single-Party Democracy

Even some conservatives are starting to feel alienated by the partisan priorities of Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the GOP-controlled state legislature.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, governor of Arkansas, delivers the Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address in Little Rock, Arkansas, February 7, 2023. (Photo by AL DRAGO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

What happens when one party becomes dominant in a liberal democratic environment? We’ve experienced over a decade of such dominance from Republicans in my home state of Arkansas, where Democrats have been relegated to just 18 out of 100 seats in the state House and six of 35 in the state Senate—a drastic change in fortune from 2010, when every county in the state voted to re-elect incumbent Democratic Governor Mike Beebe. Chris Jones—you might not recognize that name; he was the state Democrats’ candidate for governor last fall—pulled in a little over a third of the vote in the most recent gubernatorial election, which Sarah Huckabee Sanders won by almost 28 points. Almost half the state’s registered voters did not bother to vote.

As is the case in many “red” states, Arkansas has an uncompetitive political environment, and Republicans have had virtually uncontested control of state government since 2012, when they secured their first in a yet-unbroken chain of governing trifectas. Democrats obviously enjoy similarly consolidated power in coastal strongholds like New York and Washington. But Arkansas is the state I know best, and it provides a clear example of the poisonous culture that develops among the state’s political leadership when the opposing party has no meaningful power to hold them to account.

To be clear, democratic politics have always had a rough side—public scrapping, name-calling, and other unbecoming expressions of intense disagreement over policy—but what we’re seeing in the Natural State exceeds the boundaries of political fair play and ends up in much darker territory.

Consider the tenor and priorities of Huckabee Sanders’s administration. The day she took office, she used an executive order to require her education secretary to scour the state’s schools of any trace of “indoctrination and critical race theory.” Three days later, she used another executive order to ban the word “Latinx” from state documents—not exactly a high-impact act, but a flashy lib-triggering one in the eyes of her constituents. She recently ordered the state’s national guard troops to deploy to the southern border to address an alleged enforcement crisis arising from “the failed policies of the Biden Administration.”

Apart from the official work of her office, she has also paid attention to larger cultural flashpoints and turned them into opportunities to build her political brand while raising money. In April, following the controversy over Bud Light airing a commercial featuring a trans woman, Huckabee Sanders released an anti-trans ad parodying the company’s “real men of genius” commercials and selling “real women of politics” can coolers to benefit Sarah for Governor, her official campaign organization.

To be sure, Huckabee Sanders has also pushed forward more substantial legislation that has taken up classic Republican priorities like tax cuts, tougher crime measures, and education reform that favors private and charter schools. But even these more typical partisan measures show the pernicious effects of party’s uncontested control of state government. Those effects are most apparent in her administration’s way of dealing with the critics of the bills.

The LEARNS Act is an education reform package that Huckabee Sanders’s administration has touted as the signature achievement of its first 100 days. The lengthy bill introduces extensive changes to Arkansas’s education system such as pay raises for teachers, new degree tracks emphasizing job training, and an expected ban on CRT instruction, but the features of the bill that have drawn the most attention are provisions related to public and private education in the state: It makes public education monies available to fund private school tuition and introduces an accountability system wherein public schools that receive low grades can avoid direct takeover by the state by permitting themselves to be subject to de facto takeovers by charter schools. One Democratic state rep said the LEARNS Act could result in “a systematic dismantling of the public school system in Arkansas.”

For these and other reasons, the act has encountered substantial bipartisan pushback since its speedy passage through the state legislature this spring. Resistance to the bill has been led by education professionals and by residents of both larger liberal cities like Little Rock and the small, rural Arkansas towns that will struggle with the combined financial pressures of mandated support for private school vouchers and a requirement to raise the base pay for all teachers to $50,000. Objectors received a boost on May 26 when a circuit judge put a hold on the law in advance of a June 20 hearing.

In a tweet posted a day after the ruling that blocked LEARNS, Huckabee Sanders slammed the “far left” circuit court judge for trying to “silence parents, allow CRT and indoctrination, slash teacher pay, and trap kids in failing schools.” In an accompanying video, the governor characterized objectors to the bill as a cabal of radical leftists determined to attack “our teachers, our families . . . and our students’ futures.” The circuit judge’s hold has since been lifted by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

The episode speaks to a belligerence that has become customary in the posture Huckabee Sanders’s administration has taken towards its in-state critics more generally. The governor’s communications team has followed her lead by waging constant online fights with Arkansans who are critical of the administration’s policies. They’ve attacked reporting from the Associated Press as “liberal media spin” and “propaganda,” and they deem coverage of Sanders’s anti-trans trolling “activism.”

But more troublingly, when the Huckabee Sanders comms team isn’t impugning the motives and character of the press and the administration’s critics, they are pointing to the 2022 scoreboard. One spokesperson attacked critics of LEARNS by labeling them “political hacks” and asserting, “Arkansas elected Governor Sanders by a 2-1 majority.” In response to anger over her anti-trans parody ad, the same spokesperson declared that “the vast majority of Arkansans agree with the ad’s message.”

Will Saletan characterizes this move as “democracy-washing,” in which “democracy . . . cleanse[s] the authoritarian.” Just as Senator Lindsey Graham justified his craven capitulation to MAGA as an acceptance of the will of his overwhelmingly pro-Trump Republican constituents, the Huckabee Sanders administration uses its electoral margin to provide itself with a limitless mandate not subject to normal accountability or debate. As social scientist Craig Calhoun writes, “Simple majoritarianism is a degenerate form of democracy and a problem for republican ideals.” It is degenerate in part because the only form of democracy worthy of the name is one that protects pluralism.

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Huckabee Sanders did not introduce this style of governing in Arkansas, to be clear; she inherited an aggressive, belligerent state legislature from former Governor Asa Hutchinson, whose resistance to aspects of state lawmakers’ heavy-handed agenda earned him their contempt. His successor’s priorities have more closely aligned her with the legislature, making the state GOP’s governing trifecta a newly efficient machine.

But just as Huckabee Sanders’s touted electoral mandate doesn’t justify freedom from accountability or criticism, it also can’t cover over the disconnect between the Republican-dominated state government and the voters who put that government in power. As political scientist Christopher Williams notes, this disconnect is apparent in both specific issue areas and in the fact that while the percentage of self-identified conservatives has remained fairly consistent over the past decade, the state’s government has changed a great deal, shifting more and more to the right. In 2021, the 93rd General Assembly ended its session with a double-digit net negative approval rating.

What lever can the state’s Republican voters pull to change things if they’re not happy with this status quo? Public dissatisfaction does not seem to have a chastening effect on our lawmakers. Ensconced in supermajorities, Republican members of both chambers have demonstrated a growing contempt for public accountability and an imperious attitude toward the lawmaking process.

For example, my state has led the nation in pro-gun legislation since Uvalde despite the fact that Arkansans—while conservative, yes, and against too much gun control—are not supportive of further loosening gun regulations: only a little more than 10 percent favor looser restrictions.

While conservative critics of state Republican politics are typically ignored, critics from the opposite side of the aisle can expect to be punished for their dissent. Back in 2021, Chris Attig, a parent of a trans child, testified against a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors in the state. When Attig overran the allotted two-minute speaking time by 30 seconds, continuing even after the mic was cut, State Rep. Jack Ladyman asked Capitol Police to intervene. They forcibly removed Attig, who was then briefly jailed and charged with disorderly conduct. Earlier, speakers in support of the bill had been given up to 40 minutes each to testify. Then-Governor Hutchinson vetoed the bill, but was overridden by the legislature.

While Arkansas lawmakers are now working with a gubernatorial administration that shares its goals of prosecuting culture-war causes, especially those that target the state’s small and beleaguered LGBTQ population, there may be a ceiling to the legislature’s aspirations. On Tuesday, the state law banning gender-affirming care for minors was struck down by a federal judge in Little Rock. The state’s attorney general has announced his intent to appeal the decision, and the case could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

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The dynamics I’ve described in Arkansas politics are working themselves out in other states and jurisdictions with similarly homogenous politics. Reflecting on these trends helps explain the abuses of minority members of red state legislatures in Tennessee, Nebraska, and Montana. Single-party democracy has been a major abetting factor in cases of corruption in blue states like New York and Illinois and at the municipal level in Democrat-run cities like Chicago. Wherever one party becomes dominant, major problems with abuse and corruption are waiting in the wings.

The problem has been exacerbated by gerrymandering, which in Wisconsin has given rise to a state legislature whose partisan makeup simply does not match that of the population it serves. But to a large degree, state- and district-level political homogeneity is a natural result of geographic self-sorting, a process that has over the past quarter century cut the number of competitive U.S. House districts in half. Little prevents these emerging supermajorities from engaging in corruption, advancing cruel policies that drive away political minorities, or simply atrophying into unresponsive and lazy governments.

Functioning democracies are made up of majorities, minorities, and pluralities. A person’s place in these groups may shift and change, but their basic sense of belonging in the larger American political community never should. What concerns me about the continuing growth of single-party democracy across the country is the implication that certain states or places exist “for” only some of their residents rather than all of them—and that belonging more fundamentally to a larger American political community is a wrecked ideal, and only competing factions remain. Single-party democracy in Arkansas gives a sense for the destination at the end of that road.

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Correction (June 22, 4 p.m. EDT): An earlier version of this piece conflated charter schools and private schools. These references have been clarified.