The right is bankrolled by self-interested one-percenters making long-term investments; the left, by one-percenters with "moral whims"

Meaghan Winter is the author of All Politics Is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States, a new book that analyzes how Democrats lost control of the vast majority of US state legislatures and governorships, why this is a crisis, and what to do about it next.

Winter makes a pretty compelling case for state parties as crucial to national progressive politics: "When state Democratic Parties are weak, they cant block assaults on abortion rights, or voting rights, or collective bargaining rights. They cant serve as talent incubators for future members of Congress, and that, in turn, weakens the national party."

But more important is her analysis of how the Republican project to hijack the states -- through gerrymandering, voter suppression and wedge issues -- came about, and why the Democrats have struggled to counter it.

In an interview with Sarah Jones in New York Magazine, Winter says that the GOP takeover was financed by deep-pocketed one-percenters making shrewd, self-interested calculations about how their investments would pay off, and that this drove them to sustain their funding, year after year, to create long-term projects with skilled, coordinated leaders who were able to court (and frighten) a base of turkeys-voting-for-Christmas poor people who would support rich peoples' further enrichment.

By contrast, one-percenters who fund the Democrats are acting out of a sense of noblesse oblige, or "moral whims," and they are thus dilettantes whose funding is both erratic and arbitrary, and therefore unable to create and sustain those strong movements. Read the rest