What does Steve Marshall leave behind?

Last week, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall lost his bid to go to the U.S. Senate. He finished over 70,000 votes behind U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, R-Enterprise, and about 5,000 votes behind former Navy SEAL Jared Hudson.

So a person who for nearly 10 years has occupied one of the state’s most prominent political offices lost to a relative newcomer. It’s even more notable because Marshall spent much of that decade trying to be the perfect politician for right-wing media. 

Which may explain his record.

Believe me, I tried to find positive things there. There are a handful of consumer settlements, like a $60 million agreement with Terminix back in 2020. His office fought to maintain former Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard’s conviction on felony charges, though that’s tempered by former corruption prosecutor Matt Hart’s departure in 2018.

But Marshall spent much of his time seemingly focused on the fringes of his party. He attacked gender-affirming care for transgender youth. He intervened in a lawsuit to make it harder for New Yorkers to protect their children from measles. And in 2022, he refused to call Joe Biden the duly elected president of the United States.

His record on issues in the state? Marshall joined the U.S. Department of Justice’s dubious prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center, but as far as I can tell, he kept aloof from a U.S. Department of Labor lawsuit alleging child labor violations in Alabama’s automotive industry.  He threatened to prosecute people helping Alabamians seeking abortion care in other states.

Marshall didn’t treat Alabama’s prison crisis with the seriousness it requires. Despite appalling reports of physical and sexual assault in men’s correctional facilities, he rejected a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020. That closed off a method that had worked with women’s prisons. And it left the state open to a federal lawsuit, which swiftly followed (from President Donald Trump’s DOJ) and continues today.

In 2023, he intervened to effectively free a former Montgomery police officer sentenced to 14 years in prison for killing 59-year-old Greg Gunn in 2016. His announcement made a perfunctory acknowledgement of the pain felt by Gunn’s family.

We could go on. All attorneys general are grandstanders to one degree or another. But it’s rare to see grandstanding that’s almost wholly about politics, devoid of any benefit to the public.

And it’s hard to see how Marshall’s time in office aimed at anything but his political ambitions. He chased every conservative cause; he attacked every person identified as an enemy by right-wing media. Marshall never paused, never pushed back, never risked crossing the narrative. He conformed to what the GOP voter, as shaped by conservative media, says they want from their leaders.

And what did that get him? Third place.

Because aggressive conformity is the baseline for Alabama Republicans now.

Just look at Marshall’s opponents. Moore and Hudson’s platforms are little more than paranoia and trite conservative truisms, so vague that one could conclude that neither Moore nor Hudson knows anything specific about the state they want to represent.

But Marshall offered nothing different. His platform was pro-gun; pro-Trump; anti-abortion rights and anti-transgender rights. Indistinguishable from that of any other Republican.

Meanwhile, Moore had the backing of Trump and a strong regional base in the Wiregrass, an advantage in any Republican primary. And in a year when Republican voters seemed unhappy with incumbents, Hudson could better claim the outsider mantle. One can’t say that breaking away from conservative expectations would have yielded a better result for Marshall. But conforming to them meant he couldn’t distinguish himself.

There’s a ruthless, Sith-like quality to Alabama politics. For those of you who haven’t invested hundreds of hours in the “Knights of the Old Republic” video games: The Sith are Darth Vader’s people. They operate as a hypercharged Ayn Randian society in which the only value is power. If you have it, you can do what you want to those who are powerless.

All too often in Alabama, power leads to pain. In this just-concluded primary season, it was hard to find any major Republican candidate who wasn’t campaigning against the existence of some group. Most pledged to use public resources to harm one segment of the public or another. And usually to win applause from some right-wing platform.

But when the only value is power, everything becomes a target. Every venue is a battlefield. And when all you do is attack and parry, you can’t build anything. You can’t stop to lend someone a hand. Or lay the foundation for a better day.

Marshall used power the way Alabama’s system demands. And as he walks off the stage, he leaves nothing except a sheaf of angry press releases, missed opportunities and pain.

He wasn’t the first to go this way. He won’t be the last. The people in the jobs change, but they get swept into a system with no sense of the common good, where everyone is trying to dominate someone else. Where a person can spend a decade lashing out at the world without ever leaving a mark.