The phrase suggests that democracy needn’t mean the same thing everywhere in the United States. That is, a state may choose to liberalize democracy as defined by the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to include rights not enshrined in those documents. Recall that same-sex marriage was actually a right granted by specific states to same-sex couples before the SCOTUS heard Obergefell vs Hodges and decided that such a right could flow from the then established (now questioned) right to privacy.
Of course, the notion of laboratory includes trying things that could, in fact, restrict the extant rights of individuals or groups provided that those restrictions didn’t run afoul of the SCOTUS’ interpretation of the Constitution and its amendments.
Watching the kind of attacks that Florida, Texas and other Red States have launched against minority populations and marginalized groups, the notion of laboratory is less Manhattan Project and more Frankenstein Castle. Rather than expanding rights, these laboratories have seemed hellbent on restricting them. And, with the SCOTUS turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to such things, these states are emerging as Laboratories of Autocracy. Soon some will degenerate into Laboratories of Fascism, I predict.
Just as the right to bodily autonomy has been surrendered to the states by the high court, so too can other rights such as the rights to same-sex and inter-racial marriage. All of these flow from the right to privacy which now seems questionable to the SCOTUS.
It all feels to me like an inevitable spiral towards a less perfect union – a dystopia. Let’s bring back literacy tests and poll taxes! Let’s disenfranchise anyone with a traffic ticket or a citation for jaywalking. We should codify the death penalty for a miscarriage, why not? Let’s pass as many restrictions as possible on individual freedom and make them enforceable by bounty hunting. Let’s use Texas as the model dystopia; it’s a laboratory, after all.
And while we are at it, let’s re-establish debtors’ prisons, indentured servitude, child labor, the seven-day work week, and slavery (perhaps just for undocumented persons at first until we get the hang of it). This is the South, after all.
I bet Christian Nationalists are salivating as I type.