How Authoritarians Took Over the GOP

Introduction

Donald Trump and Trumpism are the culmination of a decades-long shift in the Republican Party away from the constitutional principles conservatives share with most Americans to the authoritarianism embraced by radicals within the party. It’s been a transformation driven by a strategy that prioritized partisan conflict over collaborative government and courted an angry, fearful populism, aided by a news media that reported, but mostly failed to heed, the warnings from inside the GOP.

Following the nearly unprecedented period of good feelings, patriotism, and relative unity between the parties that came after World War II, the shift from bipartisanship to extreme partisanship has been a radical one. For many Americans, the period of political and social advancement from the New Deal to the Great Society, withdrawal from Vietnam, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency seemed to assure a progressive future. Even the ascent of Ronald Reagan, supply side economics, and a push for market-based solutions to society’s problems seemed normal amidst the expected swings of the political pendulum. The productive bipartisanship that continued for much of the 1980s blinded many in politics and the news media to the larger threat as democratic norms began to fall.

The bond that unites Americans around the idea of democracy has always been a fragile one. Starting with the compromise on slavery in our Constitution, tensions between citizens holding different worldviews have lingered at or near the surface of our politics. For the most part, the aspiration to live in a nation of freedoms ruled by popularly determined laws has held the country together. But to borrow from Judge Learned Hand, it’s not the laws and constitutions that make democracy strong – it’s when liberty lies strong in the hearts of men and women. In those moments, power is more easily shared. When one party or the other feels it has lost influence, the sense of power that comes with liberty ebbs. This is when our democracy is most fragile and our union most vulnerable.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

Our current crisis dates to when Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) ran for president in 1964 on a platform that rejected the good government policies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a two-term Republican president. Goldwater favored a conservatism that went well beyond concern for fiscal responsibility. Conservatives like Goldwater objected to the expansion of the federal government and the tax revenue it needed to support the Democrats’ social welfare programs – programs that were expanded by Eisenhower Republicans. Instead, Goldwater favored smaller government, emphasizing states rights and the role of business in lifting American prosperity. Goldwater’s overwhelming loss and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives – and perceived liberal favoritism by the news media – angered and frustrated conservatives at their apparent exclusion from policymaking and the national narrative.

Years later, in 1971, at the request of the US Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell, soon to be nominated to the Supreme Court, proposed a strategy to combat what he said was a broad attack on the American economic system. As a corporate lawyer familiar with the federal government’s efforts to implement new laws protecting the environment, workers, and consumers, Powell proposed an equally broad response that included but went far beyond marching an army of lobbyists into Washington. He recommended the establishment of counterparts to each facet of liberal culture – think tanks, academic curriculum, and media – that would propound ideas and perspectives more consistent with the conservative interests of the business community. He also called for an aggressive effort to place conservative judges in the federal judiciary.

By 1982, conservatives had built a considerable intellectual foundation that closely resembled Powell’s blueprint. The Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and other organizations embodied the recommendations outlined by Powell and served as the catalyst for the conservative movement.

In a more significant development, conservatives in the GOP brought together forces – extreme wealth represented by big business and those who profited from it, religious fervor supplied by Christian fundamentalists, and the Dixiecrats’ racist legacy of slavery and Jim Crow – that gave the movement its political impetus and elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980. The Reagan coalition, as it is often referred to, introduced into mainstream politics three passionate groups whose righteousness was tapped over time to produce a steadily mounting assault on American democracy.

Most significantly, two years before Reagan’s victory, candidate-for-Congress Newt Gingrich (R-GA) declared war, not just on Democrats but on, in his view, the mild-mannered middle-class Republicans who dominated his party. His election to the House of Representatives introduced a nastiness to the conduct of politics that defied the norms of the times and attracted the attention of the news media. Gingrich aggressively courted this attention and the influence it brought him. He rose swiftly up the ranks of the Republican Party. By the early ‘90s, he had unified the party behind a narrative in which Republicans were patriots and Democrats were not, a false but persistent storyline that would divide the nation into red and blue armies of voters.

With the media treating this color war as a captivating story framed within the norms of our two-party system, the populist anger it aroused remained mostly invisible to the general public. Most political observers, including many in the news media, failed to heed the warnings of a deepening fracture within the Republican Party.

By the time Donald Trump ran for office in 2016, our democracy had begun to buckle under assault from the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Senate Majority Leader in the last two years of Barack Obama’s administration who packed the federal courts with conservative-minded judges by ignoring the norms of the judicial nominating process. Trump’s presidency, marked by racist tropes, fawning over foreign dictators, and his refusal to accept the peaceful transfer of power – predictably fascist in nature – further emboldened many on the far right to speak their minds and act without fear of reprisals. A surprising number of these Americans seem prepared to discard the Constitution and accept autocratic rule.

Contrary to commonly reported views among political observers, the assault on our democracy did not begin with Donald Trump, nor will it end with him.

The timelines that follow detail this steady transformation of America’s conservative party to one that supports radical anti-American ideas that were once deemed unimaginable by all who believe that to be pro-American and pro-democracy were the same thing.

Yet today, the Republican Party finds itself entertaining some of the same unsettling nativist and authoritarian impulses that characterized Europe throughout the 20th century. These ideals are antithetical to what it means to be a Republican, and what it means to be American.

— from Defending Democracy Together, which describes itself as an “advocacy organization created by lifelong conservatives and Republicans”

Timeline: The Rise of Authoritarians in the GOP

Foundation for Culture Change (1971 - 1982)

Lewis Powell wrote a memo for the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 that would set the country on a new path that favored big business and policies around fiscal conservatism. He decried the absence of conservative viewpoints in the country’s cultural centers and called for conservatives to aggressively pursue positions on college campuses and in the media, establish conservative think tanks, and target the judiciary for placement of conservative judges.

By 1982, a network of wealthy businessmen and conservative thinkers had created the first of many new organizations that would embody Powell’s most important ideas. The media machine that he understood was necessary to reach the public evolved soon after, but the messages it carried went far beyond the business-friendly brand of conservatism that he promoted and the standards of civil discourse and accuracy that he advocated. The cultural shift that Powell’s memo started on behalf of constitutionally-minded conservatives in the Republican Party eventually slipped from their control.

Still, for a brief time, his master class in capturing political power led conservatives to the White House in 1980 and control of Congress in 1994.

The Blueprint: Powell’s Memo
1971

Lewis Powell intended his 1971 memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System“, to be a strategy for the business community to assert itself more in the country’s intellectual and political life. What began as a response to the perceived overreach of federal regulations became instead a blueprint for culture change that favored resistance to the federal government and long term investment in changing the political direction of the country.

Within a decade of the memo’s release, the number of companies with public affairs offices in Washington had increased from 100 to more than 500 while the number of companies with registered lobbyists had risen from 175 to almost 2500. While assembling this army of policy warriors gave the business community the means to respond to further progressive policy proposals, Powell did not believe that uncoordinated activities by individual corporations could affect the kind of change he sought.

He wrote, “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

In particular, he wanted to change the liberal underpinnings that permeated American academics, art, media, AND its politics – the cultural stew that produced the kinds of regulations being promulgated in defense of consumers, workers, and the environment. For Powell, it was not enough to simply argue against such progressive policies that in his view misleadingly pitted business against community and rich against poor. He believed that a network of scholars and respected expert thinkers representing conservative views could and should redefine the common ground that those progressive policies aimed to protect.

He also believed it vital to target the judicial system for the appointment of justices and judges whose legal training was shaped by conservative views. As Powell wrote, “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” He cited the ACLU as a liberal entity that had experience promoting the appointment of judges in this manner and wanted to see a similarly equipped conservative organization take up the cause on behalf of business.

Finally, he recognized that “the entire program”, as he phrased it, required an active and aggressive media presence and the utmost care in brand management. Powell understood that long-term, lasting change required appealing to the hearts and minds of the public at large. He advised that all channels of communication had “to meet the most exacting standards of accuracy and professional excellence” so that the views they advocated would be met with “respect for their level of public responsibility and scholarship”.

1971

The Blueprint: Powell’s Memo

Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, "Attack on American Free Enterprise System", began as a response to the perceived overreach of federal regulations and “liberal society” and became a blueprint for culture change that favored resistance to the federal government and long term investment in changing the cultural and political direction of the country.

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New Conservatism: The Heritage Foundation
1973

The Heritage Foundation quickly became one of the leaders of conservative intellectual thought. President Reagan adopted its Mandate for Leadership as his administration’s operating manual, implementing nearly 60% of its policy recommendations. Four decades later, The Atlantic’s Molly Ball credited Heritage with turning Reagan’s Republican Party into “a hotbed of intellectual activity”.

Heritage launched with support from three key individuals. Richard Mellon Scaife, founder of “an informal network of influential, die-hard American conservatives determined” to save a country they thought was corrupt and in decline, was an early funder; his network included Powell. Another important funder, Joseph Coors, listed as one of Heritage’s founders, was familiar with Powell’s memo. Paul Weyrich, another founder, was a principle architect of the new conservatism and the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Heritage provided the intellectual justification for Reagan’s supply-side economics, which emphasized tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy as a means of stimulating investment and economic growth. Other Reagan-era policies that came out of Heritage included the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), enterprise zones for redeveloping inner cities, and cuts in staffing at several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency.

As Ball noted in The Atlantic, Heritage’s influence continued with passage of a welfare reform bill following the GOP’s takeover of Congress in 1994. The market-based individual mandate that expanded health insurance coverage, signed into law by Massachusetts’ Republican Governor Mitt Romney in 2006, also originated with Heritage.

1973

New Conservatism: The Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation quickly became one of the leaders of conservative intellectual thought. President Reagan adopted its Mandate for Leadership as his administration’s operating manual, implementing nearly 60% of its policy recommendations. Four decades later, The Atlantic’s Molly Ball credited Heritage with turning Reagan’s Republican Party into “a hotbed of intellectual activity”.

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Model Legislation for Faith and Profit: ALEC
1973

Founded in 1973 to promote conservative positions on social issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) had by the early 1990s partnered with corporate America to become, in the words of Newt Gingrich, “the most effective organization” for promoting conservatism and federalism. It functions primarily as a source of model legislation promoting GOP policies at the state level.

ALEC was first established in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation who is often also credited with coining the term “moral majority”. Through ALEC, he sought to promote conservative positions on social issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. By the early 1990s, the group had partnered with corporate America to become, in the words of Newt Gingrich, “the most effective organization” for promoting conservatism and federalism. The Center for Public Integrity called it “the nation’s best-known ‘model’-bill factory”. ALEC provides legislators in all 50 states and the US Congress with fill-in-the-blank legislation promoting a broad range of conservative and anti-democracy policies.

Among more than 800 laws documented in a 2011 investigation of ALEC by the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC promoted laws that made it more difficult for low income, elderly, people of color, and students to vote; opposed regulation of greenhouse gas emissions by the Environmental Protection Agency; and supported changes to the tax code that favored the wealthy and large corporations.

In a more recent report, USA Today, The Arizona Republic, and the Center for Public Integrity investigated ALEC’s output from 2010 through 2018. Investigators found that more than 2,900 bills based on ALEC models were introduced and 600 of them became law.

ALEC’s current model policies touch on issues relating to amending the Constitution and certifying teachers, among many others. One entitled “A Next-Generation Tax and Expenditure Limitation Act” recommends imposing spending limits while making it harder to enact tax increases.

1973

Model Legislation for Faith and Profit: ALEC

Founded in 1973 to promote conservative positions on social issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) had by the early 1990s partnered with corporate America to become, in the words of Newt Gingrich, “the most effective organization” for promoting conservatism and federalism. It functions primarily as a source of model legislation promoting GOP policies at the state level.

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Libertarian Cornerstone: Cato Institute
1977

The Cato Institute was founded “to originate, disseminate, and advance solutions based on the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.” For co-founder Charles Koch, Cato became a cornerstone in a network of think tanks and academic centers that he’s funded in the last four decades to promote those goals.

Among Koch’s other more prominent network investments: the Institute for Humane Studies and the Mercatus Center, both organizations started by others that eventually received majority funding from the Koch family foundations and moved to the George Mason University campus in northern Virginia in the mid-1980s.

In one of its first policy publications, Cato advocated for privatizing social security, which would be a significant step toward the limited government to which it aspired. The Mercatus Center supplied the George W. Bush administration with 14 of the 23 government regulations that it targeted for elimination or modification in 2001. The Institute for Humane Studies seeks to assist “policy entrepreneurs” in finding their most effective path in implementing social change, be it via a think tank, politics, academia, or in business.

1977

Libertarian Cornerstone: Cato Institute

The Cato Institute was founded “to originate, disseminate, and advance solutions based on the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.” For co-founder Charles Koch, Cato became a cornerstone in a network of think tanks and academic centers that he’s funded in the last four decades to promote those goals.

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Training and Messaging: GOPAC
1978

GOPAC is a Republican political action committee originally created to recruit and fund candidates at the state and local levels in an effort to build the party into a majority party. It later became the central force in training generations of Republican candidates and promoting disciplined and unified Republican messaging campaigns. GOPAC took on the coordinating role that Powell had urged on the Chamber of Commerce.

The Republican Party created GOPAC to help elect more Republicans to local, state, and national government. A decade after its founding, under the chairmanship of Rep. Newt Gingrich (GA), GOPAC became the centerpiece of the party’s efforts to educate and train new candidates for office. Gingrich implemented a comprehensive program that included training tapes, brochures on how to “speak like Newt” , seminars, and grassroots organizing. These efforts culminated in the Gingrich-led Contract With America and Republican Revolution of 1994 that gave the party control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Gingrich was then elected Speaker of the House.

1978

Training and Messaging: GOPAC

Following the 1978 midterm elections, Governor Pete du Pont of Delaware led the establishment of GOPAC, a centerpiece of Republican efforts to win more seats and build a Republican majority in local, state, and national government. GOPAC built a farm system of aggressive campaign-savvy candidates accustomed to top-down messaging and became the premier training ground for the next generations of Republican candidates.

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Media and Campus Footprint: Collegiate Network
1980

The Collegiate Network supported the establishment of conservative newspapers on college campuses through awarding grants and mentoring. Its mission was to call attention through those newspapers to conservative views and to expose the liberal bias implicit in much of campus academic and political thought.

The Collegiate Network of conservative campus newspapers was launched by the Institute for Educational Affairs, itself founded in 1978 by conservatives William E. Simon and Irving Kristol. The IEA’s first official member campus publication was The Dartmouth Review, which published its first edition in June 1980. The newspaper’s capacity to provoke and inflame the established thinking on campus quickly earned it national notoriety and inspired conservatives on other campuses to start their own newspapers along the same model. The Network included at least 70 campuses at its peak.

Alumni of the network include media celebrities Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Laura Ingraham, and political commentators Rich Lowry (National Review) and Jamie Weinstein (The Daily Caller).

In 1990, the IEA merged with the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, a right-facing public policy organization started in 1988. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute took over the Collegiate Network in 1995. ISI’s mission is to create a broad campus community of conservatives so that no one student should “feel isolated or attacked for questioning progressive orthodoxy and the ever-narrowing range of debate on campus.”

1980

Media and Campus Footprint: Collegiate Network

The Collegiate Network supported the establishment of conservative newspapers on college campuses through awarding grants and mentoring. Its mission was to call attention through those newspapers to conservative views and to expose the liberal bias implicit in much of campus academic and political thought.

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Targeting the Judiciary: The Federalist Society
1982

Founded to advance conservative ideas and legal theories among up-and-coming conservative and libertarian lawyers, the Federalist Society has grown to be the most dominant and historically significant influence in the nominating process of Supreme Court justices and judges named to the federal appeals and district courts.

The Federalist Society quickly grew from a student-run discussion group to spearheading the conservative takeover of the American judicial system. Organized to promote “originalist” interpretations of the law, six of its members now serve as justices on the Supreme Court.

The Federalists’ first recommendation for the Court, Antonin Scalia, was nominated in 1986 by President Reagan and confirmed that year. He served until his death in February 2016, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell infamously refused to hold hearings to approve President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump reassured party conservatives that he would rely on the Federalist Society to fill judicial positions. By the time he left office, his three nominees to the Supreme Court, all recommended by the Federalist Society, sat on the bench. The first of the three to be named, Neil Gorsuch, was nominated 10 days into Trump’s presidency to replace Scalia. Most of Trump’s 226 appointments, including 54 to the federal appeals courts, were vetted by the Federalist Society.

Yet, such success is not apparent on the Federal Society website. The organization, in fact, claims that it does not “sponsor or endorse nominees and candidates for public service”. Instead, it merely claims its various divisions and chapters of lawyers, faculty, and students engage in thriving exchanges and promote events relating to discussions on originalism, administrative law and the administrative state, and other topics.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) believes there are three Federalist Societies. The first, he says, is a law school debating society; the second is the parent organization that facilitates networking events to groom and support new generations of conservative legal minds. And the third, the one we are focused on here, “is the nerve center for a complicated apparatus that does not care much about conservative principles like judicial restraint, or originalism, or textualism. This Federalist Society is the vehicle for powerful interests, which seek not to simply ‘reorder’ the judiciary, but to acquire control of the judiciary to benefit their interests.” He goes on to name some of these powerful interests – the Mercer family, the Koch brothers, and the Bradley family.

This third Federalist Society, the one run by Leonard Leo, is the one that Don McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, spoke of when he joked in 2017 that the president hadn’t “outsourced” the nomination process, as his critics alleged, but rather, he had “insourced” it to McGahn, who said he had been a Federalist Society member since his law school days.

In a period of a deadlocked Congress, the judiciary is – as Powell recognized – the center of power regarding the laws that shape the nation. When Republicans control the nominating process for courts, the Federalist Society is undoubtedly the primary power broker.

1982

Targeting the Judiciary: The Federalist Society

Founded to advance conservative ideas and legal theories among up-and-coming conservative and libertarian lawyers, the Federalist Society has grown to be the most dominant and historically significant influence in the nominating process of Supreme Court justices and judges named to the federal appeals and district courts.

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The Path to Power (1978 - 1994)

An Early Warning: “The evil that I’ve caused”

Ronald Reagan dominated the 1980s as a free market conservative guided by the intellectual output of groups like the Heritage Foundation, whose pro-business ideas had a significant impact on Reagan’s policymaking. The Reagan presidency, though, was made possible with the votes of former Jim Crow-supporting Democrats and a newly actualized religious right who were motivated by social, not financial, issues. But it was the rise of Newt Gingrich that would most impact the future course of the Republican Party and the nation.

Many who supported Gingrich in his early runs for Congress had grown wary of the man after they helped elect him. In his 1984 profile for Mother Jones, David Osborne quoted several people who knew Gingrich – friends and former friends and colleagues – who described him as self-interested, “a leech”, lacking “many principles”, “a man with no conscience”, “amoral”.

Most ominously, L.H. Carter, who Osborne says was among Gingrich’s closest friends and advisors until a rift in 1979, offered this warning and remorseful confession: “He’s probably one of the most dangerous people for the future of this country that you can possibly imagine. It doesn’t matter how much good I do the rest of my life, I can’t ever outweigh the evil that I’ve caused by helping him be elected to Congress.”

Ignored at the time, today the significance of Carter’s statement is lessened by Gingrich’s absence from the spotlight and obscured by Trump’s presence in it.

Powell’s call to realign the centers of American culture around conservative ideas set off a two-phased change in the historical narrative of the country. What once was held as gospel – that the Constitution was adaptive to the evolutionary changes that happen to a society and that government had an important role in steering its path – became at best an indulgence the nation could no longer afford and at worst a traitorous foray into socialism that ran counter to the founders’ original intentions.

As the face of the first phase of the revolution, Ronald Reagan extolled the virtues of freedom and democracy while targeting the government that protected them with policies and rhetoric intended to bind together the alliance that carried him to the presidency in 1980. The Reagan coalition included fiscal conservatives, big business capitalists, white supremacists, and religious fundamentalists. Circumstances helped them elect Reagan: a decade of inflation, two energy crises, and Americans held hostage in Iran all worked against the reelection of President Carter and created an opening for a new way of thinking about how to move the country forward.

Behind the scenes of the Reagan Revolution, a much more dangerous threat began to percolate. Newt Gingrich was a political flamethrower who began his rise in the GOP in the early ‘80s and, in 1994, led the party to win the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. He was rewarded with the House speakership in 1995, but was forced out three years later after a dismal performance in the midterms. By then, however, he had started enough fires that soon began to burn beyond the party’s control. This was the next phase of the revolution – one that Reagan Republicans abetted despite any misgivings they may have had about the Gingrich tactics they embraced, and one that Democrats and the news media generally failed to recognize.

Politics “is a War for Power”
1978

Newt Gingrich was in the midst of his third campaign for Congress – and first successful one – when he made one of the defining speeches of his young career. Speaking to a group of college Republicans, he made it clear that there was little room in politics for being “nice”. In his speech, Gingrich explained what he saw as a new paradigm for the party. Civility in politics was a dead end, in his view. Instead, he urged his audience of young conservatives to be tough and nasty, declaring that politics is “a war for power”. They had better be ready for battle.

Gingrich presented the speech as a reality check for the students and for conservatism in general. He told them one of the major problems with the Republican Party was that the current crop of Republican leaders was too meek and middle class. They didn’t shout and weren’t nasty enough and respected their elders too much. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, he said, did “a pathetic job. In my lifetime … we have not had a competent national Republican leader.”

His assessment of their competency had little to do with how they governed and all to do with whether they had contributed to building “a majority capable of sustaining itself”. He let the students know he was not speaking to them as voters but because he believed some of them might become leaders. He implored them to do three things:

“Take risks. Do things that may be wrong, but do something.” Leaders, he told them, take risks and “stand the heat” when they fail. In effect, mistakes are a badge of leadership.

“Take yourself seriously.” He urged them to believe in what they were doing and defend it with arrogance, particularly when confronted by those with more experience. This is when he cautioned them that politics was not a game but “a war for power”.

“Build a majority capable of sustaining itself.” That, he told them, is the primary purpose of a political leader. He then excoriated the Republican Party for its lack of leadership during his lifetime.

In another 10 years, Gingrich would be in a position to greatly expand his education of the next generation of Republican leaders.

1978

Politics “is a War for Power”

Newt Gingrich was in the midst of his third campaign for Congress – and first successful one – when he made one of the defining speeches of his young career. Speaking to a group of young Republicans, he made it clear that there was little room in politics for being “nice”. Politics is war, he told them, and they had better be ready for battle.

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The Reagan Revolution
1980

With Ronald Reagan’s election as president, pro-business conservatives had taken an important first step in their revolt against big government. Heavily influenced by the new ideas flowing from the Heritage Foundation and the reinvigorated expression of conservative thought, Reagan made a definitive break from the liberal policies and “good government” of the prior decades.

The Reagan presidency ushered in a new set of policy ideas culled from the intellectual output of the new conservative think tanks, and in particular, The Heritage Foundation. They marked a departure from the liberal policies of the past that favored government intervention on behalf of the underprivileged and underpaid, the environment, and the under-represented. Reagan declared in his inaugural address, “Government is the problem.” It was a statement often assumed to refer generally to the Right’s desire to shrink the federal government. The essence of that concept fueled not just the Reagan Revolution but much that came after it, as expressed in the determination to dismantle the administrative state.

While fiscal conservatism sparked Reagan’s campaign, it was the Reagan coalition that carried him to victory. This New Right coalition included three distinct groups: the business community that had been angered by waves of government regulation and which was feeling absolved of its social responsibility as Milton Friedman’s views on business took root; the Jim Crow-supporting southern Democrats who angrily switched to the Republican Party following passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; and Christian evangelicals whose righteous anger was pricked by the politically engaged Moral Majority.

With Reagan as its standard bearer, this newly constituted Republican Party had at last severed ties with the party’s good government policies that had first been rejected by Republican Barry Goldwater in his failed 1964 campaign for president. Those policies were articulated in the Republican Party’s 1956 platform, citing its achievements in expanding social security, broadening coverage for unemployment insurance, improving housing, and providing better healthcare for all Americans.

The 1980 Republican platform set the party in the opposite direction and contained elements specifically aimed at coalition constituents. It called for “sweeping change in economic policy” known as supply side economics; a constitutional amendment in support of the right to life of the unborn; and stricter controls on welfare and food stamps eligibility. A pledge to Americans of Southern, Eastern, and Central European descent that they would no longer be forgotten in discussions of equal rights and fair treatment under the law may have been one of the first times that any White Americans were specifically mentioned in the context of equal rights.

Reagan’s campaign drew the support of the Ku Klux Klan – though Reagan quickly distanced himself from the group – and this fiery speech from Paul Weyrich, who denounced those Christians who have the “goo goo syndrome” – a belief in good government and the desire to have everyone vote. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he told the audience. “Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Still far from the center of the party, a new Republican base had begun to show itself.

1980

The Reagan Revolution

With Ronald Reagan’s election as president, pro-business conservatives had taken an important first step in their revolt against big government. Heavily influenced by the new ideas flowing from the Heritage Foundation and the reinvigorated expression of conservative thought, Reagan made a definitive break from the liberal policies and “good government” of the prior decades.

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Conflict Politics and Performance Find Traction
1984

Newt Gingrich was still just a junior congressman from Georgia when he began to use C-SPAN’s coverage of Congress to attack Democrats and make headlines in the national media. It set him on the fast track to political power and the Republican Party on a path to controlling the political narrative for the next several decades.

C-SPAN was still a relatively new media platform in 1984 when Gingrich used his time on camera to harangue and harass his Democratic opposition. His performances, which drew House Speaker Tip O’Neil into televised confrontation with him, brought him headlines and put him on the road to political power.

Like Lewis Powell, Gingrich grasped the need for media attention to foster a shift to a more conservative culture. As he explained at the time, “The number one fact about the news media is they love fights.” By creating conflict, Gingrich understood he could capture space in the mainstream media and use that space to reach the public and inflame the GOP base with whatever messages served his ambitions.

Gingrich was a rising star. In a 1984 profile for Mother Jones, David Osborne referenced the Washington Post’s David Broder, “dean of political columnists”, who proclaimed Gingrich to be one of the country’s future leaders, and New Right leader Richard Viguerie, who deemed him to be “the single most important conservative in the House of Representatives”. Osborne, with clear foresight, summed up Gingrich this way: “[Gingrich] has created a disciplined band of Young Turks loyal to his leadership, forged a new conservative ideology for the post-Reagan years, and forced his party’s leaders—long content to go along and get along in a House dominated by Democrats—into a more combative stance.”

Gingrich’s success in front of the C-SPAN cameras led to his appointment as chairman of GOPAC and eventually, to the House speakership.

1984

Conflict Politics and Performance Find Traction

Newt Gingrich was still just a junior congressman from Georgia when he began to use C-SPAN’s coverage of Congress to attack Democrats and make headlines in the national media. It set him on the fast track to political power and the Republican Party on a path to controlling the political narrative for the next several decades.

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The End of “Fairness” in Media
1987

Created to ensure that the public had access through radio and television broadcast channels to differing viewpoints on controversial issues, the Fairness Doctrine was also abused by three presidents. It was repealed in 1987, setting the stage for the growth of conservative talk radio as it fed the fears and stoked the anger of mostly white Christian Americans.

Established in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine grew out of the government’s desire to ensure that the broadcast frequencies which it licensed would be used in the public interest to present different views on controversial issues. The rule was deemed constitutional, according to a 1969 Supreme Court decision, at a time when there were a limited number of broadcast options available to the public.

Yet conservatives dating back to Barry Goldwater had felt squeezed out of national media coverage. It wasn’t entirely their imagination. In 1975, the New York Times reported that, in fact, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had used the Fairness Doctrine to pressure broadcasters to limit their commentary in support of Goldwater and conservative issues. President Nixon also advocated using the government’s licensing renewal power to limit what he viewed as “unfair” coverage. This abuse of power fueled conservative anger against the “liberal media” and produced a Republican-led campaign to end the Fairness Doctrine. That campaign eventually won support from several Democrats and members of the so-called “liberal media” that conservatives were so angry with.

By 1987, as the doctrine faced new legal challenges and the growing number of cable networks offered competitive alternatives to the three broadcast channels, the FCC voted 4-0 to repeal the Fairness Doctrine.

Elimination of the Fairness Doctrine opened up the airwaves to conservatives who were ready to reach an audience eager for their anti-government message. By 1995, Rush Limbaugh, whose name became synonymous with conservative talk radio, was reaching 20 million people each day across 650 radio stations. According to Paul Matzko, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the book, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement, Limbaugh “owed his rapid rise to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine by the Reagan administration in 1987”.

Matzko explained in a 2020 commentary how talk radio turned its millions of listeners into the kind of conservative who “is less focused on free markets and small government and more focused on ethnonationalism and populism”. According to Brian Rosenwald, co-creator of the Washington Post’s “Made by History” blog and author of Talk Radio’s America, Limbaugh stoked populist anger and turned his listeners on to the new “fair and balanced” cable channel that launched in the mid-90s, Fox News. (Fox paid him to advertise the network on his program.) Both Matzko and Rosenwald attribute the election of Donald Trump in 2016 to these angry and newly engaged voters.

Feature Image: Photo of Rush Limbaugh by Gage Skidmore

1987

The End of “Fairness” in Media

Created to ensure that the public had access through radio and television broadcast channels to differing viewpoints on controversial issues, the Fairness Doctrine was also abused by three presidents. It was repealed in 1987, setting the stage for the growth of conservative talk radio as it fed the fears and stoked the anger of mostly White Christian Americans.

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The Rise of Originalism
1991

When Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected as a threat to civil liberties, Republicans accused Democrats of applying an ideological litmus test to the nomination process, ignoring that they had done that themselves in selecting Bork. When they next had an opportunity to put forward a nominee, Clarence Thomas became the first of six consecutive Republican nominees groomed and vetted by the Federalist Society to sit on the nation’s highest court.

After Antonin Scalia, Bork was the second Federalist Society member that President Reagan nominated to the Supreme Court. Then-Senator Joe Biden, who was the chair of the Judiciary Committee overseeing the nomination hearing, had cautioned Reagan against nominating Bork.

Reagan, however, was under pressure to nominate someone who would decide cases more reliably for conservatives than the man he would be replacing, Lewis Powell (the same Lewis Powell who had warned of the attack on the US enterprise system). Bork received the nomination, but with Biden framing Bork’s originalist views of the Constitution as a threat to civil liberties, the Judiciary Committee voted against confirmation and the full Senate rejected him by the largest margin, 58-42, of any of the previous 26 failed Supreme Court nominees. Six Republicans joined with 52 Democrats against confirmation; two Democrats voted in favor.

Biden explained his reasoning to the New York Times, “People understand how fragile their liberties are. I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.”

Conservatives were outraged, declaring that Democrats had used an ideological litmus test against Bork – a declaration amplified through the news media that portrayed the defeat as an underhanded partisan power play by Democrats. In a pattern that would begin to repeat in the years ahead, neither Democrats nor the media seemed to focus on the Republicans’ own ideological litmus test used in selecting Bork for the nomination.

With Bork’s defeat now their rallying cry, one that persists even today, Republicans went all in on the nomination of Thomas, determined to replace the one Black justice on the court, the liberal former civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, with a staunchly conservative Black justice whose views were shifting against affirmative action.

During his confirmation hearing, Thomas was careful to avoid taking any definitive legal positions on controversial issues like abortion. That was the lesson learned from the Bork hearings. Thomas found his nomination in trouble anyway when Anita Hill, one of his former aides, accused him of sexual harassment. Rather than withdraw from consideration, Thomas denied the allegations and ultimately received the votes he needed to be confirmed. He was confirmed by a vote of 52-48, the narrowest margin since 1887, with 11 of 57 Democrats voting in favor.

Thomas’ contentious yet successful nomination to the bench began a decades-long period in which the Federalist Society’s originalist views steadily took root in the judiciary. Nearly half of President George W. Bush’s appointments to the appellate courts were members of or supporters of the Federalist Society, as were his two nominees to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. And as noted earlier, most of Trump’s appointments to the appellate courts and all three of his Supreme Court nominees – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – were Federalist Society members.

With the Court growing more ideologically conservative, it began to check off boxes on the Republicans’ agenda: Citizens United (2010) expanded the influence of money in politics; Shelby County (2013) reduced protections against voter suppression; and Dobbs (2022), eliminated the federal right to abortion. Biden’s concerns about originalism are proving true. Polls have consistently shown that most Americans oppose these results. Nonetheless, they served the three groups in the Reagan coalition who came together to radically change the course of the country: respectively, the business community, the white supremacists, and the religious fundamentalists.

1991

The Rise of Originalism

When Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected as a threat to civil liberties, Republicans accused Democrats of applying an ideological litmus test to the nomination process, ignoring that they had done that themselves in selecting Bork. When they next had an opportunity to put forward a nominee, Clarence Thomas became the first of six consecutive Republican nominees groomed and vetted by the Federalist Society to sit on the nation’s highest court.

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The Contract with America
1994

The Contract with America, written by Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Dick Armey (R-TX) with support from GOP strategist Frank Luntz, nationalized local congressional races and sharpened the culture war launched under Reagan. It asserted the kind of risk-taking vision that Gingrich had implored those young Republicans in 1978 to pursue, implicitly attacking the Democrats for “evasion and posturing” and instead promised transparency and action. The contract listed a set of specific policies covering taxes, the federal budget, crime, and a range of other issues. In an unprecedented show of unity, it was signed by 367 Republican candidates for the House of Representatives.

The contract brought about a tidal wave of victories in November. Republicans won a majority in the House and control over both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The party also increased by 10 the number of state legislatures under its control and the number of Republican governorships by 11.

Its impact cut even deeper into the course of American politics. With a clear mandate, the House passed most of what the contract pledged and the Clinton administration shifted to the right, signing on to welfare reform and balancing the federal budget. In a 2004 commentary for the Cato Institute, senior fellow Stephen Moore suggested that “the revolution led by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey helped bring the Reagan Revolution to its beneficial conclusion.

Even though many in the party leadership disliked Gingrich and his confrontational style, he was rewarded with the House speakership in 1995, a position he held for four years. While Reagan had made conservatives relevant again, Gingrich had brought the party real power. After an unexpectedly poor showing by Republicans in the 1998 midterms, Gingrich resigned from Congress when it was clear he would not be re-elected speaker. By then, the party had fully embraced his divisive tactics and relentless pursuit of political power. Gingrich had shown them what they could achieve when they stuck to the same script and, as Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer has said, “prioritize partisanship above all else”.

Feature Image: Image by GoldRingChip, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

1994

The Contract with America

The Contract with America turned the ‘94 midterm elections for the House of Representatives from a series of distinct local elections based on local issues into a national referendum on politics in Washington, DC. It is credited with the Republicans’ overwhelming victory in both national and state races that November.

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Controlling the Narrative (1988 - 2004)

A Second Warning: “The uncritical embrace of populist anger”

Newt Gingrich and strategist Frank Luntz set out to stoke the flames of anger and fear as they groomed the next generation of Republicans to take down their Democratic opponents. As they gained traction, the old Reagan Republicans began to voice their unhappiness with where they were taking the party. Bill Kristol, a conservative writer and publisher of The Bulwark who had served in the Reagan administration, was among the earliest party members to publicly express concern. In a 1994 interview, he told Michael Weisskopf of the Washington Post:

“The danger of uncritical embrace of populist anger is that it’s indiscriminate,” Kristol said. “Many things we should be angry about, but it’s also a great country and Republicans shouldn’t become such a voice for disaffection that we fail to become champions of the greatness and basic health of our society.”

Tea Party Republicans and then Trump and his MAGA supporters became the voice of the disaffected that Kristol worried about. But rather than track the possible rise of extremists in the GOP, Weisskopf and his colleague David Maraniss went on to chronicle what they alleged to be the failure of Gingrich’s revolution. Their reporting made them finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in 1996; it also served as the basis of their book, Tell Newt to Shut Up.

According to the publisher, the book was “an unprecedented, fly-on-the-wall look at the successes, sellouts, and perhaps fatal mistakes of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution…. [It] gets to the heart of the political process.”

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear the authors misunderstood what was happening, ignored Kristol’s warning, and failed to take a longer view of what Gingrich had started.

While the Reagan Republicans pursued a pro-business agenda that emphasized de-regulation and smaller bipartisan government, Newt Gingrich stepped up his assault on the bonds of inter-party collaboration that kept the federal government functioning. As head of GOPAC, he produced training materials designed to help the next generation of Republican candidates to “speak like Newt”. His goal was to divide the parties not by policy alone but by character as well, using language that suggested only Republicans were patriots and law-abiding citizens.

Working with Frank Luntz, the pollster and rising GOP strategist, Gingrich tapped into the populist anger that Kristol warned about. At one point, Luntz brought together a focus group that he said was the most negative, hostile group he’d ever assembled to test the language that ultimately made its way into the Contract with America.

Some years later, Gingrich said of Luntz, “Frank was the first person to understand the scale of radicalism in the middle class. He understands the citizen populist reaction against government in a way that is very helpful.”

As both Gingrich and Luntz knew very well, it’s language that matters most in activating that populist reaction.

Another Republican, Pat Buchanan, added a critical, combustible ingredient to the mix. Following his failed primary bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, Buchanan spoke at the nominating convention and gave a name to the shift in Republican politics, saying that his party was engaged in a “cultural war” – a phrase, soon changed to “culture war”, that appealed to the religious factions of the Reagan coalition and pulled them further into the mainstream of Republican politics.

“Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”
1990

As head of GOPAC, Newt Gingrich encouraged GOP candidates to use combative language that drew a stark contrast between Republicans and Democrats as a means of attracting media attention. It was so effective that within 15 years, the red-blue divide had become the narrative framework for discussing American politics.

Gingrich’s rise to the GOPAC chairmanship and later, to Speaker of the House, was propelled by his recognition that media attention is equal to political power, and that political conflict and controversy is what the media thrived on. Through GOPAC, he made sure others in the party followed his lead.

He transformed GOPAC from its primarily fundraising role to a center for recruiting and training the next generation of Republican candidates. GOPAC mailed out cassette tapes and pamphlets for candidates to learn key Republican talking points. By one count, almost half of Republicans newly elected to the House of Representatives from 1990 to 1994 had received GOPAC training.

John Boehner, who was first elected to the House in 1990 and later served as Speaker for five years, told the Washington Post in 1994, “If it weren’t for the tapes, I probably wouldn’t have run for Congress.”

One particular pamphlet that received a lot of attention at the time was titled, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”. Market tested by Frank Luntz, it was designed to help candidates learn to “speak like Newt” – that is, to appeal to populist anger and frustration with those in government. The pamphlet identified lists of terms, culled from Luntz’ focus groups, that Republican candidates were encouraged to use to emphasize sharp distinctions between themselves and their Democratic opponents.

The training reflected a deep understanding of how the news media works: As Jon Allsop, an editor with the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote recently, “The political media does itself seek to define candidates – often out of what I see as a lazy impulse to boil complicated elections down to narratives of clear contrast.”

Gingrich’s material provided that clear contrast – a relatively simple message that branded Republicans as the pro-family, law and order, common sense party of patriots, and Democrats as corrupt traitors who were anti-flag and anti-child.

It didn’t matter whether there was any truth to the characterizations nor that Gingrich and his colleagues were now all too willing – and frequently so – to call into question the good intentions and the patriotism of their liberal colleagues. He had a most anti-democratic mindset – that politics is war, and only his side was good for the country. And as he rose through the Republican Party on his way to the speakership and more Republicans were elected, his colleagues – even the more constitutionally-minded among them – willingly adopted or only mildly objected to his methods.

1990

“Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”

As head of GOPAC, Newt Gingrich encouraged GOP candidates to use combative language that drew a stark contrast between Republicans and Democrats as a means of attracting media attention. It was so effective that within 15 years, the red-blue divide had become the narrative framework for discussing American politics.

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“A Cultural War”
1992

At the 1992 Republican National Convention, presidential advisor, political commentator, and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan let the prime time television audience know the country was engaged in “a cultural war”, one rooted in religious beliefs that had no place for abortion rights, gay rights, or equal rights for women. The black-and-white moralizing of Buchanan’s culture war merged neatly with the divisive characterizations of Republicans and Democrats being promoted by Gingrich and Luntz.

When Buchanan effectively merged the religious war on American culture with Gingrich’s war on politics, it put the big tent politics of the Democrats and the government squarely in the crosshairs of the attack.

In his speech, Buchanan lauded the religious values of the Republican nominee, incumbent George H. W. Bush, and contrasted them with the agenda of Democratic candidate Bill Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore.

First, Buchanan quoted “a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement” who, he said, was allowed to speak at the Democrats’ nominating convention to congratulate the party for putting forward “the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.”

He ridiculed Clinton for suggesting that together with his wife Hillary, Americans would get two for the price of one, accusing Hillary of believing that “12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents” and comparing “marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation”. As the New York Times explained one week after the speech, legal scholars say such criticisms are gross distortions of her work.

Buchanan concluded his attack, “This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.”

Twenty years later, following the GOP nomination of Mitt Romney for president, the New York Times ran a story with this headline:

‘Cultural War’ of 1992 Moves In From the Fringe

Adam Nagourney, the Times’ writer, reported that many Republicans attributed Bush’s loss to Clinton in 1992 in part to Buchanan’s speech. In 2012, however, none said they were phased by such expressions of social conservatism. Nagourney pointed out that Romney, as the GOP nominee, is the “the embodiment of the party’s shift rightward”.

1992

“A Cultural War”

At the 1992 Republican National Convention, presidential advisor, political commentator, and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan let the prime time television audience know the country was engaged in “a cultural war”, one rooted in religious beliefs that had no place for abortion rights, gay rights, or equal rights for women.

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Unity and Power
1994

Six weeks before the ‘94 midterm elections, House Republicans rolled out the Contract with America, which enabled the party to regain a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years. It was tangible proof that when the party spoke with one voice – when it spoke like Newt – it was stronger and more successful at the polls.

The Contract, signed by more than 300 Republican candidates for Congress, was Gingrich’s signature act, one that achieved the political power conservatives had so long desired. That achievement vindicated his decision to nationalize the local races – what David Winston in Roll Call years later called a violation of the long-held truth that all politics is local. It marked a turning point in congressional politicking and in the political narrative over the next several decades.

Although Gingrich and Dick Armey are credited with writing the Contract with America, much of it was carefully market tested – like the GOPAC training materials – by pollster Frank Luntz. As Luntz explained at the time to The Washington Post’s Michael Weisskopf, he had gathered “the most negative, hostile voters I have ever assembled” to identify phrases that aroused the most anger (such as choosing between “career politicians” or “lifetime job”). Luntz also solicited their feedback on which issues to list first, what cover design was most compelling, and whether party labels were a big turn-off.

The result united the party’s candidates around a single narrative: With Democrats in charge in Washington, government is the problem. And it led to an increase in turnout among Republican voters in every region of the country.

According to the Pew Research Center, following a steep downward trend that began in 1991, public trust in the federal government in 1994 fell to its lowest point in more than 40 years, falling from 46% to 19%.

It also produced an increase in turnout among Republican voters in every region of the country and demonstrated that a monolithic party with a narrow popular appeal can excite voters and dominate elections. It’s a model the party has followed since, leaving little room for those who stray from the party line and leading to a resurgence of the derogatory label, RINO – Republican In Name Only, and ultimately to primarying and censuring those who prove more loyal to the Constitution than the GOP.

1994

Unity and Power

Six weeks before the ‘94 midterm elections, House Republicans rolled out the Contract with America, which enabled the party to regain a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years. It was tangible proof that when the party spoke with one voice – when it spoke like Newt – it was stronger and more successful at the polls.

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Fox News: GOP-TV
1996

Fox News launched in 1996, bringing to cable television the same combative, populist programming that populated conservative talk radio. It excelled as a megaphone for Republican talking points, soon garnering more than one million viewers a night on its way to becoming the reigning ratings winner among news channels on cable TV.

Owned by conservative publisher Rupert Murdoch and founded by Roger Ailes, who devised distinctive communication strategies to propel Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush to electoral victories, Fox News was, in the words of Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone magazine, “a new form of political campaign – one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion.”

In a revealing exchange during a 2004 interview on PBS, Richard Viguerie, introduced as “a founding father of the modern conservative movement”, explained to journalist Bill Moyers that facts don’t matter. Moyers had pointed out to him that a claim made by Fox News’ Sean Hannity was not “fair” because it had “no fact to back that up. There’s no effort to substantiate that with documentation.”

Viguerie argued otherwise, responding, “That’s what journalism is. It’s just all opinion. Just opinion.” He went on to tell Moyers that the Right was no longer going to “play by the liberal establishment’s rules”. It’s a comment very reminiscent of Gingrich’s 1978 exhortation to the college Republicans in his audience to ignore political norms and abandon the civility that he viewed as the party’s weakness.

And it’s a perspective that little more than a decade later led Republicans to try to impose the ideas of “fake news” and “alternative facts” on a “post-truth world”. Though it didn’t work – a court ordered Fox to pay $787 million dollars in a 2021 defamation lawsuit for not telling the truth about Dominion Voting Systems’ voting machines – Fox is still reported to be the most profitable unit in Murdoch’s media empire.

1996

Fox News: GOP-TV

Fox News launched in 1996, bringing to cable television the same combative, populist programming that populated conservative talk radio. It excelled as a megaphone for Republican talking points, soon garnering more than one million viewers a night on its way to becoming the reigning ratings winner among news channels on cable TV.

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Voter Fraud: The Little Lie
2000

The controversial presidential election of 2000 brought an intense national spotlight to how elections are run and boosted attention on voter fraud despite little evidence that it was a widespread problem. Nevertheless, this “little lie” persisted and was eventually magnified by Donald Trump.

False claims of voter fraud are a regular occurrence in American political history, dating from the early 1800s, and are typically put forward to promote restrictive voting laws under the guise of increasing election security. While claims of fraud have been made by both parties, historian Heather Cox Richardson has written that voter suppression initiatives have been “part and parcel of Republican governance since the 1980s” and are a reflection of Republicans’ rejection of the idea that all Americans are entitled to vote.

It wasn’t until the confusing month-long Bush-Gore vote count in 2000 and its aftermath that the deficiencies in our voting system received significant public attention. Three commissions formed to take a closer look at the potential for voting irregularities in our elections and make recommendations that would reinvigorate the public’s trust in elections. Ironically, the commissions’ reports, published between summer of 2001 and 2005, served to confirm the existence of vulnerabilities in our electoral system, particularly as Republicans persisted with claims of widespread voter fraud and the implication that it was perpetrated by the other party.

The first of the reports, from the US Commission on Civil Rights, focused specifically on voting irregularities in Florida, the source of controversy in the Bush-Gore election. Just two years earlier, the results of a mayoral election in Miami were invalidated due to sufficient evidence of fraud on behalf of the declared winner, a Democrat. Regarding the allegations of fraud raised by the Republican-controlled state government in 2000, the Commission noted that because state estimates of fraud were based on public reports, it had no way of confirming whether the incidents reported constituted actual fraud.

Instead, the Commission concluded that there had been significant disenfranchisement of eligible voters through an overly-broad purging of voter registration lists. Among its recommendations, the Commission wanted the US Department of Justice to “immediately initiate the litigation process against” all state officials who were responsible for overseeing the purge, including the governor and secretary of state. A court-ordered analysis later determined that 12,023 people may have been wrongly purged – a significant number in a state where the margin of victory was 537 votes.

In August 2001, the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, whose honorary co-chairs were former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, put forward a number of recommendations to address weaknesses that election officials had known for years. A year later, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which enacted many of those recommendations, including the creation of the Election Assistance Commission and requirements relating to voting systems, provisional ballots, voter information, voter registration, and identification for certain voters. None were implemented without some controversy.

To this day, requirements for photo identification, which have been frequently promoted by Republicans across the country, remain contentious: On September 12, 2024, the Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party sued the state over its approval for in-person voting of a digital form of ID for University of North Carolina students and employees.

Because HAVA seemed to create more controversy rather than settle concerns, a third commission, the Commission for Federal Election Reform, was organized in 2005. It is more commonly known as the Carter-Baker Commission for its Democratic and Republican co-chairs, Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III. Citing specific incidents of voting irregularities, it concluded, “There is no evidence of extensive fraud in U.S. elections or of multiple voting, but both occur, and it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

This commission also made a number of recommendations, the first of which called for 1) the states, not local jurisdictions, to be responsible for maintaining voter registration lists, and 2) the Election Assistance Commission to connect state voter registration databases to address what it deemed the vast majority of fraud claims – voting by people who had either moved or died. Four years later, under the direction of former civil rights attorney David Becker, the Election Initiatives program at the Pew Charitable Trusts launched development of ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center. ERIC, which went live in 2012, gave states, on a voluntary basis, the ability to share voter lists and identify when voter records are out of date. By 2022, 33 states and the District of Columbia were participating in ERIC, and election leaders from both parties lauded it.

Since then, nine Republican-led states have dropped out of the consortium under pressure from party leaders and a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the data sharing program. Two GOP secretaries of state who had praised ERIC – Iowa’s Paul Pate said it was “a godsend” and Ohio’s Frank LaRose called it “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have” – withdrew their states not long after making those statements.

As the Carter-Baker Commission said, fraud does occur. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, it occurs at “incident rates between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent.” That statistic obscures the very real impact even one incident of fraud can have on the outcome of a race, as was found in the Miami mayoral race.

But Republicans’ frequent and often baseless criticisms of election reforms and their persistent questioning of election results erodes the credibility of their claims of voter fraud. Like the boy who cried wolf, Republicans make it very difficult for their skeptics to believe them when they claim fraud in an election without producing evidence. And when they use general claims of fraud to pass legislation that makes voting more difficult for some segments of the population.

As the Brennan Center has argued, false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud should not justify passing laws that would create obstacles for less privileged citizens to register to vote and cast a ballot.

And yet, the little lie persists as do the efforts to suppress votes.

2000

Voter Fraud: The Little Lie

The controversial presidential election of 2000 brought an intense national spotlight to how elections are run and boosted attention on voter fraud despite little evidence that it was a widespread problem. Nevertheless, this “little lie” persisted and was eventually magnified by Donald Trump.

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The Luntz Memo: Controlling the Narrative
2002

In a now-infamous memo, GOP advisor Frank Luntz outlined a strategy by which Republicans could seize control of the narrative around climate change. He encouraged them to cast doubt on the science of climate change and to tell stories that would resonate emotionally even if they were factually wrong.

Even after they had pushed out Newt Gingrich, the GOP embraced his tactics and retained his marketing guru as its top strategist and chief narrative officer. Luntz had proved himself an expert “pol whisperer” who knew how to use the right language to win votes while blurring actual positions on issues.

In that same memo, he told them, “As Republicans, we have the moral and rhetorical high ground when we talk about values, like freedom, responsibility, and accountability.” His words played to both the politically savvy Reagan Republicans and the true believers in the patriotic divisions that he and Gingrich had laid out 10 years earlier.

The memo explained exactly how he wanted Republicans to talk about the environment, and climate change in specific. Ignoring the party’s long-held and very public pro-business positions for lower taxes, more deregulation, and shrinking the federal government, he argued that it was the Democrats who constructed “a narrative in which Republicans and conservatives are the bad guys.” Rather than suggesting they modify their positions to soften that image, he encouraged members to use language that would help them avoid being labeled as pro-business.

“It can be helpful to think of environmental (and other) issues in terms of ‘story’”, he wrote near the start of the memo. “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.”

He urged his Republican clients to believe there was no consensus on global warming, and so they needed “to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate”. And he pressed them to stop using the term “global warming” as it was too frightening, and to instead refer to “climate change” because it sounds like “a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”

By 2008, climate change had replaced global warming in the national narrative while most elected Republicans continued to cast doubt on its existence.

2002

The Luntz Memo: Controlling the Narrative

In a now-infamous memo, GOP advisor Frank Luntz outlined a strategy by which Republicans could seize control of the narrative around climate change. He encouraged them to cast doubt on the science of climate change and to tell stories that would resonate emotionally even if they were factually wrong.

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Red-Blue Divide: The Manufactured Narrative
2004

The rhetoric promoted by Gingrich and Luntz struck a nerve outside of the country’s political and economic centers. With Republicans up and down the line following the talking points given them, and conservative talk radio and Fox News and the mainstream media serving as echo chambers, the contrast that Gingrich sought for the culture war took root. The red-blue divide became our national narrative.

Paul Farhi, a staff writer for The Washington Post, was among the first to recognize the emergence of the red-blue paradigm being used to describe the relationship between Republicans and Democrats. He believed it to be a caricature of the two parties’ worldviews that exaggerated what divided them. Later studies suggest he was right.

As Paul Farhi of the Washington Post noted on election day 2004, the red-blue paradigm came to be “more than just the conveniently contrasting colors of TV graphics. They’ve become shorthand for an entire sociopolitical worldview.”

Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, Republicans – aided by the news media – had convinced most Americans that there were no shades in between red and blue. Wedge issues designed to provide contrast between candidates now irrevocably separated the parties. The problems themselves were not partisan, but Gingrich, Luntz, and their protégés in the party so framed the issues that they became weapons in their rhetorical arsenal.

Divided by a gulf filled with misconceptions on abortion, climate change, healthcare, election security, economic inequality, and immigration – misconceptions largely manufactured and promoted by Gingrich and Luntz – Americans, even the more centrist ones, found themselves caught in partisan warfare that would only grow meaner, nastier, and more threatening in the years to come.

2004

Red-Blue Divide: The Manufactured Narrative

The rhetoric promoted by Gingrich and Luntz struck a nerve outside of the country’s political and economic centers. With Republicans up and down the line following the talking points given them, and conservative talk radio and Fox News and the mainstream media serving as echo chambers, the contrast that Gingrich sought for the culture war took root. The red-blue divide became our national narrative.

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When the Authoritarians Came Out (2008 - 2022)

A Third Warning: “My-party-right-or-wrong partisanship”

In their 2004 book, “America’s Right Turn”, Richard Viguerie, considered a father of the conservative movement, and GOP activist David Franke detailed how conservatives used the media to push a new narrative and achieve political power. Near the end of the book, they acknowledged that, as a consequence of their success, conservatives had lost control of the Republican Party.

In a statement that makes Bill Kristol’s warning of ten years earlier seem quite prescient, they observed, “The conservative message of limited, constitutional government has been virtually silenced, co-opted by my-party-right-or-wrong partisanship.” In their eyes, the angry populists, tapped by Gingrich and Luntz and an all-too-willing battalion of Republicans eager for political victories, had risen to the top – in full view of a news media fixated on the red-blue divide.

Two years later, John Dean, former White House counsel under Richard Nixon and friend of Barry Goldwater, went further. In his book, Conservatives Without Conscience, he called out the authoritarian trend in the Republican Party that had begun, in his reckoning, around 1994:

“When I started writing this book I had a difficult time accounting for what had become of conservatism or, for that matter, the Republican Party…. My finding, simply stated, is the growing presence of conservative authoritarianism.”

As evidence of the party’s move away from traditional free market conservatism and respect for the checks and balances of the Constitution, he cited the party’s incivility and divisiveness, emphasis on social issues, and willingness to defy international treaties, violate the law, and extend the powers of the president.

The book received mixed reviews, with some reviewers lauding it as penetrating and powerful (Chicago Tribune, Booklist, FindLaw ), while others were skeptical. Writing for The New York Times, Nick Gillespie, then editor-in-chief of the right-leaning Reason magazine, referred to the book as “ideological comfort food” and put the word “authoritarian” in quotes when used alongside the word “Republican” (“the new study of ‘authoritarian’ Republicans”). Washington Post political analyst Chris Cillizza was similarly unconvinced, calling the premise “intriguing” but writing the “book is another rhetorical bomb in the war of words between political left and right.” Even Publisher’s Weekly could muster little to sell the book, saying it was “suffused with bitterness” and lacking journalistic credibility.

Yet once again, it seems the predominant, normative narrative of the red-blue divide exerted its influence to minimize the alarms being raised.

Sarah Palin’s nomination as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate in 2008 was a coming-out party of sorts for the mostly White, racist, homophobic, anti-intellectual fringe that had been courted by the GOP since 1980 and was now the party’s passionate base. Two years later, Tea Party victories elevated them into the mainstream of the Republican Party and brought an explicit authoritarian identity to policy negotiations in Congress. Donald Trump’s emergence as a candidate and then as president more clearly exposed the growing threat from the Right as he further emboldened party radicals and made the battle lines in the culture war impossible to ignore.

For three decades, the conservatives who led the Republican Party had courted the fringe – the white supremacists and Christian nationalists who did not like the secular inclusiveness of modern American democracy. They didn’t anticipate one of their own going to war against the party itself and cultivating a populist revolt against the “Washington insiders” who they believed were corrupting and bankrupting the government.

When Ronald Reagan declared “government is the problem”, he was referring to government as an obstacle to solving specific economic challenges at a very specific moment in time. In the view of Newt Gingrich, however, the problem with government – run by villainous liberals and weak-minded conservatives – was more pervasive. Whereas Reagan argued in favor of government for, by, and of the people rather than “government by an elite group”, Gingrich was intent on tearing the system down. And he proved adept, with Frank Luntz’ help, at encouraging others to use the same divisive tactics, even if they were not pursuing the same goal.

Some of those “others” included senior members of John McCain’s 2008 campaign.

Palin’s Nomination: Trump Before There Was Trump
2008

Sarah Palin’s nomination as John McCain’s running mate in 2008 was a coming out of sorts for the conspiracy-minded, anti-elite, anti-government populists in the GOP. Described at the time in ways that bear a striking resemblance to Donald Trump, the excitement she generated for McCain’s campaign foreshadowed the impact Trump would have in 2016.

Elevating Palin to the national stage was a pivotal moment in the transition of the Republican Party from one of principled conservatism to the authoritarian extremism of the Trump years. Her selection, based not on her qualifications for the vice presidency but on the belief that she would inject more enthusiasm into McCain’s campaign, exemplified what the party was willing to sacrifice in order to win elections and achieve the political power needed to pass their policy agenda.

Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager who played a pivotal role in securing Palin’s place on the ticket, later recognized the decision as a huge mistake and key turning point for the party. For the first time, the GOP had given a platform to and normalized the anger and conspiracy-tinged views of too many frustrated Americans. Schmidt’s explanation – that the campaign needed a jolt of energy – was a political calculation that overlooked the candidate’s many deficiencies.

Writing for the Huffington Post in 2009, one critic described Palin as

Possessing “a dangerous sense of unearned entitlement”;

Rambling incoherently and “with grating informality”;

Overusing capitals and exclamation marks in her writing;

Relying not on learning the issues but on “personality and platitudes”;

Relying “personality and platitudes” rather than learning the issues; and

Being a liar with a “seemingly boundless capacity for deception and delusion”.

On this last point, the same critic claimed, one journalist “has kept a running tally of Palin’s numerous prevarications”. That has not kept many Christian fundamentalists from supporting her, the critic further noted, as they were “untroubled by her cognitive dissonance”.

And separately, in an earlier 2009 profile of Palin for Vanity Fair, another critic wrote of Palin, “No political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition.”

In other words, Pailin was an early version of Trump. Though she didn’t provide enough of a jolt to boost McCain to victory, she showed that her brand of politics could stir up the Republican base, generate excitement, and inspire loyal support despite her shortcomings. She did enough to worry many conservatives like George Will that she would run for president in 2012. And many of them made the same mistake that has repeatedly been made of Trump: They viewed her as the source of the anti-intellectual populism that threatened the conservative movement when she was simply able to harvest what the party had already sown.

As Joshua Green, a former editor at The Atlantic, wrote in 2011 in reference to concerns over Palin, “Arguing that anti-intellectualism represents a danger to the conservative movement seems a strange tactic when most Republicans in Congress profess not to believe in global warming and when some large portion of the conservative base thinks that the president was born in darkest Africa.”

NOTE: While Green makes an important point here, he confuses conservatism with Republicanism. By 2011, the Republican Party had given its loyalty to people who were willing to sacrifice their conservative democratic principles for political power. It is a mistake commonly made even today; such people are radicals, not conservatives.

Party conservatives only temporarily held off the harvest. Palin was a lightning rod for the birth and growth of the Tea Party. She appeared as a keynote speaker at a Tea Party fundraiser early in 2010 to ridicule President Obama, declare the Tea Party to be the future of politics, and call for political leaders willing to embrace divine intervention to make the country stronger. Though she opted against running as the Tea Party candidate in 2012, eight years after her run with McCain, Trump reaped what she did not.

The pundits who feared Palin might be the future of the Republican Party understood the danger but not its source.
2008

Palin’s Nomination: Trump Before There Was Trump

Sarah Palin’s nomination as John McCain’s running mate in 2008 was a coming out of sorts for the conspiracy-minded, anti-elite, anti-government populists in the GOP. Described at the time in ways that bear a striking resemblance to Donald Trump, the excitement she generated for McCain’s campaign foreshadowed the impact Trump would have in 2016.

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The Tea Party: A Rising Tide
2010

Two years after establishment Republicans invited the populist Palin into their midst, a tidal wave of populist candidates ran for and won seats in state and national government. Running as Republicans, Tea Party candidates moved the party further to the extreme right while retaining the “conservative” label and so normalizing what was a radical split in the party. As they altered the political landscape, they made a candidate like Donald Trump electable.

Tea Partiers formed around a militant mix of fiscal conservatism and libertarian absolutism, distinguishing themselves from their conservative Republican colleagues in their uncompromising approach to policymaking. More interested in obstruction and name-calling than negotiation and governing, they shared the conservative goal of shrinking government, but unlike their colleagues, they sought to avoid collaborations that would taint their ideological purity and so, their ability to be re-elected. The verb “to primary” – meaning to oppose in the party primaries – came into use as GOP partisanship grew more extreme.

In the Tea Party mythology, the party had formed organically around local protests very early in 2009 but suddenly became a national movement following an on-air rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli. Santelli amplified those early protests against the government’s plan to bailout homeowners caught in the fallout of the subprime mortgage crisis. By the next day, the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez posted that she was seeing a similar emotional response to Santelli’s rant as that given to Sarah Palin’s speech the year before at the Republican National Convention. Her post was titled “Watch for the Palin-Santelli 2012 signs”.

The idea for a modern Tea Party, however, stretched back to 2002 when Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a group founded and financed by Charles and David Koch, launched a website, USTeaParty.com. The earliest version of the site, dated September 13, 2002, is viewable at the Internet Archive. The site gained little traction and in 2004, CSE split into two groups, FreedomWorks – run by Contract with America co-author Dick Armey – and Americans for Prosperity Foundation, chaired by David Koch. Both organizations, backed by Koch investments, helped organize the disparate Tea Party groups into a national movement. (More recently, FreedomWorks split from Trump’s Republican Party and the Kochs, and had to shut down due to lack of funding.)

Though Sarah Palin disappointed members when she did not run for president, the party continued to win seats in Congress and in state governments in 2012 and 2014. Tea Partiers have remained a visible and influential force in Washington and at the state and local levels. Twice in three years they pressured the party to push the country to the brink of default on the national debt, a dangerous action that risked the country’s financial credibility and the stability of the world economy. It was the clearest sign yet that Republicans in Congress were now operating on a party-over-country platform.

Writing in 2020, Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of a history of the modern Republican Party, wrote that the Tea Party, rather than fading away as some political observers expected, “mutated. It became the Trump movement, which is likely to dominate the Republican Party and have a major impact on politics for years to come.”

2010

The Tea Party: A Rising Tide

Two years after establishment Republicans invited the populist Palin into their midst, a tidal wave of populist candidates ran for and won seats in state and national government. Running as Republicans, Tea Party candidates moved the party further to the extreme right while retaining the “conservative” label and so normalizing what was a radical split in the party. As they altered the political landscape, they made a candidate like Donald Trump electable.

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The Heritage Foundation Turns Away from Conservatism
2013

By 2013, the Heritage Foundation no longer served as the visionary light of conservative thought. Instead, its focus had shifted from generating new policy ideas to politicking for increasingly intransigent policy positions. As it lost its intellectual footing, it succumbed to the cult of Trump.

As reported by Molly Ball in The Atlantic, the think tank’s flagship Mandate for Leadership guidance document had slimmed down from 3000 pages in 1980 to a paltry 156 pages in 2005. The latter edition prompted the National Review to compare it to Cliff’s Notes. And in 2010, as President Obama led passage of the Affordable Care Act (the Democrats’ version of Romneycare), Heritage created Heritage Action, an advocacy arm that began the organization’s shift in focus from generating conservative policy ideas to politicking for increasingly intransigent policy positions.

One of the new group’s first actions was to campaign for the defunding of Obamacare. It also initiated the congressional Scorecard, which it continues to use to assess and score the “conservativeness” of each member of Congress; scores are sometimes used to pressure congressmen on legislation and to target less partisan members for primarying.

The think tank’s growing activism, reported Ball, prompted one of its founding trustees, Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK), to accuse the organization of looking “like just another hack Tea Party kind of group”.

In addition to reversing its position on healthcare reform, Heritage also flipped on immigration. Whereas during the Reagan years it viewed immigration as important to the nation’s constant renewal, it now viewed immigrants and any policy favoring immigration with open hostility. Such reversals led to criticism that the think tank was, Ball wrote, willing “to discard analytical integrity in favor of partisan red meat.”

Heritage Action and the shift to advocacy had begun under the guidance of the organization’s original president, Edwin Feulner. It accelerated under its second president, former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who took over from Feulner in 2013. DeMint’s tenure proved to be too radical for the Heritage board of trustees, who unanimously voted to terminate DeMint’s contract in 2017 and bring back the 75-year-old Feulner on an interim basis.

The organization’s next president, Kay Cole James, who had served in each Republican administration since Reagan before joining President Trump’s transition team, took over in 2018. When she announced her resignation in March 2021, Andrew Kloster, a former Heritage attorney under Fuelner and DeMint, White House official in the Trump administration, and general counsel to Matt Gaetz (R-FL), expressed his good riddance in The American Conservative. He questioned her claim to accomplishments, noting only “there was really only one event that brought Heritage into the national spotlight: Google placed James on its new Advanced Technology External Advisory Council”, which was set up to offer guidance to the company’s new AI projects.

James’ appointment was immediately controversial and received pushback from members of the new council and from almost 2400 Google employees. On in-house message boards, according to a report on The Verge, “employees described James as ‘intolerant’ and the Heritage Foundation as ‘amazingly wrong’ in their policies on topics like climate change, immigration, and, particularly, on issues of LGBTQ equality.” Within two weeks, Google disbanded the council.

James was replaced with Kevin Roberts, an election denier who previously served as president of Wyoming Catholic College and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. As he told the New York Times, he established Project 2025 to institutionalize Trumpism, an admission that Heritage had all but abandoned its conservative roots and intellectual integrity.

2013

The Heritage Foundation Turns Away from Conservatism

By 2013, the Heritage Foundation no longer served as the visionary light of conservative thought. Instead, its focus had shifted from generating new policy ideas to politicking for increasingly intransigent policy positions. As it lost its intellectual footing, it succumbed to the cult of Trump.

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Freedom Caucus: The Radicals Organize in Congress
2015

Before it became part of the Trump movement, the Tea Party formed a new power center in Washington when it organized the House Freedom Caucus. In doing so, it institutionalized in Congress the revolt Gingrich had championed in 1978 against existing leadership and what he deemed was meek, middle class Republicanism.

As noted in 2015 by Drew DeSilver of the Pew Research Center, “What most distinguishes the Freedom Caucus from other House Republicans has been their willingness to defy the wishes of leadership” on specific policies and more generally to shift power away from party leadership to the committees.

House Speaker John Boehner, who once had been schooled to “speak like Newt” as a young GOP candidate, was targeted by the Freedom Caucus in one of their first acts. Their reason: They felt the Speaker had ignored their demands during the 2013 debt ceiling crisis and then refused to give them key committee assignments because of their opposition to his leadership. Boehner ended up resigning from Congress and the speakership in September of 2015. Two years later, in an interview with Vanity Fair, he famously said of the Freedom Caucus:

“They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”

By the time Boehner said this in October 2017, the caucus had already lined up behind Donald Trump. In his last two years in the White House, Trump appointed as his chief of staff two leaders of the Freedom Caucus – Mick Mulvaney, a Caucus founder, and then Mark Meadows, a former chair of the Caucus.

In 2023, when the Republicans again had a majority in the House, the Freedom Caucus held sway over the contentious election of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as House speaker, only to revolt against him 10 months later. After some further contentious maneuvering, they succeeded in installing one of their own, Mike Johnson, (R-LA). But even Johnson, who has at times negotiated with the Biden administration on Ukraine funding and other issues, has come under fire from Caucus members dissatisfied with his willingness to compromise.

Outside of Washington, a state Freedom Caucus network provides resources to assist 11 state-based Freedom Caucuses in their policy battles. When Politico’s Peder Schaefer looked at how the Freedom Caucus model was playing out in those places, he singled out South Carolina for the intraparty chaos the caucus there has caused. In his article, Schaefer quoted South Carolina Republican state Representative Micah Caskey: “They are a ‘let’s govern by bumper sticker’ entity. I have a general contempt for what I see as the lack of integrity and honesty with which they approach legislating.”

2015

Freedom Caucus: The Radicals Organize in Congress

Before it became part of the Trump movement, the Tea Party formed a new power center in Washington when it organized the House Freedom Caucus. In doing so, it institutionalized in Congress the revolt Gingrich had championed in 1978 against existing leadership and what he deemed was meek, middle class Republicanism.

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McConnell: Republican Court Packing
2016

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court using a line of thinking that he quickly abandoned when he had the opportunity to rush through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett four years later. These two events, along with two years spent obstructing President Obama’s nominees for the federal judiciary, reflected a strategy that ignored long-established senate norms and successfully packed the courts with Federalist Society candidates.

Ever since Lewis Powell wrote in his famous memo that “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change”, control of the judiciary had been a priority of the GOP. Already the party’s efforts had borne fruit: With Federal Society favorites Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts forming a solid originalist core, the Court had delivered decisions on campaign financing (Citizens United) and voting rights (Shelby) that the party had long sought.

In McConnell, Republicans may have found their Senate equivalent to Newt Gingrich: As described by the BBC, he is someone without principles whose tactics were effective and embraced by those around him, though the man himself was not well-liked by the public. When Barack Obama was elected, McConnell made it his personal mission to undermine the new president, and just before the midterm elections, he famously declared he would make Obama a one-term president (though he did not succeed). Like Gingrich, his priorities put party over country and made him a Tea Partier even before any Tea Party candidate had been elected.

Regarding his effectiveness at blocking Obama’s nominees during the president’s last two years and transforming the federal courts with rapid confirmations under Trump, McConnell told Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post it was “entirely premeditated”.

McConnell allowed just 28% of Obama’s nominees to be confirmed in his last two years, as compared to 80% under Ronald Reagan during the same period of his presidency and between 65% and 69% for George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

One nomination that McConnell stopped: Myra Selby, an Indiana lawyer who Obama nominated to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In his four years in office, Trump appointed 226 federal judges – more than two-thirds the number appointed by Obama in his eight years. Included in those totals are three Supreme Court justices – one of whom, Amy Coney Barrett, Trump had earlier named to the seat that Obama had intended for Selby.

According to the Pew Research Center, 54 appellate court judges were appointed under Trump to Obama’s 55, despite Trump being a one-term president. Pew credits Trump with flipping several appeals courts from majority Democrat to majority Republican.

Too often the media and even many Democrats give Trump the credit for such a radical takeover of the judiciary. But it was McConnell who made it happen, slithering mostly unseen like a snake through the tall grass of the political swamp that some say is the nation’s capital.

2016

McConnell: Republican Court Packing

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court using a line of thinking that he quickly abandoned when he had the opportunity to rush through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett four years later. These two events, along with two years spent obstructing President Obama’s nominees for the federal judiciary, reflected a strategy that ignored long-established senate norms and successfully packed the courts with Federalist Society candidates.

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Trump’s Presidency: Shedding Pretense
2017

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, he immediately started throwing gasoline on the populist fires lit by Gingrich and Luntz. The chaos, divisiveness, and anti-democratic activity in the White House was too much even for the media and general public to accept as normal. Either reluctantly or disbelievingly, the country slowly awakened to the authoritarian threat of the Trump presidency. Yet, it failed – and often still fails – to see that such a threat had been brewing in the Republican Party for some time.

It didn’t take long for some political observers to comment on the fascism that Trump brought to the White House. Just ten days after he was inaugurated, Martin Longman in the Washington Monthly referenced the 14 signs of fascism listed on a poster at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. (He said it was hanging at the museum, but according to Snopes it was only sold in the museum gift shop.) Longman noted that the new president checked off 12 of the 14 boxes. For each item, he provided a link to an article explaining how Trump satisfied that particular fascist criterion.

Longman pointed out that regarding one of the criteria, the entwining of religion and politics, Republicans had exhibited fascist tendencies well before Trump arrived on the scene. Somehow, though, Longman missed making that same connection for several other items on the list:

Powerful and continuing nationalism. Antipathy toward the United Nations , claiming patriotism as an exclusive Republican characteristic, and promoting aggressive immigration policies and legislation to end birthright citizenship were all precursors to Trump’s America First rhetoric.

Identifying enemies as a unifying cause. Vilifying Democrats as a domestic enemy was central to the GOP’s strategy to unite Republicans behind the need for electoral victories.

Controlled mass media. Gingrich and Luntz demonstrated an early mastery of mass media manipulation and showed their colleagues in the GOP how to attract attention and break through the noise with the party’s talking points. They didn’t need to financially own the media. Having Fox News, a growing number of local news programs, and conservative talk radio as willing allies gave Republicans the echo chamber they needed.

Corporate power protected. That objective – protecting corporate interests – is where the revolution started. Powell’s memo outlined the strategy for defending against a perceived attack on corporate enterprise. Calls for deregulation morphed over time into demands to dismantle the administrative state.

Labor power suppressed. Ronald Reagan is credited with breaking union power when he refused to negotiate with 13,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Republicans are generally opposed to increasing the minimum wage; holding down the cost of labor may be one of the most controllable means of maintaining high profitability.

Disdain for intellectuals and the arts. With their refusal to act on the scientific consensus around climate change, with their emphasis on bias rather than debate, and with their disparagement of “coastal elites”, the GOP has long demonstrated its disdain for intellectuals.

Fraudulent elections. This is not one that Longman checked for Trump in 2017, but as we now know, Trump’s presidency culminated in fraudulent claims of a stolen election. Republicans, on the other hand, has repeatedly used the little lie of election fraud to promote legislation that made it more restrictive for less privileged segments of the population to vote. And a voter purge by the Republican government in Florida prior to the 2000 election suppressed the votes of thousands of eligible voters; the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, won that election because Florida was decided in his favor by 537 votes.

One item left off the list at the Holocaust Museum – control of the courts – is also part of the fascist playbook. Even before Trump, the Federalist Society and Mitch McConnell made sure that open seats in the judiciary went to some of the most partisan judges available. For his part, Trump lived up to his promise to have the Federalist Society pick his judicial nominees. His nominees to the federal bench not only delivered the abortion decision Republicans had long sought, they have so far helped delay and potentially eliminate the possibility that Trump will be tried and held accountable if convicted for any of the crimes for which he has been indicted.

Feature Image: Photo of Donald Trump by Michael Vadon, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
2017

Trump’s Presidency: Shedding Pretense

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, he immediately started throwing gasoline on the populist fires lit by Gingrich and Luntz. The chaos, divisiveness, and anti-democratic activity in the White House was too much even for the media and general public to accept as normal. The country slowly awakened to the authoritarian threat of the Trump presidency.

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The End of Our Democracy? (2019 - 2024)

A Dire Warning: “Save our republic”

In March 2024, after Trump had all but secured the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, Liz Cheney, former Republican representative from Wyoming and vice chair of the January 6 Committee, issued this dire warning: “We have eight months to save our republic and ensure Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office again.”

Many conservative Republicans who had over the prior decades recognized the dangerous path the party was on – a path some helped engineer – many of them found renewed purpose in opposing Trump’s candidacy in 2016 and his re-election in 2020 and 2024. Bill Kristol, among the earliest to recognize the tightrope the GOP was walking, is among the founders of several pro-democracy, anti-Trump organizations including Defending Democracy Together, which supports a number of projects that defend democratic norms, values, and institutions, and The Bulwark, an exemplary member of the Fourth Estate that frames politics through a pro-democracy lens. The Lincoln Project, founded by some of the Republicans who helped pave the way for the authoritarians who now run the party, launched in 2019 to prevent Trump’s re-election and defeat Trumpism – the popular term for the authoritarian strain the party exposed itself to in order to achieve electoral victories in the preceding decades.

In 2024, an unprecedented number of conservative Republicans, including Cheney, and former members of Trump’s administration endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris.

The 2024 election is nothing less than a referendum on the Constitution and the continuation of American democracy. This is not hyperbole, not some partisan rant, but a recognition that we are at a crucial moment in the Gingrich war for political power. Either we are nearing the war’s end in which the radicals win, or we are at a turning point in which pro-democracy Americans unite against their common enemy.

During the 2012 campaign, it took a secret recording of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for the public to learn his thinking about the 47% of Americans who don’t pay taxes. Twelve years later, the Republican radicals are now fully out of the closet, with Trump leading the way. Movement founders and newcomers have been emboldened to reveal their thinking more overtly. No longer are we in that quaint time when secret recordings were needed to understand what our public figures are thinking.

According to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, there are three basic principles that political parties need to follow for democracy to thrive: always accept the results of fair elections, unambiguously reject the use of violence to gain or hold on to power, and break ties to anti-democratic extremists. Based on research by the Republican Accountability Project, which examined the loyalty of Republicans in Congress in 2021 to these fundamental tenets, the authors write, “more than 80 percent of them adopted mostly antidemocratic positions.” And: “Only 6 percent of Republicans behaved in a consistently democratic manner, and most of them had retired or lost primaries by 2022.”

Gingrich: “The Old Order is Dying”
2018

In McKay Coppins’ profile in The Atlantic, Newt Gingrich observed that freedom around the world has produced “a very deep discontent that the system isn’t working.” And he thinks that’s not just a good thing but essential for the survival of western civilization. He seemed pleased when he said, “The old order is dying.”

According to Coppins, Gingrich is proud of his role in the decline of American democracy and a functioning government. It was Gingrich, Coppins writes, who “pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction.”

Coppins likens Gingrich to a late-empire Roman senator – not the last time that comparisons with ancient Rome have been made. James Fallows wrote somewhat optimistically about the similarities between Rome and America in 2019. Over the next few years, he introduced condensed versions of three essays by governance analyst Edward Schnurer that examine in detail aspects of the Rome-America comparison. In his third essay, Schnurer expressed his great concern over the resemblance in our country to the “increasing hollowing out of the Roman state from a ‘common good’ into simply another form of private corporation benefiting the already-wealthy and powerful”.

On election day 2020, historian Tim Elliot wrote in Politico that America was retracing the steps of ancient Rome. The choice that day was between a Caesar-like figure (Donald Trump) who would discard democratic norms and a candidate (Joe Biden) who would make sure the country would continue to embrace its democracy.

Michael Anton, a national security adviser under Trump and writer associated with HIllsdale College and The Claremont Institute, and Charles Haywood, an entrepreneur and right-wing blogger and philosopher with a large following, both have written and talked of the need for a Caesar – a dictator – to step forward to save America in a post-Constitution America.

This is the logical end to the war for power that Gingrich declared in 1978. Democracy, which emphasizes the checks and balances among its institutions and in the process of decisionmaking, is not the objective in such a war.

Feature Image: Photo of Newt Gingrich by Gage Skidmore

2018

Gingrich: “The Old Order is Dying”

In a lengthy profile in The Atlantic, Newt Gingrich observed that freedom around the world has produced “a very deep discontent that the system isn’t working.” And he thinks that’s not just a good thing but essential for the survival of western civilization. He seemed pleased when he said, “The old order is dying."

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GOP Messaging: “We Are Not a Democracy”
2020

In June, The Heritage Foundation published a report explaining that America is a republic, not a democracy. In October, Republican Senator Mike Lee repeated this assertion. By 2022 it was often seen in comments on social media and by mid-June of 2024, it was being echoed by Trump rally goers.

In a CNN segment first aired early in the summer of 2024, Donie O’Sullivan interviewed Trump supporters who echo, in various ways, the claim that America is not a democracy. O’Sullivan contrasts their statements with two Republican presidents who believed emphatically in American democracy, declaring “Democracy is worth dying for” (Ronald Reagan) and “Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy” (George W. Bush).

He then explored the surge in this belief that we are not a democracy with Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc., who explained, “You are hearing people say ‘America is not a democracy’ because there are people around Trump who want them to be saying that, who have been planting that narrative.” She suggests the Trump camp wants Americans to get used to the idea that we are not a democracy so that they won’t be distressed by his attacks on our democratic principles.

Applebaum also dismisses the distinctions that MAGA Republicans are making between the terms “republic” and “democracy”, pointing out that throughout our history they have been used interchangeably. In her view, the reason we are quibbling over these terms now is “because there is a part of the Republic Party that would like to rule as a minority”.

As O’Sullivan notes at the end of the segment, MAGA disbelief in American democracy seemed to surge following a February speech by President Biden in which he referred to Trump as a threat to democracy. He concludes by suggesting this twisting of language is Republicans’ attempt to neutralize that accusation.

The segment reveals how narrative control is critical when two worldviews collide.

2020

GOP Messaging: “We Are Not a Democracy”

In June, The Heritage Foundation published a report explaining that America is a republic, not a democracy. In October, Republican Senator Mike Lee repeated this assertion. By 2022 it was often seen in comments on social media and by mid-June of 2024, it was being echoed by Trump rally goers.

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January 6: The Insurrection and the Bigger Lie of Erasure
2021

On January 6, 2021, following a rally on the White House ellipse where then-President Trump incited rally goers to march on the Capitol and “never give up the fight”, marchers broke through police lines and illegally entered the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. Their goal was to disrupt the certification by Congress of the 2020 election. In the months and years that followed, Trump Republicans sought both to downplay and celebrate the event.

As has been well reported, Trump sat idly by in the White House for up to three hours, ignoring pleas that he call off the rioters. Once order was restored, Congress certified the 2020 election, despite the opposition of 147 Republican congressmen and women.

In the immediate aftermath, several Republican leaders were unequivocal in their condemnation of the attack and where responsibility for it rested. Yet, in the months and years that followed, many claimed otherwise, pretending the day was peaceful or claiming the violence was instigated by the FBI. Republican leaders backed off from their initial condemnations. Trump has called the insurrectionists “patriots” and promised to pardon some of them. And one organization planned to hold a “J6 Awards Gala” on Trump property to pay tribute “to all J6 defendants who have shown incredible courage and sacrifice.”

The Capitol attack happened because Trump and his allies succeeded in spreading the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Considering the volume of video footage showing Trump marchers attacking police and breaking into the Capitol building as well as the testimony of many former Trump administration staff before the January 6 committee, the attempt to recharacterize and erase the events of that day is the Bigger Lie.

2021

January 6: The Insurrection and the Bigger Lie of Erasure

On January 6, 2021, following a rally on the White House ellipse where then-President Trump incited rally goers to march on the Capitol and “never give up the fight”, marchers broke through police lines and illegally entered the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. Their goal was to disrupt the certification by Congress of the 2020 election. In the months and years that followed, Trump Republicans sought both to downplay and celebrate the event.

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Project 2025: Heritage’s Radical Blueprint
2023

Project 2025 would radically transform the federal bureaucracy and introduce policies that would impose distinct religious values on the country. One religious leader warned it “would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”

Project 2025 is the latest in Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership series and has been closely associated with the Trump campaign. Though Trump has claimed to know nothing about it, Vox reports that about two-thirds of the document’s authors served in the Trump administration. And like other Republican presidents before him, Trump closely followed the Mandate for Leadership edition given him in 2017, implementing almost two-thirds of its recommendations.

In this new blueprint, Heritage recommends expanding the president’s power over the federal bureaucracy “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will”. Among the new and more controversial proposals, Heritage would change the classification of a vast number of federal workers so they can more easily be fired and replaced with people who prioritize loyalty to the president over the institutions they serve. Originally attempted near the end of the Trump administration, this proposal would undermine the Pendleton Act, put in place in 1883 to maintain the independence and integrity of the federal workforce by protecting it from political cronyism and nepotism.

The new document also includes numerous references to God, faith, and the bible, and would impose policies based on narrow religious views of marriage and when life begins. It would further erode the separation of church and state by allowing taxpayer money to be spent on religious education and other religion-based initiatives.

Organizations that oppose Christian nationalism are speaking out against Project 2025. These groups include the Interfaith Alliance, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty), whose executive director, Amanda Tyler, was quoted earlier. Here is her full quote, originally published in The Guardian:

“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan. It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”

While most reports suggest that Project 2025 is a transition document prepared for a possible second Trump presidency, Stephen Moore, an adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign and contributing author to Project 2025, told Politico this is not accurate.

“It’s not meant to be a blueprint for Donald Trump — it’s meant to be a blueprint for a conservative president,” Moore said.

Moore misuses the word “conservative” – no conservative would want the president to have that much power nor would they want to merge church and state in the way that Project 2025 proposes.

His comment, though, is a critical reminder that the assault on our democracy did not begin with and will not end with Donald Trump.

2023

Project 2025: Heritage’s Radical Blueprint

Project 2025 would radically transform the federal bureaucracy and introduce policies that would impose distinct religious values on the country. One religious leader warned it “would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”

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Coda: The Power of the Long Game

Lewis Powell’s 1971 memorandum set in motion a series of events that he could not foresee and did not intend. His only objective was to strengthen the business community’s influence on federal government policymaking by reshaping the cultural centers of society to be more receptive to their arguments. Social issues like abortion and gay marriage – often used as wedge issues to drive the political divide – were not within his field of view. The opposition to and undermining of expert knowledge that untethered the GOP from its conservative roots was the antithesis of the intellectual foundation he proposed.

Nevertheless, he laid out a blueprint for a culture change that was decades in the making. The news media – the guardians of democracy – allowed its own excellent reporting to be submerged, ignoring the warning signals from within the party as it instead normalized the party’s steady shift toward authoritarianism through its coverage of partisan division. It wasn’t until Trump’s arrival as a candidate in 2016 that the media began to peel back the layers of its own narrative to reveal the inevitable endgame of the widening divide.

In 2019, the New Republic ran an article with the headline, After 48 Years, Democrats Still Haven’t Gotten the Memo. In it, writer and democracy activist Adam Eichen chided the Democratic Party for failing to grasp the depth of Powell’s work and fully execute on its recommendations to regain control of the levers of power.

Democrats, however, won’t be able to do it alone. They will need the help of lower case “d” democrats – the conservative Republicans and Independents who believe in the Constitution and American democracy. That collaboration is beginning to take shape to defend against the threat of a second Trump presidency. But like the Reagan coalition that slowly dismantled the scaffolding of democratic rule, it will take time for this new coalition to rebuild and strengthen the checks and balances that define government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Sources

The URLs included with the sources below were good links when we published. However, as third party websites are updated over time, some links may be broken. We do not update these broken links. If you are interested in the source, it may be possible to find it by copying and pasting the URL into a search on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. From the search results, be sure to choose a date from around the time our article was published.

Sam Rosenfield, “What History Teaches About Partisanship and Polarization”, Scholars Strategy Network, Jul 23, 2018, https://scholars.org/contribution/what-history-teaches-about-partisanship-and, accessed Aug 28, 2024

Judge Learned Hand, “The Spirit of Liberty” speech, 1944, https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/spirit-liberty-speech-judge-learned-hand-1944, accessed Sep 5, 2024

Suzanne McGee, “How Barry Goldwater Brought the Far Right to Center Stage in the 1964 Presidential Race”, History.com, Feb 26, 2024, https://www.history.com/news/barry-goldwater-1964-campaign-right-wing-republican, accessed Mar 28, 2024

Foundation for Culture Change

Lewis F. Powell, Jr., “Attack on American Free Enterprise System”, US Chamber of Commerce, Aug 23, 1971, https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/, accessed Oct 13, 2018

Eugene B. Syndor, Jr., letter explaining the origin of the Powell memo, Washington and Lee University, https://law2.wlu.edu/deptimages/Powell%20Archives/PowellSCSFChamberofCommerce.pdf, accessed Mar 11, 2023

Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson, “The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations”, Moyers & Company, Sep 14, 2012, https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/, accessed Sep 8, 2022

Mark Schmitt, “The Legend of the Powell Memo”, The American Prospect, Apr 27, 2005, https://prospect.org/article/legend-powell-memo/, accessed Sep 8, 2022

Mark Schmitt, “The Myth of the Powell Memo”, Washington Monthly, Aug 29, 2016, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/08/29/the-myth-of-the-powell-memo/, accessed Sep 8, 2022

Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson, “The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations”, Moyers & Co., Sep 14, 2012, https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/, accessed Sep 9, 2022

Nitish Pahwa, “Time to Fight”, Slate, Aug 30, 2021, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/lewis-powell-memo-chamber-commerce.html, Mar 13, 2023

The Blueprint: Powell’s Memo

Scholarly Commons, “Powell Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System”, Washington and Lee University, https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/, accessed Aug 1, 2018

Al Jazeera, “The People vs. America”, https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/the-people-vs-america/1970s.html, accessed Aug 1, 2018

Lewis F. Powell Jr., “Attack on American Free Enterprise System”, Aug 23, 1971, https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=powellmemo, accessed Aug 1, 2018

New Conservatism: The Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation, “Heritage Has Won Victories Benefiting All Americans”, https://www.heritage.org/about-heritage/impact, accessed Sep 8, 2022

Arthur L. Laffer, “The Laffer Curve: Past, Present, and Future”, The Heritage Foundation, Jun 1, 2004, https://www.heritage.org/taxes/report/the-laffer-curve-past-present-and-future, accessed Sep 8, 2022

Molly Ball, “The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas”, The Atlantic, Sep 25, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-fall-of-the-heritage-foundation-and-the-death-of-republican-ideas/279955/, accessed Aug 30, 2024

Andrew Blasko, “Reagan and Heritage: A Unique Partnership”, The Heritage Foundation, Jun 7, 2004, https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/reagan-and-heritage-unique-partnership, accessed Aug 30, 2024

Jane Meyer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, pg. 61

Mark Schmitt, “The Legend of the Powell Memo”, The American Prospect, Apr 27, 2005, https://prospect.org/article/legend-powell-memo/, accessed Sep 8, 2022

Kim Phillips-Fein, “The Mandate for Leadership, Then and Now”, The Nation, Jun 4, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-conservative-promise/, accessed Aug 30, 2024

Avik Roy, “The Tortuous History of Conservatives and the Individual Mandate”, Forbes, Aug 10, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/, accessed Sep 1, 2024

Model Legislation: ALEC

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Rob O’Dell, “”, Center for Public Integrity, Apr 4, 2019, https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/what-is-alec-the-most-effective-organization-for-conservatives-says-newt-gingrich/, accessed Apr 11, 2023

ALEC Exposed, “Democracy, Voter Rights, and Federal Power”, Center for Media and Democracy, https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Democracy,_Voter_Rights,_and_Federal_Power, accessed Apr 12, 2023

Jill Richardson, “ALEC Exposed: Warming Up to Climate Change”, Center for Media and Democracy, Jul 27, 2011, https://www.prwatch.org/NODE/10914, accessed Apr 12, 2023

ALEC Exposed, “Taxes and Budgets”, Center for Media and Democracy, https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Taxes_and_Budgets, accessed Apr 12, 2023

ALEC, “A Next-Generation Tax and Expenditure Limitation Act”, Nov 30, 2022, https://alec.org/model-policy/a-next-generation-tax-and-expenditure-limitation-act/, accessed Apr 12, 2023

Libertarian Cornerstone: Cato Institute

Cato Institute, “40 Years of Advancing Liberty”, https://www.cato.org/cato40/timeline, accessed Sep 9, 2022

Bob Davis, “In Washington, Tiny Think Tank Wields Big Stick on Regulation”, Wall Street Journal, Jul 16, 2004, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB108994396555065646, accessed Sep 9, 2022

Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, “Creating Your Path to a Policy Career”, https://ia601203.us.archive.org/34/items/StructureOfSocialChangeNewLearnLibertyEdition_201609/Structure%20of%20Social%20Change%20-%20New%20LearnLiberty%20Edition.pdf, accessed Sep 9, 2022

Training and Messaging: GOPAC

GOPAC, “History”, https://www.gopac.org/history/, accessed Sep 12, 2022

Ballotpedia, “GOPAC”, Oct 2017, https://ballotpedia.org/GOPAC, accessed Sep 12, 2022

Stephen M. Gillon, “GOPAC Strategy and Instructional Tapes (1986-1994)”, National Registry/Library of Congress, 2010, https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/GOPACtapes.pdf, accessed Sep 12, 2022

Ceci Connolly, Howard Kurtz, “Gingrich Orchestrated GOP Ads Recalling Clinton-Lewinsky Affair”, Washington Post, Oct 30, 1998, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/ads103098.htm, accessed Sep 12, 2022

University of Houston, “GOPAC Republican Handout, https://uh.edu/~englin/rephandout.html, accessed Mar 2, 2023

Harper’s staff, “Accentuate the negative”, Harper’s Magazine, Nov 1990, https://harpers.org/archive/1990/11/accentuate-the-negative/, accessed Mar 2, 2023

Media and Campus Footprint: Collegiate Network

Wikipedia,, “Collegiate Network”, Mar 2, 2023, https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Collegiate_Network, accessed Mar 3, 2023

Wikipedia, “The Dartmouth Review”, Dec 22, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dartmouth_Review, accessed Mar 3, 2023

Sourcewatch, “Madison Center fo Educational Affairs”, Dec 11, 2007, https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Madison_Center_for_Educational_Affairs, accessed Mar 3, 2023

Wikipedia, “The Cornell Review”, Oct 2, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cornell_Review, accessed Mar 3, 2023

Intercollegiate Studies Institute, “Filling the Void Left by Modern Higher Education”, https://isi.org/about-us/, accessed Mar 3, 2023

Targeting the Judiciary: The Federalist Society

Angie Gou, “Cherry-picked history: Reva Siegel on “living originalism” in Dobbs”, SCOTUSblog, Aug 11, 2022, https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/08/cherry-picked-history-reva-siegel-on-living-originalism-in-dobbs/, accessed Sep 21, 2022

People for the American Way Foundation, “The Federalist Society: From Obscurity to Power”, Aug 2002, https://www.pfaw.org/report/the-federalist-society-from-obscurity-to-power/, accessed Feb 20, 2023

Dylan Matthews, Byrd Pinkerton, “The incredible influence of the Federalist Society, explained”, Vox, Jun 3, 2019, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/3/18632438/federalist-society-leonard-leo-brett-kavanaugh, accessed Feb 20, 2023

Ilyse Hogue, “A “Woodstock” for Right-Wing Legal Activists Kicked Off the 40-Year Plot to Undo Roe v. Wade”, The Intercept, May 10, 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/05/10/roe-v-wade-federalist-society-religious-right/, accessed Feb 20, 2023

Lawrence Baum, Neil Devins, “Federalist Court”, Slate, Jan 31, 2017, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/01/how-the-federalist-society-became-the-de-facto-selector-of-republican-supreme-court-justices.html, accessed Feb 20, 2023

John Gramlich, “How Trump compares with other recent presidents in appointing federal judges”, Pew Research Center, Jan 13, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/13/how-trump-compares-with-other-recent-presidents-in-appointing-federal-judges/, accessed Feb 20, 2023

The Federalist Society, “About Us/Frequently Asked Questions”, https://fedsoc.org/about-us, accessed Mar 7, 2023

Sheldon Whitehouse, “The Third Federalist Society”, speech, Mar 28, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/the-third-federalist-society/, accessed Apr 29, 2024

Don McGahn, speech, C-SPAN (40:45), https://www.c-span.org/video/?437462-8/2017-national-lawyers-convention-white-house-counsel-mcgahn, accessed Apr 29, 2024

The Path to Power

David Osborne, “The Swinging Days of Newt Gingrich ”, Mother Jones, Nov 1, 1984, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1984/11/newt-gingrich-shining-knight-post-reagan-right/, accessed Feb 27, 2023

Politics “is a War for Power”

Frontline, “1978 Speech by Gingrich”, PBS.org, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/newt78speech.html, accessed Apr 3, 2024

CNN Editorial Research, “Newt Gingrich Fast Facts”, CNN, Jun 7, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/16/us/newt-gingrich-fast-facts/index.html, accessed May 7, 2024

The Reagan Revolution

James Reichley, “The Reagan Coalition”, The Brookings Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1982), pp. 6-9, https://doi.org/10.2307/20079772, accessed Apr 5, 2024

Martin Lipton, “The Friedman Essay and the True Purpose of the Business Corporation”, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, Sep 17, 2020, https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/09/17/the-friedman-essay-and-the-true-purpose-of-the-business-corporation/#comments, accessed Apr 5, 2024

Lee Edwards, “Barry M. Goldwater: The Most Consequential Loser in American Politics”, The Heritage Foundation, Jul 3, 2014,https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/barry-m-goldwater-the-most-consequential-loser-american-politics, accessed Apr 5, 2024

Republican Party, Republican Party Platform of 1956, Aug 20, 1956, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1956, accessed Apr 5, 2024

Republican Party, Republican Party Platform of 1980, Jul 15, 1980, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1980, accessed Apr 5, 2024

Paul Weyrich, speech in Dallas, Fall 1980, https://youtu.be/8GBAsFwPglw?si=MWd3pvwRj-XI8HMH, accessed Apr 5, 2024

Conflict Politics and Performance Find Traction

C-SPAN, House Session May 15, 1984, https://www.c-span.org/video/?171083-1/house-session, accessed Apr 5, 2024

The End of “Fairness”

Wikipedia, “Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_Broadcasting_Co._v._FCC, accessed Apr 24, 2024

Les Brown, “Reported Political Use of Radio Fairness Doctrine Under Kennedy and Johnson Is Causing Concern”, The New York Times, Mar 31, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/31/archives/reported-political-use-of-radio-fairness-doctrine-under-kennedy-and.html, accessed Apr 24, 2024

Craig R. Smith, “The Campaign to Repeal the Fairness Doctrine”, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 3, 1999, pp. 481–505, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41940183, accessed Apr 26, 2024

Al Tompkins, “How Rush Limbaugh’s rise after the gutting of the fairness doctrine led to today’s highly partisan media”, Poynter, Feb 17, 2021, https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2021/how-rush-limbaughs-rise-after-the-gutting-of-the-fairness-doctrine-led-to-todays-highly-partisan-media/, accessed Apr 26, 2024

Paul Matzko, “The Fairness Doctrine Was the Most Deserving Target of Rush Limbaugh’s Rage”, Reason, Feb 19, 2021,, https://reason.com/2021/02/19/the-fairness-doctrine-was-the-most-deserving-target-of-rush-limbaughs-rage/, accessed Apr 26, 2024

Paul Matzko, “Talk Radio Is Turning Millions of Americans Into Conservatives”, The New York Times, Oct 9, 2020, https://www.cato.org/commentary/talk-radio-turning-millions-americans-conservatives, accessed Apr 26, 2024

Jeremy Hobson, “How Conservative Talk Radio Paved The Road For Donald Trump”, WBUR/Here and Now, Oct 2, 2019, https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/10/02/conservative-talk-radio-book, accessed Apr 26, 2024

The Rise of “Originalism”

Linda Greenhouse, “Washington Talk: The Bork Hearings; For Biden: Epoch of Belief, Epoch of Incredulity”, The New York Times, Oct 8, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/08/us/washington-talk-the-bork-hearings-for-biden-epoch-of-belief-epoch-of-incredulity.html, accessed Jul 3, 2024

Ilya Shapiro, “The Original Sin of Robert Bork”, Cato Institute, Sep 9, 2020, https://www.cato.org/commentary/original-sin-robert-bork, accessed Jul 2, 2024

Linda Greenhouse, “Bork’s Nomination Is Rejected, 58-42; Reagan Saddened”, The New York Times, Oct 24, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/24/politics/borks-nomination-is-rejected-5842-reagan-saddened.html, accessed Jul 3, 2024

Ian Millhiser, “The Federalist Society controls the federal judiciary, so why can’t they stop whining?”, Vox, Nov 19, 2022, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23457938/supreme-court-federalist-society-whine-first-amendment, accessed May 6, 2024

Julia Ingram, “Clarence Thomas’ Long Battle Against Affirmative Action”, PBS Frontline, May 9, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/clarence-thomas-long-battle-against-affirmative-action/, accessed Jul 6, 2024

Timothy Bella, “The time Clarence Thomas said affirmative action was ‘critical’ for society”, The Washington Post, Jul 1, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/30/clarence-thomas-affirmative-action/, accessed Jul 6, 2024

Neal Devins, Lawrence Baum, “Split Definitive: How Party Polarization Turned the Supreme Court into a Partisan Court”, Supreme Court Review vol 2016, last revised Nov 2, 2017, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/1939/, accessed Apr 30, 2024

Charles Lane, “Roberts Listed in Federalist Society ’97-98 Directory”, The Washington Post, Jul 24, 2005, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/07/25/roberts-listed-in-federalist-society-97-98-directory/07462c8a-f148-4b4f-97f5-b44cfc3c1333/, accessed Jul 2, 2024

Ed Whelan, “Was John Roberts Ever a Member of Federalist Society?”, Confirmation Tales, Feb 22, 2024, https://www.confirmationtales.com/p/roberts-federalist-society, accessed Jul 2, 2024

U.S. Senate, “Supreme Court Nominations (1789 – Present)”, https://www.senate.gov/legislative/nominations/SupremeCourtNominations1789present.htm, accessed May 6, 2024

Andy Cerda, Andrew Daniller, “7 facts about Americans’ views of money in politics”, Pew Research Center, Oct 23, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/23/7-facts-about-americans-views-of-money-in-politics/, accessed May 1, 2024

Ashley Balcerzak, “Study: Most Americans want to kill ‘Citizens United’ with constitutional amendment”, The Center for Public Integrity, May 10, 2018, https://publicintegrity.org/politics/study-most-americans-want-to-kill-citizens-united-with-constitutional-amendment/, accessed May 1, 2024

Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, “Money, Politics and the American Public, Oct 14, 2014, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/blog/money-politics-and-american-public, accessed May 1, 2024

Evangel Penumaka, Isa Alomran, “A Supermajority of Voters Support the Freedom to Vote Act”, Data for Progress, Sep 24, 2021, https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/9/24/a-supermajority-of-voters-support-the-freedom-to-vote-act, accessed May 1, 2024

Kristine Liao, “Americans Feel About Who Should Be Allowed to Vote? And Why?”, American Public Media Research Lab, Jun 29, 2021, https://www.apmresearchlab.org/motn/election-policy-views, accessed May 1, 2024

Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, “Public Opinion on the Voting Rights Act”, Aug 6, 2015, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/blog/public-opinion-voting-rights-act, accessed May 1, 2024

Gallup, “Abortion: Gallup Historical Trends”, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx, accessed May 1, 2024

Gallup, “Where Do Americans Stand on Abortion?”, Jul 7, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/321143/americans-stand-abortion.aspx, accessed May 1, 2024

Pew Research Center, “America’s Abortion Quandary”, May 6, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abortion-quandary/, accessed May 1, 2024

The Contract with America

Isaac Chotiner, “Frank Luntz’s Tarnished Legacy”, CBS News, Jan 29, 2007, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/frank-luntzs-tarnished-legacy/, accessed Jun 21, 2024

History, Art & Archives, “Party Divisions of the House of Representatives, 1789 to Present”, US House of Representatives, https://history.house.gov/Institution/Party-Divisions/Party-Divisions/, accessed Jun 21, 2024

Jeffrey Gayner, “The Contract with America: Implementing New Ideas in the U.S.”, The Heritage Foundation, Oct 12, 1995, https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-contract-america-implementing-new-ideas-the-us, accessed Jun 21, 2024

Ballotpedia, “State Government Trifectas”, Jun 25, 2024, https://ballotpedia.org/State_government_trifectas, accessed Jun 19, 2024

Nick Hillman, “Party

How Authoritarians Took Over the GOP

Storyline

Introduction

Timeline: The Rise of Authoritarians in the GOP

The Blueprint: Powell’s Memo

New Conservatism: The Heritage Foundation

Model Legislation for Faith and Profit: ALEC

Libertarian Cornerstone: Cato Institute

Training and Messaging: GOPAC

Media and Campus Footprint: Collegiate Network

Targeting the Judiciary: The Federalist Society

An Early Warning: “The evil that I’ve caused”

Politics “is a War for Power”

The Reagan Revolution

Conflict Politics and Performance Find Traction

The End of “Fairness” in Media

The Rise of Originalism

The Contract with America

A Second Warning: “The uncritical embrace of populist anger”

“Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”

“A Cultural War”

Unity and Power

Fox News: GOP-TV

Voter Fraud: The Little Lie

The Luntz Memo: Controlling the Narrative

Red-Blue Divide: The Manufactured Narrative

A Third Warning: “My-party-right-or-wrong partisanship”

Palin’s Nomination: Trump Before There Was Trump

The Tea Party: A Rising Tide

The Heritage Foundation Turns Away from Conservatism

Freedom Caucus: The Radicals Organize in Congress

McConnell: Republican Court Packing

Trump’s Presidency: Shedding Pretense

A Dire Warning: “Save our republic”

Gingrich: “The Old Order is Dying”

GOP Messaging: “We Are Not a Democracy”

January 6: The Insurrection and the Bigger Lie of Erasure

Project 2025: Heritage’s Radical Blueprint

Sources

Foundation for Culture Change

The Blueprint: Powell’s Memo

New Conservatism: The Heritage Foundation

Model Legislation: ALEC

Libertarian Cornerstone: Cato Institute

Training and Messaging: GOPAC

Media and Campus Footprint: Collegiate Network

Targeting the Judiciary: The Federalist Society

The Path to Power

Politics “is a War for Power”

The Reagan Revolution

Conflict Politics and Performance Find Traction

The End of “Fairness”

The Rise of “Originalism”

The Contract with America