Introduction
The bond that unites the states has always been a fragile one. Ever since the three-fifths compromise in our Constitution, our politics has gone in cycles, with democracy strong mostly when political parties with opposing worldviews can still find some common ground and accept compromise and the balance of shared power. It tends to tilt away from democracy and union whenever people with strongly-held views feel they are losing their influence on policymaking.
The foundation for just such a tilt was laid in the 1970s. At the request of the US Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell, soon to be nominated to the Supreme Court, drafted a memo in 1971 that outlined a response to what he said was a broad attack on the American economic system. As a corporate lawyer with ties to big tobacco companies and familiar with the federal government’s efforts in the 1960s to implement new laws protecting the environment, workers, and consumers, he 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 – conservative think tanks, academic curriculum, and media that would propound ideas and perspectives more consistent with the desires of the business community. He also called for an aggressive effort to seize control of the judiciary.
Within 10 years, the business community had its conservative foundation in the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Collegiate Network of conservative college newspapers, and the crown jewel, the Federalist Society. It also had established the alliances needed to give the movement its political impetus.
The year 1980 marks a turning point in the short history of our country when our politics once more began to fall out of balance. Commonly considered the start of the Reagan Revolution, it was an era when the politics of fiscal conservatism, free markets, and small government gained traction in Washington. It also marked the coalescing of 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 – that produced a steadily mounting assault on American democracy.
Sometimes called the “culture war” and treated by the news media mostly as a captivating story of deepening political division within the norms of our two-party system, the threat posed by this assault remained mostly invisible to the general public, cloaked in the non-discriminatory language of conservative versus liberal politics. It wasn’t until the Tea Party victories in 2010, the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and the establishment of the Freedom Caucus in Congress that the public began to take notice of a radical shift in the nation’s politics. Finally, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 woke the media and many Americans to the damage being done to the core principles of our democracy.
The January 6 insurrection, continued popularity of many election deniers, attacks by elected officials on the integrity of our democratic institutions, and the brazen advocacy of Christian nationalism by some in elective office have driven home the very real and present danger to our constitutionally-protected freedoms. What started as a reasonable effort by democratically principled, business-friendly conservatives to gain a larger voice in national politics very quickly devolved into a relentless lust for political power in which the norms of good government, including service to the public and respect for the political opposition, were ignored for tactics that favored only party victory.
Even as many Americans, including many conservatives, are now openly resisting the authoritarians in our midst, our challenge is to recognize that over the last decades too many members of the GOP had embraced authoritarian tactics – or remained silent as their colleagues did so – to bring us to this point. The assault on our democracy did not begin and will not end with Trump.
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
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.
Introduction
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Laying a Conservative Foundation
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Credits
Related Problems: Threats to Voting Rights
Author: George Linzer
Contributing Editor: David Hawkings
Published: April 11, 2023
Feature image: The American Leader, based on images by Library of Congress on Unsplash and thomas-bethge