The Threat to Our Democracy: How We Got Here

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 it was accepting of compromise but tilting away from democracy and union from time to time when opposing views could no longer be balanced. Tribalism, defined here as a rejection of the idea that all people have an equal right to freedom and the right to an equal voice in self-government, is the constant though sometimes unacknowledged threat to that delicate equilibrium.

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 – an era when conservative politics gained traction in Washington – it also marked the coalescing of forces that produced an assault on American democracy that was mostly treated by the news media as a captivating and deepening political division within the norms of our two-party system. And so, the threat posed by this assault remained mostly invisible to the general public. It wasn’t until the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that the news media and many Americans began waking up to the extent to which our democracy had been damaged.

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 an effort by principled 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 respect for the political opposition, were ignored and policy positions taken whether or not they served the interests of the nation.

Even as many Americans, including some conservatives, are now openly resisting this insurgency, our challenge is to recognize that too many members of the GOP had embraced authoritarian tactics – or remained silent as it happened – to bring us to this point. The assault on our democracy did not begin and will not end with Trump.

The Reagan Alliance

Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with the backing of three distinct groups: the Jim Crow-supporting southern Democrats who had become Republicans following passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Christian nationalists who were courted to the cause by the politically awakened Moral Majority, and a business community motivated solely by profit and feeling absolved of its social responsibility. It was an alliance brought together and led by a core of conservatives who had spent the prior two decades struggling to win votes for their candidates and attention for their message of limited, constitutional government.

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 encapsulated in this statement from the party’s 1956 platform:

“We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs — expansion of social security — broadened coverage in unemployment insurance — improved housing — and better health protection for all our people.”

The 1980 platform set the party in the opposite direction. It called for for lower taxes mostly for the rich, spending cuts to social safety net programs, and deregulation – policies Reagan explained in one simple phrase during his inaugural address. His declaration that “government is the problem” made sense to those who had reason to fear federal spending habits in a changing world economy. It also appealed to businesses, whose executives and shareholders saw federal regulations as an impediment to market competitiveness and greater profits; to the former southern Democrats who fled to the GOP in search of a party friendlier to their argument for states’ rights as a defense of their Jim Crow policies; and to those on the Religious Right who opposed the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade and found the GOP aligned with their positions not only on abortion but on education issues and other aspects of the brewing “culture wars”.

What happened next was no accident but the result of an intentional effort by the business community and conservatives in the Republican Party to gain control of all three branches of government – and in doing so, remake the political and social culture of the nation.

The Powell Memo

The blueprint for what was to come had been drafted nine years before Reagan’s election in the summer of 1971. Just two months before his nomination to the Supreme Court, Virginia corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr. prepared a strategy memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that detailed how the business community should assert itself in the face of what he called an attack on the American free enterprise system. He described an assault on the business community from “varied and diffused” sources that included “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and politicians” – in other words, important centers of American culture.

What Powell proposed was an aggressive counter-assault that involved creation and nurturing of a parallel set of cultural centers that would support free market ideas and conservative principles of limited government. Circulated widely, the essence of the plan was reflected in the founding of several new organizations, including The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and a network of brash, right-wing college newspapers, with funding and collaboration from such prominent conservatives as Joseph Coors, Charles Koch, Robert Bork, and William F. Buckley. By the middle of Reagan’s first term, they had established the intellectual foundation needed to advocate through the Republican Party for the kind of culture change that Powell had in mind. By the late 1990s, the party and its supporters had built the messaging model and media platform needed to complete the mission.

Losing Control

The conservatives who engineered Reagan’s victory, however, had not understood the depth of antipathy for the federal government harbored by many of their allies. Nor had they foreseen the changes happening in the media industry that would help shift the levers of power within the GOP to a more single-minded, less principled wing of their party. The pivotal figure in this shift was Newt Gingrich, a junior congressman from Georgia. In the early 1980s, he used the relatively new C-SPAN cable network to introduce into the halls of government the kind of half-truths and misleading attacks that were common on the campaign trail but mostly absent from the actual process of governing. His TV grandstanding made headlines, found an audience, and served as an example to young Republicans, propelling Gingrich to leadership roles in the party and foreshadowing the forever campaign of conflict politics that has now divided the country and hobbled the work of Congress.

Over time, the messaging at the heart of this shift toward governing through high conflict divided the nation into two irreconcilable sides in our two-party system. Matters of policy became campaign platforms that defined your identity – what side you chose in debates over abortion and climate change determined which side you were on. The GOP would have us believe that on one side is the red team of patriots who believed in family values, the sanctity of life, and law and order. And on the other is the blue team of corrupt, amoral, disloyal socialists.

This point was driven home by the investigations in the 1990s into Bill and Hillary Clintons’ personal and financial affairs. The echoes of all the accusations and headlines – from the failed Whitewater land deal in Arkansas to the suicide of White House aide Vince Foster to Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress – may have contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2008 Democratic primary and most certainly were heard in the “lock her up” chant at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Republicans’ aggressiveness, not only on policy disputes but also on matters of character, successfully moved what political scientists call the Overton Window steadily rightward, normalizing extreme and dangerous ideas about Democrats, our democratic institutions, and who should have a say in running the country. With the red-blue paradigm firmly established as the window through which the media and most Americans viewed events, Democrats and independents who spoke out against Republicans and their increasingly anti-democracy statements and tactics were too easily questioned and disregarded as partisan. Any Republicans who spoke out against their colleagues were dismissed as RINOs – Republicans In Name Only.

Eventually, Sarah Palin, then the Tea Party, and finally, Donald Trump made racism, nativism, and anti-democracy activism centerpieces of the party. Republicans in and out of government began to talk openly about America as a Christian nation, mostly of White men and women, and downplay the violence of the January 6 insurrection – or remain silent in the face of such talk.

While the Republican Party as a whole had for decades steadily sought to restrict voting rights and alter the makeup of the courts and interpretation of our laws, Trump’s election and presidency made clear how inadequately the media had covered the intentional erosion of democratic culture. It also revealed to the nation the threat of authoritarian, minority rule that had been brewing beneath the too-long-held illusion that our politics was all business as usual.

Washington was not broken, as some proclaimed. True, it wasn’t functioning as it once had, not because the mechanisms of government had faltered but because one party no longer adhered to the nation’s motto, “E pluribus unum” – “Out of many, one”.  The GOP had exposed the vulnerabilities of our constitutional government, took advantage of them, and weakened our democracy in the process. In doing so, they emboldened the fascists among them to step forward and reveal themselves. Many of them hold public office in Washington and in state and local governments and others continue to promote and spread lies and half-truths.

Facing the Threat

Fortunately, an America awakened by election denialism and the Supreme Court’s ruling against abortion has begun to push back. In November, voters surprised most prognosticators by reversing a long history of midterm elections and choosing to support the party that held the White House. And just recently, in a critical election in Wisconsin for a state supreme court justice, Wisconites chose the candidate who disavowed heavily gerrymandered political maps and promised to protect a woman’s right to chose.

Conservatives in the GOP were not always blind to the dangers that they were unleashing but most were willing to tolerate them – and many still are – so long as they advanced conservative goals. They had needed the passion and support of the racists and homophobes and Christian moralists and nativists to eliminate campaign finance limits, pass laws that compromise the integrity of our elections and the authority of voters, and change the makeup of the courts to get the decision on abortion that they desired – all issues that are opposed by a majority of Americans.

A minority of conservatives have found the courage to speak out against Trump and the other authoritarians in their midst, and some have organized to oppose their continued role in American politics. These are the Republicans who have campaigned against election deniers and for Joe Biden and other Democrats. Today, their message is about preserving our democracy and putting the interests of the nation ahead of party politics.