How Authoritarians Took Over the GOP

Politics “is a War for Power”

In a speech to college Republicans, Newt Gingrich explained what he saw as a new paradigm for Republican politics. Civility in politics was a dead end, in his view. Instead, he urged his audience of young conservatives to be tough and be nasty, declaring that politics is “a war for power”.

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. Nor did Gingrich much like the state of the party. 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.

The Reagan Revolution

The election of Ronald Reagan 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, racial and gender equality, and the environment. As Reagan declared in his inaugural address, “Government is the problem.”  This was the Reagan Revolution and the start of the culture war against the New Deal liberalism of the Democrats that had been embraced by Eisenhower Republicans.

While pro-business conservatism fueled 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 now feeling absolved of its social responsibility as Milton Friedman’s views on business took root; the Jim Crow-supporting southern Democrats who switched to the Republican Party following passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; and Christian nationalists who were courted to the cause 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; stricter controls on welfare and food stamps eligibility; and a pledge to Americans of European descent – in other words, White Americans – to have their value recognized in considerations of equal rights and opportunities.

Supply-side economics, a cornerstone of the new government, required reductions in government spending and cuts to taxes, particularly for corporations and the country’s top earners. Spending cuts included reducing staff at the US Environmental Protection Agency by more than 20% and reducing civil enforcement cases by 75%. And tax cuts favoring corporations and the wealthy have since been a staple of Republican policymaking. The legacy of the so-called “trickle down” policies has been low inflation, stagnant wage growth for the bottom half of the economic ladder, and substantial increases in executive compensation.

While no constitutional amendment on right to life has yet materialized, the GOP’s anti-abortion stance became an important wedge issue that helped rally previously unengaged citizens and win votes from conservative Democrats then and in the decades since. The party campaigned on reversing the federal right to abortion through the courts, delivering on its promise with the Dobbs decision in 2022.

It is worth noting that in his 1985 call to participants in the March for Life, Reagan expressly denounced violence as a means of settling the issue, saying “the spirit of understanding also includes, as all of you know, a complete rejection of violence as a means of settling this issue. We cannot condone the threatening or taking of human life to protest the taking of human life by way of abortion.” Adherence to civil discourse and democratic processes still applied among the party’s political leaders.

To keep his promise to “European descendants”, the Reagan administration had a well-documented record of failing to support civil rights and affirmative action laws. And while Reagan never used the term “reverse discrimination”, he opposed mandatory hiring quotes based on race and gender.

Conflict Politics and Performance Find Traction

C-SPAN was still a relatively new media platform in 1984 when the young congressman from Georgia, Newt 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.

Gingrich, like Lewis Powell, 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.

The End of “Fairness” in Media

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 this new brand of conservatism and its angry and engaged voters.

The Rise of Originalism

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 who opposed 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 steadily 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.

The Contract with America

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”.