As usual, this post started out as a 15-minute video. You can see it here.
Harvard Prof. Daniel Ziblatt, one of the authors of How Democracies Die, talks about what he calls the “conservative dilemma” which is this: How can conservatives win national elections with unpopular economic policies?
Turns out American conservatives have been quite ingenious at coming up with ways to win elections without majorities. Republicans won a majority of votes in a presidential election only once since 1988, when the first George Bush won reelection. They won the popular vote in 2004, but lost in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. Yet they retain enormous power nationwide.
Today I’m going to talk about one of their tactics which they have deployed with great success: A well-oiled propaganda loop.
The era of extraordinarily successful Republican propaganda started off with Ronald Reagan, who was a master. One of his most successful efforts was to turn people against the federal government. Reagan famously said, “The nine more terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” One idea was that deregulating industry (keeping government out of industry’s business) would benefit everyone. Another was that government was inefficient and it was better to privatize government functions which of course results in a few people owning the infrastructure, which leads to greater levels of income inequality. In fact, you can see what happened with income inequality after Reagan began deregulating industry.
You see, a way to help break government is to make people distrust it. Alexander Hamilton, in contrast, understood that the way to give a government legitimacy and hence create stability was for the government to help people.
Why did conservatives want to “break” the federal government?
After the Civil Rights movement, the White supremacists, corporate interests, and white Evangelicals found themselves with a common goal: Dismantle the federal government. Each group had its own reasons.
- White Evangelicals wanted the church to run people’s lives. They wanted Christianity to dominate America.
- White Supremacists resented the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate America and federal legislation that made that happen. They understood that only a strong central government would protect the rights of minorities.
- Corporations wanted to dismantle the New Deal and regulatory agencies.
These three groups came together after the Civil Rights movement to form the coalition that dominates the modern Republican Party. There is thus a direct line from Reagan’s insistence that the government can’t be trusted to the Jan. 6th insurrection.
In a Bulwark piece entitled, “Anti-Democratic Conservatism Isn’t New,” historian Joshua A. Tait shows that the American conservative movement has always been uncomfortable with democracy. Tait takes us back to the 1950s, that pivotal decade when segregation was ruled unconstitutional. People who read Democracy in Chains are already familiar with these arguments and history.
Democracy in Chains, though, focuses on economist James M. Buchanan and the modern libertarian movement. Tait focuses more on William F. Buckley, who founded the National Review, the magazine that influenced a generation of conservatives.
In 1957 Wiliam F. Buckley wrote a National Review editorial about Black voting rights in the South. He concluded the White community was entitled to “take such measures as necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” In other words, the minority should take measures to prevail over the majority if it needed to do so to preserve “culture.” What culture might that be? White Southern “culture” of course. Buckley argued for the “right of the few to preserve, against the wishes of the many, a social order superior that that which the many, given their way, might promulgate.”
Buckley understood that the 15th Amendment was in the way. (The 15th Amendment, added after the Civil War, gave Black men the right to vote.) To get around the 15th Amendment, Buckley suggested that the South should deny the vote to “marginal” voters of both races.
Buckley and his pals cloaked all of this in fancy language, but the upshot was that some people are more equal than others. They were anti-egalitarian; they rejected the idea that all people are equal. They also rejected a strong government because they understood that “centralization alone is able to foster uniformity and egalitarianism.”
Buckley believed that democracy was in tension with “liberty.” He and his disciples argued that too much democracy leads to “tyranny.” They worried about the “tyranny of the majority.” Tyranny of the majority basically means that a majority can vote to tyrannize the minority. To prevent that, we have constitutional and federal regulations protecting individual and minority rights. In a functioning democracy, what the majority wants is limited by constitutional and regulatory protections. So for example, because of the 15th Amendment, the majority can’t decide to deny the vote to Black men.
Abraham Lincoln offered an excellent definition of democracy: “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.” The “held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations” part is how we prevent tyranny of the majority.
So when conservatives worry about tyranny of the majority, what are they actually worried about? A Supreme Court case from 1905 illustrates what conservatives mean when they say that federal regulations interfere with personal liberty.
Back before there were worker protections, the state of New York enacted a statute known as the Bakeshop Act, which made it illegal for employers to force bakers to work more than 60 hours a week or more than 10 hours a day. Conservatives argued that this law interfered with the freedom to enter contracts. The idea was that if a person was willing to work 70 hour weeks for a few pennies an hour, the federal government had no business interfering. The Supreme Court of the United States agreed, and struck down the New York law on the grounds that it interfered with the rights of people to freely enter contracts.
The case is called Lochner v. New York, and, among other things, serves as a reminder that in the past, we have had reactionary Supreme Courts. It took a lot of work and about thirty years to get that case overturned.
When libertarians tell me that “America isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic,” I end the argument quickly by explaining that when I say ‘liberal democracy” I mean this:
Very few conservatives are willing to openly reject this definition. They like to cloak their anti-egalitarian views in weasel words and slogans.
The right-wing propaganda machine really took off in the 1980s. That was when Rush Limbaugh became a sensation. The Republican Party came to rely on people like Rush Limbaugh and later Fox News to turn out voters. The result was that after a few decades Republican voters came to be sealed in an information bubble. They distrusted any source other than right-wing media. They were primed for conspiracy theories.
We’ve watched over the past five years or so as some conservatives reach their limit. The Never Trump conservatives reached their limit when Trump won the Republican nomination. Many others didn’t reach their limit until after the insurrection, when lots of Republican voters changed their registration status to “independent.”
The result is that the voters who remain largely embrace Trump’s lie that the election was stolen. As of the end of May, fifty-three percent of Republican voters believed that Trump won the election. Similarly, in a national poll by Quinnipiac University, 66% of people who classified themselves as Republicans said they want to see Trump run for president in 2024.
Trump controls these voters, which gives him control of the Republican Party. The fact that Trump controls Republican voters explains Sen. Lindsey Graham’s assertion that the Republican Party can’t “move forward” without Trump. As the Republican Party shrinks and hardens into a far-right-wing party willing to tout a lie intended to undermine free and fair elections and willing to cover up for insurrectionists, its leadership will entirely depend on voters who believe the lie and support insurrection when elections don’t go their way. Speeding up the process of the Republican Party hardening into a right-wing extremist party is Trump’s demand that anyone who doesn’t toe the line and repeat the lie be ousted from the party.
Last week it was reported that Trump is growing increasingly fixated on the Republican-backed audits as he pushes the lie that he won the election. This brings us to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the whackier conspiracy theorists. Lindell claims to have evidence of massive fraud in the 2020 election. No one else has seen this evidence, and dozens of courts threw out the claims for lack of evidence, but that doesn’t bother the bulk of those left in the Republican Party.
In late May, Lindell appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room and said: “Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August.” He also said eventually even liberals such as Rachel Maddow would admit the election was stolen. To be clear, there are no legal means by which Trump can be “reinstated.” Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election. Meanwhile, Lindell and others are watching the Republican-backed audit in Arizona because they believe in a “domino” theory” – they think if any Arizona ballots can be proven to be fraudulent, elections in other battleground states that Biden won can also be overturned.
Two people close to Trump reported that Trump has been quizzing confidants about a potential August return to power. As was typical for Trump, he claimed that a lot of “highly respected people,” who he declined to name, were saying it’s possible. Both these sources said they decided not to tell Trump what they were thinking—which was that he was not going to be reinstated in August.
This raises the question: If there are people in Trump’s inner circle who know that there is no possibility he will be reinstated in August, why don’t they tell him?
One reason, of course, is that he rebuffs advisors who do tell him to drop the whole stolen-election story.
Another reason is that, to retain power, those in Trump’s inner circle need to keep their voters engaged and their base riled. Dangling the possibility that Trump will be reinstated in August accomplishes this.
In practical terms, it doesn’t matter whether a political figure is genuinely delusional, or whether that person is lying for political gain. In other words, whether or not Trump believes the lie doesn’t matter. The effect is the same. It’s worth noting, though, that Charles C.W. Cooke of the National Review declared a few days ago that after speaking to an “array of different sources” he is confident that Trump is truly delusional: Trump actually believes he will be reinstated as president this summer.
Just yesterday, another story broke. The New York Times reported that newly released emails show that in late December and early January, Mark Meadows, formerly Trump’s chief of staff, asked the DOJ to examine the claim that people in Italy used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the US and switch votes from Trump to Biden.
Such embrace of insanity creates a cycle in which the Republican Party (1) sheds itself of non-believers, (2) finds ways to keep the true believers riled and engaged, and thereby (3) unhinges itself more thoroughly from reality, which (4) makes the Republican Party increasingly dangerous.
Also, as a result, conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell have become wildly influential as their ideas are echoed across America from the mouthpiece of a former president who retains an iron grip on a majority of Republican voters.
A few days ago, an acquaintance told me that both parties are equally extreme, so I’ll conclude with this chart that I’ve mentioned before, which found Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, and Berkeley political scientist Paul Pierson:
The chart is based on a systematic analysis of the campaign platforms of leading parties. It shows that the Republican Party is now positioned to the right of mainstream conservatives. The Democratic Party is positioned left of center, where it belongs.
So if I talk more about the Republican Party, it’s because the Republican Party is posing a serious danger to our democracy.
