Summary
Chapter 6: Positive Polarization
Nixon and his handlers needed an “other” as an enemy, and they had it in people of color and in the New Left, which had sprung up in the 1960s calling for individualism, democracy, and the overthrow of unjust systems. Nixon pulled together pro-business Republicans, Southern racists, traditionalists, and “law and order” voters in his winning coalition, and began spreading the idea that the Democrats were the other and extraordinary measures were needed to protect the country from them.
One strategy was to connect patriotism and national pride with Republicans. Republicans painted Democrats as dangerous and anti-American, especially in relation to the Vietnam War. Another strategy was to paint Black and Brown people as lazy and desirous of handouts. This was a way to attract people who did not want to think of themselves as bigots into Nixon’s supporters, but it brought the bigots too. Another strategy was to attack anyone who tried to limit the free enterprise system, like Ralph Nader with his calls for consumer protections. Business interests approved, and implemented aggressive tactics to preserve their profits.
The liberal consensus was weakening in the 1970s. Strong conservative organizations claimed that the bad economy of the 1970s was the fault of regulation and taxation, and made abortion a conservative rallying point. Nixon was able to handily win a second term with his divisive tactics, and even though he was eventually brought down by Watergate, his administration had “launched a successful operation in Chile that would be a laboratory for overturning a democratically elected leader without leaving obvious fingerprints” (48).
Chapter 7: The Reagan Revolution
Reagan continued the process of “rolling back the liberal consensus and re-creating a nation based on the idea that some people are better than others” (49). He cultivated the cowboy image, which wasn’t hard since he had been an actor, and worked with Republicans to cultivate an image of Democrats as a “party of grievance and special interests who simply wanted to pay off lazy supporters, rather than being interested in the good of America as a whole” (50). He helped join the Party with right-wing religious groups, appealing to the influential Moral Majority and increasing the number of Republican voters.
President Carter was running for reelection and challenged Reagan’s record, but it was easy enough to claim that the “liberal media” was unfair. Anytime Carter or anyone else criticized Reagan, they were labeled as “scolds,” admonished with a “there you go again” and roll of the eyes.
Reagan won and set about dismantling the laws that brought the liberal consensus into being. He implemented supply-side economics, which sounded palatable but did not work. The administration spent billions of money on defense and the national debt skyrocketed. Reagan was reelected but Democrats took the House and did well in the Senate. The administration used Movement Conservatism rhetoric to combat this slippage in support, ending the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and facilitating the rise of talk radio.
Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, had embraced the liberal consensus but shifted to Movement Conservatism when his poll numbers proved to be low. The infamous “Willie Horton” used journalistic style to convey ideological propaganda, a tactic that would be increasingly used by conservatives. The ad essentially suggested a Democrat was responsible for putting white people at risk because it said, incorrectly, that the Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis let a Black man out of prison for a weekend who went on to rape a white woman and stab her boyfriend. This now infamous ad used racist scare tactics and proved very successful. Bush won, and though to his credit did try to rein in his party, it did not work. Newt Gingrich, a Republican representative from Georgia, wrote a memo about how Republicans could use language to smear Democrats—words like endanger, disgrace, welfare, intolerant, lie, steal, waste, etc. would prove to be powerful weapons.
In 1992 after the extreme conservative Pat Buchanan lost a presidential bid, he declared there was a “culture war” going on and that nothing less than the soul of America was at stake. American values centered on freedom, not democracy, he claimed, and those who were unhappy with their lot could look to the Democrats as the source of their pain.
Chapter 8: Skewing the System
Democrats were on the defensive as Republicans powerfully shaped the nation’s political system. It was clear that voters still preferred the liberal consensus, so Republicans focused on evangelicals and businesses to get votes. They spoke of “ballot integrity” and “voter fraud” to suggest Democrats won illegitimately.
Democracy was in danger in other ways. Samuel Alito, then a lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, thought it would be better for the president to have more authority than Congress. One way to do this was through “signing statements” added to laws, which would convince the courts that they were valuable interpretative tools. Reagan did this in 1987, which was essentially an advancement of “the theory of the unitary executive, which says that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office, by Congress, for example, or the courts, is unconstitutional” (62). Presidents prior had accepted Congressional oversight, but now Republicans were suggesting presidents could act alone.
Republicans began looking to the “ideological purity” of judges when choosing to nominate them for positions on the courts. They also “advanced their flirtation with authoritarianism through foreign affairs” (63) and centered foreign policy in the White House and made it secret. When the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986, Republican government officials were unrepentant that they’d done anything wrong, and callously challenged those who would call them to account for their actions. Even though 14 people were indicted, President Bush pardoned them, which was an undermining of American democracy.
Chapter 9: A New Global Project
With the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, alliances of money, influence, and power began to take shape with Russia and some of the former Soviet republics. Authoritarian governments had long been claiming to be “anti-communist” to secure U.S. aid, and now oligarchies were more thrilled than ever to park their money in the U.S. Republicans were more interested in spreading capitalism than democracy, and this helped.
Movement Conservatives attacked anyone who was insufficiently committed to free enterprise, even members of their own party not deemed extreme enough. They kept hammering at Democrats the most, though, especially as the Democrat Bill Clinton had just been elected. One thing the “neo-cons” claimed was that the U.S. was not the strongest in the world anymore, and that their Project for the New American Century touted the removal of Saddam Hussein as a key part of this. He had been out of reach since the end of the Gulf War when the Bush administration let him stay in power, but was now fair game after 9/11.
Bush’s son, Goerge W. Bush, began wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush Doctrine said the U.S. would preemptively attack nations suspected of planning terrorist attacks on the U.S. The Bush administration equated anyone not in favor of the war in Iraq as defending Islamic terrorism and justified its use of torture and suspension of civil liberties.
It was clear in the early 2000s that Republicans believed some people were better than others and should be the only ones controlling the economy, society, and politics. They put out the false narrative that anyone else was an enemy of the country and could not countenance any refutation of their worldview, even when the facts showed something else. One aide even stated that the way the world worked now was that America is an empire and was able to create its own reality.
Chapter 10: Illegitimate Democracy
Though Republicans tried their best to suggest he was not an American citizen and Democrats were socialists, Barack Obama was handily elected as the Democratic president in 2008. The “birther” conspiracy lingered, and Republicans treated Obama with disdain and refused to work with him on any part of his agenda throughout his presidency. They used the filibuster to stop Democrats in Congress and held up his judicial appointments. They claimed “Obamacare” was socialism even when the idea of universal health care had been a Republican one (Theodore Roosevelt), a cause helped by the new fringe group of the Tea Party, who called for a return to the country’s more traditional principles (as they saw them).
Republicans were aided in their disinformation campaign by the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which said corporations could spend however much money they wished on campaign advertising so long as they were not formally working with a candidate or party. It was unclear where the dark money came from, but though some sounded the alarm, the money kept pouring in.
Elections were also becoming less free and fair as gerrymandering proliferated. Republicans took advantage of new technology to shift this into overdrive, and won control of legislatures in several important states.
Republican voters saw Democrats as dangerous and Republican voters had skewed the system in their favor, and “so, in 2016, the Republicans would ride the themes of the past forty years to their logical conclusion” (79).
Analysis
In the second half of the first part of the book, Richardson takes readers through the decades leading up to the “logical conclusion” that is Trump. One of the main ideas advanced by the white supremacists of the antebellum/Civil War/Reconstruction era and the Republicans of the modern era is that some people are better than others and thus have some sort of right to rule. In almost all eras, the people who should rule were white, male, propertied, and usually Christian and heterosexual. People of color, women, the poor, and queer Americans were subordinate, deprived of citizenship or the privileges of citizenship, enslaved, oppressed, and/or violently kept away from the halls of power and governance.
In the Founding era, the Declaration of Independence declared that all men were created equal and the Constitution established a government based on the people, but slavery expanded, indigenous peoples lost their lands, and women had no voice. In the antebellum era enslavers violently put down slave rebellions and states’ rights advocates tenaciously manipulated the political system to retain their own power. The Civil War ended slavery, preserved the Union, and ostensibly gave Black men the right to vote and hold office, but behind the scenes politically Democrats worked to disenfranchise those new voters and push them back into slavery-like conditions with the Jim Crow Laws, and vigilantes like the KKK sowed fear and perpetrated violence to enforce their preferred hierarchy.
In the 1950s, Richardson explains that “business, religious, and political leaders insisted that the federal government’s defense of civil rights was an attempt to replace white men with minorities and women. To stay in control, politicians ramped up attacks on their perceived enemies and began to skew the machinery of government to favor their interests” (xix). This reactionary, but predictable, attitude wasn’t enough to stop the momentum or prevent the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, and the Gay Liberation Movement, but it certainly allowed Nixon and Reagan success in appealing to those Americans who were uncomfortable or afraid of being left behind.
Richardson sees this moment of the 1960s as a crucial one in the fashioning of the current makeup of the two parties. After all, the Democrats were the pro-slavery, white supremacist, states’ rights party up until the mid-20th century, and Republicans were more supportive of equality and a big federal government. Things started to shift in the 1920s and 1930s with the critical, realigning election of 1932 that brought Franklin Roosevelt into office with a coalition of voters that consisted of Black people, urban workers, and rural voters, but Richardson believes the most important transformation between the parties comes in response to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She explains, “When the Democrats under FDR and then especially under Harry S. Truman begin to move toward civil rights, racist Southern Democrats become homeless. Led By South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, they swing behind the Republicans when Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater runs for president in 1964, but it is not clear they’ll stay there. In 1968, Republican candidate Richard Nixon courts Thurmond, promising he’ll back off on federal protection of desegregation. That’s the Southern Strategy, and it injects old Southern racism into the Republican Party, a poison from which it has never recovered. After 1965, the Democrats, in contrast, move to embrace democracy, including Black voting. That process is messy and operates by fits and starts, but it never stops, with the 1993 so-called Motor-Voter Act making it easier to register to vote a sign of that continuing process.”
The Reagan administration and Republicans in Congress passed policies that “created an underclass of Americans increasingly falling behind economically” (57). But they also “had given that underclass someone to hate” (57), and used effective strategies to whip up that hate and have it manifest in support for Republicans at the ballot box.
