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or distributed. Copyright protected material.
 Also by Thomas E. Patterson

The Unseeing Eye:

The Myth of Television Power in National Elections
The Mass Media Election
The American Democracy
Out of Order
We the People
The Vanishing Voter:
Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty
Informing the News
The Mueller Report for Those Too Busy to Read It All
How America Lost Its Mind
Is the Republican Party
Destroying Itself?
KDP Publishing, Seattle, WA
ISBN: 9781658728638
Copyright © Thomas E. Patterson
All rights reserved.
Printed in United States of America
 About the Author

Thomas Patterson is the Bradlee Professor of Government

& the Press at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of
Government.
He was raised in a small rural Minnesota town that was,
and has remained, staunchly Republican. After college, he
served in Vietnam as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Special
Forces. He then earned his PhD in political science and
joined the faculty at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School
of Citizenship, where he taught for two decades before
joining the Harvard faculty in 1996.
He is the author of several books, including Out of Order,
which received the inaugural Graber Award as the best
book of the decade in political communication, and The
Unseeing Eye, which the American Association for Public
Opinion Research named as one of the most influential
books on public opinion in the previous half century. He is
also the author of We the People (McGraw-Hill), an
introductory American government college textbook that’s
now in its 13th edition. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil.
One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked….
Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction,
as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable.
Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests
nor force can touch it; reasoning is of no use; facts
that contradict personal prejudices can simply be
disbelieved—indeed the fool can counter by
criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can
just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions…. If we are
to deal adequately with folly, we must try to
understand its nature.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years” (1943)
To the many students over the years

whose youthful idealism has

deepened my hope

of an America

true to its founding principles

 Contents

About the Author

Introduction

One. The Republican Traps 1

Two. The Ideological Trap 5

Three. The Demographic Trap 35

Four. The Media Trap 63

Five. The Money Trap 87

Six. The Moral Trap 109

Seven. The Conservative Imperative 141

Notes 153

Index 193
 Introduction

America needs a healthy two-party system but hasn’t had one in years.
When not mired in gridlock and brinkmanship, the Republican and
Democratic parties are beset by petty feuding and renegade behavior.
Republican and Democrat voters are losing respect for reason and for
each other. Deception is raging, as is anxiety. Intolerance is on the rise.
One bad thing feeds off the next.
French philosopher Albert Camus said that “one should never
indulge in useless lamentations over an inescapable state of affairs.”
Perhaps our party system is so broken that it’s of this type. But I believe
that it can be repaired, a task that necessarily starts with an
understanding of why it’s broken. Both parties are to blame, but their
contributions differ in scale and kind.
The Republican Party took a bad turn several decades ago and has
since traveled a road harmful to America and to itself, which explains
the book’s title, Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself? The GOP has set
for itself five deadly traps that have eroded its ability to govern and
acquire new sources of support. It could be facing a series of lopsided
election defeats in the years ahead. That would be bad for the GOP and
bad for the country, as I explain in the book’s final chapter, after having
first devoted a chapter to each of the GOP’s deadly traps: the ideological
trap, the demographic trap, the media trap, the money trap, and the
moral trap.
The Democratic Party’s problem is different in kind. It stems from
trying to manage its diversity and far-ranging policy commitments in
an era of income inequality, wage stagnation, lengthening life spans,
globalization, rapid demographic change, and the huge national debt
that has accumulated since George W. Bush’s administration. It would
be a tall order for any political party and, if the Democrats can’t
shoulder it, our governing crisis could worsen. The Democratic Party’s
challenge is the subject of my next book. The title – Can the Democrats
Govern? – foretells the test that it faces.
A few words about my political leanings are in order. I’m a
conservative when it comes to safeguarding political norms and
institutions; a progressive when it comes to the quest for a more
inclusive and sharing society; a libertarian when it comes to respecting
people’s rights and private lives; and a populist when it comes to
paying heed to the people.
I’m an optimist in my faith in democracy. A democracy’s work is
never done. There’s always a better democracy to be had if Americans
work toward it. The founders of our constitutional system didn’t claim
to have the last word on how best to govern our nation, and we should
be wary of those today who claim to have it.
I owe thanks to Kevin Wren, my Harvard assistant, for his tireless
help; Lorie Conway, my wife, whose keen eye for weak spots in my
prose and argument is my steadiest guide; and the scores of writers and
scholars whose work has informed this book.

Thomas E. Patterson
Boston, Massachusetts
January 6, 2020
Is the Republican Party
Destroying Itself?

Thomas E. Patterson
 CHAPTER ONE

The Republican Traps

“Man is the only kind of varmint that sets
his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.”

John Steinbeck, writer

On May 29, 1925, British explorer Percy Fawcett sent a letter to his wife
Nina. He was deep in the Amazon seeking proof of a lost civilization,
rumored to be one of great wealth. His final line was, “You have no fear
of any failure.”1
Those words were Fawcett’s epitaph. An officer in the British Army,
he had repeatedly ventured into the Amazon, seemingly immune to its
dangers. Other explorers had fallen victim to disease or hostile natives,
or had gone mad from battling insects, fatigue, and close encounters
with death. Not Colonel Fawcett. He had spent years in the jungle,
mapping it for the Royal Geographical Society. His reputation was
legendary. His underwriters and acolytes thought that he was
invincible. But sometime in the year of 1925, Fawcett disappeared,
never to be heard from again
The epitaph of the Republican Party is not clear, nor is it certain there
will be one. There is nothing in today’s balance of power between the

1
two parties that would predict a dark future for the Republican Party.
The GOP holds the presidency and has a majority in the Senate. The
Party also looks healthy through the lens of the past four decades. A
year after the Watergate scandal forced President Richard Nixon to
resign, political scientist Everett Carll Ladd described America’s two-
party system as a party-and-a-half system.2 The 1974 midterm election
had been a blowout. The Democrats had picked up 49 House and four
Senate seats. In the 1976 election, Democrats won the presidency, a two-
thirds majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof three-fifths majority
in the Senate. It didn’t last. Since 1980, the GOP has held the presidency
for more years than the Democratic Party and controlled Congress for
nearly as many years.
Nevertheless, there’s a Fawcett-like hubris to the GOP. The GOP has
walked itself into five traps, each of which threatens its future. Judging
from history, one trap alone could be enough to send it into a tailspin.
After the stock market crash of 1929, the Republican Party, which
controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, was trapped by
its laissez-faire belief that the economy was self-correcting. Republicans
stuck to their belief even as joblessness soared. Americans weren’t
willing to wait for the economy to recover on its own. They voted
heavily Democratic in the next three presidential elections, ushering in
an era of Democratic control. In the period from 1932 to 1968, the
Democrats held the presidency except for Dwight Eisenhower’s two
terms of office and controlled the House and Senate for all but four
years.
Today’s Republican Party is confronting five traps of its own
making. They vary in their lethality but, together, could cripple the
party for a generation or more. One trap is its steady movement to the
right, which has distanced the party from the moderate voters who hold
the balance of power in a two-party system. A second trap is
demographic change. Younger adults and minorities vote heavily
Democratic, and their numbers increase with each passing election. The
2
older white voters upon whom the GOP depends are shrinking in
number. Within two decades, based on demographic change alone, the
GOP faces the prospect of being a second-rate party. Right-wing media
are the Republicans’ third trap. A powerful force within the party, they
have tied the GOP to policy positions and versions of reality that are
blunting its ability to govern and to attract new voters. A fourth trap is
the large tax cuts that the GOP has three times given the wealthy. The
rich have reaped a windfall but at a high cost to the GOP. It has soiled
its image as the party of the middle class and created a split between its
working-class and marketplace voters. The fifth trap is the GOP’s
disregard for democratic norms and institutions, including its effort
through voter ID laws to suppress the vote of minorities and lower-
income Americans. In the process, it has made lasting enemies and
created instruments of power that can be used against it.
In the five chapters that follow, each trap will be explained—how it
developed, how it coalesced, why it’s deadly, and why it will be hard
to reverse. These chapters are followed by a final one that explains what
the GOP should do if it is to remain competitive. Underlying the final
chapter’s analysis is a belief that our democracy requires a healthy and
competitive two-party system. America would not benefit from the
demise of the Republican Party, nor can it flourish from the course that
the GOP is pursuing.
The United States needs to restore what historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. called the “vital center.”3 It’s the place on the political
spectrum where interests come together to develop policies that serve
the interests of the many rather than those of a partisan few. The vital
center was also what the framers of the Constitution were seeking when
they debated how best to organize a political system that would govern
a large and diverse nation. They divided the powers of government in
order to force competing interests to engage in compromise and
negotiation in the process of enacting the nation’s laws.

3
 Neither party alone can serve the nation’s interests. As poet and
literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed, a vibrant society
requires both “progression” and “permanence.” Without progression,
which comes mostly from the left, a society stagnates. In the absence of
permanence, which comes mostly from the right, society becomes
unmoored from its enduring values.4 As philosopher John Stuart Mill
noted, a democracy requires both a responsible right-center party and
a responsible left-center party. “A party of order or stability, and a party
of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of
political life,” Mill wrote. ”Each of these modes of thinking derives its
utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the
opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and
sanity.”5

4
 CHAPTER TWO

The Ideological Trap

’Old times there are not forgotten, look away,
look away, look away, Dixie Land.”

Daniel Decatur Emmett’s “Dixie”

The Republican Party’s ideological trap was set the minute that it
turned to the South to end a decades-long losing spell that began in
the 1930s. The “Solid South” had keyed the Democrats’ victory streak.
Take away its votes in the 1932-1964 period and the Democrats would
have controlled Congress for fewer years than the Republicans and
would have lost four presidential elections instead of two.
If Republicans could get the South to switch sides, the parties’
fortunes would change. And that’s precisely what happened. Since the
South switched to the Republican column in the 1968 election,
Republicans have won eight of the thirteen presidential elections.
Without the South, Republicans would have won only three. Yet, if the
Republican Party becomes uncompetitive, and there is good reason to
think that it might, the South is a key part of the explanation. It is not
the full story, but the South is a central reason why the GOP’s future is
at risk.

5
 ***
From the Civil War through the early 1960s, the South was reliably
Democratic. Nevertheless, it was the party’s weaker faction. The South
didn’t have the muscle to control the party. Three-fifths of the
Democratic base was in the North.
History linked the South with the Democrats. White southerners
despised the GOP. It was the party of Lincoln, the party that had freed
the slaves. Race also figured into the political bargain that kept the
South in the Democratic Party. In return for the South’s electoral
support, northern Democrats had kept their hands off its Jim Crow
laws. The strict seniority rule for picking chairs of congressional
committees also served the South’s interest. Because it was solidly
Democratic, the South’s congressional members were virtually assured
of reelection, enabling them to accumulate the years of service required
to chair a committee. There were periods when southern Democrats,
although outnumbered by northern Democrats, chaired most of the
House and Senate committees, including the most powerful ones.1
It was a devil’s bargain, but it enabled northern Democrats to control
the national party. They shaped the national platform and picked the
national leaders. During the century after the Civil War, every
Democratic presidential nominee hailed from the North.
The significance of this arrangement—one where the South’s role
was that of the junior partner—did not enter Republicans’ minds when
they turned to the South to stop their losing streak. They didn’t foresee
the likelihood that, if the South changed sides, it would come to
dominate the GOP. Until the 1980s, the Republican Party was
dominated by its moderate wing, which was concentrated in the
Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. With the exception of Barry
Goldwater in 1964, each of the party’s post-World War II presidential
nominees was from its moderate wing, which also controlled the party
platform. The GOP’s weaker faction was the conservative wing, which
was concentrated in the Mountain and Plains states.

6
 That balance of power was upended when the South moved into the
GOP. The shift is evident in the makeup of Republican membership in
the House of Representatives. Southerners were a small fraction of
House Republicans in the 1960s but are today its largest faction,
accounting for roughly half of all congressional Republicans (see Figure
2.1). Southerners also dominate the House Republican leadership. They
hold five of the eight party leadership positions and are the ranking
member on fifteen of the twenty-one standing committees.
It’s not the first time that a political party has been led by a region of
the country but it’s the only time that a party has been so thoroughly
led by an outlying region. The South is the nation’s poorest region, its
least educated region, its most religious region, its most racially divided
region, and its most anti-government region.2 The South’s role in the
GOP as led the party into an ideological trap, which has steadily
tightened and is nearing the point where it threatens the party’s ability
to compete.

7
 ***
Although the South’s shift to the GOP is widely attributed to Richard
Nixon’s southern strategy, signs of change had surfaced three decades
earlier. The popularity of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had
brought into Congress large numbers of liberal Democrats who clashed
over policy with their southern counterparts. By the 1950s, southern
Democrats were voting nearly as often with congressional Republicans
as they were with northern Democrats.3
The 1948 presidential election also revealed a crack in the
Democratic coalition. At the Democratic national convention, northern
Democrats narrowly adopted a platform that called for desegregating
the military, abolishing the poll tax, and making lynching a federal
crime. Disgruntled southern Democrats stormed out of the convention
and formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, choosing Strom
Thurmond, the Democratic governor of South Carolina, as their
presidential nominee. In the fall election, Thurman carried four states
in the Deep South – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South
Carolina.
The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling, which
declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional, also
tested the South’s loyalty to the Democratic Party. The ruling was
embraced by Democrats in the North and resisted by those in the South.
Alabama Governor George Wallace was among the southern leaders
who recognized that overt racial appeals would limit the South’s ability
to gain support elsewhere. Wallace created a vocabulary for playing the
race card without saying it. Segregation was not an issue of race but of
“states’ rights,” “local control,” and “law and order.”4
Although the Brown ruling was supported by most leading
Republicans, others attacked it, including William Buckley, founder of
the influential conservative magazine, The National Review. In a widely
cited editorial, Buckley asked whether southern whites were culturally
and politically entitled to rule. He answered the question by saying:

8
“The sobering answering is Yes—the White community is so entitled
because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” 5
Nevertheless, public support for equal rights was on the rise and
contributed to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited
discrimination in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other public
accommodations. Northern Democrats led the legislative effort, which
was resisted by every parliamentary maneuver that southern members
of Congress could muster, including the longest filibuster in Senate
history. In signing the bill, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson knew
the risk that it posed for his party, reportedly telling an aide that he’d
“signed away the South for a generation.”6
Among the handful of Republican senators to vote against the Civil
Rights bill was Barry Goldwater, who ran against Johnson as the
Republican nominee in that year’s presidential election. On the floor of
the Republican National Convention, some black delegates were cursed
and shoved, and one had his suit set on fire. Baseball star Jackie
Robinson was on the convention floor and said, “I now believe I know
how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” 7 During the campaign,
Goldwater claimed that the Civil Rights Act violated the constitutional
right of free association. At stake, he said, was the right of hotel keepers
and restaurant owners to pick their customers.8 In addition to his home
state of Arizona, Goldwater carried only four states – the same Deep
South states that Thurmond had carried in 1948.

***
During the 1968 presidential campaign, the race issue was both out in
the open and peering in from the shadows.
George Wallace had formed a new party, the American Independent
Party, through which to run for the presidency. Knowing that he
couldn’t win, Wallace hoped to pick up enough electoral votes to deny
his opponents a majority, which would throw the election into the
House of Representatives. Once there, southern members would use
their votes as a bargaining chip to try to get one of the parties to agree

9
to void the Civil Rights Act.9 Wallace carried five southern states and
came within 10 percentage points of carrying three more, which would
have given him the electoral votes needed to send the election into the
House.
Recognizing that he couldn’t outflank Wallace on the race issue,
Republican nominee Richard Nixon sought to outflank the Democratic
nominee Hubert Humphrey. “The whole problem is really the blacks,”
Nixon said to an aide. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes
this while not appearing to.”10 Exploiting the summer riots in urban
ghettos, Nixon called for “law and order.” Nixon told an aide that one
of his TV ads “hits it right on the nose…It's all about law and order and
the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”11 His campaign
produced ads that aired only in the South, some of which featured
Thurmond, who by then had switched to the Republican Party.12
Nixon’s chief-of-staff, John Ehrlichman wrote that Nixon was
determined to capture “the racists,” saying that “subliminal appeal to
the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and
speeches.”13
Nixon’s southern strategy helped him to narrowly win the 1968
election with 43 percent of the popular vote. He prevailed in the
Electoral College by carrying five states that had been part of the Civil
War Confederacy. Humphrey carried only one, Texas.
Once in office, Nixon endorsed black voting rights and extended
affirmative action to include all government hiring. Moderate
Republicans had been uneasy with Nixon’s veiled racial appeals during
the campaign and praised his apparent change of heart.14 But Nixon was
playing a two-sided game, sensing that an increase in black voters
would spark a white backlash.15 Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips
explained the strategy: “Without that prodding from the blacks, the
whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the
local Democrats.”16
The suburbs were also a Nixon target.17 In implementing the 1968
Fair Housing Act, Nixon limited the policy to inner cities, refusing to

10
release funds or take legal action to force suburbs to accept public
housing projects.18 When the Supreme Court in 1971 upheld racial
busing,19 Nixon instructed the Justice Department to slow the pace of
lawsuits, leaving the issue to be played out in the courts. And he
attacked the “forced busing” of students from inner-city districts to
suburban districts. “I can assure you,” Nixon said, “that it is not the
policy of this government to use the power of the federal government
or federal funds . . . for forced integration of the suburbs. I believe that
forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest.” 20
In his 1972 reelection campaign, running on a platform that called
for an end to racial busing, Nixon swept the southern states. Nixon’s
southern strategy was not the only reason that the South went
Republican. After the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, the GOP
would have attracted southern whites even if Nixon had not put out the
welcome mat. Nor did they need Nixon’s words to tell them that they
opposed racial busing for the purpose of integrating public schools.
Post-war economic development, which had broadened the South’s
middle class, was also working in the GOP’s favor.21

***
In 1973, the Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade decision, which
upheld the right of women to choose abortion. To religious
conservatives, it was yet another assault on religion. A decade earlier,
the Supreme Court had ruled that Bible readings and prayers in public
schools were unconstitutional.22
A Gallup poll conducted after the Roe v. Wade decision found that
Republicans and Democrats had similar opinions on the ruling.23 That
changed after the political parties took up the religious issue. The
Republican Party’s 1976 platform called for a constitutional amendment
that would “restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.”
The Democratic Party platform endorsed a woman’s right to choose.
The religious issue played most strongly in the South with its heavy
concentration of evangelical Christians. It was in southern schools that

11
Bible readings and prayers were most often part of the daily routine,
and it was from southern pulpits that the abortion decision was most
roundly denounced.24 Evangelical Christians were also the Americans
most upset by the sexual revolution that had emerged in the 1960s.
Christianity Today, the leading evangelical Christian magazine, called it
“America’s sex crisis” and warned that it would destroy the family and
the nation’s moral fiber.25
The fight against social change was led by Baptist ministers. Jerry
Falwell created the Moral Majority, which had four million members,
two million donors, and chapters in every southern state. Pat Robertson
used his Christian Broadcasting Network, which had a million daily
viewers, to create the Christian Coalition. In the 1980 presidential
election, the Christian Right threw its weight behind Republican
nominee Ronald Reagan, saying that he would “lead them out of the
wilderness of unrighteousness.” 26 Even though Reagan was running
against Jimmy Carter, a southern born-again Christian, he carried the
white evangelical vote by a two-to-one margin.27
The Reagan years brought white evangelical Christians into the
ranks of Republican party organizations. By the mid-1990s, they chaired
scores of Republican county and local organizations.28 Evangelicals had
earlier been inward looking. Compared with Catholic and mainline
Protestant churches, evangelical churches place less emphasis on
assisting the disadvantaged and more emphasis on a personal
relationship with God and dedication to the local congregation.29 Until
the Reagan years, evangelicals had the lowest voter turnout rate of the
leading Christian faiths. They would eventually have the highest.30
Reagan’s efforts on behalf of the religious right were largely
symbolic. He called for two constitutional amendments, one to ban
abortion and the other to legalize school prayer. Although he didn’t
push hard for either one, his support among white evangelicals didn’t
waver. It was a lesson not lost on Republican strategists. As long as
Republican candidates stayed true to the pro-life position on abortion,
they could count on the support of white evangelicals.

12
 ***
For Reagan, race was a bigger issue than religion. He had spoken out
against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the
1968 Fair Housing Act, saying of the 1968 law: “If an individual wants
to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,
he has a right to do so.”31
Although the civil rights policies of the 1960s were firmly in place
when Reagan sought the presidency in 1980, affirmative action and
racial busing in public schools were unsettled issues. His first speaking
appearance as the Republican presidential nominee was at the Neshoba
County Fair in Mississippi, not far from where three white civil rights
activists were murdered in 1964 by local Klan members. Speaking to the
nearly all-white crowd, Reagan made no mention of the killings but
spoke bluntly about his opposition to federal power. “I believe in states’
rights,” Reagan said. “And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of
our government today by giving powers that were never intended in
the Constitution to be given to that federal establishment.”32
Once in office, Reagan tried to persuade Congress to strip federal
courts of their jurisdiction over busing. Failing in that effort, the Reagan
administration withheld federal busing funds from communities that
were under court order to desegregate their public schools. The head of
Reagan’s Civil Rights Division said, “We are not going to compel
students who do not want to choose to have an integrated education to
have one.”33
Reagan also attacked affirmative action. He said that government
has “a right and responsibility to eliminate discrimination in hiring and
education.” His words might have been taken as a plea for the fair
treatment of black Americans, except for what Reagan said next: “If
your ancestry is Czechoslovakian, Polish, Italian, or if you are of the
Jewish faith, you might find yourself the victim of discrimination.”34
“Reverse discrimination” was not a new idea, but Reagan popularized
it. Reagan directed his Justice Department to find ways to gut
affirmative action. Rather than bringing cases involving alleged

13
discrimination against minorities, the Justice Department pursued
cases where white workers claimed to be the victims of discrimination.
When the Supreme Court rebuffed the effort, Reagan found other ways
to undermine the policy. He exempted most companies that had federal
contracts from complying with affirmative-action hiring requirements
and appointed affirmative-action opponents to key positions in the
Civil Rights Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. 35
Nor did Reagan stop with affirmative action and busing. Reagan
vetoed a bill prohibiting racial discrimination by private organizations
receiving federal funds. In justifying the veto, which Congress
overrode, Reagan repeated what he had said about the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, claiming that the bill would “unjustifiably extend the power of the
federal government over the decisions and affairs of private
organizations.”36 Reagan also tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act
(VRA) when it came up for renewal. After Congress rejected the effort,
Reagan directed the Justice Department to go slow in enforcing the
VRA.
Reagan’s attempt to weaken the VRA played most strongly in the
South. Enacted in 1965, the legislation had empowered federal agents
to register voters in designated states and counties with a history of
voter suppression. White officials in the South had claimed that the
VRA infringed on their constitutional authority over elections, an
argument rejected by the Supreme Court, which cited the Fifteenth
Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. The Court
said, “After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the
Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the
advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its
victims.”37

***
Reagan’s signature policy efforts – reducing taxes and attacking welfare
spending – also played strongly in the South. It was the region where

14
distrust of federal power and opposition to government spending were
highest. When Lyndon Johnson’s signature anti-poverty bill, the 1964
Economic Opportunity Act, was voted on in Congress, half of the
South’s Democratic senators and two-fifths of its Democratic
representatives voted against it, even though the region had the
nation’s highest poverty rate.38
Nevertheless, Reagan’s attacks on welfare transcended region more
fully than did his positions on race and religion. Welfare spending had
increased sharply in the previous two decades, and taxpayers across the
country were unhappy about it. Americans were four times more likely
to say that government was spending “too much” on welfare than to
say it was spending “too little.”39 Working-class whites were
particularly concerned, believing that their tax dollars were being spent
on blacks who were too lazy to get a job.40 Nixon had received a majority
of the white working-class vote in 1968, becoming the first Republican
presidential nominee in memory to do so.41 Reagan drew working-class
whites more fully into Republican ranks, scooping up two out of every
three of their votes.42
In attacking welfare spending, Reagan folded race into the mix by
raising the specter of “welfare queens” – welfare recipients who, as
Reagan described them, drove Cadillacs and had children out of
wedlock in order to fatten their welfare checks. It didn’t take a whole
lot of imagination to think that single black mothers were sitting behind
the wheel. Reagan’s pitch helped cement the view among some
Americans that federal welfare programs were designed to help
minorities.43 The perception worked to Republicans’ advantage after
Reagan persuaded Congress to enact the largest tax cuts in history, most
of which went to high-income Americans. Democrats saw the tax cuts
as an opening. They believed that their call to increase taxes on the
wealthy would enable them to win support among working-class
whites. It didn’t. The call was countered by a belief that the revenue
would be spent to help black Americans.44

15
 Democrats controlled the House throughout Reagan’s presidency,
and he had only limited success in cutting welfare spending.
Nevertheless, Reagan succeeded in shifting the national debate from
one focused on federal spending as a means of solving social problems
to one focused on tax cuts and welfare spending.45 Even Democrats
found themselves talking about the welfare issue. Bill Clinton, the
Democrats’ 1992 presidential nominee, ran on a promise “to end
welfare as we know it.”

***
Reagan’s presidency gave renewed life to the Republican Party, which
had suffered devastating election defeats in the aftermath of the
Watergate scandal. Not only did Reagan win reelection in a landslide,
but the GOP prevailed in the election to choose his successor. Reagan
accomplished what conservatives since Goldwater had only dreamed
of achieving. He had assembled a grand alliance of marketplace
conservatives, white evangelicals, working-class whites, and national
security hawks.
Nevertheless, the Reagan presidency cemented an ideology that
would gradually put the party at risk. The GOP had reinvented itself
around a set of issues aligned with those of southern politics: racial bias,
religious traditionalism, and small government. The Party of Lincoln
was now the party of states’ rights.
There was nothing new about a party reinventing itself. The
Democrats had done it during the 1930s Great Depression, shifting from
a states’ rights party to one that used federal power as a means of
economic recovery and redistribution. It was in the 1930s that the term
“liberal” came into popular use as way to describe the Democratic
Party.46 What was unique about the GOP’s repositioning was the nature
of its issues. Each could be pursued without trading away the others.
Cuts in government spending could be accomplished without
alienating those concerned with abortion or affirmative action. The
GOP’s issues were also reinforcing. Most Republicans who held

16
conservative opinions on race also held conservative positions on
religion and federal spending.47 There were exceptions, of course. Some
longstanding Republicans drawn to the GOP by its pro-business
policies had little in common with the newcomers attracted by its
positions on race and religion, but they stayed put anyway, anchored
by the party’s promise of lower taxes and less regulation. Nevertheless,
by historical standards, the GOP had crafted an ideologically cohesive
coalition.
In earlier times, when a party had repositioned itself, it had done so
in ways that made room for voters with diverse and even conflicting
interests – a pattern that historically had distinguished American
parties from those in European multiparty systems. In Europe, a party
could acquire a share of power if it had the backing of a cohesive
minority. But, in a two-party system, it was all or nothing. To gain
power, a party had to attract a voting majority. As a result, U.S. parties
had traditionally positioned themselves near the center in order to
create as large a coalition as possible. If a party tried to play one group
off another, or took a strong position on a wedge issue, it risked losing
some of its own supporters.
In the Reagan years, the GOP ignored the “big tent” maxim of two-
party politics – that parties need to moderate their positions in order to
attract a broad coalition. The GOP instead positioned itself to build a
different and riskier type of coalition. It embraced a set of issues – race,
religion, and federal programs - that were divisive by nature. Their
pursuit would solidify the GOP’s base but would cut it off from voters
who held opposing views. The unanswered question in the Reagan
years was whether the GOP could continue its move to the right and
still attract majority support.

***
During the 1988 presidential election while trailing Democratic
nominee Michael Dukakis in the polls, George H.W. Bush took a page
from the Nixon-Reagan playbook. It started with an independent

17
group’s political ad featuring Willie Horton, a black convict who had
raped a woman and brutally assaulted her husband while on weekend
furlough from a prison in Massachusetts, where Dukakis was governor.
A series of ads on the same theme were created by the Bush campaign,
and Bush started moving up in the polls.48 Bush’s campaign advisor Lee
Atwater remarked: “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to
wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.” 49
Nevertheless, the politics of division did not come naturally to Bush
and it didn’t carry into his presidency, nor was he trusted by his party’s
conservatives, which led him to placate them by declaring himself a
fiscal conservative. Said Bush, “Read my lips. No new taxes!”
Nevertheless, two years into his presidency, with the federal deficit
exploding from a slowing economy and a revenue shortfall resulting
from the Reagan tax cuts, Bush negotiated a tax increase with
congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Although the bill eventually passed, a revolt by House conservatives
defeated the first attempt.50 The House revolt was led by Georgia
congressman Newt Gingrich, and it was Gingrich rather than Bush who
would define the next phase of the GOP’s evolution. Declaring that
“there is no room for compromise,” Gingrich urged his Republican
colleagues to block Democratic bills, even ones that Republicans
favored, in order to create legislative gridlock.51 Gingrich declared,
“You’re fighting a war.... This party does not need another generation
of cautious, prudent [leaders] …. What we really need are people who
are willing to stand up in a slug-fest.”52 He circulated a vocabulary for
Republicans to use when talking about Democrats. On the list were
words like “radical,” “sick,” and “traitors.”53
Gingrich also targeted the party’s moderates. He called GOP Senate
leader Robert Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state” and sought
to unseat Republican House leader Robert Michel. Recognizing that his
days were numbered, Michel retired from politics, saying that the
newer breed of congressional Republicans were “more interested in
fighting” than “in legislating.”54 When the Republicans then swept the

18
1994 elections and took control of the House for the first time in forty
years, Gingrich became Speaker of the House. He eliminated the strict
seniority rule for picking committee chairs, which allowed him to strip
moderate Republicans of their posts. He raised large amounts of
campaign funds, using the money to support Republican candidates
whose beliefs aligned with his. He took control of the Republican
Party’s state and local training organization, using it to recruit like-
minded candidates.55
As it turned out, Gingrich struggled to make the transition from
antagonist to governing leader. He concocted an ill-advised
government shutdown, led the ill-fated impeachment of Bill Clinton,
was charged and fined for improper uses of campaign funds, was found
to have had an extra-marital affair with a woman half his age, and had
infuriated many of his Republican colleagues with his imperial style.
After the Republicans lost House seats in the 1996 and 1998 elections,
Gingrich faced a revolt within his caucus and resigned as Speaker,
saying, without apparent irony, “I’m not willing to preside over people
who are cannibals.”56 Although he was out as Speaker, Gingrich had set
in motion the purge of Republican moderates and had developed the
confrontational style that would come to define the Republican way of
governing.
The Gingrich years coincided with a shift in the regional makeup of
the GOP’s congressional delegation. The South’s rapid shift into the
Republican column in presidential politics after passage of the 1964
Civil Rights Bill was not matched at the congressional level. Most of the
South’s Democratic incumbents were racially conservative, and voters
saw no reason to unseat them. And with a few exceptions like Strom
Thurmond, Democratic incumbents saw no reason to switch to the
GOP. Doing so would have meant forfeiting their years of seniority on
congressional committees.
Gradually they retired and, as they did, so did the makeup of the
South’s congressional delegation. When Gingrich entered Congress in
1979, nearly two-thirds of the South’s white senators and

19
representatives were Democrats. When he left office two decades later,
nearly two-thirds were Republicans.57 It was a radical transformation.
In 1960, not a single top GOP congressional leader was from the South,
and a mere one in seven congressional Republicans was from the
region. When Gingrich left the House in 1999, southerners constituted
more than a third of Republican lawmakers and held roughly half of
the leadership positions. Over the same period, the number of
congressional Republicans from moderate states fell from two-thirds of
the total to less than half, and their control of leadership positions was
slipping.

***
In 2000, George W. Bush lost the New Hampshire Republican primary
to John McCain and was trailing in the polls in the upcoming South
Carolina primary. With his campaign reeling, Bush pulled out the race
card. By email, phone, and flyer, the Bush campaign falsely alleged that
McCain had fathered a “Negro child.” Voters were asked in push polls
whether they intended to vote for Bush and, if the answer was yes, they
were urged to vote. If they said that they planned to vote for McCain,
the caller would say in effect, “Would you vote for him if you knew he
had an illegitimate black child.”58 Bush won the South Carolina primary
and went on to win the presidency by the margin of a single electoral
vote. The South carried him to victory. He won all of the region’s 182
electoral votes - two-thirds of his total.
Four years later, running for reelection and dragged down by an
increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, Bush pursued a novel reelection
strategy. Presidential candidates had typically shifted toward the center
for the general election. Conceding the middle to the other party was
seen as political suicide. Goldwater had tried it in 1964, positioning
himself to the right in a belief that conservatives “would come out of
the woodwork” to support his candidacy. Goldwater lost in one of the
biggest landslides in presidential history, attracting barely more than 38
percent of the vote.

20
 But the political landscape had changed by 2004. The GOP had
shifted to the right during the Reagan years and then continued to move
in that direction. In 1964, most of the voters who identified with the
Republican Party were huddled near the middle. Now they were
grouped on the right. Guided by Karl Rove, his chief political advisor,
Bush chose a base-centered turnout strategy. Rather than shifting
toward the middle, Bush gambled his presidency on a belief that
positioning himself toward the right would get the Republican base to
turn out in large numbers.59
It’s questionable whether Bush made the right choice - he won by the
smallest reelection margin in presidential history. But the window on a
centrist strategy was narrowing for the GOP. If it continued its
rightward shift, it would reach a point where a base strategy was its
only realistic option.

***
In his last year in office, Bush’s approval rating fell below 40 percent,
dragged down by an unforgiving war in Iraq and by the worst recession
since the Great Depression. In the 2008 election, the Democrats won the
presidency and a three-fifths majority in both the House and Senate.
Democrats were conceivably in the same position that they had been in
1932, when propelled by a precipitous decline in the economy, they had
also won a landslide election.
But that’s where the parallel ends. When President Franklin
Roosevelt took office after the 1932 election, he championed a single
goal – putting Americans back to work. He initiated one jobs program
after the next, seeking to gain the public’s trust. In the ensuing
presidential election, Democrats won an even larger victory than they
had in 1932, consolidating their position as America’s dominant party.60
They remained so for the next thirty years.
After their landslide victory in 2008, Democrats embarked on a
different course. Although polls indicated that jobs were the top issue,
President Obama, after quickly getting an economic stimulus bill

21
through Congress, jumped headlong into health care reform, ignoring
the fact that the issue had backfired on two earlier Democratic
presidents.61 Several leading Democrats, including Vice President Joe
Biden, tried to talk the normally prudent Obama out of it. Obama was
undeterred, saying, “I’m feeling lucky.” 62 It took a year to get the health
care bill through Congress. As a policy initiative, it was a major
achievement. As a political move, it was a disaster. It alienated large
numbers of Americans and reenergized a demoralized Republican
Party. In the 2010 midterm election, the GOP won a landslide victory,
gaining control of the House and cutting deeply into the Democrats’
Senate majority.
The Republican victory owed in part to the Tea Party movement,
which had emerged the previous year in reaction to Democratic
spending initiatives – a $787 billion economic stimulus package and the
proposed health care reform bill. The initiatives sparked a backlash
echoing that of the Reagan years – the federal government was
spending far too much and helping far too many undeserving people at
the expense of hardworking taxpayers.
Although Democrats were the Tea Party’s main target, the
Republican “establishment” was close behind. Amid all of the GOP’s
symbolic nods to racial and religious conservatives, the party’s policy
agenda was controlled by its marketplace conservatives. Sailing into
power on the votes of a Republican base that was increasingly working
class, they pursued free trade agreements and large tax cuts for the
wealthy. Working-class Republicans had begun to wonder if the
Republican establishment had their interests at heart, a sentiment that
boiled over during George W. Bush’s last year in office when
lawmakers bailed out the banks while leaving struggling homeowners
to fend for themselves.
The Tea Party drove the GOP’s strategy in the 2010 election. In the
past, after a party had taken a drubbing in an election, as the
Republicans had in 2008, it had shifted toward the center in an effort to
win back the supporters that had defected to the opposing party. But in

22
2010, the Republicans shifted further to the right. Tea Party activists
mounted primary election challenges to a large number of Republican
moderates, beating several of them, and then backed staunch
conservatives in the general election.63
The Congress elected in 2010 turned out to be the first in history with
no ideological overlap between members of the opposing parties. As
measured by roll-call votes, the least conservative Republican in the
House or Senate was more conservative than the least liberal Democrat
in that chamber.64 Not a single member in either chamber had a voting
pattern that overlapped with even as much as one member of the
opposing party. It was a dramatic change from the 1960s when
Congress consisted of southern and northern Democrats and moderate
and conservative Republicans. Roughly a fourth of House and Senate
members in that period were out of step with their party’s majority -
more conservative in the case of Democrats and more liberal in the case
of Republicans.65
The disappearing middle in Congress owed to the GOP’s shift to the
right (see Figure 2.2). The ideology of northern Democratic lawmakers
did not change much after the 1960s. Their shift to the left had started
in the early 1900s and was largely in place by the 1960s, the point at
which the GOP began its decades-long shift to the right. The Republican
congressional party had been a center-right party. It was now a right-
wing party.
As Republican leaders moved to the right, Republican voters trailed
along, widening the gap between Republican and Democratic
identifiers. In 1987, there was a 17 percentage-point gap in Republicans
and Democrats’ opinions on whether government should take care of
people who can’t take care of themselves. By 2007, the gap was twice
that size. On the issue of giving minorities a helping hand, the partisan
gap had also doubled. In terms of traditional ideas about family and
marriage, the partisan gap had widened by a factor of four. 66

23
 Democrats contributed to the widening gap, but it was mostly a
result of Republicans’ rightward shift. In 1987, there was, for example,
a 4 percentage-point difference between Democrats and Republicans on
the question of whether abortion should be “illegal in all
circumstances.” By 2011, the gap had widened to 18 points with
Republicans accounting for two-thirds of the change. (The gap would
continue to widen, standing at 25 points in 2019 with Republicans
accounting for more than three-fourths of the change).67
The divide between the parties went beyond policy opinions. Two
of America’s deepest divides, race and religion, had merged and found
outlet in the political parties.68 The GOP had become a white, church-
going party – nearly nine in ten of its voters were non-Hispanic whites
and five of every six of its voters said that religion was an “important”
part of their daily lives.69 Americans were becoming separated by how
they lived and looked, making partisan conflict an issue of identity as
well as of policy.70

24
 ***
The Tea Party movement exposed a shift of power within the GOP.
Republican lawmakers were no longer in charge of the party’s agenda.
They had become captives of the party’s base.
Moderate Republicans were finding it difficult to win nomination.
Primary elections have low turnout, and those who show up tend to
hold more extreme views.71 It was increasingly risky for Republican
incumbents to pursue a moderate course, as Indiana Senator Richard
Lugar discovered. The Senate’s most senior Republican and its top
foreign policy expert, Lugar lost in a 2012 primary to a right-wing
challenger who attacked him for having "lost his conservative edge."72
Fearing that they might be next, moderate Republicans moved to the
right in order to stave off the possibility of a primary election
challenger.73 And when they ended up with a challenger, even a weak
one, they moved even further to the right.74 Running Scared, a 1997 book
by political scientist Anthony King, told of how House incumbents,
because of high campaign costs and their two-year term of office,
constantly worry about reelection.75 If such a book were written today
about Republican lawmakers, it would be titled, Governing Scared. They
live in fear of casting a vote that will anger the party’s primary voters.76
Few bills illustrate the point more clearly than does the 2018 bill to
protect “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought into the
country as young children. Drafted by Democratic Senator Chris Coons
and Republican Senator John McCain, the bill sought to balance
Democratic and Republican concerns – protection for Dreamers and
their immediate families as a concession to Democrats and heightened
border security as a concession to Republicans. Off the record, many
congressional Republicans expressed support for the bill. Yet it never
came close to passing. The Republican majority in the House refused to
bring it to the floor for a vote and, when introduced in the Senate, only
10 percent of Republicans backed it.
The political center is a risky place for Republican lawmakers to find
themselves. In 2017, Arizona Republican senator Jeff Flake said

25
Republicans and Democrats should work together to fix health care and
immigration. For all the fury it unleashed, you would have thought he’d
been caught selling child porn. “Don’t get me started on Jeff Flake,” said
Kelli Ward, the right-winger who unsuccessfully challenged John
McCain in Arizona’s 2016 Republican Senate primary. Ward then
proceeded to blast away at Flake, accusing him of turning his back on
conservative principles, lying to the voters, and being lower than a
snake in the grass.77 Shortly thereafter, Flake announced he would not
seek reelection.
The empowerment of the Republican base rested on a miscalculation
by leaders like Nixon. They saw the shift to the right as a political
strategy. But that’s not how Republican voters saw it. They took their
leaders’ promises to heart. 78 A Pew Research Center poll found that
staunch conservatives are four times more likely than staunch liberals
to say that their representatives should “stick to their positions” rather
than engage in “compromise.”79

***
At no earlier time in American history would a politician like Donald
Trump have been elected president. That he won in 2016 says more
about the Republican Party than it does about Trump. In the whole of
American history, there is only one major party – today’s GOP - that
would have nominated a Trump-like candidate for president.
In his 2016 run for the presidency, Trump smashed a cornerstone of
the southern strategy – the use of veiled ethnic and racial attacks.
Trump didn’t bother talking in code. “Mexicans are bringing drugs.
They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” “Whiteness” was Trump’s
definition of a real American. Trump’s candidacy highlighted how far
to the right Republicans had traveled since the Reagan years. Reagan
backed a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included amnesty

26
for undocumented aliens. Trump vowed to round them up and ship
them out of the country.
Trump’s use of the race card was nothing new. In 1989, he had taken
out full-page ads in the New York City papers, saying “Bring Back the
Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!” It was a response to the prison
terms that five black and Hispanic teenagers had received for allegedly
raping and beating a young woman who was jogging in New York’s
Central Park. A decade later, DNA evidence and a confession led to the
conviction of the real perpetrator. When the five men received a cash
settlement for their wrongful imprisonment, Trump tweeted "Innocent
of what – how many people did they mugg?" He slammed the payment
in an angry op-ed in the New York Daily News. “My opinion on the
settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace,” Trump
declared. “A detective close to the case, who has followed it since 1989,
calls it ‘the heist of the century.'”80 Trump hauled out the race card again
in 2011, claiming that Barack Obama was born in Africa. “Growing up
no one knew him,” Trump said when told by a reporter that Obama had
a Hawaii-issued birth certificate.
Trump lucked out in the 2016 general election, winning the electoral
vote while losing the popular vote by nearly three million votes. On the
other hand, his success in the Republican primaries was no fluke. He
received the highest number of primary votes ever received by a
Republican presidential candidate, a record that’s doubly remarkable
in that he faced seventeen opponents.81 The crowds at Trump’s
campaign rallies dwarfed those of any Republican candidate in
memory. His blood-and-soil pitch, the likes of which had not been seen
since George Wallace, drew a rabid response, as did his vow to jail his
Democratic opponent. Observers predicted that his threats and lies
would eventually alienate a chunk of the Republican base. They failed
to recognize that he was saying what many Republicans had been
waiting for years to hear and saying it in ways that echoed their beliefs.

27
 To be sure, some Republican voters were disturbed by revelations of
Trump’s extra-marital affairs. A candidate who was thrice-married and
an adulterer would seem to be too much for white evangelicals to
accept. But too much was not enough. Trump picked up four of every
five of their votes – a record high. “I believe he’s president of the United
States for a reason. I think God put him there,” said Baptist minister
Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham.82
Trump benefitted from the wide divide between the parties. Voting
against him could have meant victory for the Democrats, a prospect that
most fence-sitting Republicans believed was worse. Compared with
1980, twice as many partisans today have a strongly negative view of
the opposing party. A growing number of Americans dislike the
opposing party more than they like their own party, and often by a wide
margin.83 When political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven
Webster studied recent elections, they found that “ratings of the
opposing party were by far the strongest predictor” of the vote. “The
greatest concern of party supporters,” they wrote, “is preventing the
opposing party from gaining power.” 84
In 2016, Trump received the votes of 92 percent of Republican
identifiers – a 2 percentage-point increase on McCain’s showing in 2008.
And despite the claim of some pundits that Trump had forged a new
Republican coalition, it mirrored those of other recent Republican
nominees. As for his Electoral College votes, more than half came from
the South.

***
The Trump presidency has been like no other. Replete with fiery news
conferences, early-morning tweets, overnight policy shifts, insults of
foreign leaders, slams of congressional leaders, the firing of political
aides, fits of temper, and one false claim after another, it has been

28
mesmerizing. And unsettling. “We’re in unchartered waters in all of
this,” a Republican leader said. “This is all new territory.”85
Reporters wondered why congressional Republicans were largely
silent when Trump attacked the rule of law, trashed the nation’s
institutions, and turned the GOP’s soft-edged pitch into razor-sharp
nativism. There was a reason for their silence – the intimidating
presence of Trump and the primary voters aligned with him. Exit polls
in 2016 revealed that more than half of Republican primary voters felt
their party’s lawmakers had “betrayed” them.86 They had voted heavily
for Trump,87 and it was Trump from whom they were now taking their
cue. As she was leaving the Senate, Democrat Claire McCaskill said her
GOP colleagues would tell her privately that Trump “doesn't have a
grasp of the issues, he's making rash decisions, he's not listening to
people who know the subject matter. But in public if they go after him
... they know they get a primary, and they know that's tough."88
Nevertheless, congressional Republicans also had policy reasons for
protecting Trump. With notable exceptions, his policy goals were ones
they had championed – tougher immigration enforcement, tax cuts on
business and upper-incomes, business deregulation, repeal of the
Affordable Care Act, the appointment of conservative judges to the
federal bench, cuts in social welfare programs, the narrowing of
affirmative action and gay rights, the burdening of family planning
providers, and more. During Trump’s first two years in office, the
average Senate Republican backed his position on legislative bills 91
percent of the time. For House members, the average was 94 percent.89
After Trump won the 2016 election, some observers suggested that
Trump’s New York City background might lead him to govern as
something other than a conservative Republican. That assessment was
never realistic. To get his programs through Congress, Trump required
the backing of Republican lawmakers. The option he did have, and
which he pursued, was to push the GOP further to the right on a range

29
of issues, including immigration, civil rights, the environment, and
business deregulation.90
Trump has erased whatever uncertainty there was about the
ideology driving the GOP. It is out in the open and it is out of step with
the thinking of most Americans. As Republicans have moved ever
further to the right, they’ve become increasingly divorced from
majority opinion. Americans who identify as Republicans have issue
opinions that are markedly at odds, not just with those of self-identified
Democrats, but with those who identify as independents. Figure 2.3
shows the opinion gap on nine salient policy issues, using the average
opinion of independents as the baseline. On every issue, Republicans
are further away from independents than are the Democrats. On some
policy issues – including taxes, health care, and climate change – the
gap between where Republicans are located and where independents

30
are positioned is huge. Across the nine policy issues, the opinion of the
average Republican is more than twice the distance (28.4 percentage
points) from where the average independent is positioned than is the
opinion of the average Democrat (12.6 points).
It’s a dangerous position for an American political party to find
itself. Neither the GOP nor the Democratic Party has enough loyalists
to win on its own. As the GOP has tacked ever further to the right, it
has distanced itself ever further from the independent voters who hold
the balance of power in U.S. elections. Whatever threat Trump poses to
the future of the Republican Party, it’s secondary to the long-term risk
inherent in Republicans’ policy positions.
The 2018 midterm election exposed the risk. Democrats outpolled
Republicans in House races by nearly nine million votes – the largest
margin by either party in nearly a half century.91 Some Republican
incumbents who lost their seats in 2018 tried to shift toward the center,
which prompted Trump to tweet that they had lost because they didn’t
embrace “what we stand for.” In truth, they lost because they were from
competitive districts and couldn’t attract enough independent voters.
Independents voted for Democratic House candidates by a 56-44
percent margin in 2018.92
Republican candidates who won in 2018 were largely from one-
sided House districts that Republicans couldn’t have lost if they tried.
A look at these districts reveals just how narrow and southern the
Republicans’ base has become. Of the 165 districts labeled “safe
Republican” or “likely Republican” in 2018 by the Cook Political
Report, nearly three-fifths are in the South. If areas bordering the South
with large numbers of white evangelicals are included, the figure
approaches three-fourths. The GOP’s southern overtures have
solidified the party in the South and bordering areas but fostered a
brand of politics that has endangered it elsewhere.

31
 The question is whether the GOP can do what vulnerable parties
have historically done – shift toward the political center. It’s possible,
but the GOP cannot easily do it. Its moderate leaders have been all but
eliminated and those who might be inclined to try would risk their
careers in doing so. Today’s GOP operates in a closed loop, twirling
away on the right flank of the political spectrum. It’s a road to ruin in a
two-party system.

***
Has there ever been a time in the nation’s history where a major
American political party has found itself in the position that the
Republican Party occupies today? As it happens, there was such a time.
In the 1880s, less than twenty years after the end of the Civil War,
the Republican Party was in trouble. Founded on the abolition of
slavery and the sharing of wealth, it had abandoned its principles,
turning against black Americans and forsaking even the pretense of
helping lower-income farmers and workers. It had shifted to the far
right, aligning itself with the industrial barons who were gouging
farmers and exploiting labor. As its support declined, it resorted to dirty
tricks. It sought to limit access to the ballot, repressed the labor
movement, attacked Catholic immigrants as agents of the Pope, and
bought votes with money funneled to it by big business. If not for the
good fortune of being out of power when a devastating depression
struck in the early 1890s, it could have gone the way of the Whig Party
that it had replaced in the 1850s.
What also helped save the GOP was the emergence of reform leaders
like Theodore Roosevelt who fought to restore its founding ideals. They
took aim at the party bosses, seeking through primary elections to shift
control of nominations to the voters. They sought to regulate the
business trusts by breaking them up in order to weaken their hold on

32
the markets. And they expanded the federal government’s role in
protecting the public through the creation of new agencies, such as the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
A major reform movement is less likely in today’s GOP. Ironically,
Ironically, primary elections are a main reason. The primary election is
now the entry door to elective office, and on the Republican side it’s
largely closed to those who would move the party closer to the center.
When he entered the 2016 race for the Republican presidential
nomination, Jeb Bush had national name recognition, executive
experience as Florida’s governor, and a hefty war chest. In an earlier
time, he would have been nearly a shoo-in for nomination. His problem
was that he was a moderate in a right-wing party. A sign of how far he
was out of step with his party was the issue of teaching evolution in
public schools. Three out of every five Republicans believe that God
created people in their current form less than 10,000 years ago - a belief
that’s at odds with evolutionary science.93 It has prompted Republican
demands for creationism to be taught alongside evolution in high
school biology classes. Bush was the only one of the 18 candidates for
the 2016 Republican nomination who openly said that he believed in
evolutionary biology. And he was quick to note that it was a personal
belief. “It does not need to be in the [public school] curriculum,” Bush
said.94 The verdict on Bush’s candidacy came quickly. He finished sixth
with 3 percent of the vote in Iowa, fourth with 11 percent of the vote in
New Hampshire, and fourth again in South Carolina with 8 percent. Of
the total votes cast during the competitive phase of the 2016 Republican
nominating race, only one out of seven were cast for a moderate
candidate.95
The Republican Party is captive to its reactionary base. Held together
by interlocking beliefs about race, religion, and small government, the

33
base is unyielding. It’s an ideological trap that could sink the GOP – and
it’s but one of five deadly traps that the party has set for itself.

34
 CHAPTER THREE

The Demographic Trap

“The superior power of population cannot be

checked without producing misery or vice.”

Thomas Malthus, demographer

Historian Clinton Rossiter said America’s political parties “are

creatures of compromise.”1 It was the 1950s and Rossiter was describing
the parties’ need to temper their policies because each had large
numbers of voters from nearly every demographic group - whether it
was Catholics and Protestants, men and women, rich and poor, blacks
and whites. The parties could pursue wedge issues only at risk of
angering some of their supporters. The parties’ diversity also restrained
voters. It was harder for them to see members of the opposing party as
the enemy and easier for them to vote for the opposing party if they felt
their own party was ignoring their interests.
That’s not the look of today’s parties. The GOP depends on white
voters, whereas the Democratic Party relies heavily on the votes of
minority group members. Religion, gender and geography also divide
the parties. Churchgoers, men and rural residents lean Republican
whereas seculars, women and urban dwellers lean Democratic.
The demographic divide didn’t just happen. As the Republican Party
pursued one wedge issue after the next, voters took sides and acquired
images that hardened the split. When asked in polls how warm or cold
they feel toward particular groups, Republicans give “evangelicals” a
much warmer rating than do Democrats. 1 “Blacks” and “Hispanics” are
viewed less favorably by Republicans than by Democrats, who rate
“whites” less highly.2 “Feminists,” “immigrants,” “gays and lesbians,”
and “Muslims” get a chillier response from Republicans than from
Democrats.3 The only groups to get colder ratings than any of those
mentioned are opposing partisans. Democrats reserve their coldest
rating for Republicans, who return the favor.4
The GOP’s reliance on wedge issues has snared it in a trap of its own
making. Its major demographic groups are shrinking in size, whereas
those aligned with the Democratic Party are increasing.

***
Without the votes of white evangelical Protestants, the Republican
Party would already be a second-rate party. Subtract their votes and the
GOP would have lost the 2016 presidential election by nearly 60 percent
to 40 percent.5 Even the GOP’s image as a “white” party owes to white
evangelicals. Non-evangelical whites voted Democratic by a 53-47
percent margin in 2016.6
White evangelical Protestants are the GOP’s most loyal voters. Over
the past few elections, their vote has increased from three-to-one to
four-to-one Republican. Almost nothing stands between the GOP and
evangelicals. In a 2011 poll, only 30 percent of white evangelicals said
they would support a candidate who had engaged in immoral
behavior.7 Yet, in the 2017 election for an Alabama Senate seat, 80
percent of white evangelicals voted for Republican nominee Roy
Moore, who was credibly accused of sexual molestation when he was
in his thirties and his victims were in their teens. 8
Nevertheless, the ability of white evangelicals to prop up the GOP is
declining. America’s fifth wave of religious revival began to wane in the
1990s, and white evangelicals have since been declining in number (see
Figure 3.1). They accounted for 24 percent of the U.S. population in the
early 1990s, compared with 13 percent today.

36
 White evangelicals have compensated for their declining number by
voting at ever higher rates. Until Ronald Reagan’s 1980 candidacy drew
them into politics, they had one of the lowest turnout rates of any group.
White evangelicals have compensated for their declining number by
voting at ever higher rates. Until Ronald Reagan’s 1980 candidacy drew
them into politics, they had one of the lowest turnout rates of any group.
By the 2000 election, their turnout rate had reached the national
average, and it has climbed higher with each election. In 2016, it reached
85 percent – the highest of any demographic group.9 Nevertheless, the
2016 election could mark the peak of white evangelicals’ voting power.
Their turnout rate is at or near its ceiling, and their numbers are
continuing to fall. A third of young adults raised in a white evangelical
household are leaving the religion.10
The GOP is not in danger of losing the support of white evangelicals.
They are one of the least cross-pressured of America’s voting groups.
Their religious identity dwarfs their other identities and aligns with

37
Republican policies.11 However, their support of the GOP may have
peaked. A growing number of white evangelicals believe that the
GOP’s positions on the poor, immigrants, and minorities are
incompatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ – a sentiment that has
widened during Donald Trump’s presidency.12 During the Trump
impeachment proceedings, Christianity Today, the leading evangelical
magazine, called for Trump’s removal from office, saying that “a leader
of such grossly immoral character” was a danger to the nation and an
affront to Christian values.13 In the 2018 midterm election, white
evangelicals’ support for Republican candidates dropped by 5
percentage points from its level in the 2014 midterm.14
Regional differences in the white evangelical vote could also hurt
Republicans. In the heavily Republican South, where religious and
racial attitudes are intertwined, white evangelicals vote about 90-10
percent Republican. Elsewhere, where the GOP can less afford to lose
votes, white evangelicals vote less heavily Republican and are more
responsive to issues that could lead them to break with the GOP.15
The decline in the number of white evangelical Protestants has been
accompanied by a decline in the number of white mainline Protestants
and Catholics, who also tend to vote Republican. Between 2006 and
2016, white mainline Protestants dropped from 18 percent of the
population to 13 percent, whereas white Catholics dropped from 16
percent to 11 percent.16
Increasing in number are religious “nones” – individuals who
profess no religious affiliation and rarely or never attend church
services. The religiously unaffiliated have doubled in size during the
past two decades and now constitute a fourth of eligible voters. 17 They
tend to have liberal views on social issues like same-sex marriage and
have voted two-to-one Democratic in recent elections.18 They could give
the Democrats a comparative advantage for years to come. Whereas a
third of white Christians are 65 years of age or older and only a tenth
are under 30, the religiously unaffiliated are the reverse – a third are
under 30 and only a tenth are 65 or older.19

38
 Although the voting power of white Christians is declining, their
importance to the GOP has not. They constitute roughly half of its
voters - a bloc that the GOP can ill afford to lose. Yet, their presence
constrains the GOP. If it were to soften its position on abortion and other
issues salient to conservative Christians in an effort to reach out to other
voters, it would lose some of their support. It’s more than a theoretical
possibility. It has happened when Republican candidates have backed
a woman’s right to choose.20

***
During the era of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition, white working-
class voters – defined as whites without a college education – were the
largest source of Democratic votes. 21
Party coalitions eventually weaken, and the breaking point for the
New Deal coalition was civil rights. After passage of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, Democratic support among working-class whites fell. The
1968 Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, failed to carry their vote,
and no Democratic nominee since then done so. The Republicans’ edge
over the Democrats has been as high as two-to-one – a level attained by
Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Donald Trump in 2016.
Although working-class whites are a mainstay of the GOP, their
ability to carry it is diminishing. In the 1990s, they were more than half
of the population. It’s barely 40 percent today and is projected to fall by
a few percentage points with each succeeding presidential election.
Nevertheless, if the GOP can find a way to get them to the polls – their
turnout rate is below the national average – it could delay the impact.
Nevertheless, the GOP might be near the peak of its white working-
class support. The racial and ethnic resentments that have drawn many
of them to the GOP are not felt as keenly by younger working-class
whites. The GOP’s economic policies also cap its support from working-
class whites. On issues like health care, unions, the minimum wage, and
higher taxes on the wealthy, their opinions are closer on average to the
positions of the Democratic Party than to those of the GOP.22

39
 The GOP’s courtship of white working-class voters has come at a
price. The politics of division is a politics of trade-offs, and Republicans
have traded away the votes of the nation’s minorities, none more fully
than black Americans. After the Civil War, they were solidly
Republican. That hold weakened in the 1930s as a result of New Deal
economic programs and then weakened further in the 1960s when
northern Democrats took the lead on civil rights legislation. Blacks
today vote roughly nine-to-one Democratic. The margin is so high that
it offsets much of the white working-class vote. In 2016, Democrats had
a net gain of more than 13 million votes among blacks, compared with
Republicans’ net gain of roughly 30 million among working-class
whites.23 If the two groups’ voting patterns stay the same going
forward, the difference will shrink with each election – unlike the white
working-class population, the black population is growing in size.
Although Republican leaders have periodically attempted to woo
black voters, the effort has always been half-hearted and recently has
been all but abandoned in favor of voter ID laws and other tactics aimed
at suppressing their vote. Indeed, the Republicans’ best hope with black
Americans is that they don’t vote. When a party loses a group’s vote by
a ratio of nine-to-one, even a small decline in turnout can make a
difference. The outcome of the 2016 presidential election might have
tipped Trump’s way on a 5 percentage-point drop in black turnout from
its 2012 level, a lesson not lost on either black community leaders or the
Democratic Party. They organized a massive get-out-the-vote effort in
2018, which resulted in an 11 percentage-point increase in the black vote
from the previous midterm. Fifty-one percent of eligible black
Americans went to the polls - their highest midterm turnout level ever.24

***
The GOP’s use of race and religion as wedge issues did not initially
create a backlash among white college-educated Republicans. Many of
them were marketplace Republicans who stayed put, lured by the
GOP’s tax policies. But the GOP’s hold on college-educated whites - a

40
group that was once a reliable Republican voting bloc – has gradually
weakened. By the early 2000s, white Americans with a post-graduate
degree had moved into the Democratic camp and those with an
undergraduate degree were heading that way. Today, among the
college educated, Democratic identifiers outnumber Republican
identifiers by more than 10 percentage points (see Figure 3.2).
If the gap persists, the GOP will find it hard to compete. Unlike non-
college whites, those with a degree are growing in number. They also
vote at a much higher rate. Although outnumbered, college-educated
whites make up nearly the same proportion of the voting electorate as
do non-college educated whites.25.
The GOP could conceivably make inroads with college educated
whites. Their shift toward the Democrats is relatively recent and based
largely on social issues. Although the GOP’s veiled racial appeals, anti-
immigrant policies, and unbending stance on issues like abortion and
same-sex marriage have solidified the support of working-class whites,

41
they have alienated many college-educated whites. If the GOP could
find a way to soften its stands without angering its base, college-
educated whites could be the easiest voters for the party to recapture.
Except for those with post-graduate degrees, they lean slightly
conservative in their political views.26
It’s nearly impossible to imagine such a reversal taking place while
Trump is president. His presence has accelerated the shift of college-
educated whites to the Democratic Party. In 2018, their support of
Democratic candidates was the highest ever recorded for a midterm.27
Nor is there any guarantee that a reversal would happen when Trump
leaves office. He is far from being the only Republican leader whose
actions limit the GOP’s appeal to the college educated. Examples
abound, including the restrictive abortion laws recently enacted by the
Republican state legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana,
Arkansas, Missouri, and Ohio. The longer that the GOP stays on its
current path, the more it will reduce its chance of regaining support
among the college educated. They are no different than other voters in
how their party loyalty is solidified. The longer they stick with the
Democrats, the greater is the chance that it will become a lifelong habit.

***
When women won the right to vote in 1919, the initial result was a sharp
decline in the percentage of eligible voters going to the polls. Even as
late as 1960, turnout among women was nearly 10 percentage points
below that of men.28 But society was changing. The tradition-minded
women born before suffrage were giving way to generations of women
who never doubted that the vote belonged to them as much as it did to
men. Women today vote at a slightly higher rate than do men.29
In the early decades of women’s suffrage, their partisanship was
virtually indistinguishable from that of men. Then, in the 1980 Reagan-
Carter race, a gender gap appeared (see Figure 3.3). Women’s support
for the Democratic nominee was 8 percentage points higher than that of
men. And in every presidential election since, the gap has persisted.

42
ranging from a low of 4 percentage points in the 1992 Clinton-Bush
election to a high of 11 percentage points in the 1996 Clinton-Dole and
the 2016 Trump-Clinton elections.
When the GOP turned to the right under Reagan, it embraced
positions that disturbed many women. Its stand on abortion was not the
only one, and, for most women, not the main one. Reflecting their
greater economic vulnerability and larger role in child care, women are
more likely than men to support government spending on health care,
education, and poverty.30 The GOP’s national security policies also
contribute to the gender gap. Women are less supportive than men of
military spending and the use of military force. 31
The gender gap has widened under Trump. The release of the Access
Hollywood tape during the 2016 campaign – where Trump was heard
bragging about molesting women – and subsequent revelations about
43
hush-money payments to two women with whom he had adulterous
affairs drew a strong reaction from many women, as did Senate
hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, which
centered on allegations of sexual misconduct. In the 2018 midterm
election, 59 percent of women backed Democratic candidates in House
races, compared with 47 percent of men. It was the largest gender gap
ever recorded for a midterm election. 32
Of the inroads that Democrats made in 2018, the hardest one to
sustain could be the gain among suburban women. Some Democratic
policies, including public housing and higher taxes on upper incomes,
conflict with the views of many of them. 33 Nevertheless, the GOP has
been unsuccessful in its decades-long effort to close the gender gap, and
the GOP’s problem with female voters could get worse. The women
who are most antagonistic to its policies – single women and college-
educated women - are increasing in number. In the 2018 midterm, white
college-educated women voted for Democratic House candidates by a
margin of 60-40 percent.34

***
Rarely in American history has a voting group shifted so quickly from
one party to the other as have Asian Americans (see Figure 3.4). In the
1992 presidential election, they voted two-to-one in favor of Republican
nominee George H.W. Bush. Since 2000, they have voted heavily
Democratic. In 2012 and 2016, the Republican nominee received less
than 30 percent of the Asian American vote.
Asian Americans are a group that the GOP could ill-afford to lose.
They make up 6 percent of the population and are the nation’s fastest
growing ethnic group. And they have many of the characteristics of a
Republican voting bloc. Their average family income is the highest of
any racial group.35 Asian Americans are also overrepresented in the
small-business sector – a traditional Republican stronghold. They are

44
twice as likely as white Americans to own and operate a small business.
The GOP’s version of “family values” also describes many Asian
Americans. Their divorce rate is half that of the general population, as
is their rate of out-of-wedlock births.36
Asian Americans exemplify the demographic trap that the
Republican Party has set for itself. As it shifted to the right and
embraced white America, it signaled to newer arrivals, who are
disproportionately Asian and Hispanic, that they are not fully welcome
here. Many Republican officials have said so openly. Others have
voiced it through policies that burden immigrants and non-whites.37 For
its part, the right-wing media system is a hotbed of white nationalism.
On the 75th anniversary of D-Day, Rush Limbaugh likened migrants to
“invaders.” “Now, they’re not armed, and it’s not a military invasion
obviously,” Limbaugh said, “but it nevertheless is an invasion.”38
Asian Americans’ low turnout rate – it lags the national average by
roughly 10 percentage points – has reduced the threat that Asian
45
Americans pose to the GOP. Trump’s actions and nativist rhetoric
might have changed that. In the 2018 midterm election, turnout among
Asian Americans nearly reached the national average. They cast 77
percent of their votes for Democratic congressional candidates – the
highest percentage ever.39
Republican strategists believe that Asian Americans can be wooed
away from the Democratic Party through attacks on affirmative action,
which can place Asian-American applicants at a competitive
disadvantage in admission to elite schools like Harvard and Stanford. 40
But if that’s the GOP’s best issue, it’s in more trouble than it might think.
Asian Americans are among affirmative action’s strongest supporters,
reflecting their underrepresentation in management positions and the
fact that most of their sons and daughters go to non-elite colleges.41
Even if the GOP were to make inroads with Asian Americans, the
Democratic Party will benefit in the long run from how they have voted
in recent elections. Most people who vote for the same party in two or
three successive elections become life-long supporters.

***
Hispanics are a more immediate threat to the GOP than are Asian
Americans. At 18 percent of the population, Hispanics are America’s
largest minority group and are increasing in size. In 2045, which the
U.S. Census Bureau projects as the year that minorities will constitute a
majority of the population, Hispanics will make up a fourth of the
total.42
Although Hispanics have voted Democratic for decades, their
support has solidified in recent years. George W. Bush attracted 45
percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, but no Republican nominee since
then has come close to that level. In 2016, the Hispanic vote split 70-30
percent in Democrats’ favor.43
Reagan’s presidency presented Republicans with an opportunity to
attract Hispanic voters. The 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act granted legal
status to undocumented aliens with no criminal record who had been

46
in the country for a specified number of years. But miscalculation and
malice have ruined the GOP’s standing with Hispanics. The list of
Republican missteps is long, including California Republican governor
Pete Wilson’s effort in the 1990s to deny public school and other services
to undocumented immigrants; a 2005 Republican House bill that called
for rounding up and deporting all undocumented residents; the
enactment of “English-only” laws by several Republican state
legislatures; the Arizona Republican legislature’s enactment of a 2010
law requiring police to check the legal status of anyone they stopped;
the repeated refusal of Republican lawmakers to grant legal status to
“Dreamers.” Aside from the Republican Party’s shunning of Catholics
in the nineteenth century, there’s no historical parallel to the GOP’s
disparagement of Hispanics.
Trump’s demand for a border wall and his anti-immigrant rants –
Mexicans are “drug-dealers, criminals, rapists” – have made a bad
situation worse. Scapegoating has a way of creating lifelong enemies. In
a 2019 poll, 51 percent of Hispanics said they felt that the GOP was
“hostile” toward them, with an additional 29 percent saying they
thought that the GOP “doesn’t care” about them. 44 There are flashes of
genius in Trump’s unusual brand of politics. Picking fights with a fast-
growing segment of the electorate is not among them.
Anemic voter turnout has reduced the threat that Hispanics pose to
the GOP (see Figure 3.5). Although a larger demographic group than
blacks, fewer of them go to the polls. Only about half of vote-eligible
Hispanics have turned out in recent presidential elections. Trump
might have prodded them into action. In the 2018 midterms, their
turnout rate jumped by 14 percentage points over the previous midterm
– their highest midterm turnout level ever.
In the long run, Republicans could make inroads with Hispanics.
Many Hispanics have conservative views on issues like abortion, same-
sex marriage, and national security.45 Yet, they tend to hold liberal
views on economic issues. In recent polls, Hispanics’ top-ranked issues

47
have been immigration and health care – issues on which most of them
have a negative view of the GOP. 46 Even if Republicans were to soften
their policy stands, the gain would be small. Many Hispanics’ loyalty
to the Democratic Party has deepened as a result of their distrust of
Republicans.47

***
The 1930s triggered a radical change in the parties’ fortunes. In the 1920,
1924, and 1928 presidential elections, the Republicans won each time by
a three-to-two margin. When the Great Depression struck in late 1929,
Republicans took the blame, and Democrats turned the tables. In 1932
and 1936, the Democrats won by a three-to-two margin. But it was a
related development that enabled the Democrats to dominate American
politics for the next three decades. In the 1932-1940 elections, first-time
voters favored the Democratic Party by nearly two-to-one, and most of
them retained that loyalty.48 Election after election, their votes carried
the Democrats to victory.
48
 Only once since then have young voters heavily backed a party in a
sequence of presidential elections. Since 2004, they have voted heavily
Democratic each time (see Figure 4.6). In 2000, their vote divided almost
evenly between the parties. In 2004, Democrats gained a 10 percentage-
point margin that widened to 34 points in 2008. It was at 24 points in
2012 and 20 points in 2016.
No development poses a larger threat to the GOP’s future. Over the
past four presidential elections, voters under 30-years-of-age have
preferred the Democratic nominee by an average of 22 percentage
points. These voters now include everyone between the ages of 21 and
43 – more than a third of the nation’s adults.
The GOP is facing a massive generational problem (see Figure 3.7).49
Among Millennials, a category that is America’s largest age group and
includes adults born between 1981 and 1996, 62 percent are self-
identified Democrats and only 29 percent identify with the GOP. Gen
Xers – those born between 1965 and 1980 – also strongly identify with

49
the Democratic Party. The margin is 51-41 percent among that group.
Baby Boomers – those born between 1946 and 1964 – lean Democratic
by a narrower margin, 48-45 percent, The only generation that leans
Republican is the Silent Generation, defined as those born in 1945 or
earlier. They divide 51-45 percent in the GOP’s favor.50 Nor can the
GOP find comfort with Generation Z – the generation born after 1996.
They became eligible to vote for the first time in 2016 and voted even
more heavily Democratic than did Millennials.51
Conventional wisdom holds that voters become more conservative
as they age, which, if true, would reduce the GOP’s generational risk.
But the evidence says otherwise. Gen Xers have become more
Democratic over time. In 1994, the first election year that they were
eligible to vote, Republican identifiers outnumbered Democratic
identifiers by 49-43 percent. The numbers have since reversed, with
Democratic loyalists now holding a 10 percentage-point lead among
Gen Xers. Baby Boomers have also become more Democratic over time,
although by a smaller margin. The Silent Generation is the only group
that has become more Republican with age.52
50
 But that’s only part of the aging story. The major change that occurs
with age is a greater likelihood of voting. Today’s young adults are
more likely to vote Democratic with greater regularity than they are to
become Republicans. Turnout among those who came of voting age in
2004, for example, was about five percentage points higher in 2016 than
it had been in 2004. They also voted more heavily Democratic than they
had in 2004.53
Republicans’ chances of reversing the generational trend are small.
Today’s young adults are not like those of yesterday – nearly half are
minority group members. Indeed, Democrats’ large edge in party
loyalty among Millennials is partly a result of the group’s makeup –
non-white Millennials identify with the Democratic Party over the GOP
by a whopping 54 percentage points, compared with an 11-point
margin among white Millennials.54
The GOP’s platform is at odds with the thinking of young adults.
They tend to have progressive views on most issues, including same-
sex marriage, the legalization of marijuana, and gun control. 55 Four out
of every five of them believe that immigration is good for the country,
and a large majority hold the same belief about racial diversity. 56
Climate change is another issue where the GOP’s position conflicts with
the thinking of most young adults. Three-fourths of them believe that
climate change is being driven by human activity, that it poses a serious
threat, and that not enough is being done to address the problem. Most
Republicans hold none of these opinions. 57 It’s difficult, in fact, to
identify issues on which most young adults agree with the GOP.

***
Scientific opinion polls first appeared in the 1930s and for a long period
there was a demographic group on which no data were collected.
Pollsters assumed that respondents wouldn’t answer the question
truthfully and didn’t bother to ask it. But in the 1970s and then at an
increased rate, gays and lesbians came out of the closet.

51
 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans are a
heavily Democratic group – ranking second only to black Americans in
their party loyalty. In the 2016 presidential election, members of the
LGBT community voted 85-15 percent Democratic (see Figure 4.7). And
that is only part of their contribution to the Democratic Party. Members
of the LGBT community are more likely than other Americans to vote,
contribute money to a political candidate, and volunteer to work on a
political campaign.58
Reagan’s presidency contributed to the political awakening of the
gay community. Reagan was courting the votes of fundamentalist
Christians and spoke out against gays, saying that they are “asking for
recognition and acceptance of an alternative lifestyle which I do not
believe society can condone, nor can I.” Later, despite urgent appeals
from his Surgeon General, Reagan delayed funding for the AIDS
epidemic that was ravaging the gay community. And when the idea of

52
civil unions for same-sex couples was proposed, Reagan flatly rejected
it: “Society has always regarded marital love as a sacred expression of
the bond between a man and a woman. We will resist the efforts of some
to obtain government endorsement of homosexuality.”59
Another turning point came when 1992 Democratic presidential
nominee Bill Clinton ignored the advice of aides and promised to end
discrimination against gays and lesbians, including a ban on their
military service. It was the first time that a major-party presidential
nominee had endorsed gay rights, and it prompted a conservative
backlash. Clinton’s position was attacked from the podium of the
Republican National Convention and from the pulpits of evangelical
churches. Republicans put referenda on state ballots aimed at denying
legal protections to homosexuals in areas such as employment and
housing.60
Same-sex partnerships got folded into the partisan fight in the early
2000s. Although the Democrats’ national platform did not endorse
same-sex marriage until 2012, Democratic state legislatures authorized
civil unions and then gay marriage, whereas Republican legislatures
passed laws restricting marriage to the union of a man and a woman.
After the Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage in 2014,
Republicans called for a constitutional amendment to reverse the
ruling. They then included it as a plank in their 2016 national platform,
which also called for legislation that would deny spousal and parental
rights to LBGT couples and permit discrimination against LGBT people
in housing, adoption, and foster care decisions.
The GOP has little hope of making inroads on the LGBT vote as long
as white evangelicals drive its social policy agenda. And the LGBT
community could become a greater source of Democratic votes. A
recent survey found that young adults are far more likely than older
adults to openly identify as LGBT. The importance of this finding rests
on the process by which most LGBT people acquire their party loyalty.
For most people, it’s acquired early in life from one’s parents. For most
LGBT people, party loyalty is associated with “coming out.” After

53
“coming out,” the large majority of them, including those raised in a
Republican family, align with the Democratic Party. 61 The link between
sexual identity and party identity helps to account for an unusual
feature of the LGBT vote. Unlike the vote of most groups, factors such
as income and race have only a weak relationship to the LGBT vote.
Wealthier and white members of the LGBT community are nearly as
likely to vote Democrats as are the less affluent and minority group
members.62

***
“You may delay, but time will not.” Those are the words of Benjamin
Franklin from more than two centuries ago, but they apply to today’s
GOP. It has been employing a rearguard strategy, using wedge issues
to resist the ticking clock of a changing America. The strategy has
helped the GOP to win elections but has been remarkably shortsighted.
Time is catching up with the GOP. Its loyal voters are declining in
number and yet have locked the party in place. It cannot reinvent itself
without risking their support and, in any event, it couldn’t reinvent
itself in a convincing enough way for a quick turnaround. Republicans
have traded the party’s future for yesterday’s America.
The severity of Republicans’ problem can be seen by projecting the
results of future elections by using U.S. Census Bureau data on
demographic change. If a group’s voting pattern stays the same from
one election to the next, it’s contribution to the overall vote will result
solely from demographic change. If a group is shrinking in size, its vote
will count for a smaller share of the total vote in the next election. If it’s
increasing in size, its vote will count for a bigger share.
Figure 3.9 shows the projected results of the 2020 through 2032
presidential elections using voters’ preferences in the 2016 presidential
election as the baseline and accounting for changes in the electorate’s
racial, ethnic, religious, and educational makeup. 63 As can be seen, the
Republican share of the two-party presidential vote is projected to
decline with each passing election. The racial group – whites - that it

54
depends upon for votes is shrinking in size while minority groups –
blacks, Asian Americans, and Hispanics – are increasing in number.
Moreover, the white voters who lean Republican – evangelical
Christians and the non-college educated – are declining in number,
whereas those that lean Democratic – the religiously unaffiliated and
the college educated – are increasing. In 2016, the Democrats won the
popular vote by a 51-49 percent margin. In 2020, based on population
change alone, the margin would increase to 52-48 percent. The
Democrats would add to their lead in each successive election and, in
2032, the margin would be 55-45 percent. Historically, when a party has
received 55 percent of the vote, the opposing party has not had enough
support to have a chance of winning Congress or the presidency.
As bad as those projections are for the GOP, they are not the worst
case. Its future looks truly bleak if the calculations are based on voter
preferences in the 2018 midterm election. The midterm was a
Republican debacle. Democratic congressional candidates received
nearly nine million more votes than their Republican opponents – the

55
largest margin in a midterm since 1974. Using voter preference in the
2018 election as the baseline,64 the GOP’s position deteriorates rapidly
(see Figure 3.10). Republicans are projected to lose the 2020 election by
a 54-46 percent margin and thereafter by increasing amounts. By 2032,
the GOP is losing in a landslide, 59-41 percent. In the past, when a
political party has faced that kind of trend, it has taken years for it to
recover.
Donald Trump might be the best precinct captain that the Democrats
have ever had. His presidency has spurred Democratic-leaning groups
to go to the polls. Turnout in the 2018 midterm reached its highest level
in fifty years with the largest increases occurring among Democratic-
leaning groups and the smallest increases occurring among those tied
to the GOP. Compared with the 2014 midterm election, turnout in 2018
jumped by 15.7 percentage points among 18- to 29-year-olds, compared
with 6.7 points for those 65 years-of-age or older; increased by 12.0
percentage points among women compared with 10.9 points for men;
rose by 12.3 points among minority group members compared with
11.7 points among whites; and increased by 12.3 points among college-

56
educated whites compared with 6.8 points for the non-college
educated.65 Moreover, each of the Democratic-leaning groups voted
more heavily Democratic than it had in 2014, whereas each of the
Republican-leaning groups voted less heavily Republican.
The GOP’s problem in future elections can also be seen through the
lens of generation change. Over the next four presidential elections,
most members of the Silent Generation – the Republicans’ largest source
of votes – will have passed away, whereas Millennials – who vote
heavily Democratic – will be a larger share of the electorate. Generation
Z, which so far have shown itself to be as strongly Democratic as
Millennials, will also make up a greater share of the electorate, while
Baby Boomers, who vote more narrowly Democratic, will become a
smaller share.
Figures 3.11 and 3.12 show the generational projections based on the
2016 and 2018 voting patterns, respectively. 66 The results align with the
earlier projections based on ethnic, racial, religious, and educational
change. When the 2016 presidential election is used as the baseline, the

57
outcome is bad enough – a projected defeat by 52-48 percent in the 2020
election that increases to 56-44 percent in 2032. When the 2018 midterm
election is used as the baseline, the projected defeat jumps to 54-46
percent in 2020 and rises to 59-41 percent in 2032. If the latter were to
occur, Republican candidates would win election in some states and
districts but would be uncompetitive elsewhere. Democrats would
control the presidency, House, and Senate, and also control most
governorships and state legislatures.

***
As dismal as the demographic projections are for the GOP, it has
geography on its side. It acquires an advantage from how America’s
voters are distributed across states and districts. Except in the South,
Republican voters are spread more evenly than are Democratic voters,
who are concentrated in the nation’s cities and in states like California
and Massachusetts. As a result, Democrats “waste” more votes than do
Republicans. The tendency was evident in the 2016 presidential election

58
when Democrats won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes but
lost the electoral vote when Republicans scraped by with razor-thin
wins in three states. It’s possible that Republicans could win the
electoral vote again in 2020 even if it were to lose the popular vote by a
somewhat larger margin than it did in 2016. In Ohio, Michigan,
Wisconsin, and Iowa – all of which voted Republican in 2016 – non-
college whites make up a large share of the electorate. If they were to
go heavily Republican in 2020, the GOP’s presidential nominee could
conceivably win a majority of the electoral vote while losing the popular
vote. Thereafter, if the projections shown earlier were to hold, the GOP’s
hold on the presidency would end.
The GOP’s geographical advantage extends to House races. In urban
House districts, Democrats “waste” a lot of votes. Their victory margin
often exceeds 75 percent of the two-party vote. Gerrymandering has
also contributed to Democrats’ wasted votes. Republicans have control
of most of the state governments and, in carving out House districts,
they have packed a few districts with Democrats, while placing enough
Republicans in other districts to secure victory but not so many as to
“waste” their votes. Nevertheless, as the 2018 midterm election
revealed, the GOP’s geographical advantage in House districts is
inadequate protection when the national vote goes heavily Democratic.
Republicans also have a geographical edge in Senate races. Most of
America’s less populated states – including Wyoming, Idaho, and the
Dakotas - are solidly enough Republican to weather a Democratic wave,
although New Hampshire and Maine are trending Democratic. The
GOP’s foothold in the South would also continue, though it would be
less firm. Florida and North Carolina would become toss-up states, and
Georgia and Texas would later come into play. Nevertheless, if there is
a Democratic wave in America’s future, the Senate will be Republicans’
last stand. Democrats would eventually take firm control of it but not
as quickly or solidly as the presidency and House.
No area of the country illustrates more clearly the Republicans’
demographic problem than does the West and Southwest. California
was once a reliably Republican state. The state turned Democratic on
Republicans’ insensitive treatment of its Hispanics and Asian

59
Americans. Minorities now constitute a majority in California and vote
so heavily Democratic that the GOP is no longer competitive in
statewide races. Colorado and New Mexico were also once reliably
Republican states that are trending Democratic as a result of
demographic change. Arizona and Nevada, also heavily Republican
until recently, are heading in the same direction.67

***
Few things are certain in politics, but only a fool would dismiss the
power of demographic change. Instead of bringing on board yet
another media consultant a few decades ago, Republicans would have
been wise to hire a demographer. After the immigration laws were
changed in 1965 to eliminate the decades-old barrier to entry of
Hispanics and Asians, immigration occurred at a near record pace,
contributing to a rise in the U.S. population from 180 million in 1960 to
330 million today. During that period, Hispanics increased from 4
percent of the population to 18 percent while Asian Americans
increased from 1 percent to 6 percent.
Republican leaders aren’t blind to their demographic problem. They
know that the country is rapidly becoming more diverse and secular.
But rather than seeing it as an opportunity, they have seen it as a threat.
They’ve resorted to trying to rig the system through strict voter ID laws
and other devices aimed at keeping minorities – and in some places,
college students - from going to the polls.
The GOP has pursued its strategy of division so relentlessly that it
doesn’t have the short-term option of giving it up. And if it wasn’t
locked into the strategy before Trump took office, it is now. But there
will come a time when, if it doesn’t change, the GOP could join the
Federalists and the Whigs as once-great American parties that died
because of an inability to adapt. That possibility is almost unthinkable
in today’s age. The Democratic and Republican parties are protected by
tradition, favorable electoral laws, and a reservoir of funding and
support. But the revitalization of the GOP in a nation that’s becoming
increasingly diverse will not be fast or easy. It’s wishful thinking to
believe that the Republicans’ demographic problem will disappear

60
when Donald Trump leaves office. That he has aggravated the problem
is obvious. There is a lemming-like aspect to the behavior of Trump and
his followers. Despite losing the popular vote in 2016, he has narrowed
his base rather than expanding it, urged on by his party’s diehards.
Republicans are racing headlong toward a demographic cliff.
But the GOP’s demographic problem was cemented well before
Trump came on the scene. Former Republican President George W.
Bush saw it coming and tried to reverse it, taking the lead in 2007 in
forging a compromise immigration reform bill that would have
legalized most of the nation’s undocumented immigrants while
tightening border security. When it came up for a vote in the Senate, it
was filibustered by Republicans. When Bush tried a second time, they
again led the filibuster and, on the cloture vote, 76 percent of them voted
against it, which killed the bill. When a similar bill made it through the
Senate in 2013, it died in the House when the Republican majority
refused to bring it to the floor for a vote.
The Republican National Committee’s post-mortem on the 2012
election was an equally futile exercise. The report called for the party to
reach out to immigrants, minorities, and women. Most Republican
lawmakers weren’t paying attention or, if they were, weren’t buying.
Soon after the report’s release, Republican lawmakers killed the 2013
comprehensive immigration reform bill and have since defeated several
attempts to grant legal status to Dreamers. But even if Republican
lawmakers were to seek a more moderate path, right-wing talk show
hosts and the party’s diehard primary voters would have their scalps,
as happened to House majority leader Eric Cantor when he said that
he favored a path to citizenship for Dreamers.
The GOP’s reactionaries will not go down without a fight. Many of
their harshest words have been directed at Republican leaders who
urge the party to embrace diversity. But their grip on the party will
eventually weaken, as it must if the party is to survive in an increasingly
diverse America.
It would not be the first time that the Republican Party has
transformed itself. When Democrats took power in the 1930s and then
used federal power to regulate markets and enhance economic security,

61
Republicans fought the change at every step, holding onto their faith in
laissez-faire capitalism. That belief persisted through the 1940s and,
when Republicans finally came back into power in 1953, the party’s
conservatives vowed to repeal the New Deal. But the GOP’s moderate
wing was by then strong enough to prevent it. President Dwight
Eisenhower was scathing in his judgment of his party’s conservatives.
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security,
unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm
programs,” Eisenhower said, “you would not hear of that party again
in our political history."68

62
 CHAPTER FOUR

The Media Trap

“Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long,
and it will move about like a snake and strike the other way.”

Jean Anouilh, dramatist

They had a deal, or so they thought. Congressional Republicans and

Democrats had negotiated a bill to keep the government open, and
President Donald Trump had agreed to sign it. That is, until he got an
earful from the right-wing media. Rush Limbaugh mocked Trump’s
negotiating skills. “A measly $5 billion,” Limbaugh said. “Somebody
needs to explain to me how this happened.” 1 Fox’s Dan Bongino,
subbing for Sean Hannity, said that the Republican base would rebel if
the wall was not funded. “They want their wall,” Bongino said, “and
they want it now.” Ann Coulter said that Trump would have a “joke
presidency” if the bill didn’t include more than $5 billion to fund a wall
along the Mexican border.
The first sign that Trump had changed his mind came from
Limbaugh. “The president has gotten word to me that he is either
getting funding for the border or he’s shutting the whole thing down.”
Trump then claimed that he’d never agreed to sign the bill in the first
place. “I've made my position very clear,” he said, “any measure that
funds the government has to include border security.”2 His words
signaled the beginning of the longest government shutdown in the
63
nation’s history, one that sidelined hundreds of thousands of
government workers.
America’s right-wing media are a propaganda machine the likes of
which the world has rarely seen. Propaganda dates to Ancient Greece,
but America’s right-wing media are unusual. Propaganda has typically
been controlled from the top through government, whereas America’s
conservative media system operates from the bottom through private
media outlets. In the first years of that system, the Republican
establishment was elated at the boost that it gave their party. House
Republicans named Limbaugh an “honorary member” of their chamber
and called him “our majority maker.”3 What Republican lawmakers
didn’t anticipate was that the right-wing media would eventually grow
beyond their control and shrink their influence in the party.
Rather than a boon, the right-wing media have turned out to be a
Republican trap. They have crippled the party’s adaptability by tying it
to a rigid ideology. They’ve antagonized minority groups, thereby
limiting the party’s efforts to attract new voters. They’ve opposed any
form of compromise, which has hurt the party’s ability to govern.
They’ve concocted alternative realities that have blinded Republicans
to the world as it is. And their damage will be hard to undo. Right-wing
media are deaf to the harm that they’re causing the Republican Party.

***
“The press is your enemy,” the president said. “Enemies. Understand
that? . . . Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.” 4
The words were spoken, not by Donald Trump, but by Richard Nixon.
Republicans’ long-running feud with the press came into the open
when Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, called the broadcast
networks “nattering nabobs of negativism.” That was followed by
publication of Edith Efron’s The News Twisters, which alleged that the
television networks favored the “elitist-liberal-left.”5 Nixon helped turn
The News Twisters into a bestseller, buying copies at leading bookstores
and using campaign funds to distribute copies to opinion

64
leaders.6 Nixon’s battle with the press went beyond hawking a book
and unleashing his vice president. He threatened the broadcast
networks with an anti-trust suit that would strip them of their owned-
and-operated stations. ““If the threat of screwing them is going to help
us more with their programming,” Nixon said, “then keep the threat.”7
Nixon’s distrust of the press carried over to Ronald Reagan. “I’ve
come to believe,” Reagan said, “there is very little, if any, honesty in the
media.” Reagan created the White House Office of Communications as
a way to bypass the national press. It launched a daily news service that
fed the “official, unedited version of what the President and his office
have to say” directly to local news outlets. 8
Reagan’s decisive move came in 1987 when his appointees at the
FCC revoked the fairness doctrine, which had been in place since the
late 1940s. Based on the notion of a “free marketplace of ideas,” the
doctrine required broadcasters to air alternative points of view. The
House and Senate voted to reinstate it, but Reagan vetoed the bill,
claiming that it infringed on station owners’ free speech. Reagan had a
partisan purpose in mind. Unlike most journalists, most station owners
were Republicans, and the fairness doctrine inhibited the airing of
conservative talk shows. If a station carried one, it was obligated to air
a liberal show in an equivalent time slot. With the fairness doctrine out
of the way, station owners were free to carry only programs that fit their
beliefs. Hundreds of radio stations shifted to talk shows, most of which
had a conservative slant.9
Their hosts discovered through trial and error what listeners wanted
to hear. Thoughtful give-and-take between guests dragged down
ratings. What listeners liked best were rants about liberals, Democrats,
and big government.10
The highest-rated program, the Rush Limbaugh Show, had millions of
weekly listeners.11 Limbaugh, who started in radio as a shock jock,
promoted Reagan’s agenda, railing against welfare queens and
affirmative action. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Reagan’s
successor, George H.W. Bush, became Limbaugh’s promoter. Bush was

65
trailing Bill Clinton in the polls and, seeking a boost, invited Limbaugh
to spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom, lugging his suitcase into the
room when he arrived.12
Bush lost, which was a boon for Limbaugh. He now had a seated
president to rail against. Limbaugh blasted Clinton as a womanizing,
draft-dodging, pot-smoking liberal. When Clinton placed his wife,
Hillary Rodham Clinton, at the head of the health care reform task force,
Limbaugh went after her, calling her a “feminazi,” a “bitch,” a “crook,”
and the “yuppie wife from hell.” Nor did he spare the Clintons’ 13-year-
old daughter Chelsea. “Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat,”
Limbaugh said. “Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there
is also a White House dog?"13 Attacks on an innocent teenager were foul
territory even for talk radio but they played to a rapt audience.
Clinton’s pursuit of health care reform gave Limbaugh an issue on
which to whip up his listeners. He hauled out nearly every falsehood
imaginable – that people would lose their family doctor, that they
would not be allowed to buy fee-for-service insurance, that their
insurance costs would skyrocket, that they would have to get the
permission of a government bureaucrat before seeing a doctor, that
doctors who broke the rules would face long jail sentences.14
Clinton’s failed attempt at health care reform fueled the GOP’s
landslide victory in the 1994 midterm election, one that gave them full
control of Congress for the first time in forty years. As the election
approached, Limbaugh began each show by counting down the
number of days to the election, imploring listeners to use the “one
weapon” at their disposal – the vote. Exit polls indicated that partisan
talk show listeners voted three-to-one Republican.15 The New York Times
dubbed Limbaugh “the Republican national precinct captain.” 16

***
Limbaugh’s success led Rupert Murdoch to start Fox News in 1996 as a
conservative television alternative to the mainstream media. He hired
Republican political consultant Roger Ailes to run it.

66
 Fox’s impact on Republican lawmakers was almost immediate. A
study found that, as Fox expanded into new markets, congressional
Republicans in these markets shifted to the right on roll-call votes.17 It
took more time for Republican viewers to discover Fox and make it their
own. CNN had a lengthy head start and a loyal following that cut across
party lines. Fox was marketing itself as “fair and balanced,” which
required viewers to figure out that it had a conservative slant. That type
of discovery doesn’t happen overnight. When “The Colbert Report”
was launched on Comedy Central as a satirical take on conservative talk
shows, some Republicans watched for months before figuring out that
Steven Colbert was lampooning their party. 18
By 2002, Fox was the most watched cable network, bolstered by the
popularity of “The O’Reilly Factor.” With 3 million nightly viewers, Bill
O’Reilly had the highest rated cable TV talk show. Trafficking in
outrage, he presented a black-and-white struggle for America’s soul -
god-fearing conservatives versus godless liberals, the little guy versus
the establishment, “patriots” versus “pinheads,” facts versus spin. In
Culture Warrior, O’Reilly explained his pitch, saying that he was “a
warrior in the vicious culture war that is currently under way in the
United States of America…. On one side of the battlefield are the armies
of the traditionalists like me, people who believe the United States was
well founded and has done enormous good for the world. On the other
side are the committed forces of the secular-progressive movement that
want to change America.” 19

***
In the late 1990s, the right-wing media system concocted an alternative
reality. Most of the earlier efforts had been spontaneous outbursts of
absurdity. This one – an attack on the science of climate change - was
calculated and unrelenting. It came in response to the 1997 Kyoto
Protocol, which called upon developed nations to reduce their carbon
emissions. Alarmed that it would hurt corporate profits and taking the
advice of Republican strategist Frank Luntz, conservatives launched a

67
coordinated campaign to discredit climate science.20 Luntz said that
emotion rather than reason would drive the response of Republican
voters.21 “When you’re talking issues like the environment,” Luntz
declared, “a straight recitation of facts is going to fall on deaf ears.” 22
The campaign intensified when former vice president Al Gore’s film
on the dangers of global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, landed him
an Oscar and the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Right-wing talk show hosts
called Gore a fraud, claiming that climate change theory was a hoax
devised by scientists and environmentalists in order to get foundation
grants.23 Limbaugh used a cold January day to mock the theory,
intoning “the ice isn’t melting” as if he were reciting a line from the
Wizard of Oz.24
Abandoning all pretense of being “fair and balanced,” Fox News led
the attack on climate science, as Duke University’s Fritz Mayer found
in his study. Unlike the traditional press, where the findings of climate
scientists were the main topic, Fox played up the claim that the theory
was a hoax. Fox kicked into high gear with Gore and then again in 2009,
the year of the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, which
was the first such gathering since the Kyoto summit. “Gore remained a
favorite villain,” Mayer wrote, “but now the UN, its scientists and the
organizers of the summit, became the greater target.” For four years
running, the hoax narrative dominated Fox’s coverage. Sean Hannity
said, “The movement is run by hacks and frauds and given that Al Gore
personifies it maybe that it shouldn’t come as a surprise.” Eric Bolling
said, “Carbon dioxide, you know, the stuff you and I breathe every day
is dangerous…. This sets up a government power grab like taxpayers
have never seen before.”25
The propaganda campaign worked like a charm. At the time of the
1997 Kyoto agreement, a majority of Republicans believed that the
climate was changing and that human activity was driving the change. 26
By 2010, despite mounting scientific evidence to the contrary, only a
third of Republicans thought the earth was warming and only a sixth
attributed it to human activity.27

68
 Fox’s Republican viewers were the leading skeptics, being twice as
likely as other Republicans to reject global warming.28 It was not the
first time that they had been off the mark. In response to the 2003 U.S.
invasion of Iraq, Fox viewers were far more likely than other Americans
to falsely believe that Iraq had close ties to al Qaeda, that Americans
had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that world opinion
favored the U.S. invasion of Iraq.29
Fox also took the lead in promoting the Tea Party, as sociologists
Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson found in their study. “As the
Tea Party grew from infancy to adolescence,” they wrote, “Fox was
pointing the way and cheering.” 30
Fox began its buildup of the Tea Party six weeks ahead of the first
major protest rally. Fox viewers were told that the Tea Party was
“starting to really take off.” A week in advance of Tax Day, the
drumbeat intensified. Glenn Beck told his viewers “to let politicians
know that we have had enough. Celebrate with Fox News. This is what
we’re doing next Wednesday.” Sean Hannity said, “And, of course,
April 15th, our big show coming out of Atlanta. It’s Tax Day, our Tax
Day tea party show. Don’t forget.” Megyn Kelly told viewers to “join
the Tea Party action from your home” by watching the rallies on Fox’s
website. During the week of the protests, Fox mentioned the Tea Party
movement nearly 250 times.31
Not to be outdone, right-wing talk radio hosts threw their weight
behind the Tea Party. Limbaugh took the lead, coining the term
“porkulus” to describe Democratic spending programs, which
prompted organizers to call the first rally the “Porkulus Protest.” The
rally was held a few days before CNBC’s Rick Santelli came up with
“tea party” as a more appetizing label.32
The Tea Party movement turned out to be good business for right-
wing media. It drove listeners to conservative talk radio, viewers to Fox
News, and traffic to conservative bloggers and websites. The
conservative media system’s growth spurt was second only to that in
the years following elimination of the fairness doctrine.33

69
 Although the Tea Party movement helped fuel the Republicans’
landslide victory in the 2010 midterm election, it would eventually put
the party at risk. It pushed the GOP further to the right and emboldened
right-wing media – a development that would bring their agenda into
conflict with that of the Republican establishment.

***
By 2010, the right-wing media system had changed markedly.
Limbaugh and Fox’s success had bred a host of imitators and
competitors. The cost of entry was low, given the countless internet,
broadcasting, social media, streaming, and podcasting options that had
become available.
Limbaugh was still the top-rated talk show host, but Sean Hannity,
Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, and Mark Levin also had huge audiences.
Of the top twenty syndicated partisan talk-shows, eighteen were
conservative and only two were liberal. Of the top twenty local partisan
talk shows, nineteen were conservative and only one was liberal. Led
by Laura Ingraham, nine of the eleven top talk shows transmitted
nationally via satellite were hosted by conservatives.34 All told,
conservative talk shows had a cumulative weekly audience in excess of
fifty million listeners.35
The internet at first was a different story. It was a liberal enclave. Of
the top five websites, there was only one that was conservative, The
Drudge Report, which had made its reputation by breaking the story of
Bill Clinton’s involvement with Monica Lewinsky. But Drudge soon had
plenty of company on the right, including Gateway Pundit, RedState, Hot
Air, and Red State News. An infusion of money from conservative
donors fueled the conservative surge. Robert Mercer, cofounder of a
successful hedge fund, gave millions to Andrew Breitbart to start
Breitbart News. Businessman Foster Friess financed The Daily Caller,
founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel.36 No reliable estimate exists
of the total traffic on right-wing websites but it’s high and it’s a closed
loop – 90 percent of the links are to other right-wing sites.37

70
 A top right-wing website – it had ten million visitors a month until
being shut down by Facebook and YouTube in 2018 for spreading
malicious information – was Alex Jones’s InfoWars. Jones built his
business model on absurd conspiracy theories, starting with the false
claim that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job” orchestrated by
“globalists” in Washington to further their geopolitical ambitions.
Among Jones’s concoctions was the claim that the massacre of twenty-
six children and teachers at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary
School in 2012 was faked by actors hired by gun control advocates.38
Conspiracy theories flow like water through the right-wing media
system, serving the same purpose as scapegoating. As social
psychologist Ilan Shira noted, conspiracy theories originate in a belief
that bad things don’t just happen on their own, that someone is
responsible, and that they need to be stopped or punished. As Shira
described it: “It’s not our fault. It’s them."39
Less visible on the right than talk shows but increasing in number
are alt-right You Tube channels. More than one hundred have monthly
audiences in the tens of thousands.40 One such operative, who calls
himself “Black Pigeon Speaks,” espouses a white nationalist ideology
wherein Jewish bankers are trapping us in debt slavery, Muslim
immigrants are plotting to impose Sharia law, and women are betraying
their biological heritage by placing their careers above childrearing.
Black Pigeon Speaks said of women, “This half-century long
experiment of women’s liberation and political enfranchisement has
ended in disaster for the West.” Black Pigeon Speaks is far from the
biggest player on the alt-right You Tube circuit, but over the years his
videos have nonetheless attracted more than fifteen million viewers.41
As the right-wing media system expanded, a pattern emerged. The
newer entrants had positioned themselves to the right of those already
there. And they pulled earlier entrants in their direction. 42 Although
there was audience attention to be had on the moderate right, there was
more of it on the hard right. A vortex works that way. It pulls
everything toward it and the pull becomes stronger as it intensifies.

71
 ***
Exposure to right-wing media is an immersive propaganda experience
closer to what one would expect to find in China than in America.
Alternative realities and verifiable facts mingle freely – so freely that the
distinction can be lost on all but the discriminating listener. Studies
indicate, in fact, that most people aren’t very good at distinguishing fact
from fiction.43 And it’s not like conservatives are merely dipping their
toes into what right-wing media are saying. Conservatives are four
times more likely than liberals to have a partisan media outlet as their
primary news source.44
Right-wing media feed off listeners’ resentments and exploit the
tendency of people to believe that policy problems have easy fixes.45
Talk show hosts claim a cornerstone on truth. “Man-made global
warming is a 100 per cent, full-fledged, undeniable hoax,” Limbaugh
said, “It’s not even arguable in terms of science.” 46
Many conservatives have come to embrace beliefs that are wildly at
odds with reality but squarely in line with what right-wing media are
telling them. A 2012 study found, for example, that a large percentage
of Republicans falsely believed that the 2010 Affordable Care Act
provided free medical care to illegal immigrants. 47 The following are a
few of the more conspicuous examples from recent years, along with
the percentage of Republicans (R) and Democrats (D) who held the false
belief at the time the poll was taken:

The statistics collected and reported by the government

are bogus (42%-R, 24%-D)48
The 2010 Affordable Care Act established “death panels”
(47%-R, 20%-D).49
Earth is not warming or warming from natural causes
rather than also from human activity (62%-R, 12%-D).50
Millions of people cast illegal votes for Hillary Clinton in
the 2016 election (57%-R, 12%-D).51
72
 Barack Obama was definitely or possibly born outside the
United States (41%-R, 12%-D).52
Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election
(64%-R, 16%-D).53
U.S. military forces found weapons of mass destruction
after invading Iraq (44%-R, 9%-D).54

Conspiracy theories are also widespread on the right. After the mass
killing at the Sandy Hook school, Republicans were twice as likely as
Democrats to believe that the truth of the shooting was being
suppressed. The number of Republicans who felt this way was not tiny.
A third of them believed it,55 which is roughly the same number who
believed that Hillary Clinton could have conspired to hide a child sex-
ring being run by Democrats out of a pizza shop in Washington, DC.56
To someone not steeped in the messages of right-wing media, such
beliefs would seem absurd. But they are a predictable effect of what
passes for reality on right-wing outlets. The pizza-shop sex-ring
allegation is among the conspiracy theories that have been widely
trafficked on right-wing media.57 And some theories have been voiced
on nearly every right-wing outlet, as happened after Seth Rich was
murdered soon after Wikileaks released hacked DNC emails
embarrassing to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Rich was a DNC
staffer with access to the DNC’s email files. Had he helped Wikileaks
gain access to the files? Did he have additional emails so explosive that
they would torpedo Clinton’s campaign? Even though Washington, DC
police said that Rich was killed in a botched robbery attempt,
conspiracy theorists fingered Clinton as the culprit. It was not the first
such claim about Hillary and Bill Clinton. Limbaugh has made it a
litany. “How many other politicians have you heard of who have had
so many mysterious deaths associated with them?” Limbaugh asked on

73
the air. “It’s a lot of people they know who have died, who have been
murdered…. There’s a Clinton body count.” 58
For those steeped in it, there’s no protection from such nonsense.59
Education doesn’t help. The college educated are sometimes the most
susceptible, given that they see themselves as immune to propaganda.60
It’s known as the “smart idiot effect.”61 Highly educated Republicans,
for example, are more likely than other Republicans to believe that the
theory of climate change is a conspiracy hatched by self-serving
scientists and environmentalists.62
Nor does high office provide immunity. Trump is a conspiracy buff.
His theories range far and wide - pharmaceutical companies are hiding
research that shows vaccines cause autism, Ted Cruz’s father conspired
in the Kennedy assassination, Justice Anthony Scalia might have been
smothered to death in his sleep, global warming is a hoax concocted by
the Chinese. When billionaire Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in jail while
awaiting trial for sex offenses, Trump retweeted a right-wing pundit,
“#JefferyEpstein had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”63
James Surowiecki’s notion of the “wisdom of crowds” holds that the
aggregate opinion of a large group of people results in better decisions
than would the opinion of individual experts.64 However, the theory
assumes that the group’s opinions are not derived from a shared source
of disinformation. In that case, the result is what social psychologists
call “pluralistic ignorance.”65 In America’s past, pluralistic ignorance
was largely confined to ideological groups like the John Birch Society.
In today’s age of right-wing media, it describes large numbers of
Republicans.

***
Sometime during the evolution in conservative media, a power shift
took place. Right-wing talk show hosts began as accomplices of
Republican leaders. But as their reputations grew, they became a power

74
in their own right, leveraging their ties to the Republican base to
promote a reactionary and populist brand of politics.
An early sign was Rush Limbaugh’s 2009 speech, carried live on Fox,
to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Calling upon
conservatives “to take back the nation,” Limbaugh laid out his platform
for the Republican Party and then went on the attack. He predicted that
Obama’s “socialist” policies would ruin the economy, saying “I want
him to fail.” He dismissed out of hand the idea that Republicans and
Democrats should work together to fix the nation’s problems – “where
is the compromise between good and evil?” He attacked John McCain
as someone who “gets along with the enemy.” In an appearance the
next day on CNN, Republican National Chairman Michael Steele tried
to deflate Limbaugh’s rant, calling him “an entertainer” and saying:
"Yes, he's incendiary. Yes, it's ugly." Limbaugh was irked at Steele’s
remark, which led Steele to backpedal, saying he had “enormous
respect” for Limbaugh. "I was maybe a little bit inarticulate,” Steele
said. “There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his
leadership."66
A larger demonstration of the right-wing media’s growing power
came when Eric Cantor, the House majority leader who was next in line
to become Speaker, lost in a 2014 primary to a Tea Party-backed political
unknown. A right-wing talk show host, Laura Ingraham, led the
campaign against Cantor after he suggested that Republicans should
grant legal status to Dreamers - undocumented aliens brought to the
United States as children. For Ingraham, an unyielding opponent of
immigration, Cantor’s proposal was treasonous, and she weighed in,
giving his primary election opponent, in her words, “a bigger
microphone.”67 The lesson of Cantor’s defeat was not lost on Republican
lawmakers. “Immigration reform, any hope of it, just basically died,”
said a Republican Senate staffer.68
Whatever chance Jeb Bush had of getting the 2016 Republican
presidential nominee also died at the hands of the talk shows. After Mitt
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Romney was defeated in the 2012 election – the fifth time in the last six
presidential elections that the Republican nominee had lost the popular
vote - the Republican National Committee studied the party’s poor
showing among women, minorities, and young adults. The RNC’s
recommendations included support for comprehensive immigration
reform. “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them
in the United States,” the report said, “they won’t pay attention to our
next sentence.”69
Bush should have benefitted from the RNC’s assessment. He spoke
Spanish and favored a path to citizenship for long-term undocumented
immigrants who were leading productive lives. Bush also had the
largest war chest of any of the GOP contenders. What Bush didn’t have
was the backing of the right-wing media. “He’s not a conservative,”
Limbaugh said. “The ideal, the perfect ticket, for the 2016 election:
Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush. Now, they can figure out who’s on top of the
ticket on their own, but when you compare their positions, Hillary
Clinton and Jeb Bush, on the key, important issues, they are two peas in
the same pod.”70 Mark Levin called Bush a “good moderate
Democrat.”71 Glenn Beck, speaking at once for himself and his listeners,
said: “I think Jeb Bush … despises people like us.”72 InfoWars’ Alex Jones
resurrected an old conspiracy theory, accusing the Bush family of being
Nazi collaborators and claiming that Bush planned to turn America into
“a fascist dictatorship.”73 When the attack on Bush started, he was far
ahead of the other GOP contenders in the polls. By the time of the Iowa
caucus, he had fallen to fourth place, the choice of a mere 6 percent of
Republicans nationwide. 74
One of the few Republicans to speak out against the right-wing
media was John McCain. “Stop listening to the bombastic loud mouths
on the radio, television, and the internet,” McCain said on the Senate
floor in 2017. “To hell with them! They don’t want anything done for
the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood.” 75 When McCain’s
speech was posted on You Tube, 90 percent of the comments were
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negative. One writer said, “For the record, this man is a liar, a
treacherous worm, and a turncoat.” Another said, “Songbird McCain
should retire now and take up a job in the George Soros foundation.” 76

***
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy was a road show version
of a right-wing talk show. He packed four of their favorite hot-button
issues—immigration, Islamic terrorism, free trade, and Obamacare—
into his announcement speech.77 During the campaign, he filled his
speeches with stories he’d seen on Breitbart and employed talking
points taken from “Fox & Friends.”78
Nevertheless, conservative media were split on Trump. The GOP
had been on the outside looking in during Obama’s two terms.
Republicans were desperate for a win, and Trump didn’t have the look
of a winner. The Wall Street Journal was sharply critical of his candidacy,
saying: “A broken Washington needs to be shaken up and refocused on
the public good, and who better to do it than an outsider beholden to
neither political party? If only that reform possibility didn’t arrive as a
flawed personality who has few convictions and knows little about the
world.” “Never Trump!” was The Weekly Standard’s position, claiming
that “a Trump presidency would be disastrous.” Fox also held back on
Trump, which prompted him to lash out. Trump complained that Fox
was “treating him badly.” In a Fox-sponsored primary election debate,
Trump clashed repeatedly with Fox’s moderators.
Right-wing talk show hosts and bloggers jumped in on Trump’s
side. The effort to stop him, Limbaugh said, was the work of a “cliquish,
elitist club . . . I’m talking about the establishment – conservative media,
the brainiacs, the think tanks.”79 Hannity threw his support to Trump,
consoling him after he’d been attacked by a Republican lawmaker: “[He
was] extraordinarily unfair to you.”80 Calling itself the GOP’s “populist,

77
nationalist litmus test,” Breitbart News railed against the Republican
“globalists” and “corporatists” who were trying to stop Trump. 81
The Republican establishment was no match for Trump and the
right-wing media. Trump got the Republican nomination, and his
media allies whipped their conservative media rivals where it mattered
– in the ratings. Harvard’s Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal
Roberts examined four million online messages transmitted or shared
during the 2016 campaign. Fox and Breitbart were the major sites among
right-wing media and, at times, the upstart Breitbart’s site was getting
more traffic than Fox’s site. When it became clear that Trump would
win the Republican nomination, Fox embraced him and moved to the
right, seeking to win back some of the audience it had lost. 82 (The Weekly
Standard never jumped on the Trump wagon and, with its subscriber
base eroding, closed down in 2018.)
As the 2016 campaign progressed and the mainstream press began
to scrutinize Trump more closely, Trump turned on it. Early on, the
news media were enthralled by the novelty of his candidacy and the
ratings boost that he gave them. His early coverage was far heavier and
more positive than that of his Republican rivals. 83 And it gave him a leg
up on his opponents. Trump said that there’s nothing more powerful
than keeping “people interested…. It’s not the polls. It’s the ratings.”84
Nevertheless, when it appeared that Trump might actually win the
GOP nomination, the press went on the attack, handing out to him the
same medicine that it had been giving to other candidates. Trump fired
back, borrowing yet another page from the right-wing media’s
playbook. For years, they had been tearing at the mainstream press’
credibility in order to bolster their own. Previous Republican nominees
had let talk show hosts and bloggers lead the attack. Trump took the
lead for himself: “fake news,” “fake media,” “the opposition party,”
“disgusting media,” “corrupt media,” “lying media.” He had
journalists forcibly removed from his rallies, roped off those who

78
remained, and threatened if elected to change the libel laws to make
journalists easier to sue.
Pundits predicted that Republicans in large numbers would desert
Trump in the November election. He ran further to the right than any
of his predecessors and didn’t have their knowledge, experience, or
self-restraint. Nevertheless, nine out of ten self-identified Republicans
voted for him –the same proportion that had backed other recent GOP
presidential nominees. The pundits shouldn’t have been surprised.
Trump might have sounded outrageous to those who were not
marinated in right-wing talk shows. For those who were, he sounded
like the radio hosts that they’d been listening to for years. He ran on the
white nationalist agenda of the right-wing media – anti-immigrant,
anti-minority, anti-government, anti-globalist, anti-establishment.

***
Trump’s victory in 2016 was interpreted by the right-wing media as
confirmation of what they’d be saying all along – that electoral success
requires a candidate who runs unapologetically to the right. In truth,
however, the conservative media are a threat to the Republican Party’s
future. They’ve ensnared the party in three traps that have put it at risk.
One trap is the right-wing media’s insularity – “epistemic closure”
in the words of the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez.85 It’s an information
cocoon the likes of which Americans have never seen.86 And it’s
bolstered by a decades-long effort to destroy the credibility of the
mainstream media. Limbaugh regularly tells his listeners to boycott the
press. “I’ll let you know what they’re up to,” he says. “And as a bonus,
I’ll nuke it!”87 Nor do right-wing media tolerate Republican critics. As
John McCain became increasingly critical of their rants, they set about
destroying his credibility. At the time of his death, McCain’s
favorability rating was 50 percent higher among Democrats than
among Republicans.88
The audience for right-wing media reinforces their insularity.
Although a few conservative talk shows, websites, and blogs take a

79
moderate line, they struggle to attract followers. Nor does the right-
wing audience like it when one of their favorites blows up the script.
Mark Levin, one of the few top right-wing talk show hosts to declare
“never Trump” during the 2016 primaries, backed down as his ratings
declined. “I’m gonna vote for Donald Trump,” Levin declared as he
jumped on the Trump bandwagon.89
The closed nature of the right-wing media system is a trap. It
deprives Republicans of the flexibility that a political party requires.
The durability of the Republican and Democratic parties – they are
among the few political parties anywhere in the world to have survived
for more than a century – is due not to their ideological consistency but
to their ability to adapt. By changing their path at key moments, they’ve
reorganized themselves with new bases of support, new policies, and
new philosophies. Today’s Republican Party doesn’t have that option.
Its tethered to a rigid and self-perpetuating ideology enforced by right-
wing media.
Few examples illustrate the point better than does the right-wing
media’s response to the autopsy that the Republican National
Committee conducted after the 2012 election. If it was obvious that
demographic change required Republicans to reach out to young
adults, women, and minorities, right-wing media couldn’t see it.
Limbaugh accused the RNC of being “totally bamboozled,” saying the
GOP would pay hell if it changed.90 Ann Coulter declared that the
RNC’s plan would “wreck America.”91 Sean Hannity was an outlier,
saying that he’d “evolved” on the immigration issue and for the good
of the party favored a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens.
“We’ve got to get rid of this immigration issue altogether,” Hannity
said.92 His ratings slumped thereafter and he retreated to his earlier
position.93
“A sociopathic alternative reality” is one analyst’s description of the
imagined world of right-wing media.94 That world was on display
during the 2019 government shutdown. As it continued day after day,

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polls indicated that most Americans blamed it on Trump and
congressional Republicans. Trump’s approval rating sank to the lowest
level of his presidency and the GOP’s image was deteriorating.95 When
Trump finally relented, most Americans were relieved. Right-wing
media personalities were livid. Ann Coulter tweeted, “Good news for
George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest
wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.” The Daily Caller
said it was a “serious reversal,” headlining the article “TRUMP
CAVES.” Mike Cernovich, a prominent alt-right blogger, tweeted that
Trump had become the “Commander-in-Soy.” Breitbart headlined its
story, “NO WALL.” Sean Hannity, who had built a close relationship
with Trump through their late-night phone calls, put a spin on Trump’s
retreat that was itself a sign of just how closed the loop had become.
“You don’t know the Donald Trump I know,” Hannity said. “He right
now holds all the cards.”9697
The closed nature of the right-wing media system has advantages.
It’s an ideal system for exploiting confirmation bias – people’s
preference for information that reinforces what they’d like to believe.98
But it reduces their ability to respond effectively to change. The authors
of Network Propaganda – the Harvard-based study that examined four
million online messages from the 2016 election – summarized the
problem as well as anyone: “The right wing of the media ecosystem
behaves precisely as the echo-chamber models predict—exhibiting high
insularity, susceptibility to information cascades, rumor and conspiracy
theory, and drift toward more extreme versions of itself.” 99

***
The second snare in the Republicans’ media trap is political. It’s
undermining the GOP’s ability to win elections and to govern when in
power.
In a two-party system, general elections are normally won in the
middle by attracting the support of independents. That’s not true in

81
every case, but it’s true in the long run. A party that positions itself on
the far edge of two-party politics is putting itself at risk. But that’s
precisely the position imposed on the GOP by right-wing media, which,
when it fails, blame everyone but themselves. After Republicans got
pounded in the 2018 midterm election, Limbaugh faulted centrist
Republicans for buying into the “giant scam” that uncommitted voters
prefer moderate candidates. “[They] still haven’t figured it out,”
Limbaugh said.100
The damage being done to the GOP by right-wing media is nowhere
clearer than in the party’s failure to attract minority voters. To hear
right-wing media tell it, Hispanics and Asian Americans aren’t “real”
Americans. "In some parts of the country,” Ingraham said, “it does seem
like the America that we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive
demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people and
they're changes that none of us ever voted for and none of us like.” 101
Whether they like it or not, the GOP’s future chances, as the
Republican National Committee acknowledged, will rest with
Hispanics and Asian Americans. Within a few decades, they will
constitute a third of the population. The likelihood that the GOP will be
able to attract large numbers of them is small. Republicans didn’t have
an Asian American problem until right-wing media began railing
endlessly about recent immigrant groups. The GOP carried the Asian-
American vote by two-to-one in 1992 and has lost it by two-to-one in
the past few elections. Hispanics, too, have voted more heavily
Democratic in recent elections. A 2018 poll found that most Hispanics
see the GOP as hostile to and unwelcoming of people of their ethnic
background.102
The right-wing media also make it difficult for the GOP to govern.
The writers of the Constitution designed a governing process based on
compromise and accommodation. The provision for a separate
executive and the division of legislative power between two coequal
chambers—apportioned differently and with a longer term of office for

82
senators—was intended to force lawmakers to come to the center to get
things done. To right-wing media outlets, the political center is akin to
hell. Upon retiring from the House in 2015, ten-term Republican Tom
Latham lamented the unyielding pressure coming from right-wing
media. “They will not take 80 percent – it’s got to be 100 percent or
you’re not pure,” he said. “They don’t give a damn about governing, or
about anything other than being pure themselves. And it’s causing
more people to be concerned about primaries than ever before. I just
don’t see – with continual pounding of the drums in the media and
these outside groups – I don’t know how you function.” Asked whether
the right-wing media were a menace, Latham responded, “Oh, yeah.
Are you kidding?”103
House Republicans are not the only ones to feel the pressure. “If you
stray the slightest from the far right,” former Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott said, “you get hit by the conservative media.”104 Right-wing
bloggers and talk show hosts use their Facebook pages to urge their
followers to contact members of Congress and demand that they stick
to hardline positions. There’s been a five-fold increase in recent years in
the messages that flow into Republican congressional offices. “It’s all
the base, and they’re all angry,” a senior Senate Republican aide said.
“It’s horrible. It’s really depressing.”105
Pressure from right-wing outlets leads Republican candidates to
stake out extreme positions and to overpromise, both of which haunt
them when in office. During the 2010 midterm election in response to
the Tea Party movement, House Republican candidates crafted a
platform, “Pledge for America,” that included a promise to cut the
federal budget by $100 billion. The pledge was impossible to keep,
given that Democrats controlled the presidency and the Senate and that
a cut of that size would require slashing popular programs. Yet, the
right-wing media demanded that House Republicans follow through,
which nearly led them to shut down the government when Senate
Democrats blocked the proposed budget cuts.106

83
 Lawmakers can’t do their job if outsiders are pulling the strings.
Congress works well when its members have the freedom to negotiate.
It sputters when they’re straightjacketed by outside forces.107 The
Republicans have had a share of power since 2011 and for two of those
years controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, and yet
have not shown a capacity to govern. The period has been marked more
by Republican-led government shutdowns (four as of this writing) than
by major legislative acts.
In the long run, a party that cannot govern struggles at election time.
In 1931, British prime minister Stanley Baldwin was being attacked so
relentlessly by press barons Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere
that it appeared as if his government would topple. Calling them
“engines of propaganda,” he said that they were seeking to exercise
“power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot
throughout the ages.”108 The same can said of America’s right-wing
media outlets. They’re calling many of the shots, and yet it is
Republican lawmakers who take the blame when things go haywire.

***
A third snare in the Republicans’ media trap is the fantasies concocted
by right-wing media. Whether it is death panels or phantom terrorists,
they’ve been inventive if nothing else. They haven’t completely escaped
the earth’s gravitational pull but they’re getting mighty close.
They’re not the first to show that propaganda works, nor is their
formula a new one. Falsehoods are easier to peddle in an echo chamber.
Although there are reliable voices on climate change among right-wing
media, they are few in number and don’t get much attention. Each day,
millions of Republicans hear from the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity,
where they are repeatedly told fanciful stories. In dismissing climate
change, Hannity said “hurricanes have gone on forever,” as if that claim
was somehow proof of anything other than the recurrence of
hurricanes. On Fox News during the first half of 2019, six out of every

84
seven substantial references to climate change either rejected the theory
or dismissed its effects.109 Familiarity with a claim, simply hearing it
again and again, can lead people to think it’s true. 110 As it turns out, it
helps if a familiar claim is actually true. In that case, there’s a near
certainty that people will accept it as fact. But even if it is false, people
are likely to think it’s true if they hear it often enough.111
Confirmation bias also lends credibility to right-wing media
concoctions. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman
shows that factual accuracy is not what most people seek. They prefer
explanations that conform to what they’d like to believe.112 For
opponents of Obamacare, the claim that it included death panels was
another reason to reject it.
Once people embrace a false reality, they tend to keep it. Research
shows that individuals are skilled at protecting what they want to
believe.113 It can occur through selective retention – the tendency to
recall supportive items and forget conflicting ones. 114 It can happen
through selective exposure - closer attention to supportive messages
than to opposing ones.115 And it can work through selective perception
– seeing what we want to see in a situation. 116 Leon Festinger, the
founder of cognitive dissonance theory, was struck by the difficulty of
getting people to change their minds. “A man with conviction is a hard
man to change,” Festinger wrote. “Tell him you disagree and he turns
away. Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources.
Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point…. [When] presented with
evidence - unequivocal and undeniable evidence - that his belief is
wrong, he will emerge not only unshaken but even more convinced of
the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”117
All of this would suggest that the right-wing media’s flight into
fantasy is a winning strategy for the Republican Party. But there is a
reason why it’s risky. A hazard of making things up is that one must act
like it’s true. And yet, policies based on false realities can end up
making things worse. The United States is still bearing the costs of the

85
disinformation campaign conducted by right-wing media and the Bush
administration in the run-up to the 2003 military invasion of Iraq.
Americans with false beliefs about Iraq – a group that was heavily
Republican - were far more likely than better-informed Americans to
favor the ill-fated invasion.118 And the Americans who were the most
misinformed were those who relied on right-wing media for their
information.119
Big lies are not like white lies. They cause real harm. When the
Obama administration called for vaccination in the face of the 2010
swine flu pandemic, right-wing media claimed it had no scientific basis.
Glenn Beck urged Americans to do “the exact opposite.” Nearly 20,000
Americans died from the pandemic. People who took the advice of Beck
and his ilk were at risk of digging their own graves.
The GOP’s misinformation problem thus runs deeper than a bunch
of errant thoughts. As the New York Times’ David Brooks noted, right-
wing media contribute to a breakdown in Republicans’ ability to deal
with reality, to sort through complexity, to make use of evidence. When
a party makes a habit of playing fast and loose with the facts, other
things begin to unravel.120

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 CHAPTER FIVE

The Money Trap

“When everyone was busy playing their cards, guessing others’

hands and counting chips, we took a deck and a bottle and
a corner table. At the end of that dreamy night, rattles stopped,
bottles emptied, everyone gone. But there on our table was
this beautiful house erected of cards, stories, hopes and secrets.
Something we built quite unknowingly. She looked at me
with starry eyes and whispered – “Can we keep it?” The
curious inn keeper, from a distance answered – “No”.

Nahiar Ozar, writer

Republican economic policy ventured into fantasyland in the early

1980s. Ronald Reagan engineered a huge tax cut for the wealthy on a
belief that it would generate so much economic growth that federal tax
revenues would go up, not down. Instead, the budget deficit ballooned
and the national debt soared.
Reagan didn’t pay as much as a penny for his fantasy. The tax cut
stimulated the economy, smoothing his way to a second term. But the
tax would turn into a trap for the GOP. Having long touted itself as the
fiscally responsible party, the national debt nearly tripled during
Reagan’s presidency.1 Neither Harry Truman in pursuing the Korean

87
War nor Lyndon Johnson in carrying out the Vietnam War had run up
that much red ink. It was the start of a decades-long period in which the
GOP’s words bore almost no relationship to its fiscal policies.
Americans did not at first recognize the contradiction. They
continued to think of the GOP as the fiscally responsible party. But the
combination of additional tax cuts for the wealthy and high federal
spending under George W. Bush weakened the illusion and deepened
the GOP’s trap. Working-class whites questioned whether the
Republican “establishment” had their interests at heart, a perception
that Donald Trump exploited on his way to the 2016 Republican
presidential nomination. “The party of Reagan was the party that had
coalitions that worked seamlessly together,” a leading GOP strategist
observed. “What Donald Trump has identified is a party that is literally
splitting apart between the donor class and the working-class parts of
the party.”2 But Trump then presided over yet another Republican tax
cut for the wealthy, further damaging the party’s reputation for fiscal
discipline while also deepening the divide between working-class and
marketplace Republicans.

***
Until the 1930s, U.S. economic policy was shaped by notions of laissez
faire capitalism. Markets were left to operate largely on their own,
regulated by the decisions of producers and consumers. When the
economy nosedived, as it did every few decades, it was left to recover
on its own. Americans were told to ride it out, that the economy would
self-correct.
When the stock market crashed in late 1929, ushering in the Great
Depression, Republicans were in office and responded as laissez-faire
theory dictated. As the misery spread – eventually a quarter of the
nation’s workers would be jobless and another quarter would be unable
to find full-time work - Americans lost patience and looked to the

88
Democrats, who turned to government spending as a way to get the
economy moving. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt wasn’t
versed in economic theory, he responded as British economist John
Maynard Keynes had prescribed. Keynes had criticized how
governments responded to an economic downturn. When tax revenues
declined from shrinking incomes and profits, governments would cut
back on their spending. The spending cuts, Keynes argued, worsened
the problem by adding to the joblessness. Instead of cutting back on
spending, Keynes said, governments should increase it, thereby
stimulating the economy until the private sector was back on its feet.3
Roosevelt’s New Deal followed Keynes’s script. The Works Progress
Administration (WPA), for example, employed millions of jobless
Americans on public works projects. New parks, bridges, and other
facilities were built in hundreds of American cities and towns. Workers'
income fed into the economy, boosting production, which led to job
hires.
Republicans attacked the New Deal as the road to socialism. But
“demand-side” policy worked as Keynes had predicted. With more
jobs came more income, which led to more consumer spending. As the
“demand” for goods increased, production increased, hastening the
economic recovery. By the Nixon presidency, Republicans had
begrudgingly accepted the idea that, when the economy dips,
government should increase its spending. “I’m now a Keynesian in
economics,” Nixon said.4
In the late 1970s, a sharp rise in oil prices and a cutback in defense
spending from America’s withdrawal from Vietnam triggered the
longest economic recession since World War II. As with previous ones,
it hurt the party in power. Incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter lost the
1980 presidential race to Ronald Reagan.
A critic of Keynesian economics, Reagan took a different approach
to boosting the economy - the largest tax cut in history for business and
high-income taxpayers. Reagan described it as “supply-side” policy to
89
distinguish it from Keynesian demand-side policy. If firms and wealthy
taxpayers received a tax cut, Reagan argued, they would use the extra
money to invest in production - the supply side of the economic
equation. With increased production would come more jobs, with more
jobs would come more pay, with more pay would come more consumer
spending, with more spending would come more production – a
virtuous circle that would help everyone. It was trickle-down
economics - the idea that wealth at the top of society generates economic
activity for the benefit of those below.
The theoretical basis for supply-side policy was the Laffer Curve,
devised by University of Southern California economist Arthur Laffer
and first presented to high-ranking Republican policymakers during a
luncheon meeting with Donald Rumsfeld. On a napkin, Laffer drew a
graph intended to show the relationship between tax rates and tax
revenue. On one axis, from 0 percent to 100 percent, was the tax rate.
On the other axis, from 0 percent to 100 percent, was the tax revenue.
Laffer then drew a curve expressing the relationship between the two.
He pointed out that, if the tax rate was 0 percent, there would be no
government revenue. There would also be no government revenue if
the tax rate was 100 percent because workers and firms wouldn’t have
an incentive to engage in economic activity. Laffer argued that
somewhere between 0 percent and 100 percent there was an optimal
point where the rate of government taxation would maximize economic
growth and thereby maximize tax revenue. Laffer postulated that the
ideal point was lower than the current tax rate, predicting that a tax cut
would increase government revenue rather than shrinking it.
Laffer’s theory was untested, and there was no reliable estimate of
the “optimal” tax rate. Reagan chose a tax rate based on what he
believed the wealthy should pay – proposing that the highest marginal
tax rate be dropped from 70 percent to 50 percent. A subsequent Reagan
initiative dropped it to 28 percent. The size of each cut was pulled out
of a hat. David Stockman, who was Reagan’s budget director, later
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admitted to the sleight of hand. "There was less there than met the eye.”
Stockman said. “Nobody has figured it out yet. Let's say that you and I
walked outside and I waved a wand and said, 'I've just lowered the
temperature from 110 to 78.’”5
Reagan was convinced that Laffer’s theory was sound. Others in the
administration were skeptical but willing to accept the outcome either
way. If the tax cut increased government revenue, Republicans would
have the best of both worlds – less taxes on the wealthy and more
money for government. If the effect was to balloon the federal deficit
and debt, that was okay too, because it would increase pressure to cut
domestic spending programs that were championed by Democrats.
Reagan’s tax cuts had one predictable effect. They made the rich a
lot richer. The income of the top 1 percent of earners increased at an
average yearly rate of 6 percent during Reagan’s eight years in office.
Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted income of those in the bottom half of
the income distribution was stagnant, falling from a yearly average of
$16,371 in 1980 to a yearly average of $16,268 in 1988.6
The result was a widening income gap. In the 1920s, the top 1 percent
of earners had captured 24 percent of the nation’s total annual income.
The percentage dropped after Democrats imposed a high marginal tax
on upper incomes when they took power in the 1930s. When Reagan
took office in 1980, the top 1 percent were capturing less than 10 percent
of the nation’s income. When he left office, their share had jumped to 15
percent.7
The Reagan tax cut blew the lid off the federal budget. The promised
revenue windfall didn’t materialize. Federal revenue dropped sharply.
Adding to the budget problem was a rise in government spending.
Convinced that the Soviet Union was a dire threat, Reagan had
persuaded Congress to boost defense spending to its highest peacetime
level ever. In addition, Reagan had backed down on his campaign
promise to cut domestic spending, fearing that cuts in popular
programs would hurt Republicans’ election chances. 8 The national debt
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doubled during Reagan’s first term and then doubled again during his
second. It had stood at $998 billion when Reagan took office and was at
$2,857 billion when he left - the largest increase in both relative and
absolute terms since World War II.9
Reagan tried to make it appear that the debt was everyone’s doing
but his own. In a speech to the National Association of Realtors, Reagan
said, “We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed
enough.”10

***
The bill for Reagan’s fiscal policies came due when his successor,
George H.W. Bush, was president. It might have cost him his job. In
accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, Bush had
said “Read my lips – no new taxes!” But as the federal debt continued
to climb, he changed his mind. An old-school Republican who believed
in fiscal discipline, Bush joined with Democrats and moderate
Republicans to push for a fiscal package that raised the highest
marginal tax rate from 28 percent to 31 percent. A group of House
Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, tried to block the effort but failed.11
Bush’s support among Republican voters fell, and he lost the 1992
election to Democrat Bill Clinton.
Clinton then did what presidents have seldom done. He submitted
to Congress a package of spending cuts and tax increases aimed at
getting the deficit under control. He proposed to raise taxes on high
incomes by eliminating the cap on Medicare taxes and by increasing the
top marginal rate from 31 percent to 39.5 percent. The bill also proposed
a $255 billion cut over five years in military and welfare spending.
Every House and Senate Republican voted against the bill, and it
narrowly passed. The vote in the Senate was 50-50 with Vice President
Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote. Congressional Republicans were
apoplectic. House minority whip Newt Gingrich declared that the bill

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would cause a “job-killing recession.” Dick Armey, chair of the House
Republican Conference, said: “This plan is not a recipe for more jobs. It
is a recipe for disaster…. Taxes will go up. The economy will sputter
along. Dreams will be put off, and all this for the hollow promise of
deficit reduction and magical theories of lower interest rates.”12
Republicans had been wrong in their prediction about the Reagan
tax cuts and were wrong once again. The economy went on a tear.
During Clinton’s two terms in office, the unemployment rate fell to its
lowest rate in a quarter century. Unemployment among blacks and
Hispanics fell by half, reaching their lowest levels in history. Inflation
dropped to its lowest level in thirty years. The rate of home ownership,
which had declined during the Reagan and Bush years, reached a
record high. The poverty rate fell to its lowest level in three decades.
The increase in average monthly job hires was the highest ever. In
Clinton’s last year, the economy set the record for the longest
continuous expansion in the nation’s history. 13
Nevertheless, the income gap did not shrink. It fell during Clinton’s
first three years as a result of the tax increase on upper incomes but then
rose when the stock market soared. The advent of the internet had
sparked a boom in the technology sector. Employment in tech firms rose
sharply and salaries for tech sector workers doubled in the 1990s.14 Until
the “tech bubble” burst in 1999, the stock markets had shot up by 250
percent during Clinton’s presidency, boosting the income of those with
large holdings. When Clinton took office, the top 1 percent of earners
received 14 percent of all annual income. It reached 22 percent before
declining when the tech bubble burst.15
The Clinton years were the only time in the last half century that the
United States has had a budget surplus. The combination of a growing
economy, spending cuts, and the tax increase put the government in the
black. When Clinton took office, the budget deficit had stood at $290
million. His final budget had a $124 billion surplus - the third year in a
row that government had run a surplus. The black ink was projected to
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produce a nearly $6 trillion surplus over the next decade that could be
used to fully retire the national debt.
Republicans were not impressed. Over the course of Clinton’s
presidency, a mere third of Republicans on average approved of his
handling of the economy.16 A 1999 Pew Research Center poll found that
most Republicans believed that their party was the better steward of the
economy.17

***
As in 1980 but this time with the help of five Republican-appointed
Supreme Court justices, an economic downturn in 2000 contributed to
the election of a Republican president. George W. Bush inherited both
a sluggish economy and a budget surplus, giving him a justification for
pursuing a tax cut. Bush declared that "a surplus in tax revenue, after
all, means that taxpayers have been overcharged." And there was no
doubt about which taxpayers Bush had in mind. He proposed a huge
tax cut for high-income taxpayers, although he pitched the proposal as
one aimed at helping middle-class families.18 Bush also claimed that
government would come out ahead – rapid economic growth would
result in increased revenue.
Economists weren’t buying Bush’s argument. They had studied the
Reagan tax cuts and concluded that supply-side theory was fantasy.
Ten Nobel Prize economists, joined by more than 400 other economists,
issued a statement saying that the proposed tax cuts would result in
budget deficits that would widen the gap in income between the
wealthy and other Americans and reduce the governments’ ability to
invest in public education, infrastructure, and other areas of need. 19
Republican lawmakers were undeterred. The Bush tax cuts were
contained in two bills, one enacted in 2001, the other in 2002. Both bills
received nearly unanimous Republican support in Congress, ensuring
their passage.

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 As it happened, the economists had it right. The National Bureau of
Economic Research found that the Bush tax cuts added hundreds of
billions to the national debt.20 Heightened government spending also
contributed to the rising debt. Although Bush had campaigned on a
promise to cut government spending, it rose during his first term even
though Republicans controlled the House for all four of those years and
the Senate for two of them. During Clinton’s first term, federal spending
had declined by 19 percent. In Bush’s first term, it rose by 21 percent. 21
During his eight years in office, the national debt increased from $5.7
trillion to $10.6 trillion – easily the biggest jump since World War II. 22
Bush had promised that all Americans would share in the tax cuts
but didn’t publicize the size of their share. It was an Orwellian promise.
All taxpayers were equal but some were more equal than others. The
average tax savings to Americans in the top 1 percent of income was
more than $50,000 a year, whereas it was about $600 a year for those in
the middle of the income scale and less than $100 a year for those in the
bottom fifth.23 In the first decade of the Bush tax cuts, Americans in the
top 1 percent of income had an average tax savings of half a million
dollars – an amount greater than most Americans are able to save
during their entire lives. And the top 1 percent didn’t have to work
harder or longer to get their bonus. It was contained in legislation
passed by Congress and signed into law by the stroke of Bush’s pen. At
peak in Bush’s second term, the top 1 percent of earners captured 24
percent of national income – the highest since the 1920s.24
Economists were skeptical of Bush’s claim that upper-income
taxpayers would invest the extra money in economic production. Their
tax savings from the Reagan cuts had mostly been tucked away in
personal accounts and spent on personal assets like boats and second
homes. As it happened, most of their windfall from the Bush tax cuts
went for the same things.25
As the wealthy were getting wealthier, so too were homeowners as
a result of rapidly rising home prices. Deregulation of the banks had
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started under Reagan, had accelerated under Clinton, and been allowed
to continue under Bush. It had encouraged banks to engage in risky
lending. The percentage of mortgages given to individuals with a weak
or sub-prime credit rating rose sharply.26 As long as housing prices
continued to rise, the risk was contained. Struggling homeowners could
take out a home equity loan to keep up with their mortgage payments.
But when the housing market stalled in 2006 and then tumbled in 2007,
the economy began to crumble. When Americans by the tens of
thousands then defaulted on their mortgages, the house of cards
collapsed. Lehman Brothers, a century-old financial institution, went
bankrupt and others were teetering on the edge. To prevent a financial-
sector crash that would wreck the entire economy, Congress and the
Bush administration enacted the Troubled Assets Relief Program
(TARP), which authorized the Treasury Department to buy risky assets
from financial institutions in order to give them the cash they needed to
stay afloat.
The economic downturn contributed to a Democratic landslide in
the 2008 election. Now in control of the presidency, House, and Senate,
Democrats set about restoring order to the economy. Following
Keynesian theory, they enacted a $787 billion stimulus package that
included funding for construction projects and grants to state and local
governments, which had seen their tax revenues plummet as a result of
the economic slowdown. No House Republican and only three Senate
Republicans voted for the bill. Senator Mitch McConnell, who had
backed the $2,900 billion Bush tax cuts, was enraged by the $787 billion
stimulus bill. “Yesterday the Senate cast one of the most expensive votes
in history,” McConnell said. “Americans are wondering how we’re
going to pay for all this.”27
Five months into the Obama presidency the U.S. economy began to
grow, the start of what would become its longest upward climb in the
nation’s history. It did not come cheap. During Obama’s time in office,
the national debt rose from $10.6 trillion to $19.9 trillion. Although
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Obama was able to cut in half the annual budget deficit that he had
inherited from Bush, it remained high each year as government
spending consistently outpaced government revenue. Yet, the economy
recovered and then some during his two terms. The stock market
reached an all-time high, as did after-tax corporate profits, Home prices
jumped 20 percent. The jobless rate, which had peaked at 10 percent
during the economic downturn was cut to 4.8 percent, nearly a full
point below its post-World War II average.28

***
A few months after Obama took office, Republican lawmakers
announced their plan for dealing with the economic downturn –
spending cuts. At a Capitol Hill press conference, minority leader John
Boehner said that House Republicans would soon unveil the plan.
"Over the next couple of weeks,” Boehner said, “you'll have a chance to
see what real budget cuts look like." On the Senate floor, McConnell
said that spending cuts were needed to “protect our children and
grandchildren” from the cost of paying off the national debt.29
It was all for show. Republican lawmakers didn’t have the votes to
control the budget and knew that steep cuts in government spending
would deepen the recession. They were positioning themselves to
attack the Democrats as the tax and spend party in the 2010 midterm
elections. The strategy payed off. Republicans won control of the House
and would hold it throughout Obama’s remaining years of office,
enabling them to block his agenda.
Republicans’ pledge of fiscal responsibility went out the window in
2017 when, for the first time in a decade, they controlled the presidency
and both chambers of Congress. They used it to pursue yet another tax
cut for the wealthy. And they did it without the excuse that had been
used to justify the Reagan and Bush tax cuts. The economy didn’t need
a boost. It was on its longest upward climb ever. Historically, a strong

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economy has been a time to reduce budget deficits and pay down the
national debt.30 Republicans chose instead to send the federal
government deeper into the red.
Economists criticized the proposed tax cut, saying that it would
worsen the income gap, grow the budget deficit, and increase the
national debt. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz ridiculed the proposal,
saying “Either it’s a religious belief, a belief where no amount of
evidence would change that, or they are using the argument cynically
and they just want more money for themselves.” 31 Trump
administration officials were singing a different tune, claiming the tax
bill would be a godsend for ordinary Americans. The White House
Council of Economic Advisors said it would increase the average
worker’s wages by at least $4,000 a year.32 Treasury Secretary Steve
Mnuchin claimed that the only Americans who would pay higher taxes
were those making more than a million dollars a year. He also claimed
that the tax cut would pay for itself and that his department would
release a research report supporting the claim. It was never released.33
Every Senate Republican and 97 percent of House Republicans voted
for the tax cut bill. McConnell, who had shepherded the bill through the
Senate, was bullish. "I not only don't think it will increase the deficit,"
McConnell said, "I think it will be beyond revenue-neutral. In other
words, I think it will produce more than enough to fill that gap." 34
House Speaker Paul Ryan also praised the bill, saying, “It’s something
that will help improve the lives of people for a long time to come.” 35
If the people Ryan had in mind were upper-income Americans, he
was on target. The 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act gave them a windfall. The
top 1 percent averaged a 3.4 percent increase in after-tax income – an
amount in excess of $30,000 a year.36 For Americans in the middle-
income range, the average increase was 1.6 percent, or roughly $1,000 a
year.37 Wealthy Americans also got a death wish of the favorable kind.
The 2017 bill raised the exemption on the estate tax to $11.2 million for

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individuals and $22.4 million for couples - a change that benefits only
the richest of the rich.38
The 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act was a godsend for corporations,
which had their highest marginal tax rate reduced from 35 percent to 21
percent. The cut was in part a payoff to the wealthy donors that had
bankrolled Republican candidates.39 As the bill was working its way
through Congress, House Republican Chris Collins said, "My donors
are basically saying, 'Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'" 40 Senate
Republican Lindsey Graham said that the “the financial contributions
will stop” if the bill didn’t pass.41
Virtually nothing that Republicans claimed about the 2017 tax cuts
has come true. Economic growth has slowed rather than sped up since
their enactment. Government revenue has fallen rather than risen,
contributing to a $1 trillion budget deficit in 2019 – the first time in the
nation’s history that it’s reached that level. The national debt has not
declined, climbing from 76.4 percent of GDP when Trump took office
to 79.5 percent of GDP by his third year in office.42 The share of national
income received by the top 1 percent has increased, as has their share of
the nation’s wealth (how much they own, as opposed to how much they
earn in a given year). They now have 40 percent of the nation’s wealth,
the highest level in more than a half century. Their share is greater than
the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans.43

***
“Party images” are the broad assessments that people have about a
party from prolonged exposure to it. Party images form over time but
tend to endure and can help or hinder a party. During the Great
Depression, the Democratic Party came to be seen as “the party of
prosperity,” which gave it an advantage over the GOP, which was
widely blamed for the Depression. The 1930s New Deal programs also
contributed to the Democrats’ image as “the party of the little man” – a

99
result of its enactment of government jobs programs, collective
bargaining, social security, and the minimum wage.
Those same policies, however, also gave Democrats less favorable
images as “the big government party” and “the spending party.” These
stereotypes were reinforced by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which
included public assistance programs like Medicare, Medicaid, public
housing, and food stamps. Most Republicans opposed the New Deal
and Great Society programs, which gave them the image of the “fiscally
responsible party.” These images played into Reagan’s election as
president in 1980. Reagan’s message was conveyed in simple phrases:
“Big government is the problem, cutting taxes and regulation the
solution; a rising tide will then lift all boats and those who work hard
will live the American Dream.” Supporting Reagan’s message were
pithy soundbites - “big government,” “tax and spend liberals,”
“government is the problem, not the solution,” “tax relief.” 44
Fiscal responsibility is still a Republican refrain but it’s out of line
with the party’s policies. Of the last seven presidents, four have
presided over a rise in the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP,
whereas three have presided over a decline. The seven presidents
divide exactly along party lines. The four Republicans - Reagan, the two
Bushes. and Trump - have all presided over a widening budget deficit.
The second Bush presidency is the extreme case. During George W.
Bush’s tenure, the budget deficit increased by 4.7 points as a percentage
of GDP. Each of the three Democratic presidents – Carter, Clinton, and
Obama – presided over a shrinking budget deficit, although narrowly
in Obama’s case. Clinton’s time in office was the best case – the deficit
declined by 5 points as a percentage of GDP.45
The national debt is a similar story. Of the seven most recent
presidents, four of the top five in terms of presiding over a rising debt
level are Republicans. Obama is the lone Democrat in the top five, and
he inherited a depressed economy that produced a steep decline in

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government revenue and required stimulus spending to reinvigorate
the economy.46
Reflecting the enduring power of party images and the stubborn
tendency of party loyalists to see their party favorably, Republicans still
see the GOP as the more fiscally responsible party. But the large edge
that Republicans once had on the issue is gone. Most independents - the
group that holds the balance of power in national elections - place the
blame for the rise in the debt and deficit on Republicans.47 Independents
also had a dim view of the 2017 tax cut, opposing it by a margin of
nearly three-to-one.48
Republican tax cuts have also eroded the party’s most treasured
image – its claim to be “the party of the middle class.” A recent Gallup
poll asked Americans what they liked and disliked about the political
parties. Second on the list of what respondents disliked about the
Republican Party – trailing only what they saw as the GOP’s
“inflexibility” and “unwillingness to compromise” – was their
perception that it favors “the rich” and fails “to protect the middle
class.”49 The opinions of independents reveal just how far the GOP’s
image has deteriorated. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that
independents by a margin of more than two-to-one – 64-26 percent -
believe that Republicans favor “the rich” over “the middle class.” 50 In
the 2018 midterm election, independents with progressive economic
views backed House Democratic candidates by a three-to-one margin.51
The Republicans’ image as “the party of the rich” is not an image
that a party would choose to have. When an internal Republican
National Committee poll found that Americans opposed the GOP’s
2017 tax cut bill by a two-to-one margin, largely on a belief that it
favored the rich, the report lamented that “We’ve lost the messaging
battle.”52 Republicans have lost more than the messaging battle.
Republicans have set themselves up for a legislative encounter that
they’ll lose no matter what they do. When the Democrats are next in
power, one of their first acts will almost surely be a bill that would cut
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taxes on the middle class and pay for it by raising taxes on the rich. The
bill would be hugely popular. Polls show that Democrats,
independents, and Republicans alike want a middle-class tax cut. Polls
also show that large majorities of Democrats and independents want
the wealthy to pay higher taxes. A recent Fox News poll found that even
a slight majority of Republicans would like to tax the rich more
heavily.53 Republican lawmakers will be trapped when the bill comes
up for a vote. If they vote against it, they’ll be seen as enemies of the
middle class. If they vote for the bill, they’ll anger their wealthy
supporters.
Republicans have walked themselves to the edge of a fiscal cliff
without a safe way to walk themselves back. Republicans can claim, as
they have since Reagan, that the federal budget is riddled with waste
and abuse, which, if eliminated, would slash the budget deficit. But that
claim wouldn’t be pursued any more vigorously than it was during the
Reagan, Bush, or Trump years. There is waste and abuse in the federal
budget but it’s not anywhere near the level of what Republicans say,
which is why they avoid the issue when in power.54
Republicans’ only realistic step toward restoring their image of fiscal
responsibility would be to take a knife to government spending. It
would require cuts in widely popular programs like social security or
in areas popular among Republicans, like national defense and
homeland security. Any effort of that kind would cost the GOP support,
a lesson brought home when Republicans in Kansas were forced to do
it. In 2012, Kansas’s Republican legislature passed into law a deep tax
cut that Republican governor Sam Brownback said would pay for itself
and fuel unprecedented economic growth. The growth spurt didn’t
materialize. The Kansas economy grew more slowly than those of
surrounding states. Meanwhile, the state went hundreds of millions
into the red as a result of declining tax revenues, forcing widespread
spending cuts. Public education was among the areas affected. Many
local schools had to cut back to a four-day week and eliminate extra-

102
curricular activities.55 Facing a public revolt, the Kansas legislature
voided the tax cut, though it had to override Brownback’s veto to do so.
Having ventured too deep into fantasyland to find his way out,
Brownback declared that the tax cuts had been a success. In the 2018
elections, even though Kansas is a heavily Republican state, Kris
Kobach, the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate and an all-out supporter of
the Kansas tax cuts, lost to his Democratic challenger.

***
The Reagan and Bush tax cuts had majority support – two-to-one for
the Reagan cut and nearly three-to-two for Bush’s.56 The 2017 tax cut
was opposed by a one-sided majority of two-to-one.57 Even among
Republicans, the disapproval rate was much higher than for the earlier
tax cuts.58
Republican opposition was concentrated among working-class
whites who felt their interests were being sacrificed for the benefit of
corporations and the wealthy. It was not the first time that they had felt
betrayed. They had opposed the bank bailout engineered by
“establishment Republicans” in the closing months of the Bush
administration, which had led many of them to back the Tea Party
movement. When establishment Republicans pushed back against the
Tea Party’s growing power, right-wing media lashed out. Talk show
host Michael Savage said he was “sickened” by establishment
Republicans, whom he labeled the party’s “eunuchs.” “Now you
understand how the Tea Party arose,” he told his listeners. 59
Free trade agreements were also part of the Tea Party’s dispute with
the Republican establishment. Although the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted in the first year of Clinton’s
presidency, it had been negotiated by George H.W. Bush. And it was
another Republican president, George W. Bush, who had negotiated the
next major free trade arrangements – bilateral pacts with Korea,
Colombia, and Panama. A 2010 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll
found that Republican opposition to free trade agreements was

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concentrated among Tea Party supporters who believed the pacts
destroy American jobs.60
The Tea Party movement should have alerted marketplace
Republicans that their grip on the party was slipping but, then again,
perhaps nothing could have prepared them for Donald Trump. They
didn’t see him coming and, when he started to catch on, they didn’t
think that he could win the GOP nomination. They misjudged their
party’s base. Exit polls indicated that more than half of Republican
primary voters in 2016 felt “betrayed” by their party’s leaders.61 They
voted heavily for Trump.62
The split in Republican ranks carried into the early months of the
Trump administration when one Trump initiative after the next failed
to make it through the Republican-controlled Congress. Steve Bannon,
who had been head of Breitbart News and was then serving as a
presidential advisor, said that removing “establishment Republicans”
from Congress was a higher priority than ridding it of Democrats. “We
are declaring war on the Republican establishment,” Bannon said.
“Nobody is safe. We’re coming after all of them.” 63 Right-wing attacks
on their own party’s lawmakers produced a poll finding never before
seen, one that might have led analysts to think the poll was a fake. But
it was conducted by a reputable polling organization, the Pew Research
Center. It found that Republicans had less trust in Congress than
Democrats, even though their party had control of Congress. It was the
first time ever that members of the majority party had expressed less
trust in Congress than had members of the minority party.64
Ironically, it was Trump who dampened the growing split between
the party’s working-class and business factions. He mollified working-
class whites by killing the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade
agreement that Obama had negotiated. Then, as the first year of his
presidency was nearing its end, Trump mollified marketplace
Republicans by putting his weight behind the tax cut bill despite a
promise of massive tax cuts for “the middle class, the forgotten people,
the forgotten men and women of this country, who built our

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country." To soothe his working-class supporters, Trump claimed that
the tax cuts would “pay for themselves” and spark an unprecedented
period of economic growth that would fill their pocketbooks.
Trump has retained the loyalty of working-class whites even as he’s
pursued policies that are aligned more closely with the interests of
marketplace conservatives. Although his critics have derided the
inconsistency of his economic policies, it has enabled him to keep the
Republican coalition together. Offsetting his positions on business
deregulation and upper-income tax cuts are his positions on
immigration and trade, which go against marketplace Republicans’
desire for cheap labor and open markets but appeal to working-class
whites, who see them as a threat to their jobs and wages.
What’s unclear is what will happen when Trump is out of the
picture. The economic agendas of marketplace conservatives and
working-class whites are at odds – protectionism versus free trade,
tougher versus more open immigration policies, middle-class versus
upper-class tax cuts. At stake is the direction of the party – whether it
will retain the business orientation that has dominated the GOP since
the late 1800s or adopt the populist agenda of its working-class faction.
In a party showdown, it’s difficult to imagine that working-class
Republicans would prevail. The GOP has been tied to the interests of
business since early in the Industrial Age. Wealth and free markets are
built into the party’s DNA. It’s no great surprise that, even with the rise
of the Tea Party, marketplace Republicans have largely had their way
on policy issues. Trump embraced tax cuts for the wealthy, has sided
with the insurance industry on healthcare, and has pursued business
deregulation to the hilt, including deregulation of big banks. In a
populist pitch, he promised to “drain the swamp” while at the same
time engaging in crony capitalism. His administration is laden with
corporate executives and pro-business lobbyists. His recent nominee for
Secretary of Labor is a pro-business attorney whose specialty included
legal challenges to regulations designed to protect workers.65 The
tentacles of business run deep in the Republican Party.

105
 So do the tentacles of money, which marketplace Republicans have
in abundance. Economic power translates fluidly into political power
and became even easier after the Citizens United and SpeechNow court
rulings unleashed campaign spending by corporations and
independent expenditure groups. 66 As the income and wealth gaps
have widened, so has the power gap resulting from their uneven
distribution. The power gap is particularly acute for the Republican
Party, which, more than the Democrats, depends on major donors to
give its candidates an edge. Marketplace Republicans don’t have a
stranglehold on the GOP as a result of being the party’s donor class, but
it tightens their control over policy. An exhaustive study of 1,779 policy
decisions by political scientists Martin Gilens and Ben Page found
lawmakers’ policy decisions more closely match the interests of wealthy
citizens and well-funded corporate lobbies than they do the interests of
ordinary citizens.67
Whichever direction the GOP takes, it will upset those on the losing
end. A breakup as severe as the Democratic split in the 1960s is unlikely,
but even a modest breakup would be costly. The GOP is already
shrinking because of demographic change.

***
Working-class whites are tied to the GOP largely by the politics of
resentment that started with Nixon and racial busing and now rests on
Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Muslims, non-whites, and foreigners.
But if working-class whites were to look first to their economic interests,
Republicans would lose votes.
Republican leaders have protected the party from loss through
alternative realities that have, among other things, convinced many of
the party’s working-class followers that America’s manufacturing
system can be restored to its former glory and that Republican
lawmakers can produce a healthcare program that covers more people,
provides more choice, and offers better care at a lower cost than
Obamacare ever could. There is no evidence for either of these notions,

106
and no serious analyst finds either claim remotely plausible. But they
are credible at a time when polarization has prompted some voters to
put more trust in what their party’s leaders are saying than in what the
evidence indicates.
Republicans’ strongest buffer against a loss of its working-class
support is its white-heritage pitch. Race, religion, nationality and other
social identities are a potent political force. People instinctively divide
the world into “we” and “they,” and working-class whites are the
Americans most likely to say that they “feel like a stranger” in their own
country.68 They feel pitted against minorities not just for material
rewards but “for the right to define the nation’s identity.”69 Any party
that can get its followers more riled up about an NFL player taking a
knee during the playing of the national anthem than about their need
to work two jobs in order to make ends meet has figured something out.
But scapegoating doesn’t work forever. The lengthy attack that the
Republican Party once waged on Catholics worked to its advantage
until the hardships of the Great Depression led Americans to look first
to their pocketbooks. Religion receded in people’s minds, and it
upended the political order – an era of Republican control gave way to
an era of Democratic control.
Class identities are again gaining strength in America, propelled by
income inequality, wage stagnation, high levels of personal debt, and
the high cost of housing, college, and health insurance. Although
Republicans are relatively united on cultural issues, they are divided on
many economic issues.70 Lower-income Republicans are twice as likely
as higher-income Republicans to favor raising the minimum wage and
taxing the rich. And they are more than twice as likely as upper-income
Republicans to believe that unfair policies determine who is rich and
who is poor in America.71
As a 2019 Democracy Fund study found, the rise in class awareness
is a bigger threat to the GOP than it is to the Democratic Party. The
study showed that Democrats are relatively united on economic
policies. The positions of higher-income Democrats differ only slightly

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on average from those of lower-income Democrats. Republicans are a
different story. Their views on economic issues split along income lines.
As the study’s authors noted, “Lower-income Republicans are
substantially more economically progressive than higher-income
Republicans.” In fact, when it comes to economic issues, some
Republicans look like Democrats. “About one in five Republicans,” the
study’s authors wrote, “hold economic views more in line with the
Democratic Party than their own party.”72 Signs of slippage occurred in
the 2018 House elections when one in seven Republicans with
economically progressive views voted Democratic – four times the
defection rate of other Republicans.73
A rise in class awareness among working-class whites will work
against the GOP, and there’s nothing on the horizon to suggest that the
sources of their economic anxiety will soon disappear. The odds are
increasing that the GOP will face a day of economic reckoning.

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 CHAPTER SIX

The Moral Trap

The subversion of established institutions

is merely one consequence of the previous
subversion of established opinions.

John Stuart Mill, philosopher

There was a time in American politics when the Republican Party

occupied the moral high ground. Founded on restoring the nation’s
governing ideals, it stood for abolition and the spreading of wealth to
small farmers, blue-collar workers, and local merchants. For its part, the
Democratic Party stood for white supremacy and Manifest Destiny.
Later, when the GOP was hijacked by the robber barons, progressive
reformers like Theodore Roosevelt fought to restore the party’s
founding principles. Even as late as the 1960s, a moral impulse led
Republican lawmakers, without whom the legislation would have been
defeated, to support the Civil Rights Act.1
Nixon’s southern strategy launched the Republican Party on a
different trajectory. Everything from voter suppression to executive
overreach are hallmarks of today’s GOP. Aside from the southern
Democrats of the Jim Crow-era, Republicans’ current path has no
historical parallel.

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 It’s a mistake to assume that the Constitution alone will protect our
democracy. If that were true, the sad history of democracy in Latin
America – a place where country after country copied the U.S.
Constitution – would have been far different. As Harvard’s Steven
Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note in How Democracies Die, democracies
depend on ethical norms to keep their politics in check. One such norm
is mutual tolerance – acceptance of the opposition as a rival with
legitimate rights and interests rather than as an enemy. A second norm
is forbearance - recognition that political power should be used with
restraint rather than being weaponized and taken to its lawful limits or
beyond.2 These norms were once defining features of the Republican
Party but have less standing in today’s GOP. There was no
constitutional barrier to prevent Wisconsin’s outgoing Republican
governor Scott Walker, in consort with the state’s Republican
legislature, to strip the governor’s office of power before the incoming
Democratic governor could be sworn in. But it violated the
longstanding norm of American politics that the outgoing party accept
the change in power that comes with losing an election.3 North
Carolina’s Republican legislature pulled the same stunt when the state’s
voters elected a Democratic governor.
The GOP has turned away from its conservative roots. As a political
philosophy, conservatism includes a commitment to traditional norms
and institutions, a belief that political problems are moral issues that
carry with them a civic obligation, and an understanding that power
can corrupt and must be used judiciously.4 Edmund Burke, the
eighteenth-century father of modern conservatism, wrote of the need to
respect “the accumulated wisdom within existing institutions.”5
However much that imperative might have guided the Republican
Party at an earlier time, it no longer does.
Republicans’ recent actions pose a threat to their party. Although the
GOP has achieved short-term gains from ignoring democratic norms, it
has created enemies and pathways to power that in the not-too-distant

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future could backfire on it. And if that day comes, the GOP will not have
the protection of the norms that it has flattened.

***
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was thought to have ended the voter
suppression that had long plagued America’s elections. For a century,
the South’s white-controlled state governments had used every
conceivable trick to keep blacks from voting. They imposed literacy,
property, and education requirements on voting and then exempted
individuals, including their lineal descendants, who had the right to
vote before former slaves were granted the right to vote. In effect, the
“grandfather clause” exempted white males from the requirements,
while imposing them on black males. When primary elections were
introduced around 1900, eight southern states adopted “whites-only
primaries.” Given that the Democratic Party controlled the South, its
primary elections were decisive. The victors were virtually assured of
winning the general election.
Black Americans who tried to vote were subjected to beatings, rigged
literacy tests, and the possibility of having their names printed in the
local paper, making it impossible for them to find jobs with white-
owned businesses. Even as late as the mid-1940s in Mississippi, a mere
2,500 blacks were registered to vote. This in a state where the black
population numbered more than 400,000.6
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was designed to end the dirty tricks. The
legislation empowered federal agents to register voters in states and
localities with a history of voter suppression. In the next presidential
election, black turnout in the South rose sharply.7 For the first time in
the nation’s history, nearly every citizen who wanted to vote had a
reasonable chance of doing so.
That’s no longer the case. North Dakota Republicans perpetrated
one of the latest assaults on the right to vote in 2017 when they enacted
a law that requires voters to have written proof of a residential address
before they can vote. The law targeted Native Americans who live on

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rural tribal lands, which don’t have names and numbers on all their
roads. Although their ancestors had lived on the land for generations
before white settlers arrived, they were disqualified from voting. And
there is no mystery as to why. North Dakota’s Native Americans vote
heavily Democratic.8
The idea of disenfranchising minority voters was hatched by
Republican legislators in Indiana and Georgia. Indiana’s law required
its residents to have a government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s
license or passport, in order to register to vote. Those who didn’t have
one and wanted to register had to take proof of citizenship to a state
motor vehicle office to obtain without charge a state-issued photo ID
card. Georgia took that policy a step further by requiring citizens
without a government-issued photo ID to pay twenty dollars to obtain
a voter identification card. A federal judge struck down the fee as being
an unconstitutional poll tax. The Georgia legislature responded by
eliminating the fee while retaining the photo ID requirement.
Georgia and Indiana Republicans knew who they were targeting.
Minority group members, young adults, and people of low income – all
of which are associated with voting Democratic – are less likely to have
a passport or driver’s license (see Figure 6.1).
Other Republican states were quick to follow Indiana and Georgia’s
lead. Nearly thirty states adopted a voter ID law and all but one was
under Republican control. 9 Some states were forced to reenact their law
after the courts struck down the first attempt. Pennsylvania’s first
version required applicants to go to a state motor vehicle office, even
though nine of the state’s counties didn’t have one and the office in nine
others was open only one day a week.10 Wisconsin’s first attempt was
struck down because it imposed a fee on applicants. The fee could be
waived if the applicant knew enough to request a waiver, but clerks
were prohibited from telling applicants about it. 11
The mentality that kept blacks from voting in the Jim Crow era is
now back and falsely packaged as a way of preventing voter fraud. As

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a longtime Republican political consultant said: “Of course it’s political.
Why else would you do it?”12 Republican lawmakers in Florida and
Pennsylvania slipped up and publicly said that the aim was to depress
the Democratic vote.13 A Republican staff aide in Wisconsin quit the
party after attending a meeting where the state’s voter ID law was
crafted. “I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus,” he said, “when
the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A
handful of the GOP senators were giddy about the ramifications and
literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college
voters. Think about that for a minute. Elected officials planning and
happy to help deny a fellow American’s constitutional right to vote in
order to increase their own chances to hang onto power.”14

***
The transparency of Republican efforts to disenfranchise minorities
through voter ID laws should have convinced the Supreme Court to
invalidate the practice as a violation of federal law or the Constitution.
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But that’s not the way that the Supreme Court saw it. In a 6-3 vote in a
2008 case involving Indiana’s ID law, the Court ruled that states have a
“valid interest” in preventing voter fraud. The Court’s majority
acknowledged that Indiana’s Republicans had a partisan motive in
enacting the law but argued that it “should not be disregarded simply
because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the
votes of individual legislators.” The Court dismissed the claim that the
process of obtaining a photo ID placed an unfair burden on citizens.
“Because Indiana's cards are free,” the Court said, “the inconvenience
of going to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering required
documents, and posing for a photograph does not qualify as a
substantial burden on most voters' right to vote, or represent a
significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.” 15 Each of the six
justices in the majority was appointed to the Court by a Republican
president.
The six justices didn’t say how they determined that the ID
requirement was not an undue burden on citizens. Although state-
issued voter IDs are “free” in one sense, they are not free in the way that
counts. It takes time and travel to go to an issuing agency, and an
applicant may have to pay to acquire a certified copy of a birth
certificate or other document in order to show proof of citizenship. A
Harvard Law School study examined such costs, concluding that they
range between $75 and $175 for the typical applicant – a lot of money
for people without much of it.16
In 2013, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court sanctioned
additional forms of voter suppression in a challenge to the 1965 Voting
Rights Act (VRA). In a 5-4 vote in Shelby County v. Holder, with all five
majority votes being cast by Republican appointees, the Court
invalidated the provision of the VRA that included the formula for
determining which states and counties were subject to federal oversight
because of a history of voter discrimination. Designated locations had
been required by the VRA to obtain permission from a federal judge
before making changes in their election procedures that could adversely

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affect a minority group, such as redrawing electoral district lines or
altering registration requirements. In its Shelby County decision, the
Supreme Court’s majority said that the formula for identifying the
jurisdictions subject to federal oversight was based on “obsolete
statistics” and could not be applied unless Congress revised it.17
The ink was barely dry on the Court’s decision before Texas, North
Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi – which were now free of the
preclearance requirement – put new voter ID laws into place.18 Texas’s
law was the most brazenly partisan. Included on the list of acceptable
forms of identification were gun licenses, which Texas Republicans are
more likely than Texas Democrats to have.19 Excluded from the list were
college IDs and state employee IDs, which Texas Democrats are more
likely to have. Today, every state that was part of the Civil War
Confederacy has a voter ID law, except for North Carolina, which had
its voter ID law struck down in 2016 by a federal court for targeting
“African Americans with almost surgical precision… in an effort to
depress black turnout."20
Voter suppression has a long history in the South, and it’s no
surprise that it has been reborn in the region and has taken its most
severe form there. A Brennan Center study found that the South has a
higher rate of voter disenfranchisement than do other regions. 21 The fact
that voter suppression has seeped into other Republican areas is also no
great surprise, given the GOP’s trajectory since the Nixon presidency.
Studies have found that voter ID laws address a problem that is
nearly non-existent. Illegal voting is as scarce as hens’ teeth.22 There is
no reliable study showing that it’s widespread, and numerous studies
show that it’s vanishingly rare. One study, for example, obtained the
election fraud records of every state and found an “infinitesimal”
amount of documented fraud.23 Another study found that the odds of
an individual being hit by lightning is forty times greater than the
likelihood that the individual will commit voter fraud.24
Illegal voting by non-citizens is so rare as to elude efforts to find it.
After the 2016 election, the New York Times queried state election

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officials about voter fraud. No state said that fraud had been
widespread and 26 states reported no instances of it. 25 In an attempt to
show that voter fraud was widespread, Texas’s Republican attorney
general launched an exhaustive investigation and found only two
prosecutable instances of it – this in a state where 9 million voters go to
the polls.26 Kansas’s Republican secretary of state sought to prosecute
illegal voters, scouring the state’s nearly 2 million registered voters
looking for culprits. He ended up with a mere handful, which a judge
concluded were “explained by administrative error, confusion or
mistake.”27 The judge then cited the secretary of state for contempt of
court for failing to properly inform thousands of Kansas citizens of their
right to vote after he had held up their voter registration applications
on grounds that their citizenship was in doubt.28
There’s no mystery as to why voter fraud is rare. It’s difficult enough
to get eligible voters to the polls, much less to get those who are
ineligible to knowingly take the risk. The penalty for illegal voting can
be high – as much as a $10,000 fine and five years in prison in some
states – and the incentive is low – the probability that a single vote will
change the outcome of a national or statewide election is virtually zero.
In the tens of thousands of such elections since 1900, not one has been
decided by a single vote. And only one congressional election in that
period – the 1910 race in New York’s 36th district – was that close.

***
Voter ID laws are not the only device that Republicans are using to keep
citizens from exercising their right to vote. 29 Like the southern
Democrats of old, today’s Republicans have stretched the possibilities
to the limits.
Georgia Republicans have instituted an “exact match” system that
disqualifies voters whose voter registration form has any kind of
mismatch with a birth certificate or other type of identification being
used to prove citizenship, as when one form contains a middle initial
and the other does not. Georgia first tried to implement the system

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when it was subject to the preclearance requirement of the Voting
Rights Act, The Justice Department blocked it on grounds that a
mismatch system would disproportionately affect African Americans.
Freed of that constraint when the Supreme Court nullified the
preclearance requirement, Georgia implemented it and held up more
than 50,000 registrations because they failed the “exact match”
requirement. Black residents accounted for more than two-thirds of the
total.30
Ohio’s Republican legislature enacted a law removing from the
voting rolls citizens who had not voted in two years and had failed to
return a notification card sent to the citizen’s voter registration address.
Portrayed as a means of preventing voter fraud, it primarily affects
citizens who rent their housing and move frequently – a group that
disproportionately includes the young, poor, and minorities. The law
was blocked by a lower court as a violation of federal law but the
Supreme Court reversed that ruling in a 5-4 decision. The Court’s five
Republican-appointed justices held that the law was “reasonable.”31
The list goes on. North Carolina’s Republican legislature, after
conducting a study that found black residents were more likely to make
use of early voting, cut back on the number of places where early votes
could be cast. Alabama reduced the number of voter registration sites
in minority areas. Texas reduced the number of polling places in
minority precincts. Florida and South Carolina cut the number of voting
machines in minority areas, resulting in long delays on election day.
If nothing else, Republicans have been inventive. Instead of
requiring residents to have a street address, North Dakota Republicans
could have imposed a voter ID requirement as a means of suppressing
the Native American vote. But, if Republicans had picked that option,
the tribes would have had an easy solution. They have the authority to
issue tribal IDs, which the federal government recognizes as a legal
form of identification. Although the motive behind the North Dakota
law – the disenfranchisement of Native Americans - was as clear as day,
the Supreme Court allowed it to stand.32

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 The Supreme Court’s sanctioning of voter suppression echoes an
earlier time in the court’s history. It waited three decades before
striking down the South’s “grandfather clause.” It waited four decades
to declare the South’s “whites-only primaries” unconstitutional. It
regularly rejected legal challenges to literacy tests, relenting only after
they were outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It allowed the use of
the poll tax decade after decade, failing to strike it down in state
elections until its use was barred in federal elections by the Twenty-
Fourth Amendment, which was ratified in 1964. Although the Court has
championed the right of free expression, its record on protecting the
right to vote is appalling.

***
Republicans’ disregard for the sanctity of the vote is a moral trap that
will hurt the party in the years ahead. Whatever the effect on the
suppressor, suppression lengthens the memory of the suppressed.
Boston Republicans learned that lesson after they did everything
imaginable to put down the Irish Catholic immigrants coming to their
city. Over time, as the Irish worked their way into the community,
Boston Republicans largely forgot why they had treated the Irish so
shabbily. The Irish didn’t forget. Since 1900 Boston has rarely elected a
Republican mayor, and most of its Democratic mayors have been of
Irish descent, including the current one.
California’s Republican Party is another monument to the power of
memory. In the 1990s, the state’s Republicans decided that an anti-
immigrant platform was a winning formula. Although it helped
Republican Governor Pete Wilson win reelection in 1994,33 the backlash
turned California into a Democratic state. Minority groups now
constitute a majority of Californians and their vote is so one-sidedly
Democratic that Republicans have almost no chance of winning a
statewide election. In the 2016 presidential election, California’s two-
party presidential vote went Democratic by 91-9 percent among blacks,
80-20 percent among Asian Americans, and 75-25 percent among

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Latinos. In order to win the state in 2016, Trump would have had to
carry the white vote by the implausible margin of 79-21 percent.34
Whatever short-term gains the GOP has achieved through voter
suppression and other underhanded tactics, the long-term losses could
cripple it. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans know that they’re
the target of Republican ploys.35 Depriving people of their right to vote
is a sure way to create enemies for life. Republicans’ image among
minority voters is now so damaged that it will take years for them to
repair it.36
Ironically, Republicans haven’t achieved all that much in the short
run from their tactics. The transparency of the Republican’s efforts at
voter suppression – apparent to all but the Supreme Court – has led to
mobilization drives that have registered hundreds of thousands of
minority group members, enough to offset, and in some elections
exceed, the number who have been disenfranchised. 37 In the 2018
midterm election, the turnout increase among minority group voters
was higher than among white voters.38
The trap that the GOP has set for itself could deepen if Democrats
gain control of additional states. If they do, they will void voter
suppression laws and take steps to ease voting. The effort is already
underway in Democratic-controlled states. Since 2016, ten of them have
instituted Automatic Voter Registration (AVR).39 AVR is a modification
of the registration procedure established by the 1993 Motor Voter Act,
which requires states to offer voter registration to individuals who
apply for a driver’s license or public assistance. As originally applied,
registration was “opt in” – individuals had to agree to become a
registered voter when offered the opportunity. In contrast, AVR is an
“opt out” system. Unless individuals declare that they don’t want to be
registered, their names are automatically added to the voter registration
rolls.
Oregon in 2016 became the first state to adopt AVR and the
statewide rate of new registrants tripled.40 Vermont was the second
state to make the change, and its rate doubled. Vermont now has the

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highest rate of registered voters of any state. More than 90 percent of its
eligible adults are on the registration rolls. 41 Republican Senator Mitch
McConnell attacked AVR as a “power grab” by Democrats, as if making
it easier for people to vote is an assault on democracy.42

***
Even the weapon that Republicans have used most successfully could
be turned against it. After the 2010 census, Republican state legislatures
took gerrymandering to an unprecedented level. An age-old practice,
gerrymandering places the opposing party at a disadvantage through
election district boundaries that are drawn in a way that wastes its votes
– diluting its votes in some districts and overloading them in others.
Computer software has increased the manipulative potential of
gerrymandering. A virtually unlimited number of redistricting
possibilities can be modeled to find the one that yields the largest
number of seats. It’s a powerful tool, and Republican states have
applied it without restraint. An Associated Press study found that
gerrymandering after the 2010 census gave Republicans a bonus of
nearly two dozen House seats.43
Several Republican states have taken gerrymandering to the point
where they are now a democracy in name only. Republican candidates
for the State Assembly in Wisconsin received only 45 percent of the
popular vote in the 2018 election but won 63 percent of the seats. It has
positioned Wisconsin Republicans to control the redistricting that will
occur after the 2020 census, enabling them to lock down the state
legislature for yet another decade.
In 2019, the Supreme Court upheld unrestricted partisan
gerrymandering. The ruling came in a 5-4 decision with the five
Republican-appointed justices in the majority. “Excessive partisanship
in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” said Chief
Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority. “But the fact that such
gerrymandering is incompatible with democratic principles does not
mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary…. Federal judges

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have no license to reallocate political power between the two major
political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the
Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”
In a blistering dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “For the first time in
this Nation’s history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about
an acknowledged constitutional violation….” 44
Nevertheless, Republican gerrymandering is not without risk.
Although Democratic legislatures have been more restrained in
redistricting than their Republican counterparts, 45 there’s no reason to
think that they’ll continue to do so. Democrats might conclude that
turnabout is fair play, and they will have that opportunity after the 2020
census. They’ll be better positioned than Republicans to tilt elections in
their favor. Democrats control several of the highly populated states
and could control even more in the years ahead as a result of
demographic change. Unlike lightly populated Republican strongholds
like Kansas and Nebraska, heavily populated states – which are more
often under Democratic than Republican control – are easier to
redistrict in ways that give the controlling party a windfall. Florida
Republicans demonstrated the potential after the 2010 census when
they divided the state in a way that enabled them to win two-thirds of
its U.S. House seats even though they received only half of the state’s
congressional vote.

***
Republicans once prided themselves on being the guardians of the
nation’s political institutions. They’ve recently taken to tearing them
down.
The framers of the Constitution divided the powers of government
between institutions in order to force competing interests to engage in
compromise and negotiation in the process of enacting the nation’s
laws.46 And that’s how the political system has typically operated. There
have been times – the Great Depression being one - when one party had

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enough power to govern on its own. But bargaining across party lines
has typically been how policy was enacted.
Republicans turned away from that style of governing in the 1990s
when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House. “There will be no
compromise,” Gingrich said.47 Gingrich’s notion of how to govern was
better suited to a European parliament than to the Congress. In a
parliamentary democracy, there is no division of executive and
legislative power – both are vested in the majority party. If it has a
sizeable enough majority, it can govern on its own. But in the American
system, power is divided between the president and Congress, which
is further divided into the House and Senate. The American system
requires all three institutions to agree before a law can be passed, which
had led political scientists to conclude that “the genius of the American
two-party system” is that it encourages the two parties to work
together.48
Today’s Republicans prefer confrontation to cooperation. The effect
has been predictable – political gridlock. The number of bills enacted
into law has fallen sharply from the level of a few decades ago and the
bulk of those enacted have been ceremonial rather than substantive.49
Democratic lawmakers bear part of the blame, but the two parties are
not equally to blame. For Democrats, obstructionism has been an
occasional tactic. For Republicans, it has been a constant strategy. As
journalist Elizabeth Drew wrote, Republicans have invented a novel
concept of governing – preventing things from happening.50 After
Democrats captured control of the presidency, House, and Senate in the
2008 elections, Republicans sought to obstruct nearly everything that
Democrats tried to accomplish. Republican Senate leader Mitch
McConnell said that his sole goal was to make Obama “a one-term
president” – a remarkable stance in the context of a country struggling
to recover from the most severe economic downturn since the Great
Depression. On the House side, Republican lawmakers – led by Paul
Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Eric Cantor – enforced party discipline in
an effort to derail Obama’s agenda.51 Longtime congressional observers

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Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote: “Over the past decade, it has
become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a
movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique,
extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political
system.”52
House Republicans have created a rule that eliminates even the
possibility of bipartisanship. Used by Gingrich but named during the
tenure of his successor, Dennis Hastert, the Hastert Rule holds that
when Republicans have a majority in the House, the Speaker should
bring a bill to the floor only if it’s supported by a majority of House
Republicans. A Republican Speaker is not bound by the rule—it’s an
informal directive. But Republican speakers have honored it, knowing
that they will lose their position if they don’t. “Maybe you can [ignore
the rule] once, maybe you can do it twice,” a former House member
said, “but when you start making deals, when you have to get
Democrats to pass the legislation, you are not in power anymore.” 53
As an observer noted, the Hastert rule is “a structural barrier to
compromise.”54 It’s what enabled right-wing Republicans to shut down
the government in 2013. Although a House majority would have voted
to keep the government open, a bill to that effect didn’t make it to the
House floor because it was opposed by a majority of Republicans. When
asked why he had let his fellow Republicans shut down the
government, House Speaker John Boehner said, “When I looked up, I
saw my colleagues going [for it]. You learn that a leader without
followers is simply a man taking a walk.” 55 The shutdown finally ended
when Boehner, under pressure from Senate Republicans to reopen the
government, ignored the Hastert rule and brought a bill to the floor.
Although a majority of House Republicans voted against it, it passed by
the lopsided margin of 285–144.
It’s impossible to know how many of the nation’s pressing problems
have gone unattended because of the Hastert Rule, but it’s not hard to
imagine some of them. The nation’s immigration system might look
very different today if not for the Hastert rule. In 2013, after six years of

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haggling, the Senate by a 68-32 vote finally passed a comprehensive
immigration reform bill that balanced Republicans’ concerns about
border security with Democrats’ concerns about protecting
undocumented immigrants already here. Despite the Senate’s
overwhelming support for the bill, it never made it to the House floor
because of the Hastert rule. A majority of House Republicans insisted
on a bill limited to border security and wouldn’t budge, which killed
the initiative. Had it gone to the floor, it had a solid chance of passing.
House Democrats were united behind the bill, and the votes of a mere
10-15 percent of House Republicans would have put it over the top.
On the Senate side, Republicans have used every conceivable
parliamentary maneuver to marginalize Democrats. When Justice
Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died early in President Obama’s final year
in office. Senate Republicans refused to call hearings on Obama’s
nominee, Merrick Garland, knowing that if they won the 2016
presidential election a Republican president would fill the seat. Said
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, “It is the Senate’s
constitutional right to act as a check on the president and withhold its
consent.” Historically unprecedented, the maneuver gained force when
the eleven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee - including
several who earlier had said that Garland was eminently qualified -
signed a letter saying that no hearings would be held until after the
election.56 When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s illness prompted
speculation that her seat would become vacant in 2020, McConnell was
asked whether Senate Republicans would leave the seat open to be
filled by the candidate who won the November election. McConnell
said, “Oh, we’d fill it.” 57
Ironically, brute partisanship cost Republicans one of their top
objectives – repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). After it was
passed in 2010 by the Democratic-controlled Congress, Republicans
vowed to kill the program. They even took their case to the Supreme
Court, where they came within a single vote of having the ACA
declared unconstitutional. Then, in 2017, congressional Republicans for

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the first time had a realistic chance of repealing the ACA. They
controlled the presidency, had a large majority in the House, and held
a slim 52-48 majority in the Senate. If they could limit Republican
defections in the Senate to two – a 50-50 tie would be decided by the
vote of Vice President Mike Pence – they would prevail. As it happened,
GOP Senator John McCain cast the deciding vote, sending the bill down
to defeat by the narrowest of margins, 51-49.
Although McCain had voted against the ACA when it was enacted
in 2010, he was disturbed with how Senate Republican leaders were
trying to kill it. They had drafted their bill in secret and had refused to
send it to committee for hearings and review. And they had written the
bill in a way that would allow it to pass through the reconciliation
process, which precluded a Democratic filibuster. It was too much for
McCain to accept. In a speech on the Senate floor two days before he
cast the deciding vote, McCain accused his fellow Republicans of
weakening the Senate and called for a return to “regular order.” “Our
responsibilities are important, vitally important, to the continued
success of our republic,” McCain said. “Our founders envisioned the
Senate as [a] deliberative, careful body.” 58
In a perverse way, Republican lawmakers’ assault on governing has
been strategically brilliant. If people can be convinced that government
doesn’t work, they are more easily convinced to oppose any type of
government action. In Why Trust Matters, Marc Hetherington shows
that, as trust in government declines, so does support for government
action. People do not necessarily change their minds about the need for
action but, as trust diminishes, they doubt that government can
deliver.59
Republican lawmakers have treated Congress like it’s a campaign
stage rather than a hall of governing. In Beyond Ideology, political scientist
Frances Lee provides endless examples of Republican lawmakers
introducing sham bills on hot-button issues solely to create the kind of
conflict that gets media attention and inflames the party’s base. House
Republicans passed 70 bills to repeal the Affordable Care Act, knowing
that each had no chance of surviving a Senate filibuster or an Obama
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veto.60 Maine Senator Susan Collins, one of the few congressional
Republicans to be troubled by such tactics, said “What’s been lost in
recent times is a commitment to Congress as an institution.” 61

***
Radical obstructionism is not the only degradation that Republicans
have imposed on Congress. They have weaponized time-honored
congressional procedures and norms.
The Senate filibuster once served to bring lawmakers together. Faced
with a filibuster, the majority party had to reach out to the other side to
get the votes it needed. For more than 150 years, the filibuster was used
sparingly, and in most cases judiciously. In the first half of the twentieth
century, it was employed roughly twenty-five times, about once every
two-year session on average. Since 1990, it has been employed roughly
one thousand times, about sixty times each session on average, most
often by Republicans.62
Early in Obama’s presidency, Senate Republicans turned the
filibuster into a weapon for blocking his judicial and executive
nominees. Half of all filibusters of judicial nominees in the nation’s
history were conducted by Republicans during Obama’s first five years
in office.63 With nominee after nominee being held up, Senate
Democrats threatened to abolish the filibuster for all judicial nominees
except those for the Supreme Court. When Republican Senate leader
McConnell then said that he would filibuster Obama’s nominees for
three vacancies on the D.C. appeals court through the remainder of
Obama’s term in order to preserve its conservative majority, Democrats
acted on their threat.64
The weaponizing of judicial appointments is part of Republicans’
larger effort to weaponize the judiciary itself. Federal judges have
traditionally been picked on a blend of their legal background, judicial
temperament, and ideology.65 Republicans have raised ideology to the
first rank, relying on the conservative Federalist Society to identify
nominees. Seventeen of President Trump’s first eighteen appellate court
nominees had ties to the Federalist Society, as did his two Supreme

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Court nominees.66 Shortly after being confirmed by the Senate, Justice
Neil Gorsuch was the featured speaker at the Federalist Society’s
annual convention, where he said, “Thank you from the bottom of my
heart for your support and prayers through that process.”67
Republicans have also weaponized congressional oversight.
Although oversight has always had a partisan element, it serves as an
important institutional check on the executive branch. Republicans
have turned it into a partisan weapon. Republican-controlled
committees dragged their feet on investigating Russian meddling in the
2016 presidential election, fearing it would call into question the
legitimacy of Trump’s victory. Republicans on the House Intelligence
Committee refused to call or subpoena key witnesses who could further
the investigation and held secret hearings with other witnesses in order
to keep their testimony out of public view. Republican members then
issued a four-page memo challenging the legitimacy of the inquiry into
Russian meddling.
Yet, after Islamic radicals in 2012 attacked the U.S. consulate in
Benghazi, Libya and killed four Americans during the Obama
administration, House Republicans went on a hearings binge. Although
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that “that there
were no efforts by the White House or any other Executive Branch
entities to 'cover-up' facts or make alterations for political purposes,"68
five Republican-controlled House committees conducted three years of
hearings aimed at tearing down President Obama and Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton. All told, congressional Republicans held 33 hearings on
Benghazi, nearly one a month on average. In a 2015 appearance on Fox
News, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy imprudently bragged,
"Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put
together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her
numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.” McCarthy subsequently
claimed that he had misspoken and denied that the Benghazi hearings
were politically motivated.69
Republicans have set a trap for themselves. Institutional rules and
norms have a purpose. When they’re cast aside without thought as to

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why they were established or the purpose that they serve, the result is
uncompromising partisanship and institutional disorder.70 The
destruction of norms can serve the interests of the opposing party as
easily as it does those of the initiating party. It would be a mistake to
assume that Democrats won’t retaliate when they next come to power.
The GOP has handed Democrats the instruments and justifying
arguments to turn the tables.
The next time that the Democrats control the Senate, they could
abolish the filibuster entirely, depriving Republicans of their ability to
obstruct legislation. If that were to happen, and the Democrats were
determined to do it, they could turn the federal judiciary on its head.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to establish the size of the
lower federal courts. Democrats could expand the number of federal
judgeships and fill the seats with nominees of their party. They could
also “pack” the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices.
Although the number of justices has been set at nine since 1869, the
Constitution gives Congress the power to determine the Court’s size. In
the 1930s, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal
programs were being overturned in 5-4 rulings, proposed expanding
the Court. The proposal failed when a number of Democratic
lawmakers refused to support it on grounds that it would politicize the
Court. It’s not clear, having unfairly lost the Scalia seat, that today’s
Democratic lawmakers would do the same. Scalia’s seat shifted the
balance of power on the Supreme Court. What would have been a Court
with a 5-4 majority of Democratic appointees became a Court with a 5-
4 majority of Republican appointees. If Democrats had not lost that seat,
several recent Supreme Court rulings – including its gerrymandering
decision – would have gone the other way.

***
Dysfunction in one institution has a way of spilling over to others.71
When Congress blocked one after another of his initiatives, Barack
Obama shifted to executive orders. “We can’t wait for an increasingly

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dysfunctional Congress to do its job,” Obama said. “Whenever they
won’t act, I will.”72 Obama proceeded to sign an executive order
granting temporary deportation relief to roughly four million
undocumented immigrants who had been in the United States for a
substantial period of time and were leading productive lives. Obama’s
executive order had no clear basis in law and was blocked by federal
courts.
Republican lawmakers hailed the court action as a victory for “the
rule of law,” as if they were somehow its uncompromising guardians.
They are the same lawmakers who have sat on their hands as President
Trump has ignored the rule of law to a degree greater than that of
Obama or, for that matter, any American president, save perhaps for
Andrew Jackson.
Near the end of the first week of his presidency and following up on
his campaign promise of a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims
entering the United States,” Trump signed an executive order that
totally banned entry by foreign nationals from seven Muslim countries,
flouting the constitutional requirement that any such order not violate
existing law. The ban contravened several laws that prohibit
discrimination based on national origin or religion, including the
Immigration and Nationality Act and the First Amendment’s
prohibition on religious discrimination. When a federal judge blocked
the order, Trump tweeted, "Just cannot believe a judge would put our
country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court
system. People pouring in. Bad!"
Trump then issued a second executive order, which removed Iraq
from the list and exempted travelers from the remaining six countries
who had a valid visa or were legal permanent U.S. residents. The courts
also struck it down. On the third try, Trump added two non-Muslim
countries to the list, North Korea and Venezuela. It was a thin disguise
but it gave the Supreme Court’s conservative justices the cover they
needed to uphold it. In a 5-4 decision, with the five Republican-
appointed justices siding with the President, the Court’s majority said
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that the issue was not Trump’s motive but “the authority of the
presidency itself.”73 The ruling was arguably the most nakedly partisan
since the Court handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 by
blocking a recount of the Florida vote. The conservative-dominated
Court accepted the Trump administration’s pretext of national security
and in the process bolstered Trump’s standing with the Republican
base. In her dissent, Justice Sandra Sotomayor detailed Trump’s
discriminatory intent and then addressed the contradiction in
conservatives’ judicial reasoning. Only a month earlier, she noted, they
had voided a decision of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission on the
ground that its members had expressed hostility toward the petitioner’s
religious beliefs.74
Throughout his presidency, Trump has pushed the limits of the law,
daring the courts or Congress to stop him. When Congress in 2019
refused to appropriate the $5 billion that he was demanding for
construction of his border wall between the United States and Mexico,
he went ahead anyway. Although the Constitution grants Congress the
power to appropriate money and designate its use, Trump declared the
situation at the border to be a “national emergency” and diverted funds
appropriated for military construction to build the wall. Lower federal
courts stayed his action, but the five Republican appointees on the
Supreme Court came to his rescue, allowing the diversion of funds to
proceed while litigation continued in the lower courts.75
The Supreme Court aside, federal courts have generally blocked
Trump’s attempts to bend the law. During his first two years in office,
lower-court judges ruled against his administration more than sixty
times - a record unmatched by any previous administration. Most of the
cases centered on the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which was
passed by Congress in 1946 to prevent arbitrary executive action. Until
Trump came along, the courts had sided with the government in
roughly 70 percent of the cases litigated under the APA. In the case of

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the Trump administration, less than 10 percent of the rulings have gone
its way.76
Nearly all presidents at one time or another have expressed
frustration with the judiciary, but they have rarely targeted a specific
judge or court. Trump has shown no such restraint. He accused one
federal judge of being “totally biased” because of his “Mexican
heritage,” called another a “so-called judge,” labeled the Ninth Circuit
Court “a complete & total disaster,” and broke the longstanding norm
against belittling a Supreme Court justice by claiming that Ruth Bader
Ginsburg was “incompetent” and that her mind “was shot.” In one
instance when a ruling went against him, he accused the judge of being
an “Obama judge.” That statement prompted John Roberts to do what
a Chief Justice has rarely done - publicly rebuke a president. The
judiciary, Roberts said, doesn’t have “Obama judges or Trump judges,
Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group
of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those
appearing before them. The independent judiciary is something we
should all be thankful for.”77
To Trump, the law is an inconvenience. After Congress passed a law
imposing new sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 election,
the President – despite his constitutional charge to “faithfully” execute
the law - chose not to enforce it, claiming that previously enacted
sanctions were a sufficient deterrent.78 A year later in a television
interview, Trump invited foreign interference in the 2020 election,
saying “I’d want to hear it” if a foreign power offered damaging
information on his Democratic opponent, adding that he would feel no
obligation to report the offer to law enforcement officials.
During the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the
2016 election, Trump told Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “unrecuse”
himself and restrict the investigation to future elections only. When
Sessions refused, Trump instructed White House counsel Don McGhan

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to tell Sessions that he had to do it. When Sessions still refused, he was
fired. Trump then ordered McGahn to tell the Acting Attorney General
to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. McGahn didn’t carry out the
order, nor, as Trump insisted, did he issue a public statement denying
that Trump had told him to fire Mueller.79 McGahn subsequently
resigned as White House counsel, replaced by a lawyer who had been
advising the White House on how to derail the Mueller investigation.80
Trump’s attempt to force the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on
Joe Biden, a possible opponent in the 2020 presidential election, is
arguably his biggest affront to the rule of law. He held up military
assistance to Ukraine while his agents pressured Ukraine to announce
that they were investigating Biden. When the pressure campaign
became known, House Democrats launched impeachment proceedings,
which the Trump administration stonewalled. Citing executive
privilege, Trump refused to turn over documents and blocked
administration officials, past and present, from testifying before the
Democratic-controlled House committees that were conducting the
inquiry. Although executive privilege is recognized as a valid
presidential power, the Supreme Court has limited it. During the
Watergate affair, the Court in a unanimous decision rejected Richard
Nixon’s claim of executive privilege in withholding from Congress
audio tapes of his Oval Office conversations. The Court held that
potentially unlawful activity is not protected by executive privilege. 81
Whatever the level of Trump’s obstruction of the impeachment
inquiry, it is secondary to the complicity of congressional Republicans.
If there was any question about whether the GOP respects the rule of
law, it was answered in their response to the inquiry. Their sole purpose
was to derail the effort to bring the facts to light. They had the option,
which Democrats pursued during the Clinton impeachment inquiry, of
allowing the facts to be heard and then concluding that the president’s
behavior didn’t rise to the level of conviction and removal from office.

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They chose instead to assist in burying the facts. In the whole of
American history, there’s no comparable instance where a party’s
elected representatives have collectively conspired to undermine the
fundamental principle that America’s democracy is based on the rule of
law and not on the whim of those in power.
Congressional Republicans have sided with Trump even in instances
where his actions threaten the integrity of their institution. For decades,
Republican lawmakers have preached personal responsibility to
Democrats, claiming that their welfare programs foster dependency
and irresponsibility. Yet, they have not taken responsibility for their
institution and have excused a president who blames everyone but
himself when things go haywire. When the administration’s policy of
separating children from their parents at the southern border
boomeranged, forcing Trump to back down, he blamed President
Obama for the policy and took credit for ending it. “I brought the
families together,” Trump said. “I’m the one that put them together.”82
The Constitution requires the president to “faithfully” execute the
laws, and Congress has an institutional duty to respond when that
provision is breached. It’s difficult to identify a time where a president
has so aggressively intruded on congressional authority as has Donald
Trump. Yet, either because they agree with his actions or fear the
consequences of challenging him, congressional Republicans have been
compliant. North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis initially spoke out
against Trump’s plan to divert funds to support his border wall, saying,
“It is my responsibility to be a steward of the Article I branch, to
preserve the separation of powers and to curb the kind of executive
overreach that Congress has allowed to fester….” Three weeks later,
Tillis backed down. He had been threatened with a primary election
challenger and shown a poll indicating that North Carolina’s
Republican voters were on Trump’s side.83

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 It’s a far cry from the Nixon era when GOP lawmakers stood up to
presidential overreach. When Nixon withheld congressionally
appropriated funds from programs that he disliked, Congress passed
the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Act, which prohibits a president
from withholding appropriated funds. Republicans and Democrats
joined together to restrain Nixon. The bill passed by 401-6 in the House
and by unanimous vote in the Senate.
Trump’s expansive use of presidential power, and GOP lawmakers’
acceptance of it, are a trap for Republicans. Executive orders have
typically been a more powerful tool in the hands of a Democrat
president than when employed by a Republican president. Democratic
presidents see government action as a means of achieving policy goals
and have used executive orders to that end.84 When the Supreme Court
sanctioned Trump’s declaration of a national emergency in order to
divert congressionally appropriated funds to build his border wall, it
created a precedent that future Democratic presidents could use for
everything from declaring a health care “emergency” to announcing a
climate change “emergency.” Forbearance – the ethical norm that
restrains the use of power – has weakened, and there’s no doubt as to
which political party bears most of the responsibility.

***
There is nothing in the Constitution that says leaders have to tell the
truth or that would hold them accountable when they lie. Yet persistent
lying erodes the trust on which democracy depends.
A generous interpretation of Republicans’ disregard for truth is that
they deny reality. The frequency of it suggests that it’s deliberate. If the
poster child of Republican disinformation campaigns is their decades-
long attack on the science of climate change, it is but one in a long string
of deceptions. Not that long ago, Republican disinformation efforts
would have been dampened by voices within the party. Deceptive

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claims lose traction when party loyalists hear leaders of their own party
say a claim is false.85 Some recent Republican leaders like John McCain
have spoken up, but most of them have played along, voicing false
claims when it gives them an edge. A recent study found that
misinformation is highest on issues where party leaders join together in
making false claims.86
It’s impossible to identify the moment when Republican leaders lost
their respect for truth, but it’s deepened with time. That’s what happens
when ethical norms are violated. The behavior becomes normalized,
and others join in.87 Republican lying nearly derailed President
Obama’s effort to reform the nation’s health care system. Betsy
McCaughey, the former Republican lieutenant governor of New York,
falsely claimed on a conservative talk show that the health care reform
bill “would make it mandatory—absolutely require—that every five
years people on Medicare have a counseling session that will tell them
how to end their life sooner.”88 From there, McCaughey’s allegation
snaked from one right-wing talk show to the next, buoyed by
passionate op-eds she wrote for the Wall Street Journal and New York
Post.89 Talk show host Glenn Beck called the legislation “euthanasia.”
“Sometimes for the common good,” Beck said, “you just have to say,
‘Hey, Grandpa, you’ve had a good life. Sucks to be you.’”90
Although the bill didn’t contain a death panel provision, Republican
leaders weren’t about to spoil a winning issue. Sarah Palin, who had
been the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee the year before, called the
death panels “downright evil” and upped the ante by invoking her
son’s Down syndrome, claiming that health care would be withheld
based on a person’s “level of productivity in society.” 91 House
Republican leader John Boehner put out a statement saying, “This
provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-
encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.” On the floor of the House,
Republican Virginia Foxx said the health care bill would “put seniors in

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a position of being put to death by their government.” GOP senator
Charles Grassley echoed the charge at a town hall meeting in Winterset,
Iowa.92
As the Republicans’ attack escalated, the death-panels allegation
spilled over to the mainstream media and quickly lodged itself in
people’s minds. A Pew Research Center poll found that six of every
seven adult Americans knew of the claim. Of those familiar with it, half
said it was true or probably true. Two out of every three Republicans
accepted the possibility.93
Donald Trump didn’t invent the presidential lie. History is filled
with presidential deceptions, including Democratic President Lyndon
Johnson’s false portrayal of progress in the conduct of the Vietnam War
– a deception aimed at building congressional and public support for
America’s military intervention in Southeast Asia. But no president has
lied with the boldness of Trump, starting with his claim that the
inaugural crowd was “the largest ever.” According to data collected by
Fact Checker, Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading
claims since taking office – an average of more than ten a day.94
Roughly a fifth of such claims have centered on immigration. In an
effort to mobilize the Republican base, Trump claimed on the eve of the
2018 midterm election that a “caravan” of migrants was nearing the
southern border and planned to storm it upon arrival. The caravan, he
said, was filled with criminals, MS-13 gang members, and Middle
Eastern terrorists. A week before the election, Trump sent 5,000 active-
duty military troops to the border to dramatize the severity of the
threat. It was hogwash. The migrants were hundreds of miles and
weeks away from the border and consisted mostly of women and
children, many of whom were seeking asylum from dangers in their
home countries.95
Trump’s deceptions are so enveloping that they have a way of
clouding Republican minds. The rarity of voter fraud did not prevent

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Trump from claiming that undocumented immigrants had cost him a
popular vote victory in 2016. “"In addition to winning the Electoral
College in a landslide,” he tweeted, “I won the popular vote if you
deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." Trump’s claim
doesn’t stand up to a moment’s thought. Undocumented aliens go to
great lengths to avoid detection for fear of deportation. It’s hard to
imagine a worst place for millions of them to try to hide out than at the
nation’s polling stations on Election Day. Nevertheless, a 2016 Public
Policy poll found that 60 percent of Republican voters believed that
millions of illegal voters kept Trump from winning the popular vote. 96
Republican deceptions get amplified and gain power through the
right-wing media system. In their study of four million online messages
transmitted or shared during the 2016 election campaign, Harvard’s
Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts found a marked
difference between media messages emanating from the right and those
coming from elsewhere. Messaging on the right, they noted, was
distinctive for its “disinformation, lies, and half-truths.”97
Deception is more than a moral problem. It has contributed to the
deadlock that has plagued Congress in recent years. Legislative
bargaining collapses when the two sides hold wildly different versions
of the facts. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan complained when
negotiation over an issue broke down, “Everyone is entitled to his own
opinion but not to his own facts.”98 Factual agreement does not settle
arguments but it’s a necessary starting point. How do you craft
legislation to address climate change when one party denies its
existence?
Deception is also a trap. It has a way of catching up with the
deceiver. The Trump administration lost whatever chance it had of
adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census when it offered a false
rationale for why it was needed. When the plan was announced,
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross claimed that the question would be

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added to strengthen enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. By knowing
the location of non-citizens, Ross said, government could better protect
minorities from discrimination. Given the administration’s foot
dragging in enforcing voting rights, Ross’s explanation seemed
implausible. Ross’s motive was gradually revealed through leaked
documents and the uncovering of the computer hard drive of Thomas
Hofeller, a Republican operative who was one of the plan’s architects.99
The citizenship question was devised to discourage non-citizens from
responding to the census, which would, among other things, give
Republicans an edge when House seats were reapportioned after the
2020 census. Montana and Louisiana were projected to be among the
Republican states to pick up an extra seat, and California and New York
were among the Democratic states projected to lose seats, with
California losing four if the undercount of non-citizens reached 15
percent.100
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court effectively killed the plan.
Although four of the five Republican-appointed justices sided with the
administration, Chief Justice John Roberts did not, and it tipped the
balance. The Court’s majority said that the Trump administration’s
explanation for adding the question “appears to have been contrived….
Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the
explanation the secretary [Wilbur Ross] gave for his decision.”101 The
Court referred the case back to a lower court, saying that the
Administration could try to provide a more convincing explanation, but
the deadline for printing the census was near and the administration
dropped the scheme.
A problem with making things up is that one must suppress the
truth. It’s too soon to know the total damage to the GOP of the collective
coverup that was the Trump impeachment inquiry. The coverup
involved every Republican House member but one, nearly every
Republican senator, and all of Trump’s executive branch political

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appointees. Think of that and then ask whether there’s a comparable
example in the entire history of Western democracies. No such example
can be found. The GOP’s assault on truth is unparalleled.
A second problem with making things up is that one must pretend
that it’s true, which can be a problem when it comes time to act. In
seeking to kill Obamacare, Republicans claimed to have a superior
option. Trump told reporters that Republicans “have a plan that is far
better than Obamacare. The Republican Party will soon be known as
the party of health care. You watch.” But in 2017, when Republicans
finally had control of the House, Senate, and presidency and had the
votes to deliver on their promise, they had no ready-made plan. When
their hastily crafted bills were evaluated by the Congressional Budget
Office, the projections were politically lethal. The version that passed
the House would have forced more than 20 million Americans to lose
their health insurance and would have required higher premiums for
all but the healthy and young. A Senate version was projected to have
similar effects, leading enough Senate Republicans to join with
Democrats to defeat the attempt to replace Obamacare with a
Republican alternative.102
Republican lawmakers’ failure to revamp healthcare contributed to
Democrats’ sweeping victory in the 2018 midterm election. According
to exit polls, healthcare was the top issue on voters’ minds. Two-fifths
of voters cited it as their top issue, and three-fourths of them voted for
a Democratic House candidate.103
The cost of deception could rise in future years. Instead of facts,
Republicans have sought clarity in dogma. When Gingrich became
Speaker in the 1990s, he abolished the Office of Technology Assessment
– the congressional agency charged with evaluating complex policy
initiatives. Although Gingrich presented it as a cost-saving measure, he
saw the agency as a barrier to ideologically based policy.104 But ideology
can take a party only so far. There will be times when Republican

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leaders are forced to confront facts that they’ve denied or bent for self-
serving purposes. When that occurs, they will find it hard to act without
angering the voters who took them at their word. It happened with
healthcare in the 2018 midterm election, and it will happen again.
The GOP could also pay another, and higher, price for its deceptions.
Although time could prove otherwise, developments to date cannot be
of much comfort to Republicans. How does a political party come into
power and preside over the strongest economy in decades, and yet lose
the midterm by one of the largest margins in history, alienate each of
the country’s fastest growing voting groups, and face the possibility
that its hold on the presidency will end with the next election? The seeds
of the Trump presidency can be found in the deceptions that
Republicans spread in the years before he came on the scene. Trump
didn’t hide who he was, and he showed himself to be an extreme
version of what the GOP had become – hostile to minorities,
unconstrained by facts, dismissive of norms and institutions. Decades
ago, the philosopher Hannah Arendt foretold the emergence of
someone like Donald Trump. Demagoguery, she wrote, is abetted by
“people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and
false, no longer exists.”105

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 CHAPTER SEVEN

The Conservative Imperative

“To see what is in front of one’s nose

needs a constant struggle.

George Orwell, writer

Many Americans wish that political parties would disappear. Parties

ranked dead last among twenty leading institutions in a recent poll.1
Yet, as political scientist E.E. Schattschneider noted, democracy is
“unthinkable” without political parties.2 Parties formed soon after the
U.S. Constitution was ratified, a pattern that has been repeated since in
every democracy. Parties enable people with different opinions and
backgrounds to join together to express their collective voice. Parties
conduct elections, organize government, frame policy issues, and
provide citizens a way to hold those in power accountable in the next
election. It is the desire to be in power, and to stay there, that compels
parties to pay attention to what citizens think.3 Small wonder that
political historian James Bryce said that “parties are inevitable. No one
has shown how representative government could be worked without
them.”4
The need for parties doesn’t stop a political party from going
haywire and undermining the democracy that it claims to serve.

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Historical examples abound and today’s Republican Party has joined
their ranks. Its effort to suppress the votes of minorities and the poor
through voter ID laws and the purging of registration rolls would be
indictment enough. But it’s only one of the GOP’s destructive acts.
Singling out the GOP is easy. What’s harder is to figure out how the
GOP can reinvent itself and when it might happen. It may not occur
until the party nosedives as a result of demographic change and the
declining appeal of its policies. The Republican Party isn’t going out of
business. It’s protected by a loyal base of supporters and favorable
electoral laws and procedures. If we had a European-style proportional
representation system, it’s conceivable that a center-right party would
rise to challenge the GOP and might eventually eclipse it. 5 But that’s
not our system, and it’s likely that the Republican Party is here to stay.
But it’s heading toward the nearest thing to extinction in America’s two-
party system – a lengthy period as the nation’s weaker party.
That outcome is a less desirable prospect than a Republican Party
that reasserts its heritage as a responsible conservative party. As
philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, a healthy democracy requires both
a civic-minded conservative party and a civic-minded liberal party.
Each party acts as a check on the other and has a distinctive contribution
to make – order and stability for the conservative party, progress and
reform for the liberal party. But each party has an obligation to move
the country forward in a responsible way.6

***
America was founded on the vision of a new form of government, 7 one
captured in the words of the Declaration of Independence - “all men are
created equal” with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was a radical idea in the
age of kings. But the vision quickly became Americans’ bond. Other
people took their identity from the shared ancestry that had led them
gradually to gather under the same flag. Long before there was a France
or a Japan, there were French and Japanese people linked by blood. Not

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so for Americans. They were a multitude of people from different lands,
held together by allegiance to a set of beliefs.8 The French observer
Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to recognize that shared
ideals were Americans’ bond. “Habits of the heart” was how
Tocqueville described them.9
America’s ideals were inclusive, serving as a source of unity for
those already here and a beacon of hope for those seeking refuge or a
fresh start. It was a bold experiment, one of the most daring in world
history. The United States opened its shores to people who in other
parts of the world were at each other’s throats. The fact that the United
States needed immigrants to settle its lands and later to man its factories
did not diminish the call. And for those who remained in their home
countries, America presented itself as a model for what their nation
could become. The United States entered World War I, as Woodrow
Wilson stated it, “to make the world safe for democracy.” America then
triumphed against totalitarianism in World War II and did what no
conquering army had done. Rather than plundering its enemies, it
helped them to rebuild.
The American vision was forward looking. What had been achieved,
no matter how worthy, was never enough. America could always be
made better. In the words of historian Alan Brinkley, the United States
was “the unfinished nation.”10 That notion has propelled the many
efforts, including the Progressive and Civil Rights movements, to make
America a more free, equal, and self-governing society.
America didn’t always live up to its founding vision, but the vision
never lost its power. Both political parties embraced it. In their more
urgent need to win elections and organize government, they sometimes
ignored its tenets. But they stood by it with the glaring exception of the
South’s Democratic Party, which stood against the American vision in
nearly every respect. When stripped of slavery by the Civil War,
southern Democrats looked backward rather than forward, seeking
through Jim Crow laws to recreate the two-race society that they had
lost on the battlefield. During the great wave of immigration in the late

143
1800s and early 1900s, although relatively few immigrants settled in the
South, it was the nation’s least welcoming region.11
The driving vision in today’s Republican Party is closer to that of the
old South’s Democratic Party than to the vision advanced by
Republican leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
Today’s GOP is xenophobic rather than welcoming, exclusive rather
than inclusive, nostalgic rather than forward looking, and destructive
rather than protective of people’s rights when it helps them to win
elections.12 In its intent to “make America great again,” it is pursuing a
vision of America that never was. And the vision it’s pursuing is not
that of a conservative party deserving of the name. Those who pursue
a fantasized past are properly called reactionaries. Conservatives take
what is and ask how time-honored traditions and norms can improve
it. A conservative party would be protective of established institutions
rather than destructive of them. It would be a party that values stability
and measured progress. It would be a constructive steward of
America’s heritage.
The GOP will have difficulty restoring its conservative tradition. It
was already far down the reactionary road before Donald Trump
arrived on the scene. Democrats have contributed to the tribalism that’s
fueling our partisan conflict, but Republicans have turned it into a
strategy – a remarkable shift for a party that was once a critic of identity
politics.13 Polls indicate that Republicans are increasingly hostile
toward blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and others who are not white and
Christian.14 Even America’s immigrant heritage has little standing in
today’s GOP. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that barely a
third of Republicans believe that “America’s openness to people from
all over the world is essential to who we are as a nation,” whereas a
majority believe that immigration is a threat to “our identity as a
nation.”15 And in low-minded Donald Trump, the Republicans have for
the first time since Richard Nixon a president for whom division is a

144
strategy.16 Newt Gingrich, who knows a thing or two about incitement,
spoke admiringly of Trump’s style: “He intuits how he can polarize.” 17
America’s top leaders have typically acted with restraint,
recognizing that forbearance fosters unity. When Thomas Jefferson won
the election of 1800 and declared it a “revolution” of the common
people, he refused to incite them, knowing that it would unleash their
resentment of the wealthy.18 For Trump and many other top
Republicans today, forbearance is an archaic notion. It’s not hard to
imagine, for the first time in memory, that we don’t know where we’ll
end up as a nation. Republicans have created an arms race between
civility and incivility, the future and the past, unity and division, and
it’s imposing a high cost on America’s ideals. It will also eventually
impose a high cost on the GOP. A party built on the selective nostalgia
of aging white Americans is a party headed toward second-class status.
The GOP would not have to abandon its issues in returning to its
conservative roots. There’s a thoughtful conservative argument about
why countries need to control their borders, why they need to respect
religious practices, why they need to protect the sanctity of the ballot,
why they need to guard against overregulation. There’s a reflective
conservative response to the problems that result when rural America
is left behind while cosmopolitan America soars ahead or when
government tries to do too much. An earlier Republican Party would
have made those arguments. Today’s GOP sees them as wedge issues.19

***
Writing a century after it was ratified, the British prime minister
William Gladstone declared that the U.S. Constitution was ”the most
wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose
of man.”20 Gladstone admired the precedent it set – the principle that
the highest authority was the law and not the whims of those in power.
The great fear of the framers of the Constitution was that
government would be captured by a faction whose interest was

145
“adverse to that of the whole society.”21 To guard against the possibility,
the framers divided power among the institutions of government in a
way that would allow each of them to check the power of the others.
The system was also designed to force interests to engage in
compromise and negotiation, resulting in policies that served the
interests of the many.
When political parties formed after the Constitution’s ratification,
they organized themselves in a way aligned with the Constitution’s
design. Because candidates were individually elected in single electoral
districts, parties sought to build the large and diverse coalitions that
would give their candidates a chance to place first in a large number of
districts. Parties also had an incentive to nominate candidates whose
positions were moderate enough to attract voters of the other party.
Most lawmakers were moderates, and some had views that were closer
to the positions of the other party than to those of their own party.22
With most lawmakers clustered near the center of the political
spectrum, lawmakers with more extreme views had to come toward the
center if they wanted a say on legislation.
Those earlier Congresses were not without faults. Some issues,
including civil rights, were off the table because they were thought too
risky and disruptive. But persistent gridlock of the type that has
plagued Congress in recent years was rare. That pattern began to
change in the 1990s when Republican lawmakers shifted to the right.
As they did so, and then moved even further to the right, the
congressional middle began to weaken and is now all but gone.23 Except
for brief periods where one party has controlled the House, Senate, and
presidency, legislative gridlock has been the rule. Policy problems,
including the nation’s chaotic immigration system and its crumbling
infrastructure, have gone unattended. In recent years, Congress has
enacted many fewer bills than in the past, and most of the those that
have passed were uncontroversial or routine.24

146
 Republican lawmakers are the leading obstructionists, mindlessly
blocking bills that in past times would have had bipartisan support.
Examples are plentiful, but few illustrate the problem as clearly as
Republicans’ refusal to deal with foreign meddling in U.S. elections.
Despite the unanimous conclusion of the nation’s intelligence agencies
that foreign operatives interfered in the 2016 election and were
preparing to do so again in 2020, Senate majority leader Mitch
McConnell refused to bring a bill to the floor that would have required
states to use paper ballots to back up their electronic systems and would
have obliged campaigns to notify law enforcement officials if offered
help by a foreign country. “Clearly this request is not a serious effort to
make a law,” McConnell said on the Senate floor, “[Democrats] are
seeking a political benefit.”25
There’s no rule that would require lawmakers to act in ways
consistent with the nation’s constitutional design, but problems result
when they don’t. In their devotion to ideology and party unity,
Republican lawmakers are behaving like a European parliamentary
party, which works in a governing system where there is no separation
of executive and legislative power and where the majority party has the
votes to enact policy on its own. But that’s not how the American system
is designed to work. In its separation of power and the requirement that
the House, Senate, and president agree in order to enact legislation, a
rigidly ideological party is a barrier to governing.
More than a half century ago, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote
admiringly of the “vital center” – the place on the political spectrum
that accommodates the interests of the many rather than those of a
partisan faction.26 The vital center was also what the framers imagined
when they thought about how best to govern a diverse nation with its
many interests, each with a legitimate claim to representation.
Restoring the political center is a necessary step toward getting the
nation’s politics back on track.

147
 If the need for a reconstituted Republican Party is clear enough, the
path to creating it is not. The barriers to change within the party are
formidable. It’s not clear where the leadership for change would come
from now that the party has shed and muted its moderates. Those who
have not quit the party or lost their office in a Republican primary have
been silenced by the awareness that speaking up will put them next in
line to go.27 John McCain was one of the few with the courage and
standing to speak out but, at the time of his death, McCain was seen
more favorably by Democrats than by Republicans.28 If moderate
Republican leaders had done more at the start to stop the rise of their
party’s reactionaries, rather than teaming up with them for narrow
partisan gain, some of what has happened since the 1990s would have
been blunted. Cutting the reactionaries down to size will be much
harder today.
Power within the GOP resides on the far right. That’s where most of
the big money – the Koch brothers, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelson – is
located.29 And that’s where right-wing media are concentrated. A
decade ago, they broke with Republican moderates, throwing their
support to the Tea Party movement and then to the candidacy of
Donald Trump. Any attempt to move the GOP toward the center would
likely die at the hands of right-wing media.
If not by right-wing media, an effort to shift the GOP toward the
center would be strangled by the party’s base. As Republican leaders
like Gingrich moved to the right, they carried with them the Republican
rank-and-file. The Tea Party movement carried them further to the
right, as has the presidency of Donald Trump. The Republican diehards
who turn out in large numbers in primary elections are
uncompromising.30 It’s become increasingly difficult for moderate
Republicans to prevail in the party’s primaries, and more than a few
Republican incumbents have lost their seats to a primary challenger
positioned to their right. Being “primaried,” a theoretical possibility in
the past, is a clear and present danger for Republican moderates. 31

148
Right-wing voters beget right-wing lawmakers, a birthing that shows
no sign of slowing.
The GOP’s conservative heritage is likely to be restored by the same
force that has previously led America’s parties to reinvent themselves –
a series of humiliating election defeats. And make no mistake, that day
is coming for the GOP. Republicans are facing a demographic time
bomb unlike any of the past. Younger adults and minority group
members vote heavily Democratic, and their numbers increase with
each passing election. The older white voters that are the GOP’s base of
support are shrinking in number. Within two decades, based on
demographic change alone, the GOP could find itself out of power
except in a few southern and midwestern strongholds.
If the GOP were to resist change at that point, it would be bad for the
GOP and bad for America. It would lead to a lengthy period of
Democratic dominance that would likely not end well. Political parties
that govern in the absence of a strong rival party tend to overreach. In
the case of the Democrats, it would likely be in the form of a disruptive
move to the left. A competitive two-party system, contested by two
responsible parties, is what gives voters their best chance to influence
the country’s direction while also assuring them, if they end up on the
losing side, that their legitimate rights and interests will be respected.

***
Democracy rests on an implied social contract. Citizens agree to be
governed on the understanding that the same rules apply to all and that
no rule can unfairly disadvantage one group of citizens relative to
others. No citizen, in the absence of knowing what life has in store,
would rationally consent to any other governing arrangement. “The
liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled,” wrote theorist John
Rawls, “the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” 32

149
 As sensible as that principle is, it has little standing in the Republican
Party. The GOP once took pride in its commitment to individual rights
and institutions.33 Today’s Republican Party treats them as tokens to be
manipulated in order to increase their chances of victory. It’s hard to
say when Republicans lost touch with the public good, or who initiated
it. Hijinks of one type or another have been around for as long as parties
have existed. The desire for power can seduce even the sober minded.
But no party, aside from the old South’s Democratic Party, has engaged
in voter suppression as brazenly and on such a large scale as has today’s
Republican Party. The list of such acts is too long to enumerate here but
they include voter ID laws aimed at keeping Democratic-leaning
groups from registering to vote; the selective reduction of voting hours,
polling places, and voting machines to discourage Democratic voters
from participating; and the effort to manipulate the census in order to
undercount groups associated with the Democratic Party.
Such actions breach the social contract that is implicit in the
relationship between governors and governed, and they undermine the
legitimacy of government and elections. Norms are as basic to a well-
functioning democracy as are its laws. They are the standard for how
leaders and institutions should act. When respected, they are so
effective at tempering behavior that citizens don’t recognize their
importance. Only after they’re cast aside is their worth revealed.34
No conservative party true to its ideological heritage would engage
in undemocratic practices as freely as does today’s Republican Party.
Western conservative parties have historically accepted responsibility
for guarding political norms and protecting political processes and
institutions. The break from that tradition in today’s Republican Party
testifies to what it has become. The GOP is now a conservative party
only in name. It’s a reactionary party.
That tendency was firmly in place before Donald Trump entered the
scene, and it eased his way. He epitomizes the GOP’s normlessness. No
president in history has paid so little attention to norms or cared so little

150
about them. Trump lies with impunity, threatens repeatedly, heaps
scorn on opponents and institutions, promotes unfounded conspiracy
theories, exploits racial and ethnic divides, ignores legitimate checks on
his authority, and on and on. And he does it all with barely a word of
protest from Republican leaders and with the loyal backing of the
Republican base.
Trump is a race to the bottom that could spread to more GOP leaders
and might even convince some Democrats that they need to copy
Republican tactics in order to compete. Normlessness works that way.
It’s contagious. When norms are cast aside without thought as to why
they were instituted, or what purpose they serve, the predictable result
is political disorder and decay.
A clear loser in Republicans’ normlessness is our democracy. It is a
smaller version of its former self. Republicans’ actions will also end up
hurting their party. The GOP has traded the short-term gain of
suppressing the vote of minorities for their long-term enmity. They are
increasing in number, and their votes could someday wreck
Republicans’ chances of winning elections. And yes, other Americans
have also been hurt by the GOP’s underhanded tactics. These
Americans are disproportionately the young and women – two other
groups that have turned away from the GOP in ever larger numbers. 35
To work properly, our democracy requires two parties that are
ideologically distinct but equally civic-minded. One of those parties
needs to be a responsible center-right party, the place on the political
spectrum that the GOP once occupied. To say that the current version
of the Republican Party will have difficulty reoccupying that place is
self-evident. The forces that have brought the GOP to its current place
are powerful and resilient. Some are still gaining strength, driven by a
perennial motive - the lust for power.

151
152
 NOTES
Chapter 1

1
The content in this paragraph and the next is from Thomas Page, “On the hunt
for the lost city of Z,” CNN, March 24, 2017. https://www.cnn.com/t ravel/
article/ the-lost-city-of-z-percy-fawcett-james-gray-david-grann/index.html
2
Everett Carll Ladd, Transformations of the American Party System: Political
Coalitions from the New Deal to the 1970's (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975).
3
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (New York: Transaction Publishers,
1997).
4
Coleridge’s writings influenced John Stuart Mill’s thinking on the need for
both a party of progress and a party of stability. See Mill, On Liberty, 192. The
reference to Coleridge’s ideas in this paragraph owe to Russell Kirk, “Ten
Conservative Principles,” Kirk Center, 1993, https://kirkcenter.org/conserv
atism/ten-conservative-principles/
5 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), 58.

Chapter 2
_____________________________
1
“Power of the Southern Bloc in Congress,” History, Art & Archives, U.S.
House of Representatives, downloaded December 12, 2018. https://history.
house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Temporary-
Farewell/Southern-Bloc/
2
U.S. government data except for religion, which is based on poll data. For a
comprehensive although now somewhat dated profile of the South, see John
Shelton Reed, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
3
Sean Trende, “Misunderstanding the Southern Realignment,” Real Clear
Politics, September 9, 2010. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles
/2010/09/09/misunderstanding_the_southern_realignment_107084.html
4
Howell Raines, “George Wallace, Segregation Symbol, Dies at 79,” New York
Times, September 14, 1998 https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/14/us/george-
wallace-segregation-symbol-dies-at-79.html.
5
Quoted in Jeet Heer, “How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump
Possible,” The New Republic, February 18, 2016. https://newrepublic.com
/article/130039/southern-strategy-made-donald-trump-possible

153
6
Cited in Bill Moyers and Julie Leininger Pycior, Moyers on America: A
journalist and his times (New York: New Press, 2004).
7
Ben Fountain, “American Crossroads: Reagan, Trump and the devil down
south,” The Guardian, March 5, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2016/mar/05/trump-reagan-nixon-republican-party-racism
8
Ian Millhiser, “Tea Party Activists Aren’t Gearing Up For 2016 — They Want
to Refight 1964,” ThinkProgress, March 10, 2014, https://think
progress.org/tea-party-activists-arent-gearing-up-for-2016-they-want-to-
refight-1964-abe3755a9239/.
9
William Miller, New History of the U.S. (New York, Dell, 1968), 485.
10
Quoted in Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 50.
11
Quoted in Michelle Brattain, “Forgetting the South and the Southern
Strategy,” Miranda 5 (2011). https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/2243.
Quote was taken from Dan Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrinch:
Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Baton Rouge, LA:
LSU Press, 1996) 30.
12
Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President, 1968 (New York: Trident Press,
1969), 122.
13
Quoted in Eric Levitz, “Trump Has Not Transformed the Republican Party
— Yet,” New York Magazine, June 14, 2018, http://nymag.com/intelli
gencer/2018/06/trump-has-not-transformed-the-republican-party-yet.html.
14
See Joshua Green, “Birth of the Southern Strategy,” Bloomberg
Businessweek, December 4, 2014. https://www.bloomberg.com/news
/articles/2014-12-04/birth-of-the-southern-strategy
15
See, for example Gareth Davies, “Richard Nixon and the Desegregation of
Southern Schools,” Journal of Policy History 19 (2007): 367-394.
16
Quoted in James Boyd, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy,” New York Times, May
17, 1970.
17
Matthew D Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt
South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Byron E. Shafer and
Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and
Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009).
18
Douglas S. Massey, “The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act,” Sociol
Forum 30 (2015): 571-588. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc /articles/
PMC4808815/
19
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971).
154
20
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1970
(Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Registrar, 1971), 454.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/ppotpus/4731750.1970.001?view=toc
21
Lassiter, The Silent Majority; Shafer and Johnston, The End of Southern
Exceptionalism.
22
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962); Abington School District v. Schempp,
374 U.S. 203 (1963).
23
Gallup Poll, 1975.
24
Peter Applebome, “Prayer in Public Schools? It's Nothing New for Many,
New York Times, November 22, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/22
/us/prayer-in-public-schools-it-s-nothing-new-for-many.html.
25
See Robert Nathanael Morris, "Surfing the Tide of Sex Anarchy: How Sexual
Co-Revolutionaries Remade Evangelical Marriage, 1960-1980," (2016).
Graduate Theses and Dissertations, http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6328.
26
Bruce Buursma, “A New Crusade,” Chicago Tribune, August 31, 1980.
27
Clyde Haberman, “Religion and Right-Wing Politics: How Evangelicals
Reshaped Elections,” New York Times, October 28, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/us/religion-politics-evangelicals.html.
28
Susan Welch, John Gruhl, John Comer, and Susan Rigdon, Understanding
American Government (Boston: Cengage, 2010), 185.
29
Eric M. Uslaner, “Religion and Civic Engagement in Canada and the United
States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41 (2002): 239-254.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1388006?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
30
Ken Miller, “Data shows a downward demographic spiral for Republicans,”
TechCrunch, undated, downloaded March 1, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/
2017/02/11/data-shows-a-downward-demographic-spiral-for-republicans/.
31
Quoted in Matthew Yglesias, “Reagan’s Race Record,” The Atlantic,
November 9, 2007. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007 /11/
reagans-race-record/46875/
32
Transcript of Reagan Speech, http://neshobademocrat.com/Content/
NEWS/News/Article/Transcript-of-Ronald-Reagan-s-1980-Neshoba-County-
Fair-speech/2/297/15599.
33
Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Hundreds of School Districts Have Been Ignoring
Desegregation Orders for Decades,” Pacific Standard, May 2, 2014,
https://psmag.com/education/hundreds-school-districts-ignoring-desegreg
ation -orders-decades-80589.

155
34
Quoted in Doug Rossinow, “It’s Time We Face the Fact that Ronald Reagan
Was Hostile to Civil Rights,” History News Network, April 20, 2015.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158887
35
Justin Gomer and Christopher Petrella, “How the Reagan administration
stoked fears of anti-white racism: The origins of the politics of “reverse
discrimination," Washington Post, October 10, 2017. https://www.washing
tonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/10/how-the-reagan-
administration-stoked-fears-of-anti-white-racism/?utm_term=.be5df7c13e10.
36
Quoted in Doug Rossinow, “It’s Time We Face the Fact that Ronald Reagan
Was Hostile to Civil Rights,” History News Network, April 20, 2015.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158887
37
South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301 (1966).
38
"President's ‘War on Poverty’ Approved," CQ Almanac 1964, 20th ed.
(Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1965), 208-29, http://library.
cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal64-1304191.
39
Andy Kiersz, “Trump is giving a major policy speech,” Business Insider,
February 38, 2017. https://www.businessinsider.com/american-opinion-on-
government-spending-and-budget-priorites-2017-2
40
Andrew Levison, “Who Lost the Working Class?” The Nation, April 26,
2001, https://www.thenation.com/article/who-lost-working-class/
41
Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, “The Decline of the White Working
Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class,” Brookings Institution, 2008,
pp. 9-10. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/04_ demo
graphics _ teixeira.pdf.
42
Exit polls, 1980.
43
“Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government,” Pew Research
Center, November 23, 2015. http://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/1-trust-
in-government-1958-2015/.
44
A number of studies have looked at the connection of race and government
spending, including recent books on resentment generated by government
spending programs. See Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
45
David E. Rosenbaum, “In Four Years, Reagan Changed Basis of the Debate
on Domestic Programs, New York Times, October 25, 1984,
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/25/us/in-four-years-reagan-changed-basis-
of-the-debate-on-domestic-programs.html.
46
The ideology described now as “liberal” was once called “progressive.”

156
47
Arthur H. Miller and Martin P. Wattenberg, “Politics from the Pulpit:
Religiosity and 1980 Elections,” Economic Outlook, Summer 1986, pp. 61-64.
https://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/infoserv/isrpub/pdf/Politicsfrom_5389_.P
DF; Ryan Claassen, Godless Democrats and Pious Republicans?
48
Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders, Divided by Color (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996).
49
Quoted in Morgan Whitaker, “The legacy of the Willie Horton ad lives on,
26 years later,” MSNBC, October 21, 2013. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-
legacy-the-willie-horton-ad-lives
50
Steve Kornacki, “These six words changed George H.W. Bush's presidency,”
NBC News, December 4, 2018. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-
house/six-words-changed-presidency-george-h-w-bush-n943391
51
Quoted in McKay Coppins, “The Man Who Broke Politics,” The Atlantic,
November 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/
newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/
52
Quoted in Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New
York: Crown, 2018), 147.
53
Michael Oreskes, "Political Memo; For G.O.P. Arsenal, 133 Words to Fire,”
New York Times, Michael September 9, 1990.
54
"Nice-Guy Bob Michel will be missed". The Milwaukee Journal. October 6,
1993. Cited in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Michel
55
McKay Coppins, “The Man Who Broke Politics,” The Atlantic, November
2018 Issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-
gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/
56
“The Speaker Steps Down,” Associated Press, November 8, 1998,
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/08/us/the-speaker-steps-down-excerpts-
from-phone-call-about-gingrich-s-future.html
57
In the 1979-80 Congress, 84 of the 135 white southern senators and
representatives were Democrats. In the 1999-2000 Congress, 47 of the 131
white members were Democrats.
58
Richard Gooding, “The Trashing of John McCain,” Vanity Fair, November
2004. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/mccain200411
59
“Karl Rove – The Architect,” Frontline, undated. Downloaded July 8, 2019,
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/architect/rove/2004.html.
60
Kristi Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
61
President Harry Truman pushed for health care reform in the late 1940s and
President Bill Clinton did so in the early 1990s. Both efforts failed.
157
62
Tevi Troy, “The Democrats and Health Care: An account of political self-
destruction,” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2010. https://www.wsj.
com/articles/SB10001424052748704851204576034070250138538.
63
Jonathan Weisman, "GOP in Lead in Final Lap". Wall Street Journal,
October 20, 2010.
64
Based on the widely applied research of Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal.
See, for example, Drew DeSilver, “The polarized Congress of today has its
roots in the 1970s,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014,
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/polarized-politics-in-
congress-began-in-the-1970s-and-has-been-getting-worse-ever-since/.
65
Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America:
The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2008), figure 2.9.
66
“Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007,” Pew Research
Center, March 22, 2007, http://www.people-press.org/2007/03/22/trends-in-
political-values-and-core-attitudes-1987-2007/.
67
“Abortion Trends by Party,” Gallup News, 2019, https://news.
gallup.com/poll/246278/abortion-trends-party.aspx.
68
Andrew Sullivan, “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” New York Magazine,
September 19, 2017. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/can-
democracy-survive-tribalism.html.
69
Exit polls are basis for race and vote choice reference; for religion the source
is “Party Affiliation,” Religious Landscape Study, Pew Research Center,
downloaded August 31, 2019, https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-
study/party-affiliation/.
70
Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2018}.
71
See, for example, Alan I. Abramowitz, Brad Alexander, and Matthew
Gunning, “Incumbency, Redistricting, and the Decline of Competition in U.S.
House Elections,” Journal of Politics 68 (2006): 75-88. http://citeseerx.
ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.177.798&rep=rep1&type=pdf;
Alan A. Abramowitz, “U.S. Senate Elections in a Polarized Era,” in Burdett A.
Loomis, ed., The U.S. Senate (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011): 27-48.; Bill
Bishop, The Big Sort (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
72
Eyder Peralta, “Sen. Lugar Loses Primary to Tea Party Challenger, Ending
36-Year Career,” NPR, May 8, 2012. https://www.npr.org/sections/ itsall
politics / 2012/05/08/152292025/facing-a-tough-primary-lugar-encourages-
everyone-to-vote
158
73
Sean M. Theriault, Party Polarization in Congress (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
74
Barry C. Burden, “Candidate Positions in U.S. Congressional Elections,”
British Journal of Political Science 34 (2004): 211-227.
75
Anthony King, Running Scared (New York: Free Press, 1997).
76
Jackie Calmes, “They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing: Conservative
Media’s Influence on the Republican Party,” Shorenstein Center on Media,
Politics and Public Policy,” Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA, July 27, 2015. https://shorensteincenter.org/conservative-
media-influence-on-republican-party-jackie-calmes/.
77
Paul Kane, “Sen. Jeff Flake Relishes His Role as Republican Trump Critic:
He Can’t Help Himself,” Washington Post, Aug 25, 2016, www. Washing
tonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/08/25/sen-jeff-flake-relishes-role-as-
republican-trump-critic-he-cant-help-himself/?utm_term=.169d5f7d6b94.
78
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution
& the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2005), 9-10.
79
Pew Research Center poll, 2014. http://www.people-press.org/2014/
06/12/political-compromise-in-principle/
80
Janice Williams, “What Donald Trump Said about the Central Park Five,”
Newsweek, May 28, 2019. https://www.newsweek.com/when-they-see-us-
netflix-what-donald-trump-said-1437534
81
Will Doran, “Donald Trump set the record for the most GOP primary votes
ever,” PolitiFact, July 8, 2016, https://www.politifact.com/north-carolina/s
tatements/2016/jul/08/donald-trump/donald-trump-set-record-most-gop-
primary-votes-eve/.
82
Eric Levitz, “Trump Has Not Transformed the Republican Party — Yet,”
New York Magazine, June 14, 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018
/06/trump-has-not-transformed-the-republican-party-yet.html.
83
Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster, “The Rise of Negative Partisanship
and the Nationalization of U.S. Elections in the 21st Century,” Electoral Studies
41 (2016): 16, 21.
84
Ibid, 18.
85
Quoted in Annie Linskey, “GOP leaders still puzzle over president,” Boston
Sunday Globe, August 27, 2017, p. A6.
86
James E. Campbell, “A Review of ‘Sides, John and Lynn Vavreck. The
Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election,” Congress &
the Presidency, 42 (2015): 95-97, DOI: 10.1080/07343469.2015.991636.
159
87
2016 Republican primary exit polls.
88
Manu Raju, “McCaskill warns Dems about 'cheap' rhetoric,'” CNN,
December 24, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/24/politics/mccaskill-exit-
interview/index.html
89
Calculated from data contained in “Tracking Congress in the Age of Trump,”
FiveThirtyEight, December 13, 2018. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/
congress-trump-score/
90
Ishaan Tharoor, “The party of Trump goes fully far-right,” Washington Post,
November 8, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/11/08/
party-trump-goes-fully-far-right/.
91
Alan Smith, “Democrats won House popular vote by largest midterm margin
since Watergate,” NBC News, November 21, 2018. https://www.nbcnews.
com/politics/elections/democrats-won-house-popular-vote-largest-midterm-
margin-watergate-n938996
92
Exit polls, 2018.
93
Frank Newport, “In U.S., 46% Hold Creationist View of Human Origins,”
Gallup News, June 1, 2012. http://news.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-
creationist-view-human-origins.aspx
94
Example is from Kurt Andersen, “How America Lost Its Mind,” The
Atlantic, September 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/
2017 /09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
95
Based on author’s assessment of which GOP candidates were moderates
(e.g., Kasich, Bush) and which were right-wing (e.g., Trump, Cruz).

Chapter 3
_____________________________
1 Clinton Rossiter, Parties and Politics in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

1University Press, 1960).

.
2
“Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016,” Pew Research Center, June
22, 2016, https://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political
-animosity-in-2016/Ibid.
3
For immigrants, see ibid; for feminists and gays and lesbians, see Marc
Hetherington and Thomas Rudolph, “Why don’t Americans trust the
government? Because the other party is in power,” Washington Post, January
30, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01
/30/ why-dont-americans-trust-the-government-because-the-other-party-is-in-
power/?utm_term=.12789c32ff31; for Muslims, see John Sides, “Race,

160
Religion, and Immigration in 2016: How the Debate over American Identity
Shaped the Election and What It Means for a Trump Presidency,” Democracy
Fund Voter Study Group, June 2017, https://www.voters tudygroup.
org/reports/2016-elections/race-religion-immigration-2016.
4
“Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016,” Pew Research Center.
5
The two-party vote in 2016 divided 51-49 percent. White evangelicals
accounted for 26 percent of the voting electorate and cast 80 percent of their
votes for Trump. Removing them from the vote totals for both parties results
in a roughly 60-40 percent Democratic advantage in the vote.
6
Ken Miller, “Data shows a downward demographic spiral for Republicans,”
TechCrunch, undated, downloaded March 1, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/
2017/02/11/data-shows-a-downward-demographic-spiral-for-republicans/.
7
Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “The Trump effect? A stunning number of evangelicals
will now accept politicians’ ‘immoral’ acts,” Washington Post, October 19,
2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/10/19/the
-trump-effect-evangelicals-have-become-much-more-accepting-of-
politicians-immoral-acts/?utm_term=.3953cffe4fdc
8
Presidential election exit polls, 2000-2016.
9
Miller, “Data shows a downward demographic spiral for Republicans.”
10
Pew Research Center poll, “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious,”
November 3, 2015. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/11/03/u-s-public-becomi
ng -less-religious/
11
Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2018}.
12
Tara Isabella Burton, “The GOP can’t rely on white evangelicals forever,”
Vox, November 7, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18070630/white-
evangelicals-turnout-midterms-trump-2020.
13
Mark Galli, “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” Christianity Today,
December 19, 2019, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/ december-
web-only/trump-should-be-removed-from-office.html.
14
Exit polls, 2014, 2018.
15
Paul A Djupe and Ryan L. Claassen, eds., The Evangelical Crackup? The
Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2018.
16
Daniel Cox and Robert P. Jones, “America’s Changing Religious Identity,”
PRRI, September 6, 2017. https://www.prri.org/research/american-religious-
landscape-christian-religiously-unaffiliated/
17
Cox and Jones, “America’s Changing Religious Identity.”
161
18
Exit polls, 2016 and 2018.
19
Cox and Jones, “America’s Changing Religious Identity.”
20
Paige Winfield Cunningham, “Anti-abortion evangelicals inch away from
the GOP,” Washington Examiner, January 22, 2016, https://www.washington
examiner.com/anti-abortion-evangelicals-inch-away-from-the-gop.
21
Kristi Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
22
See, for example, Quinnipiac University poll, May 2017,
https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2461.
23
Estimates based on calculations from 2016 exit polls.
24
Jens Manuel Krogstad, Luis Noe-Bustamente, and Antonio Flores, “Historic
highs in 2018 voter turnout extended across racial and ethnic groups, Pew
Center, May 1, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/01/hist
oric-highs-in-2018-voter-turnout-extended-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups/.
25
Exit poll, 2016.
26
Lydia Saad, “U.S. Still Leans Conservative, but Liberals Keep Recent Gains,
Gallup News, January 8, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/245813/ leans-
conservative-liberals-keep-recent-gains.aspx.
27
Based on midterm election polls where the vote choice of the college
educated was recorded.
28
American National Election Studies (ANES) survey, 1960.
29
“Gender Differences in Voter Turnout,” Center for American Women and
Politics, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, July 20, 2017.
https://cawp.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/resources/genderdiff.pdf
30
Hannah Hartig, “Gender gap widens in views of government’s role,” Pew
Research Center, April 11, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ank/201 9/
04/11/gender-gap-widens-in-views-of-governments-role-and-of-trump/.
31
Richard C. Eichenberg, “Gender Difference in Foreign Policy Opinions,”
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, November 7, 2016, https://www
.thechicagocouncil.org/blog/running-numbers/gender-difference-foreign-
policy-opinion-2016.
32
Based on exit polls, multiple elections.
33
Lily Geismer, “Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue Isn’t Worth the Cost,” New
York Times, June 9, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/ opinion/
sunday/affluent-suburbs-democrats.html
34
Janie Velencia, “The 2018 Gender Gap Was Huge,” FiveThirtyEight,
November 9, 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-2018-gender-gap-
was-huge/.
162
35
“Asian-American Households Continue to Enjoy Above-Average Incomes,”
marketingcharts, February 28, 2019, https://www.marketing charts.com/demo
graphics-and-audiences/household-income-107552.
36
Avik Roy and John Yoo, “The Republican Party Needs Asian Voters,” NR,
March 7, 2019. https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/03 /25/the-
republican-party-needs-asian-voters/
37
See Janelle Wong, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, Taeku Lee, and Jane
Junn, Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their
Political Identities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2011).
38
“On D-Day, Limbaugh Calls Migrant Surge 'Invasion Force,'” Newsmax,
June 6, 2019, https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/d-day-invasion-migrants-
caravan/2019/06/06/id/919312/.
39
2018 exit poll.
40
Michelle Hackman, “Republicans Court Asian Voters with a New Message:
End Affirmative Action,” Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2018,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-court-asian-voters-with-a-new-
message-end-affirmative-action-1541071801.
41
Karthick Ramakrishnan and Janelle Wong, “Survey Roundup: Asian
American Attitudes on Affirmative Action,” Data Bits, June 18, 2018,
http://aapidata.com/blog/asianam-affirmative-action-surveys/.
42
U.S. Census Bureau population projections, September 8, 2018.
43
Exit polls, 2016.
44
Matt Barreto, “What do Latinos really think about Trump? We have a large
and accurate national Latino poll,” Latino Decisions, May 5, 2019.
https://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/what-do-latinos-really-think-about-
trump-we-have-a-large-and-accurate-national-latino-poll/
45
Perry Bacon Jr., “Why Latino Voters Haven’t Completely Abandoned The
GOP,” FiveThirtyEight, December 20, 2018, https://fivethirtyeight. com/
features/why-latino-voters-havent-completely-abandoned-the-gop/
46
See Lynn Vavreck, “Republicans and Hispanics: The Extent of the Damage
Done,” New York Times, February 16, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/
02/17/upshot/republicans-and-hispanics-the-extent-of-the-damage-done.html
47
See Vavreck, “Republicans and Hispanics: The Extent of the Damage Done.”
48
Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936.
49
The numbers in the figures for Generation Z are estimated from a 2017
Morning Consult poll that found 37 percent of them identify as Democrats and
only 14 percent as Republicans. The poll as reported did not ask independents

163
about which party they leaned toward. The author estimated the proportions
based on the distribution among millennials.
50
Pew Research Center poll, 2018.
51
Exit poll, 2016.
52
For current data, Pew Research Center poll, 2018; for earlier data, “Trends
in party affiliation among demographic groups,” Pew Research Center, March
20, 2018. https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-affiliat
ion- among-demographic-groups/.
53
Rough estimate by author from candidate preference in the 2004 and 2016
exit polls and the 2004 and 2016 U.S. Census Bureau data on voter turnout.
54
Pew Research Center poll, 2017.
55
“Gen Z and Millennials differ from older generations in views on Trump,
role of government and growing diversity in U.S.,” Pew Research Center,
January 17, 2019, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/01/17/generation-z-
looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and-political-issues/psdt_1-17-19_
generations-00/.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Vanessa M. Perez, “Political Participation of LGBT Americans,” Project
Vote, June 2014. http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/
06/RESEARCH-MEMO-LGBT-PARTICIPATION-June-20-2014.pdf
59
“Campaign Notes: Reagan Would Not Ease Stand on Homosexuals,” New
York Times, August 18, 1984. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/18/us/
campaign-notes-reagan-would-not-ease-stand-on-homosexuals.html
60
Michael Barone, “Revisiting a Transformational Speech: The Culture War
Scorecard,” American Conservative, May 30, 2018, https://www.
theamericanconservative.com/articles/revisiting-a-transformational-speech-
the-culture-war-scorecard/.
61
Patrick J. Egan, Murray S. Edelman, and Kenneth Sherrill, “Findings from
the Hunger College Poll: New Discoveries About the Political Attitudes of
Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals.” Hunter College, The City University of New
York, 2008, https://docplayer.net/82721290-Political-participation-of-lgbt-
americans.html.
62
Egan, Edelman, and Sherrill, “Findings from the Hunger College Poll.
https://docplayer.net/82721290-Political-participation-of-lgbt-americans.html.
63
In constructing the projections for Figure 3.9, the groups’ 2016 two-party
vote preferences were assumed to be their vote preference in each succeeding

164
election. The variation came from estimated changes in the composition of the
electorate, using each group’s percentage of the electorate in 2016 as the
baseline. Blacks were 12 percent of voters in 2016, projected to rise to 13
percent by 2032. Hispanics were 11 percent in 2016 projected to rise to 17
percent by 2032. For Asian Americans, it was 4 percent rising to 5 percent, and
for “other races” it was 3 percent projected to stay at 3 percent. Whites were
70 percent of the 2016 voting electorate and projected to fall to 62 percent by
2032. Among whites, it was projected that evangelicals would decline from 26
percent of voters in 2016 to 20 percent in 2032, while non-evangelicals were
projected to decline from 44 percent to 42 percent. Among whites, it was
assumed that non-college graduates would decline from 34 percent of the 2016
electorate to 26 percent in 2032. College-educated whites were projected to
stay at the 37 percent of the electorate that they were in 2016.
64
The procedure for creating Figure 3.10 is the same as described in previous
endnote for Figure 3.9 except that the 2018 voter preference and turnout levels
were used in the calculations. The main differences are that the baseline
included 1 percentage point fewer white voters and 1 percentage point more
minority voters; a drop in white-voter support for the Republican candidate;
and an increase in Democratic support among Asian-American voters.
65
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/behind-2018-united-states-
midterm-election-turnout.html.
66
In creating Figure 3.11, it was assumed that 5 percent of the electorate turns
over between each presidential election as a result of the death of older voters
and the coming of voting age of younger voters.
67
Tim Alberta, “Can the GOP Overcome Demographic Change in Red States?
New Republic, October 31, 2016. https://www.nationalreview.
com/2016/10/voter-demographics-diversifying-republicans-falling-behind/
68
Louis Galambos and Daun van Ee, “A President's First Term: Eisenhower's
Pursuit of ‘The Middle Way,’" Humanities 22 (2001). https://www.neh.gov
/humanities/2001/januaryfebruary/feature/presidents-first-term

Chapter 4
_____________________________
1
Eliana Johnson and Burgess Everett, “Pressure from base pushed a flustered
Trump into shutdown reversal,” Politico, December 20, 2018.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/20/trump-budget-reversal-1071388.
2
Johnson and Everett, “Pressure from base pushed a flustered Trump into
shutdown reversal.”
165
3
Kevin Merida, “Rush Limbaugh Saluted as a ‘Majority Maker,” Washington
Post, December 11, 1994. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ politics/
1994/12/11/rush-limbaugh-saluted-as-a-majority-maker/e4f879c5-a0d2-43b8-
ae56-9e24eeb82b62/?utm_term=.54e2d5a698ec
4
Nancy Benac, “Remember Nixon: There’s History behind Trump’s Attacks
on the Press,” Associated Press, February 17, 2017, https://apnews.com/
8b29195631f44033ad94d8b2b74048c0/remember-nixon-theres-history-
behind-trumps-press-attacks. The quote was originally reported by the
Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
5
Edith Efron, The News Twisters (New York: Nash Publishers, 1971).
6
“Edith Efron, “Fake News & the News Twisters,” History for a Sustainable
Future, undated, downloaded by author December 31, 2018,
https://eganhistory.com/2018/02/19/edith-efron-fake-news-the-news-twisters/
7
Diallynn Dwyer, “Presidents vs. the press: What came before Trump’s
‘running war’ with the media<” Boston.com, February 25, 2017,
https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2017/02/25/presidents-vs-the-press-
what-came-before-trumps-running-war-with-the-media.
8
Dwyer, “Presidents vs. the press: What came before Trump’s ‘running war’
with the media.”
9
Juanita “Frankie” Clogston, “The Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the
Irony of Talk Radio,” Journal of Policy History 28 (2016), https://www.
cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-policy-history/article/repeal-of-the-
fairness-doctrine-and-the-irony-of-talk-radio-a-story-of-political-entrepre
neurship-risk-and-cover/CEBB79E7D94F105D8D79161950C9D9AF
10
Quoted in Helen Ragovin, “My Way or the Highway,” TuftsNow, September
13, 2017, http://now.tufts.edu/articles/my-way-or-highway.
11
Nicole Hemmer, Messengers on the Right: Conservative Media and the
Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 260. For reasons that are not fully understood,
conservatives have a stronger preference for like-minded communication.
According to both polling and ratings data, conservative talk show hosts
dominate the partisan talk show sector.
12
L.Z. Granderson, “At 25, Limbaugh show still rules GOP,” CNN, August 1,
2013. https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/01/opinion/granderson-rush-limbaugh
/index.html
13
Molly Ivans, “It Ain’t Funny, Rush,” Washington Post, October 14, 1993.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1993/10/14/it-aint-funny-
rush/5dfc5618-c9f3-41a2-b88b-7f07ab4c5bf2/?utm_term=.a318b325e6a0
166
14
“Great Health Care Debate,” Bill Moyers Journal, October 7, 1994, https: //
billmoyers.com/content/great-health-care-debate/; James Fallows, “A Triumph
of Misinformation,“ The Atlantic, January 1995, https://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/1995/01/a-triumph-of-misinformation/306231/.
15
Theda Skocpol, “The Rise and Resounding Demise of the Clinton Plan,”
Health Affairs 14 (1995): 76, https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi /10.1377/
hlthaff.14.1.66.
16
Robin Toner, “Broadcaster; Election Jitters in Limbaughland, New York
Times, November 3, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/03/us/the-1994-
campaign-broadcaster-election-jitters-in-limbaughland.html
17
Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, René Lindstädt, and Ryan J. Vander
Wielen, “The Influence of News Media on Political Elites: Investigating
Strategic Responsiveness in Congress,” American Journal of Political Science
60 (2016): 5-29. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12171..
18
Harry Enten, “Do Republicans Really Have A Big Turnout Advantage In
Midterms?” FiveThirtyEight, January 9, 2018. https://fivethirtyeight.com
/features/do-republicans-really-have-a-big-turnout-advantage-in-midterms/
19
Matthew Norton, “A structural hermeneutics of The O’Reilly Factor,”
Theoretical Sociology 40 (2011): 315-346. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/
blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/1/15686/files/2018/02/Norton_TOF_pub-1zg0ihg.pdf
20
David Halperin, “Before Rubio, Before Luntz: Meet a Founding Father of
Climate Change Denial,” HuffPost, March 3, 2013; Maxwell T. Boykoff and
Jules G. Boykoff, “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige
Press,” Global Environmental Change 15 (2004): 126.
21
Mark Thompson, Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of
Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016), 168.
22
“Interview: Frank Luntz,” Frontline, November 9, 2004. http://www.pbs.
org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/interviews/luntz.html
23
Frederick W. Mayer, “Stories of Climate Change: Competing Narratives, the
Media, and U.S. Public Opinion 2001–2010,” Discussion Paper D-72, Joan
Shorenstein Center, February 2012, 8, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/
publications/papers/discussion_papers/d72_mayer.pdf.
24
“Rush Limbaugh Statements,” Politifact, January 8, 2014,
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/rush-limbaugh/statements/?page
=1&list =speaker
25
Mayer, “Stories of Climate Change.” The reference to the duration of Fox’s
emphasis on the Hoax narrative is based on Lauren Feldman, Edward W.
Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, and Anthony Leiserowitz, “Climate on Cable:
167
The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN, and
MSNBC, International Journal of Press/Politics 20 (2011): 1-29.
26
Mayer, “Stories of Climate Change.”
27
Ibid.
28
Feldman, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, and Leiserowitz, “Climate on Cable.”
29
David Folkenflik, “Fox News defends its 'patriotic' coverage,” Baltimore
Sun, April 2, 2003, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2003-04-02-
0304020026-story.html
30
Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, “The Fox in the Tea Party,”
Reuters, December 21, 2011. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/12/21
/the-fox-in-the-tea-party/. Reprinted from Theda Skocpol and Vanessa
Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
31
Skocpol and Williamson, “The Fox in the Tea Party.”
32
Tom Kuntz, “Porkulus,” New York Times, February 8, 2009.
https://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/porkulus/
33
Erik Kain, “The Republican Party Needs to Ditch Fox News If It Wants to
Win,” Mother Jones, November 7, 2012, https://www.motherjones.com/
politics/2012/11/why-republican-party-needs-ditch-happy-meal-conservatism
- if-they-want-win/.
34
Figures from Appendix B in Jackie Calmes, “They Don’t Give a Damn about
Governing: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party,”
Shorenstein Center of Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy
School, July 27, 2015, 45-48, https://shorensteincenter.org/conservative-
media-influence-on-republican-party-jackie-calmes/
35
“Audio and Podcasting Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, June 16, 2017,
www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/audio-and-podcasting.
36
W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, “The disinformation order:
Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions,”
European Journal of Communication 33 (2018): 122–139. https://journals.
sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0267323118760317.
37
Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 138.
38
“Megyn Kelly Faces Backlash over Interview with Alex Jones,” ABC News,
June 13, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZlmcyVDdfc.
39
Joshua Norman, “9/11 conspiracy theories won't stop,” CBS News, Sept 11,
2011.https://www.cbsnews.com/news/9-11-conspiracy-theories- wont-stop/

168
40
Zach Exley, “Black Pigeon Speaks: The Anatomy of the Worldview of an
Alt-Right YouTuber,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public
Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, June 28, 2017.
41
Ibid.
42
Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda:
Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
43
Clay Ramsay, Steven Kull, Evan Lewis, and Stefan Subias, “Misinformation
and the 2010 Election: A Study of the US Electorate, “ Program on
International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, December 10, 2010,
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/11375/Misinformation_Dec1
0_rpt.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y; Filippo Menczer, “The Spread of
Misinformation in Social Media,” Center for Complex Networks & Systems
Research, Indiana University, September 2016. https://research horizons.
soic.indiana.edu/files/2016/09/ Menczer.pdf; “Evaluating Information,” A
Report of the Stanford History Education Group, Stanford University,
November 2016, 1-29. https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid :fv751yt5934/
SHEG %20Evaluating%20Information%20Online.pdf
44
Katerina Eva Matsa, Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, and Jocelyn Kiley,
“Political Polarization & Media Habits,” Pew Research Center, Oct 21, 2014,
https://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/.
45
John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy: Americans'
Beliefs About How Government Should Work (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
46
Nigel Farndale, “Rush Limbaugh,” The Telegraph, Octr 30, 2018,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ world news/north america/usa/3286392/
Rush-Limbaugh-The-man-whos-always- Right.html.
47
Wendy Gross, Tobias H. Stark, Jon Krosnick, Josh Pasek, Gaurav Soods,
Trevor Tompson, Jennifer Agiesta, and Dennis Junius, “Americans’ Attitudes
toward the Affordable Care Act,” Stanford University, 2012, 9,
https://pprg.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Health-Care-2012-Knowledge-
and-Favorability.pdf.
48
YouGov poll, March 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/
rampage/wp/2017/03/24/huge-distrust-in-government-statistics-especially -
among-republicans/?utm_term=.1a87784f800d
49
“Health Care Reform Closely Followed, Much Discussed,” Pew Research
Center, August 20, 2009, http://www.people-press.org/2009/08/20/health-
care-reform-closely-followed-much-discussed/.
169
50
ABC News and Resources for the Future poll, 2018.
51
“Trump Remains Unpopular; Voters Prefer Obama on SCOTUS Pick,” 10,
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_12091
6.pdf.
52
“Quarter Doubt Obama Born in U.S.,” CNN, August 2010, http://
politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/04/cnn-poll-quarter-doubt-president-
was-born-in-u-s.
53
“Republicans Blame Bill, not Trump, for Health Bill Defeat,” CBS, March
29, 2017, www.cbsnews.com/news/republicans-health-care-trump-approval-
russia-election-meddling-cbs-news-poll.
54
Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay and Evan Lewis, “Misperceptions, the Media, and
the Iraq War,” Political Science Quarterly, 118 (Winter, 2003/2004):569-598.
55
Farleigh Dickenson University poll, May 1, 2013, http://www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009 030202496.
htmlhttps://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/publicmind/2013/guncontrol/final.pdf.
56
Kathy Frankovic, “Belief in Conspiracies Depends Largely on Political
Identity,” YouGov, Dec 27, 2016, https://today.yougov.com/news /2016/
12/27/belief -conspiracies-largely-depends-political-iden/.
57
Amanda Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal Inside the web of
conspiracy theorists, Russian operatives, Trump campaigners and Twitter bots
who manufactured the ‘news’ that Hillary Clinton ran a pizza-restaurant child-
sex ring,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017, https://www.rolling
stone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/.
58
Rush Limbaugh, “RUSH: Ask The Clintons “How Many People Do You
Know In Your Life That Have Been MURDERED?” Daily Rushbo, August
16, 2010, http://dailyrushbo.com/rush-ask-the-clintons-how-many-people-do-
you-know-in-your-life-that-have-been-murdered/.
59
Charles Taber and Milton Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation
of Political Beliefs,” American Journal of Political Science 50 (2006): 755-
769; Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The
persistence of political misperceptions,” Political Behavior (2010); Hollyn M.
Johnson and Colleen M. Seifert, “Sources of the continued influence
effects,”Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition 20(1994): 1420-1436; See also, Derek D. Rucker and Richard E.
Petty, “When Resistance Is Futile: Consequences of Failed Counterarguing
for Attitude Certainty,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86
(2004): 219-235.

170
60
Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Dawson, and Paul Slovic, “Motivated
Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” Behavioural Public Policy, 1
(2013): 54-86. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2319992.
61
The “smart idiot” effect also holds when it comes to news exposure. Those
who pay closer attention to news are harder to disabuse of a false belief than
those who don’t play close attention because they’re more likely to think their
belief is well founded. See Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 143.
62
“A Deeper Partisan Divide Over Global Warming,” Pew Research Center,
May 8, 2008, https://www.people-press.org/2008/05/08/a-deeper-partisan-
divide-over-global-warming/; Dana Nucitelli, “Can the Republican Party solve
its science denial problem?” The Guardian, April 28, 2016. https://www.
theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/apr/28/
can -the-republican-party-solve-its-science-denial-problem; see also, Josh
Clinton and Carrie Roush, “Poll: Persistent Partisan Divide Over ‘Birther’
Question,” NBC News, June 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-
election/poll-persistent-partisan-divide-over-b rther-question-n627446.
63
John Wagner, “‘So I think I was fine’: Trump defends promoting baseless
conspiracy theory about Epstein’s death,” Washington Post, August 12, 2019,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/so-i-think-i-was-fine-trump-
defends-promoting-baseless-conspiracy-theory-about-epsteins-
death/2019/08/13/75547346-bde2-11e9-9b73-fd3c65ef8f9c_story.html.
64
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than
the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies
and Nations (Boston: Little Brown, 2004).
65
See Hubert J. O'Gorman, "The Discovery of Pluralistic Ignorance,". Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. 22 (1986): 333–347, https://online
library.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1520-6696%28198610%2922%3A4<
333%3A%3AAID-JHBS2300220405>3.0.CO%3B2-X.
66
Example from Howard Kurtz, “White House Lets Limbaugh Be Voice of
Opposition,” Washington Post, Mar 3, 2009 (http://www.washing tonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009030202496.html), and “Rush
Limbaugh calls on conservatives to take back nation,” CNN, Feb 28, 2009
(http://www. cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/28/ limbaugh.speech. cpac/).
67
Calmes, “They Don’t Give a Damn”; Eliana Johnson, “Ingraham’s
Insurrection,” National Review, June 12, 2014, www.nationalreview.
com/2014/06/ingrahams-insurrection-eliana-johnson.

171
68
Senate aide, interview with Jackie Calmes, March 23, 2015. Jackie Calmes,
“They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing.”
69
Henry Barbour et al, “The Growth and Opportunity Project,” Republican
National Committee (2013): 15-16, http://goproject.gop.com/rnc_
growth_opportunity_book_2013.pdf.
70
Michael Kruse, “Jeb’s Talk Radio Problem,” Politico, March 22, 2015.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/jeb-bush-rush-limbaugh-
talk-radio-116283
71
Jose DelReal, “Jeb Bush has a serious talk radio problem,” Washington Post,
Feb 2, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- politics/ wp/ 2015 /
02/02/jeb-bush-has-a-serious-talk-radio-oblem/?utm_ term=.0e1f83d4 ccd5
72
Michael Kruse, “Jeb’s Talk Radio Problem,” Politico, March 22, 2015.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/jeb-bush-rush-limbaugh-
talk-radio-116283
73
“Jeb Bush: Close Nazi Ties Exposed,” The Alex Jones Show, December 16,
2015, https://www.infowars.com/jeb-bush-close-nazi-ties-exposed/.
74
Poll standing based on aggregation of leading national polls by pollster.com.
75
John McCain Senate speech, July 25, 2017, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=bBGMWReDjzk.
76
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBGMWReDjzk.
77
“Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” Time, June 16, 2015,
http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech.
78
McKay Coppins, “The Deep Republican Roots of Trump's Media Bashing,”
The Atlantic, October 11, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/
politics/archive/2017/10/tru2mp-press-crackdown/542670/
79
Michael Gerson, "Rush Limbaugh’s blessing of Trump is killing
conservatism,” Washington Post, March 26, 2016, https://www.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/rush-limbaughs-defense-of-trump-is-killing-
conservatism/2016/03/28/9f0c2b16-f522-11e5-8b23-
538270a1ca31_story.html?utm_term=.8cbaacb3238a.
80
Dylan Byers, “Sean Hannity embraces Donald Trump, without apology,”
CNN, May 2, 2016, https://money.cnn.com/2016/05/02/media/sean-hannity-
donald-trump-profile/.
81
Michael Calderone, “Donald Trump Is the Candidate rom Breitbart News,”
HuffPost, August 17, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-
bannon-breitbart-donald-trump_us_57b49a78e4b0b42c38afc52f.

172
82
Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda:
Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
83
Thomas E. Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential
Race,” Shorenstein Center of Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard
Kennedy School, July 13, 2016, https://shorensteincenter.org/pre-primary-
news-coverage-2016-trump-clinton-sanders/.
84
Speech of Nancy Gibbs, Harvard Kennedy School, November 15, 2017.
85
Julian Sanchez, “Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance,”
April 7, 2010, http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/07/epistemic-closure-
technology-and-the-end-of-distance/.
86
Ezra Klein, “How do you measure 'epistemic closure'?” Washington Post,
April 26, 2010, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/
epistemic _closure.html.
87
Coppins, “The Deep Republican Roots of Trump's Media Bashing.”
88
The Economist/YouGov poll, August 2018. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-
briefing-room/news/404587-poll-more-dems-approve-of-mccain-than-
republicans-after-hisl
89
Joe Concha, “Radio host Levin reverses,’” The Hill, September 6, 2016,
https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/294735-radio-host-
levin-reverses-course-im-gonna-vote-for-donald.
90
Sarah Wheaton and Michael D. Shear, “Blunt Report Says G.O.P. Needs to
Regroup for ’16,” New York Times, March 18, 2013, https://www.
nytimes.com/2013/03/19/us/politics/republicans-plan-overhaul-for-2016-
primary-season.html.
91
Robin Abcarian, “How Ann Coulter is helping the GOP destroy its White
House dreams,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2014,
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/11/local/la-me-ra-why-the-republican-
party-cannot-win-a-presidential-election-20140311.
92
MacKenzie Weinger, “Hannity: I've 'evolved' on immigration and support a
'pathway to citizenship,'” Politico, November 11, 2018. https://www.
politico.com/blogs/media/2012/11/hannity-ive-evolved-on-immigration-and-
support-a-pathway-to-citizenship-149078
93
Marc Fisher, “Making of Sean Hannity,” Washington Post, Oct 10, 2017.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-making-of-sean-hannity-
how-a-long-island-kid-learned-to-channel-red-state-
rage/2017/10/09/540cfc38-8821-11e7-961d-
2f373b3977ee_story.html?utm_term=.1ceb5756bfdf
173
94
Kurt Andersen, “How America Lost Its Mind,” The Atlantic, September
2017. https: //www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-
lost-its-mind/534231/
95
Harry Enten, “The numbers show Trump lost the shutdown and Pelosi won,”
CNN, January 27, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/26/politics/poll-of-the-
week-trump-pelosi-shutdown/index.html.
96
Abby Ohlheiser, Eli Rosenberg, and Michael Brice-Saddler, “‘Trump caves’
or ‘Genius’: Right wing splits after Trump ends shutdown with no wall
funding,” Washington Post, January 25, 2019, https://www.washing
tonpost.com/technology/2019/01/25/trump-caves-or-genius-right-wing-splits-
after-trump-ends-shutdown-with-no-wall-funding/?utm_term=.650778e
f16d5; Will Sommer, “Pro-Trump Media Stars Despair After Trump Caves on
Shutdown,” Daily Beast, January 25, 2019, https://www.thedaily
beast.com/pro-trump-media-stars-despair-after-trump-caves-on-shutdown.
97
Megan Brenan, “Record-High 75% of Americans Say Immigration Is Good
Thing,” Gallup News, June 21, 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll
/235793/record-high-americans-say-immigration-good-thing.aspx.
98
See, for example, Raymond Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous
Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2 (1998): 175–
220.
99
Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda.
100
Douglas Ernst, “Limbaugh rips Republicans who bought 'media's blue wave
scam,' ran from Trump,” Washington Times, November 7, 2018.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/7/rush-limbaugh-rips-
republicans-who-bought-medias-b/
101
“Laura Ingraham: Demographic changes 'national emergency,'" BBC,
August 10, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45146811
102
Matt Barreto, “What do Latinos really think about Trump? We have a large
and accurate national Latino poll,” Latino Decisions, May 5, 2019.
https://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/what-do-latinos-really-think-about-
trump-we-have-a-large-and-accurate-national-latino-poll/
103
Calmes, “They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing,” p. 26.
104
Calmes, “They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing.”
105
Calmes, “They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing,” p. 25.
106
Calmes, “They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing.”
107
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It's Even Worse Than It Looks:
How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of
Extremism, expanded ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
174
108
“In Defense of Harlots,” The Spectator, October 10, 2004,
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2004/10/in-defence-of-harlots/.
109
“Foxic: Fox News Network’s Dangerous Climate Denial 2019,” Public
Citizen, August 13, 2019. https://www.citizen.org/article/foxic-fox-news-
networks-dangerous-climate-denial-2019/.
110
Farhad Manjoo, “Rumor’s Reasons,” New York Times Magazine, March 16,
2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16wwln-idealab-t.html.
111
Gordon Pennycook, “Prior Exposure Increases Perceived Accuracy of Fake
News,” presentation at Combating Fake News Conference, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA, February 17, 2017.
112
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2011), 201.
113
On the issue of avoidance, see John Henderson and Alexander Theodoridis,
“Seeing Spots: An Experimental Examination of Voter Appetite for Partisan
and Negative Campaign Ads,” SSRN, July 2015.
114
Norbert Schwarz, “Metacognitive Experiences in Consumer Judgment and
Decision Making,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14 (2004): 332–48, cited
in Adam J. Berinsky, “Rumors and Health Care Reform: Experiments in
Political Information,” British Journal of Political Science 47 (2017): 241–62.
115
Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn, “Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of
Ideological Selectivity in Media Use,” Journal of Communication 59 (2009):
19–39; Natalie Jomini Stroud, “Media Use and Political Predispositions,”
Political Behavior 30 (2008): 341–66.
116
A classic study of selection perception is Albert H. Hastorf and Hadley
Cantril, “They Saw a Game: A Case Study,” Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology 49 (1954): 129–34.
117
Leon Festinger, Henry W. Rieckman, and Stanley Shachter, When Prophecy
Fails (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 31.
118
Kull, Ramsay, and, Lewis, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War.”.
119
Kull, et al, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War.”
120
Phrasing and structure modeled after a paragraph in David Brooks, “Finding
a Way to Roll Back Fanaticism,” New York Times, August 15, 2017, A23.

Chapter 5
____________________________
1
“US Debt by President by Dollar and Percent,” The Balance, undated,
downloaded August 1, 2019, https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-
president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296
175
2
Leigh Ann Caldwell and Benjy Sarlin, “Beyond Trump: Where will the
Republican Party go after 2016?” NBC News, August 25, 2016,
https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/donald-trump-republican-party/gop-future
3
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money (London: Macmillan, 1936).
4
Nixon is often quoted as saying “We are all Keynesians now” when he
actually was speaking in terms of his own thinking in a conversation with ABC
anchor Howard K. Smith in 1971. See Jeffrey Sinder, “We're All Keynesians
Now Because We Have No Choice, RealClearMarkets, July 8, 2016,
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2016/07/08/were_all_keynesians_
now_because_we_have_no_choice_102254.html.
5
William Greider, “The Education of David Stockman,” The Atlantic,
December 1981, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/12/the-
education-of-david-stockman/305760/.
6
Data are from the World Wealth and Income Database as reported in Eduardo
Porter, “Incomes Grew After Past Tax Cuts, but Guess Whose,” New York
Times, December 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/ 12/26/
business/economy/tax-cuts-incomes.html.
7
“Income Inequality,” Inequality.org, downloaded by author on August 10,
2019, https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/.
8
John Cassidy, “Reagan and Keynes: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its
Name,” New Yorker, April 30, 2014, https://www.newyorker. com/news/john-
cassidy/reagan-and-keynes-the-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name.
9
Ibid.
10
Ronald Reagan Address to National Association of Realtors, March 28, 1982
11
Cassidy, “Reagan and Keynes.”
12
"Deficit-Reduction Bill Narrowly Passes," CQ Almanac 1993, 49th ed., 107-
24. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1994. http://library.
cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal93-1105159
13
Based on multiple sources cited in “Economic policy of the Bill Clinton
administration,” Wikipedia, downloaded by author on August 10, 2019,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Bill_Clinton_adminis
tration.
14
Charles Gascon and Evan Karson, “Growth in Tech Sector Returns to Glory
Days of the 1990s,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2017,
https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/publications/regional-
economist/2017/second_quarter_2017/industry_profile.pdf.
15
“Income Inequality.”
176
16
Gregory E. McAvoy and Peter K. Enns, “Using Approval of the President’s
Handling of the Economy to Understand Who Polarizes and Why,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly 40 (2010): 547, https://peterenns.
org/sites/peterenns.org/files/pdf/McAvoy_Enns.2010.PSQ.pdf.
17
Andrew Kohut, “Retro-Politics,” Pew Research Center, November 11, 1999,
https://www.people-press.org/1999/11/11/retro-politics/.
18
“George W. Bush on Tax Reform,” Issues2000, undated, downloaded on
December 22, 2019, https://www.ontheissues.org/George_W__
Bush_Tax_Reform.htm.
19
“Economists’ Statement Opposing the Bush Tax Cuts,” undated,
downloaded by author on August 3, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Economists%27_statement_opposing_the_Bush_tax_cuts#cite_note-
Statement-4.
20
Emily Horton, “he Legacy of the 2001 and 2003 ‘Bush’ Tax Cuts,” Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 23, 2017, https://www.
cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-legacy-of-the-2001-and-2003-bush-tax-cuts.
21
Alan J. Lichtman, “Trump’s False Conservatism and the Implosion of the
Republican Party in America,” paper presented at a conference in Mecca,”
January 25, 2018, http://studies.aljazeera.net/en/reports/2018/01/trumps-false-
conservatism-implosion-republican-party-america-180125102915539.html.
22
U.S. Treasury Department figures for fiscal year 2001 and fiscal year 2009.
23
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities data in Thomas E. Patterson, We the
People, 12e (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2017), 479.
24
“Income Inequality.”.
25
Danny Yaga, “Capital Tax Reform and the Real Economy: The Effects of
the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut,” American Economic Review 105(2015): 3531–
3563, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~yagan/DividendTax.pdf.
26
Kimberly Amadeo, “The Causes of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” the
balance, July 30, 2019, https://www.thebalance.com/what-caused-the-
subprime-mortgage-crisis-3305696.
27
Robert Reich, “How Trump is destroying the GOP,” San Francisco
Chronicle, Jan 26, 2018, https://www.sfchronicle. com/opinion /reich
/article/How-Trump-is-destroying-the-GOP-12525268.php.
28
Brooks Jackson, “Obama’s Final Numbers,” FactCheck.org, Sep 24, 2018.
29
“Republicans rip Obama for insufficient budget cuts,” CNN, May 7, 2009,
https://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/07/budget.congress/index.html.
30
Dana Nuccitelli, “The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican
Party,” The Economist, December 4, 2017, https://www.theguardian.
177
com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/dec/04/the-moral-and-
intellectual-bankruptcy-of-the-republican-party.
31
Quoted in Nuccitelli, “The moral and intellectual bankruptcy.”
32
Josh Bivens, “Cutting corporate taxes will not boost American wages,”
Economic Policy Institute, October 25, 2017, https://www.epi.
org/publication/cutting-corporate-taxes-will-not-boost-american-wages/.
33
“The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party,” Skeptical
Science, undated, downloaded August 14, 2019, https://skeptical
science.com/print.php?n=3964.
34
Peter Suderman,“Mitch McConnell Predicted the GOP Tax Cut Would Raise
Revenue and Reduce the Deficit,’ Reason, January 18, 2019,
https://reason.com/2019/01/18/mcconnell-gop-tax-cut-growth-revenue/.
35
Andrew Duehren, “House Speaker Paul Ryan Praises Tax Overhaul in
Farewell Speech,” Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2019,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-speaker-paul-ryan-praises-tax-overhaul-
in-farewell-speech-11545255028.
36
Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley, “Face It: You (Probably) Got a Tax
Cut,” New York Times, April 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com
/2019/04/14/business/economy/income-tax-cut.html.
37
Dylan Matthews, “The Republican tax bill got worse,” Vox, December 18,
2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16791174/ repub
lic an-tax-bill-congress-conference-tax-policy-center.
38
Ashlea Ebeling, “Final Tax Bill Includes Huge Estate Tax Win For The Rich:
The $22.4 Million Exemption,” Forbes, December 21, 2017, https://www.
forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2017/12/21/final-tax-bill-includes-huge-estate-
tax-win-for-the-rich-the-22-4-million-exemption/#46384201d541
39
Robert Reich, “How Trump is Destroying the GOP,” robertreich.org, January
21, 2018. http://robertreich.org/post/169976307310.
40
Matt Shuham, “GOPer On Tax Cuts: Donors Are Saying ‘Get It Done Or
Don’t Ever Call Me Again,’” TPM, November 7, 2017,
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/chris-collins-donors-tax-plan.
41
Rebecca Savransky, “Graham: 'Financial contributions will stop' if GOP
doesn't pass tax reform,” The Hill, November 9, 2017,
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/359606-graham-financial-contributions-
will-stop-if-gop-doesnt-pass-tax-reform.
42
Office of Management and Budget data, 2019.
43
Greg Leiserson, Will McGrew, and Raksha Kopparam, “The distribution of
wealth in the United States and implications for a net worth tax,” Center for
178
Equitable Growth, Mar 21, 2019, https://equitablegrowth.org/the-dist r ibution-
of-wealth-in-the-united-states-and-implications-for-a-net-worth-tax/.
44
Robert M. Entman, “Framing and party competition,” Issues in Governance
Studies, 70 (2015). https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07
/party_competition.pdf
45
David Leonhardt, “Democrats Are the Party of Fiscal Responsibility,” New
York Times, April 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15
/opinion/democrats-fiscal-responsibility.html.
46
The claim in this paragraph is based on average per four-year term to control
for whether a president was in office for one or two terms.
47
“The Democracy Poll,” Democracy Journal, 52 (2019), https://
democracyjournal.org/magazine/52/the-democracy-poll-americans-and-the-
economy/.
48 https://poll. qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2501.
49
“Party Images,” Gallup Historical Trends, downloaded August 6, 2017,
https://news.gallup.com/poll/24655/party-images.aspx.
50
“Most Americans Say Government Doesn’t Do Enough to Help Middle
Class,” Pew Research Center, February 4, 2016, https://www.pewsocial
trends.org/2016/02/04/most-americans-say-government-doesnt-do-enough-to-
help-middle-class/.
51
Lee Drutman, Vanessa Williamson, and Felicia Wong, “On the Money: How
Americans’ Economic Views Define — and Defy — Party Lines,” Democracy
Fund Voter Study Group, June 2019, https://www.voterstudy
group.org/publication/on-the-money.
52
Sahil Kapur and Joshua Green, “Internal GOP Poll: ‘We've Lost the
Messaging Battle’ on Tax Cuts,” Bloomberg News, September 20, 2018,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-20/internal-gop-poll-we-
ve-lost-the-messaging-battle-on-tax-cuts.
53
Victoria Balara, “Fox News Poll: Voters favor taxing the wealthy, increasing
domestic spending,” Fox News, January 24, 2019, https://www.fox
news.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-favor-taxing-the-wealthy-increasing-
domestic-spending.
54
Mike Lofgren, “Republican Deficit Hypocrisy,” New York Times, January
15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/opinion/campaign-stops/the-
republican-deficit-hypocrisy.html.
55
Michael Mazerov, “Kansas Provides Compelling Evidence of Failure of
"Supply-Side" Tax Cuts,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 22,

179
2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/kansas-provides-
compelling-evidence-of-failure-of-supply-side-tax-cuts.
56
Gallup poll, 1981 and Harris Interactive poll, 2001.
57
Quinnipiac University poll, December 2017, https://poll.qu.edu/ national/
release-detail?ReleaseID=2508.
58
Ibid.
59
Frank Rich, “My Embed in Red,” New York Magazine, September 14, 2012,
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/right-wing-media-2012-9/.
60
NBC/WSJ poll, September 2010.
61
James E. Campbell, “A Review of ‘Sides, John and Lynn Vavreck. The
Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election”, Congress &
the Presidency, 42 (2015): 95-97, DOI: 10.1080/07343469.2015.991636.
62
2016 Republican primary exit polls.
63
Andrew Desiderio, “Bannon to Senate GOP: I’m Gonna Mow You All
Down, Save Ted Cruz,” The Daily Beast, October 9, 2017.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bannon-to-senate-gop-im-gonna-mow-you-
all-down-save-ted-cruz
64
“Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government,” Pew Research
Center, November 23, 2015. http://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/1-trust-
in-government-1958-2015/.
65
Jill Colvin, “Labor nominee Scalia has long record of opposing regulations,”
Federal News Network, July 19, 2019, https://federalnewsnetwork.
com/people/2019/07/trump-to-nominate-eugene-scalia-for-labor-secretary-2/.
66
Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), SpeechNow v, FEC, No. 08-
5223 (2010).
67
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American
Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on
Politics 12 (2104) 564-581. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ viewdoc/download
;jsessionid=37EDA24D1D5DA87AEB950CEFE63883FF?doi=10.1.1.668.86
47&rep=rep1&type=pdf
68
Cliff Young and Chris Jackson, “The rise of Neo-Nativism,” ISPOS, Ideas
Spotlight, October 9, 2015. http://spotlight.ipsos-na.com/index.php/news/the-
rise-of-neo-nativism-putting-trump-into-proper-context/
69
Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instincts and the Fate of Nations (New
York: Penguin Press, 2018), 177.
70
Matthew Yglesias, “A new survey shows how economic policy divides the
GOP and unites Democrats,” Vox, June 11, 2019, https://www.vox.com
/2019/6/11/18659986/voter-study-group-democrats-economics.
180
71
Drutman, Williamson, and Wong, “On the Money.”
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid.
Chapter 6
_____________________________
1
Paul D. Miller, “Trump’s Rise Has Coincided With A Shift In The
Republican Coalition: The Jacksonians are ascendant,” Arc, May 10, 2018,
https://arcdigital.media/trumps-rise-has-coincided-with-a-shift-in-the-
republican-coalition-568b7d4f2466.
2
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York:
Crown, 2018), 8-9.
3
The idea for this paragraph and its construction owe to Seth Masket, “The
Toughest Death of 2016: The Democratic Norms that (used to) Guide Our
Political System, Pacific Standard, June 14, 2017, https://psmag.com/news/the-
toughest-death-of-2016-the-democratic-norms-that-used-to-guide-our-
political-system.
4
“The Essence of Conservativism,” Kirk Center, March 19, 2007, https://kirk
center.org/politics-and-social-order/essence-1957/.
5
The mission statement of the Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal
includes Burke’s famous quote on the core principle of conservatism.
6
Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004) 236.
7
Alan Flippen, “Black Turnout in 1964, and Beyond,” New York Times,
October 16, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/upshot/black-turnout
-in-1964-and-beyond.html.
8
Roey Hadar, “After Stunning Democratic Win, North Dakota Republicans
Suppressed the Native American Vote.” The Nation, May 2, 2018,
https://www.thenation.com/article/after-stunning-democratic-win-north-
dakota-republicans-suppressed-the-native-american-vote/.
9
Jasmine C. Lee, “How States Moved Toward Stricter Voter ID Laws,” New
York Times, November 3, 2016, www.nytimes.com/interactive
/2016/11/03/us/elections/how-states-moved-toward-stricter-voter-id-
laws.html. Substantial research on voter ID laws has been done by NYU’s
Brennan Center for Justice.
10
“The History of Voter ID Laws Defeating Voter Suppression,” GDN,
January 31, 2014, http://greaterdiversity.com/the-history-of-voter-id-laws-
defeating-voter-suppression/.
181
11
Jay Heck and Jay Riestenberg, “Wisconsin Supreme Court Creates More
Confusion With Voter ID Ruling,” Common Cause, August 5, 2014,
https://www.commoncause.org/democracy-wire/wisconsin-supreme-court-
voter-id-ruling-creates-confusion/.
12
German Lopez, “Longtime Republican consultant: if black people voted
Republican, voter ID laws wouldn't happen,” Vox, September 2, 2016,
https://www.vox.com/2016/9/2/12774066/voter-id-laws-racist.
13
Jamelle Bouie, “Republicans Admit Voter ID Laws Are Aimed at
Democratic Voters,” Daily Beast, July 11, 2017. https://www.thedaily
beast.com/republicans-admit-voter-id-laws-are-aimed-at-democratic-voters
14
Michael Wines, “Some Republicans Acknowledge Leveraging Voter ID
Laws for Political Gain,” New York Times, September 16, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-
leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html.
15
Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008)
16
Richard Sobel, “The High Cost of ‘Free’ Photo Voter Identification Cards,”
Institute for Race & Justice, Harvard Law School, June 2014,
https://today.law.harvard.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/FullReportVoterIDJune20141.pdf.
17
Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013).
18
Jelani Cobb, “Voter Suppression Tactics in the Age of Trump,” The New
Yorker, October 29, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine
/2018/10/29/voter-suppression-tactics-in-the-age-of-trump.
19
“Pro-Gun Voters Dominate the Texas Republican Party,” Texas Monthly,
March 6, 2018.
20
Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, 2016
21
Study cited in Li Zhouli, “Voter purges are on the rise in states with a history
of racial discrimination,” Vox, July 20, 2018, https://www.vox.com
/2018/7/20/17595024/voter-purge-report-supreme-court-voting-rights-act.
22
See, Benjamin Highton, "Voter Identification Laws and Turnout," Annual
Review of Political Science 20(2017): 149–167, https://www.annualreviews.
org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-0512 15-022822 .
23
Cited in “Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth,” Brennan Center, Jan 31, 2017,
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud-myth
24
Justin Levitt, “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” Brennan Center for Justice,
November 9, 2007, https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/truth-about-
voter-fraud.

182
25
Michael Wines, “All This Talk of Voter Fraud? Across U.S., Officials Found
Next to None,” New York Times, December 18, 2016, https://www.
nytimes.com/2016/12/18/us/voter-fraud.html.
26
Cited in “Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth.”.
27
Emily Bazelon, “A Crusader Against Voter Fraud Fails to Prove His Case,”
New York Times, June 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/20 18/06/
19/opinion/a-crusader-against-voter-fraud-fails-to-prove-his-case.html.
28
Margaret Stafford, “Kansas secretary of state in contempt in voting case,”
Associated Press, April 18, 2018, https://apnews.com /daa5256a0c
17491e81f15053dfc72520.
29
See Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote (New York: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2018).
30
Shannon Van Sant, “Judge Rules Against Georgia Election Law,” NPR, Nov
3, 2018, https://www.npr.org/ 2018/11/03 /663937578/judge-rules-against-
georgia-election-law-calling-it-a-severe-burden-for-voters.
31
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, No. 16-980 (2018).
32
Amy Howe, “Court stays out of North Dakota voting dispute,”SCOTUSblog,
October 9, 2018, https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/10/court-stays-out-of-
north-dakota-voting-dispute/.
33
Anthony York, “How California Became a Modern Democratic Stronghold,”
Pacific Standard, November 10, 2017, https://psmag.com/news/how-
california-became-a-modern-democratic-stronghold.
34
Figures based on 2016 Exit Poll data for California.
35
Keesha Gaskins and Sundeep Iyer, “The Challenge of Obtaining Voter
Identification,” Brennan Center for Justice, July 18, 2012,
www.brennancenter.org/publication/challenge-obtaining-voter-identification.
36
Matt Barreto, “What do Latinos really think about Trump? We have a large
and accurate national Latino poll,” Latino Decisions, May 5, 2019.
https://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/what-do-latinos-really-think-about-
trump-we-have-a-large-and-accurate-national-latino-poll/
37
See, for example, Stephen Ansolabehere and Eitan D. Hersh, "ADGN: An
Algorithm for Record Linkage Using Address, Date of Birth, Gender, and
Name," Statistics and Public Policy 4 (2017): 1–10, https://amstat.
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2330443X.2017.1389620#.XSNjZ-hKjIU.
38
U.S. Census Bureau data, 2018 election.
39
Ryan Pierannunzi , “Studying the Impact of Automatic Voter Registration
on Turnout,” Policy Analysis Exercise paper, Harvard Kennedy School, April
2, 2019.
183
40
Jonathan Brater, “Update: Oregon Keeps Adding New Voters at Torrid
Pace,” Brennan Center, Aug 18, 2016, https://www.brennan center.org/
analysis/ update-oregon-keeps-adding-new-voters-torrid-pace, cited in Pierann
unzi , “Studying the Impact of Automatic Voter Registration on Turnout.”
41
“Secretary Condos Announces Success of Automatic Voter Registration
Program,” State of Vermont, Office of the Secretary of State, August 17, 2017,
https://www.sec.state.vt.us/media/865057/automatic-voter-registration-
update-press-release.pdf, cited in Pierannunzi , “Studying the Impact of
Automatic Voter Registration on Turnout.”
42
Ella Nilsenella, “Mitch McConnell calls House Democrats’ anti-corruption
bill a ‘power grab,’” Vox, January 18, 2019, https://www.vox.
com/2019/1/18/18188150/mitch-mcconnell-house-democrats-anti-corruption-
bill-hr1.
43
“AP analysis shows how gerrymandering benefited GOP in 2016,”
Associated Press, June 27, 2017, https://www.mlive.com/news/
2017/06/ap_analysis_shows_how_gerryman.html.
44
Rucho v Common Cause, No. 18–422 (2019).
45
“AP analysis shows how gerrymandering benefited GOP in 2016.”
46
James Madison, Federalist No. 10.
47
George Packer, “The Corruption of the Republican Party,” The Atlantic,
December 14, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-
did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/.
48
W.B. Dickinson, Jr., “American two-party system,” Congressional
Quarterly, 1964, https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id
=cqresrre1964072900.
49
“Statistics and Historical Comparison,” govtrack.com, undated, downloaded
by author on August 6, 2019, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics;
Drew DeSilver, “A productivity scorecard for the 115th Congress: More laws
than before, but not more substance,” Pew Research Center, January 25, 2019,
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/25/a-productivity-scorecard-
for-115th-congress/.
50
Elizabeth Drew, “The Republicans: Divided & Scary,” New York Review of
Books, February 19, 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/articles
/2015/02/19/republicans-divided-scary/.
51
E.J. Dionne, Jr., Norm Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann, “How the GOP
Prompted the Decay of Political Norms,” The Atlantic, September 19, 2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/gop-decay-of-political-
norms/540165/
184
52
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, “How the Republicans Broke
Congress,” New York Times, December 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com
/2017/12/02/opinion/sunday/republicans-broke-congress-politics.html.
53
Luke Johnson, “Dennis Hastert Warns John Boehner about Leadership after
Fiscal Cliff Deal,” HuffPost, January 3, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.
com/2013/01/03/dennis-hastert-john-boehner_n_2403108.html.
54
Carl Hulse, “Now, Dennis Hastert Seems an Architect of Dysfunction as
Speaker,” New York Times, May 2, 2016, www.nytimes.com/
2016/05/03/us/politics/now-dennis-hastert-seems-an-architect-of-dysfunction-
as-speaker.html.
55
Quoted in Sabrina Siddiqui, “Richard Burr: Mike Lee Government
Shutdown Threat ‘Dumbest Idea I’ve Ever Heard Of,” HuffPost, September 25,
2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/25/richard-burr-mike-lee_n_365387
0. html. McCain quoted in “John McCain: Defund Effort ‘Not Rational,’”
Politico, September 19, 2013, www.politico.com/video/2013/09/john-mccain-
defund-effort-not-rational-006151. Bohener quoted in E. J. Dionne Jr.,
“Boehner Climbs Off the Tiger,” Washington Post, September 27, 2015,
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/boehner-climbs-off-the-tiger/2015/09/
27/9 ead1890–6488–11e5–8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html?utm_term=. 7638c
1e60038.
56
Alexander Bolton, “GOP Judiciary: No hearing on Obama court nominee,”
Vox, February 23, 2016, https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/270423-gop-
judiciary-no-hearing-on-obama-court-nominee.
57
Russell Berman, “Mitch McConnell’s Grand Plan Was Obvious All Along,”
The Atlantic, May 30, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com
/politics/archive/2019/05/mcconnell-supreme-court-2020/590452/.
58
Ron Elvin, “What Is the ‘Regular Order’ John McCain Longs to Return to
on Health Care?” NPR, July 26, 2017, www.npr.org/2017/07/
26/539358654/what-is-the-regular-order-john-mccain-longs-to-return-to-on-
health-care.
59
Marc J. Hetherington, Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the
Demise of American Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005).
60
Chris Riotta, “GOP Aims to Kill Obamacare Yet Again After Failing 70
Times,” Newsweek, July 29, 2017, https://www.newsweek.com/gop-health-
care-bill-repeal-and-replace-70-failed-attempts-643832 .
61
Quoted in Frances E. Lee, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual
Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 204.
185
62
U.S. Senate data archive.https://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference
/cloture_motions/clotureCounts.htm
63
Richard S. Beth and Elizabeth Rybicki, “Nominations with Cloture
Motions,” Congressional Research Service, November 21, 2013,
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/838702/crs-filibuster-report.pdf.
64
Dionne, Ornstein, and Mann, “How the GOP Prompted the Decay of Political
Norms.”
65
See Henry J. Abraham, Justices & Presidents: A Political History of
Appointments to the Supreme Court, 3e (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992).
66
Linda Greenhouse, “A Conservative Plan to Weaponize the Federal Courts,”
New York Times, November 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.
com/2017/11/23/opinion/conservatives-weaponize-federal-courts.html.
67
John Gerstein, “Gorsuch takes victory lap at Federalist dinner,” Politico,
November 16, 2017, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/16/neil-gorsuch-
federalist-society-speech-scotus-246538.
68
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Review of the terrorist
attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012 together
with additional views,” January 15, 2014, https://www.
intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/press/benghazi.pdf.
69
Chris Cillizza, “Kevin McCarthy’s comments about Benghazi should trouble
Republicans,” Washington Post, September 30, 2015,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/30/kevin-
mccarthys-comments-about-benghazi-should-raise-a-red-flag-for-
republicans/?utm_term=.8cc311614104.
70
Charles Gibson, “Restoring Comity to Congress,” Shorenstein Center on
Media, Politics and Public Policy,” Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA, January 1, 2011. https://shorensteincenter.
org/restoring-comity-to-congress/.
71
John E. Miller, Democracy and the Informed Citizen (Brookings, SD: Prairie
View Press, 2018), 139.
72
Matt Compton, “We Can't Wait: President Obama in Nevada,” The White
House, October 24, 2011. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.
gov/blog/2011/10/24/we-cant-wait-president-obama-nevada
73
Trump v. Hawaii, et al, No. 17–965 (1968).
74
Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Nr. 16-211
(2018)
75
Trump v. Sierra Club, et al, No. 19A60 (2019).
186
76
Fred Barbash and Deanna Paul, “The real reason the Trump administration
is constantly losing in court,” Washington Post, March 19, 2019,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-real-reason-
president-trump-is-constantly-losing-in-court/2019/03/19/f5ffb056-33a8-
11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html?utm_term=.b9a05b8f3e2a.
77
“In His Own Words: The President's Attacks on the Courts,” Brennan Center
for Justice, New York University, June 5, 2017, https://www.
brennancenter.org/analysis/his-own-words-presidents-attacks-courts.
78
Jacob Weindling, “Constitutional Crisis in America: President Trump Did
Not Implement Russian Sanctions Passed By Congress,” Paste, January 30,
2018, https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/01/constitutional-crisis-
in-america-president-trump-d.html.
79
Robert S. Mueller, III, “Report On The Investigation Into Russian
Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election,” U.S. Department of Justice,
Washington, DC, March 2019, https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf.
80
Jen Kirbyjen, “Pat Cipollone is Trump’s new White House counsel,” Vox,
October 18, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/10/17/17984010/pat-cipollone-
white-house-counsel-trump-don-mcgahn.
81
United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974).
82
Allyson Chiu, “Trump, questioned on child separation policy, insists, ‘I
brought the families together,’” Washington Post, June 20, 2018,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/21/trump-telemundo-
family-separation-policy-obama/.
83
Sophia Tesfaye, “Senate Republicans stand up to Trump? Hardly — they
capitulated to the right,” Salon, March, 16 3019, https://www.s
alon.com/2019/03/16/senate-republicans-stand-up-to-trump-hardly-they-
capitulated-to-the-right/.
84
Kenneth R. Mayer, “Executive Orders and Presidential Power,” The Journal
of Politics, 61{1999): 445-466
85
Toby Bolsen, James N. Druckman, and Fay Lomax Cook, “The Influence of
Partisan Motivated Reasoning on Public Opinion,” Political Behavior 36
(2014): 235-262.
86
Josh Pasek, Gaurav Sood, and Jon A. Krosnick, “Misinformed About the
Affordable Care Act?” Journal of Communication 60 (2015): 660-673; see
also, Matthew Levendusky, Clearer Cues, More Consistent Voters (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 111–131; Rune Slothuus and Claes H. de
Vreese, “Political parties, motivated reasoning, and issue framing effects,” The
Journal of Politics 72, no. 3 (2009): 630–645.
187
87
Dionne, Ornstein, and Mann, “How the GOP Prompted Decay of Norms.”
88
Quoted in Alice Dagnes, Politics on Demand: The Effects of 24-Hour News
on American Politics (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 111.
89
Brendan Nyhan, “The Politics of Health Care Reform,” Forum 8 (2010): 9,
www.bepress.com/forum/v018/iss1/art5.
90
Glenn Beck, Fox, February 11, 2009.
91
Post on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, August 7, 2009, www.
facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434&ref=mf.
92
Boehner quoted in Angie Drobnic Nyhan, “PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year:
‘Death Panels,’” PolitiFact, December 18, 2009, www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels. Foxx and Grassley
quoted in Nyhan, “Why the ‘Death Panel’ Myth,” 9.
93
“Health Care Reform Closely Followed, Much Discussed,” Pew Research
Center, August 2009, www.people-press.org/2009/08/20/health-care-reform-
closely-followed-much-discussed.
94
Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump has made
10,796 false or misleading claims over 869 days,” Washington Post, June 10,
2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/10/president-trump-
has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/?utm_term=.135c9cbe09d9.
95
Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Trump Considers
Closing Southern Border to Migrants,” New York Times, October 25, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/us/politics/trump-army-border-
mexico.html.
96
“Trump Remains Unpopular; Voters Prefer Obama on SCOTUS Pick,”
Public Policy Polling, 10, http://www.publicpolicypolling.
com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_120916.pdf.
97
Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
98
Quoted in George Will, “The Wisdom of Pat Moynihan,” Washington Post,
October 3, 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article
/2010/10/01/AR2010100105262.html.
99
Michael Wines, “Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New
Details on the Census Citizenship Question,” New York Times, May 30, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-question-
hofeller.html.
100
“States Expected to Gain or Lose Congressional Seats After the 2020
Census,” Insights, Aug 27, 2018, https://www.insightsassociation. org/article/
states-expected-gain-or-lose-congressional-seats-after-2020-census.
188
101
United States Department of Commerce v. New York, No. 18-966 (2019)
102
Jeffrey Young, “There Is No GOP Obamacare Replacement And There
Never Has Been,” HuffPost, March 27, 2019, https://www.huffpost.
com/entry/no-gop-obamacare-replacement_n_5c9bcff1e4b07c88662fd2d3?
guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&gu
ce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKg4tUGhPCAO6_UWRoCYAUGue3a0kkAVtUsIc
5alBWLoeY-j6w0-iCPFmDhBT4v9A5hXygAiG-XDjW_T8JcDVRKgB3L
ORv VnGN2hbf5J2u2LWVH0Y6Y6EId0roDx-vl8YhNXVW0OwhkV7-
Kvbe EHBwERL4NQYsoW-Dz-CJpQnjD6.
103
Exit polls, 2018.
104
Dionne, Ornstein, and Mann, “How the GOP Prompted the Decay of
Political Norms.”
105
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt,
1951), 474.

Chapter 7
_____________________________
1
“2018 American Institutional Confidence Poll,” Baker Center for Leadership
& Governance, Georgetown University, https://bakercenter.
georgetown.edu/about-the-center/.
2
E.E. Schattschneider, Party Government. (New York: Farrar and Rinehart,
1942), 1.
3
John H. Aldrich and John D. Griffen, “The One Thing You Need to Know
About Political Parties,” conference honoring Richard G. Niemi, University of
Rochester, November 3, 2007.
4
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: MacMillan &
Company, 1888), 119.
5
Lee Drutman, “Yes, the Republican Party has become pathological. But why?
Vox, September 22, 2017, https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/ 2017/9/22/
16345194/republican-party-pathological.
6
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), 58.
7
The argument in this section follows in part and owes to David Brooks’
argument in “Donald Trump Hates America,” New York Times, July 18, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/trump-america-election.html.
8
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1955).
9
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835-1840), ed. J.P Mayer
and A.P. Kerr (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1969).
189
10
Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation, 8e (New York: McGraw-Hill 2015).
11
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-
1925, revised ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
12
David Brooks, “Donald Trump Hates America,” New York Times, July 18,
2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/trump-america-election.
html
13
See Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
14
See “Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016,” Pew Research Center,
June 22, 2016, https://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-
political-animosity-in-2016/; John Sides, “Race, Religion, and Immigration in
2016: How the Debate over American Identity Shaped the Election and What
It Means for a Trump Presidency,” Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, June
2017, https://www.voterstudygroup.org/reports/2016-elections/race-religion-
immigration-2016.
15
Claire Brockway and Carroll Doherty, “Growing share of Republicans say
U.S. risks losing its identity if it is too open to foreigners,” Pew Research
Center. July 17, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/17/
growing-share-of-republicans-say-u-s-risks-losing-its-identity-if-it-is-too-
open-to-foreigners/.
16
Speech of Nancy Gibbs, Harvard Kennedy School, November 15, 2017.
17
Speech of Nancy Gibbs. Attributed to an interview of Newt Gingrich by the
Washington Post’s Michael Scherer.
18
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1922) 178-
179.
19
Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil
War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper, 2019).
20
Cited in Thomas E. Patterson, The American Democracy (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1990), 20.
21
James Madison, Federalist No. 10.
22
Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Ideology and Congress: A Political
Economic History of Roll Call Voting, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017).
23
Poole and Rosenthal, Ideology and Congress.
24
“Statistics and Historical Comparison,” govtrack.com, undated, downloaded
by author on August 6, 2019, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics;
Drew DeSilver, “A productivity scorecard for the 115th Congress,” Pew
Research Center, January 25, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2019/01/25/a-productivity-scorecard-for-115th-congress/ .
190
25
Charles P. Pierce, “Impeachment Is Not an Exercise in Futility,” Esquire,
July 25, 2019, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28509492/
impeachment-not-futile-senate-republicans/
It is the constitutional duty of Congress.
26
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (New York: Transaction Publishers,
1997).
27
Danielle Thomsen, Opting Out of Congress (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2017). Cited in Jack Fresquez, “Charlie Dent and the Death
of the Moderate in Congress,” The Politic, November 1, 2017.
http://thepolitic.org/charlie-dent-and-the-death-of-the-moderate-in-congress/
28
The Economist/YouGov poll, August 2018. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-
briefing-room/news/404587-poll-more-dems-approve-of-mccain-than-
republicans-after-hisl
29
Robert G. Boatright, Getting Primaried: The Changing Politics of
Congressional Primary Challenges (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2013),55.
30
See, for example, Alan I. Abramowitz, Brad Alexander, and Matthew
Gunning, “Incumbency, Redistricting, and the Decline of Competition in U.S.
House Elections,” Journal of Politics 68 (2006): 75–88.
31
Boatright, Getting Primaried; Darrell M. West, “Broken Politics,” Brookings
Institution, Issues in Governance Studies, No. 33, March 2010, 4.
32
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1971).
33
Mickey Edwards, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American
Political Movement Got Lost--And How It Can Find Its Way Back (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
34
E.J. Dionne, Jr., Norm Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann, “How the GOP
Prompted the Decay of Political Norms,” The Atlantic, September 19, 2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/gop-decay-of-political-
norms/540165/
35
Mandy Velez, “The surprising ways voter suppression particularly hurts
women,” Salon, January 14, 2018, https://www.salon.com/2018/01/13/the-
surprising-ways-voter-suppression-particularly-hurts-women_partner/;
Gabriella Novello, “Next GOP Voter Suppression Ploy Targets Students,”
Who.What.Why, July 1, 2019, https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/07/01/next-gop-
voter-suppression-ploy-targets-students/.

191
192
 INDEX

abortion, 11, 12, 16, 25, 39, 41, Benghazi, 128

42, 43, 47 Benkler, Yochai, 77, 137
Abramowitz, Alan, 29 Biden, Joe, 23, 132
Adelson, Sheldon, 148 "big tent" concept of political
Administrative Procedure Act parties, 17
(APA), 131 black Americans, 9, 10, 13, 15,
affirmative action, 10, 12, 13, 14, 33, 35, 36, 40, 47, 51 54, 93, 111,
16, 30, 46, 65 112, 117, 118, 144
Affordable Care Act (2010), 30, Black Pigeon Speaks, 71
64, 72, 125, 126, 135 Boehner, John, 97, 124, 135
Agnew, Spiro, 64 Bongino, Dan, 63
Ailes, Roger, 66 border wall, 47, 63, 131, 133, 134
Alabama, 8, 36, 42, 115, 117 border with Mexico, 27, 47, 61,
alt-right, 71, 80 63, 124, 131, 133, 134, 136
American Independent Party, 9 Boston, 118
An Inconvenient Truth, 68 Breitbart News, 70, 77, 80, 104
Anouilh, Jean, 63 Breitbart, Andrew, 70
Arendt, Hannah, 139 Brinkley, Alan, 143
Arizona, 9, 27, 47, 60 Brooks, David, 85
Armey, Dick, 92 Brown v. Board of Education, 8
Asian Americans, 44, 45, 46, 54, Brownback, Sam, 102
60, 81, 118 Bryce, James, 141
Atwater, Lee, 17 Buckley, William, 8
Automatic Voter Registration Budget and Impoundment Act
(AVR), 119 (1996), 134
budget deficit, 87, 93, 96, 98, 99,
Baby Boomers, 49, 50, 57 100, 102
Baldwin, Stanley, 83 budget surplus, 93, 94
bank bailout, 24, 103 Burke, Edmund, 110
Bannon, Steve, 104 Bush tax cuts, 94, 95, 96, 97, 103
Barry Goldwater, 6, 9 Bush, George H.W., 17, 44, 65,
Beck, Glenn, 69, 70, 76, 85, 135 92, 103
193
Bush, George W., 19, 24, 46, 61, Collins, Susan, 126
88, 94, 100, 103, 130 Colorado, 60, 130
Bush, Jeb, 33, 75, 76 confirmation bias, 84
busing issue, 10, 11, 13, 14 Congress, hollowing of center 24
congressional oversight, 127
California, 46, 59, 60, 90, 118, conservatism, as political
138 philosophy, 110
Cantor, Eric 62, 75, 123 conservative media, 64, 69, 74,
Carlson, Tucker, 70 77, 79, 82
Carter, Jimmy, 12, 42, 89, 100 Conservative Political Action
Catholics, 35, 38, 47, 107 Conference, 74
Central Park Jogger case, 28 conspiracy theories, 70, 71, 73,
Cernovich, Mike, 80 150
Christian Right, 12 Constitution, design of, 146
Christianity Today, 11, 12, 38 Cook Political Report, 32
Citizens United, 106 Coons, Chris, 26
citizenship question on 2020 Copenhagen climate change
census, 137 conference, 68
Civil Rights Act (1964), 8, 9, 12, Coulter, Ann, 63, 80
14, 39, 109, 118 Council of Economic Advisors,
civil rights, 11, 12, 30, 39, 40, 146 98
civil unions, 52, 53 creationism, 33
Civil War, 5, 6, 33, 40, 60, 115,
143 Daily Caller, 70, 80
class awareness, 107, 108 death panels, 72, 84, 135
Climate change, 51, 67, 68, 72, 74 Declaration of Independence, 142
Clinton, Bill, 15, 18, 53, 65, 70, demand-side policy, 86, 89, 96
73, 74, 92 Democratic Party
Clinton, Chelsea, 66 and first-time voters, 48
Clinton, Hillary, 66, 72, 73, 76, party of little man, 99
128 party of prosperity, 99
CNN, 67, 75, 163 and "wasted votes, 89
cognitive dissonance theory, 85 demographic trap, 45, 60, 61, 148
Colbert Report, 67 Dole, Robert, 18, 43
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3 Dreamers, 26, 47, 62, 75
college-educated voters, 40, 41, Drew, Elizabeth, 123
42, 56 Drudge Report, 70
Collins, Chris, 99 Dukakis, Michael, 17
194
Economic Opportunity Act evangelical Christians, 11, 12, 16,
(1964), 14 29, 32, 36, 37, 38, 53, 54
economic stimulus package executive orders, 129, 134
(2009), 23
Efron, Edith, 64 Facebook, 70, 82
Ehrlichman, John, 10 Fair Housing Act (1968), 10, 12
Eisenhower, Dwight, 2, 62 fairness doctrine, 65, 69
elections fake news, 78
1954, 23 Falwell, Jerry, 11
1958, 48 familiarity as guide, 84
1970, 8 Faris, Robert, 77, 137
1980, 12 Fawcett, Percy, 1, 2
1990, 5, 9, 10 Federalist Party, 61
1992, 92 Federalist Society, 127
1994, 18, 66 Festinger, Leon, 85
1996, 18 Fifteenth Amendment, 14
1998, 18 filibuster, 2, 9, 61, 126, 127, 128
2000, 37 Flake, Jeff, 27
2004, 20, 46, 48, 51 Florida, 33, 60, 113, 117, 122,
2008, 20, 96, 123 130
2010, 23, 24, 69, 83, 97 forbearance, 110, 145
2012, 62, 75, 80 foreign meddling in U.S.
2014, 38, 56 elections, 146
2016, 30, 36, 37, 43, 40, 51, 54, Fox News, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70,
57, 59, 72, 73, 76, 81, 115, 118, 74, 77, 84, 102, 128
125, 127, 132, 137, 146 146 Fox viewers, 68, 69
2018, 32, 38, 42, 44, 45, 47, 55, Foxx, Virginia, 135
56, 57, 59, 81, 101, 108, 119, framers of Constitution, 3, 82,
136, 138, 139 122, 126, 145, 147
2032, 54, 55, 57 Franklin, Benjamin, 54
Electoral College, 10, 29, 136 free trade agreements, 103
Emmett, Daniel Decatur, 5 Friess, Foster, 70
Epstein, Jeffrey, 74
establishment Republicans, 13, Garland, Merrick, 125
23, 67, 77, 79, 88, 103, 104 Gateway Pundit, 70
estate tax, 98 gays, 36, 51, 52, 53

195
Gen Xers, 49, 50 hoax (climate change theory), 68,
gender gap, 42, 43, 44 72, 74
Generation Z, 49, 57 Hofeller, Thomas, 137
Georgia, 18, 42, 60, 112, 116 Hot Air, 70
Georgia's exact match system, hot-button issues, 76, 126
116 House Republicans, 6, 64, 82, 83,
gerrymandering, 59, 120, 122, 92, 97, 98, 123, 124, 126, 128
129, 150 housing market, 96
Gilens, Martin, 106 Humphrey, Hubert, 9, 39
Gingrich, Newt, 18, 19, 92, 122,
123, 139, 144, 148 Idaho, 59
Ginsberg, Ruth Bader, 125 ideological overlap in Congress,
Gladstone, William, 145 24
global warming, see climate ideological trap, 5, 7, 34
change Illegal voting, 115
Goldwater, Barry, 9, 16, 20 immigration reform, 28, 61, 62,
Gore, Al, 68, 92 75, 124
Gorsuch, Neil, 127 impeachment, 18, 38, 132
Graham, Franklin, 29 income gap, 91, 93, 98
Graham, Lindsey, 99 independents, 31, 32, 81, 101, 102
grandfather clause, 111, 117 Indiana, 26, 112, 113
Grassley, Charles, 135 InfoWars, 70, 76
Great Depression, 16, 20, 48, 88, Ingraham, Laura, 70, 75
99, 107, 122, 123 internet, 70, 76, 93
Great Society, 100 Iowa, 34, 59, 76, 135
Iraq War, 20, 68, 85
Hannity, Sean, 63, 68, 69, 70, 77,
80, 84 Jackson, Andrew, 130
Hastert Rule, 123, 124 Jefferson, Thomas, 145
Hastert, Dennis, 123 Jim Crow laws, 6, 109, 112, 143
health care reform bill, see John Birch Society, 74
Affordable Care Act Johnson, Lyndon, 9, 14, 87, 100,
Hetherington, Marc, 126 136
higher-income Republicans, 107, Jones, Alex, 70, 76
108
Hispanic Americans, 36, 46, 47, Kagan, Elena, 120
54, 60, 75, 81, 93, 118, 144 Kahneman, Daniel, 84

196
Kansas Republicans, 102 Luntz, Frank, 67
Kansas, 102, 116, 122 Maine, 59, 126
Kavanaugh, Brett, 44 mainline Protestants, 38
Kelly, Megyn, 69 Malthus, Thomas, 35
Kevin Phillips, 10 Mann, Thomas, 123
Keynes, John Maynard, 89 marketplace Republicans, 3, 16,
Keynesian economics, see 24, 40, 104, 105, 106
demand-side economics Massachusetts, 17, 59
King, Anthony, 26 Mayer, Fritz, 68
Kobach, Kris, 103 McCain, John, 19, 26, 27, 29, 75,
Koch brothers, 148 76, 79, 125, 134, 147
Kyoto Protocol, 67 McCarthy, Kevin, 123, 128
McCaskill, Claire 30
Ladd, Everett Carll, 2, McCaughey, Betsy, 135
Laffer Curve, 90 McConnell, Mitch, 96, 97, 98,
Laffer, Arthur, 90 119, 123, 125, 127, 147
Latham, Tom, 82 McGhan, Don, 132
Latinos, see Hispanic Americans media trap, 81, 84
LBGT, 53 Mercer, Robert, 70
Lee, Frances, 126 Michel, Robert, 18
Lehman Brothers, 96 Michigan, 59
lesbians, 36, 51, 53 middle class, 11, 94, 102, 101,
Levin, Mark, 70, 76, 79 104, 105
Levitsky, Steven, 110 middle-income Americans 98
Lewinsky, Monica, 70 Mill, John Stuart, 3, 4, 109, 142,
LGBT, 51, 52, 53 163
liberals, 27, 65, 67, 72, 100 Millennials, 49, 50, 51, 57
Limbaugh, Rush 45, 63, 64, 65, minority groups, 2, 13, 15, 25, 35,
66, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 38, 40, 46, 35, 51, 61, 62, 75, 80,
79, 80, 81, 84 107, 112, 113, 117, 119, 137, 139,
Lincoln, Abraham, 143 141, 151
literacy tests, 111, 118 Mississippi, 8, 13, 111, 115
Lott, Trent, 82 Mnuchin, Steve, 98
Louisiana, 8, 42, 137 moderate Republicans, 81
lower-income Republicans, 107, moderate Republicans, 10, 17, 18,
108 26, 92, 148
Lugar, Richard, 26 Montana, 137

197
Moore, Roy, 36 O’Reilly, Bill, 67
moral trap, 118 Obama, Barack, 23, 28, 72, 75,
Motor Voter Act, 119 77, 85, 96, 97, 100, 104, 123, 125,
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 137 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133,
Mueller investigation, 132 135
Mueller, Robert, 132 Obamacare, 76, 84, 107, 138
Murdoch, Rupert, 66 Office of Technology
Muslim entry ban, 130 Assessment, 139
Muslims, 36, 106, 130, 144 Ohio, 42, 59, 117
mutual tolerance, 110 Oregon, 119
Ornstein, Norman, 123
national debt, 87, 91, 93, 94, 96, Orwell, George, 141
97, 98, 99, 100 Ozar, Nahiar, 87
Native Americans, 111, 117
Nebraska, 122 Page, Benjamin, 106
Neshoba County Fair, 13 Palin, Sarah, 135
Nevada, 60 parties and democracy 141
New Deal, 7, 39, 40, 62, 89, 99, party images, 99
100, 129, 163 party polarization, 26
New Hampshire, 19, 34, 59 Patel, Neil, 70
New Mexico, 60 Pence, Mike, 125
New York Times, 66, 85, 115, 163 Pennsylvania, 112, 113
New York, 28, 30, 66, 85, 115, pizza shop conspiracy theory, 73
135, 138, 163 Pledge for America, 83
Nixon, Richard, 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, pluralistic ignorance, 74
15, 17, 27, 64, 65, 89, 106, 109, political center, 27, 32, 82, 147
115, 133, 144 political parties as creatures of
Nobel Prize economists, 94 compromise, 35
non-college educated voters, 41, poll tax, 8, 112, 118
54, 56 press, 64, 65, 68, 78, 79, 83, 97
norms, 3, 110, 126, 128, 139, 144, primary elections, 24, 26, 33, 75,
150, 151 77, 111, 133, 148
North American Free Trade propaganda, 63, 64
Agreement (NAFTA), 103
North Carolina, 60, 110, 115, 117, racial busing, 10, 11, 12, 106
133, 163 Rawls, John, 149
North Dakota, 111, 117 Reagan administration, 13

198
Reagan, Ronald, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 20, 23, 28, 37, 39, 42, 43,
46, 52, 65, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92,
93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102, 103
Red State News, 70
RedState, 70
religion, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 26,
34, 37, 40, 107, 130, 163
religious right, see Christian Right
religiously unaffiliated, 38, 54
Republican National Committee
(RNC), 62, 75, 76, 80, 82, 101
Republican Party
and alternative realities, 64, 85,
87, 94, 106
appointment of conservative
judges, 30
base strategy, 20
congressional Republicans, 7,
8, 18, 19, 27, 30, 63, 67, 80,
92, 101, 125, 126, 128, 133
conservative heritage, 110,
144, 145 148
demographic trap, 45, 60, 61,
148
diehard voters, 61, 62, 148
dirty tricks, 33, 111, 119, 149
disinformation, 74, 85, 134,
137
establishment Republicans, 13,
23, 67, 77, 79, 88, 103
as fiscally responsible party,
87, 100, 101
geographical advantage of, 59
and government shutdowns,
18, 64, 70, 80, 83, 124
and gerrymandering, 59, 120,
122, 129, 150
199
and gridlock in Congress 18,
123, 146
and health care reform, 135
and identity politics, 144
ideological trap,
and large donors, 11, 70, 99,
106
lawmakers, 19, 26, 27, 30, 47,
62, 64, 66, 70, 75, 76, 83, 94,
97, 102, 106, 107, 109, 112,
123, 126, 129, 133, 146, 147
and lying, 27, 28, 78, 85, 120,
134, 135, 137, 150
moderate wing of, 6, 62
moral trap,
party base, 20, 24, 27, 29, 63,
74, 130, 136, 150
party establishment, 23 24, 64,
77, 88, 103, 104
party of fiscal discipline, 88
party of the middle class, 3,
101
party of the rich, 101
primary election challengers,
26, 103, 133, 148
and race card, 8, 19, 28
as a reactionary party, 34, 62,
144, 148, 150
rightward shift of, 20, 25
and scapegoating, 71, 107
southern strategy of, 7, 10, 11,
27, 109
and states' rights, 8, 13, 16
strategy of division, 61
tax cuts for wealthy, 87, 88,
97, 105
and white voters, 2, 35, 54,
119, 148
Republican-appointed Supreme Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur 3, 147,
Court justices, 94 163
Reverse discrimination, 13 school prayer, 12
Rich, Seth, 73 Senate Republicans, 96, 124, 125,
right to life, 11 127, 138
right-wing media, 45, 63, 64, 67, seniority rule, 6, 18
69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, separating children at border, 133
78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 103, September 11 terrorist attacks 71
137, 148 Sessions, Jeff, 132
right-wing talk shows, 68, 74, 77, Shelby County v. Holder, 114
78 Shira, Ilan, 71
Roberts, Hal, 77, 137 Silent Generation, 49, 50, 57
Roberts, John, 120, 131, 138 Simpson-Mazzoli Act, 46
Robertson, Pat, 12 Skocpol, Theda, 69
Robinson, Jackie, 9 smart idiot effect, 74
Romney, Mitt. 75 social contract, 149, 150
Roosevelt, Franklin, 7, 23, 88, Solid South, 5
129 South Carolina, 8, 19, 34, 117
Roosevelt, Theodore 33, 109, 143 South, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 19,
Ross, Wilbur 137, 138 29, 32, 34, 38, 59, 111, 115, 117,
Rossiter, Clinton, 35 143, 149, 163
Rove, Karl, 20 southern Democrats, 6, 8, 109,
Rumsfeld, Donald, 90 116, 143
Russian election meddling, 127, southern strategy, 7, 10, 11, 27,
132 109
Ryan, Paul, 98, 123 southern whites, 8, 11
SpeechNow, 106
same-sex marriage, 38, 41, 47, 51, States’ Rights Democratic Party, 8
53 states’ rights, 8, 13, 16
Sanchez, Julian, 79 Steele, Michael, 75
Sandy Hook school shooting, 71, Steinbeck, John, 1
73 Stiglitz, Joseph, 98
Santelli, Rick, 69 Stockman, David, 90
Savage, Michael, 70, 103 supply-side economics, 89, 90, 94

Scalia, Antonin, 125 Supreme Court, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14,

Schattschneider, E.E., 141 44, 53, 94, 113, 114, 116, 117,

200
119, 120, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131,
133, 134, 138, 150
swine flu pandemic, 85
talk shows, 65, 67, 70, 71, 75, 79
Tax Cut and Jobs Act (2017), 98,
99, 101, 103
tax cuts for wealthy, 87, 88, 97,
105
Tea Party, 23, 24, 26, 69, 75, 83,
103, 104, 105, 144, 148
tech bubble, 93
Texas, 10, 60, 115, 117
Thurmond, Strom, 8, 9, 10, 19
Tillis, Thom, 133
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 142
top 1 percent, 60, 91, 93, 95, 98,
99
Trans Pacific Partnership, 104
trickle-down economics, 90
Troubled Assets Relief Program,
96
Truman, Harry, 87
Trump, Donald 27, 28, 29, 30, 31,
32, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 56,
61, 63, 64, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80,
88, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105,
106, 119, 127, 129-134, 136-140,
144, 148, 150
Twenty-Fourth Amendment, 118
undocumented immigrants, 26,
47, 61, 76, 124, 129, 136
Vermont, 119
Vietnam War, 136
vital center, 3, 147
201
voter fraud, 112, 115, 116, 117,
136
voter ID laws, 3, 40, 61, 112, 113,
114, 115, 116, 117, 141, 149
voter suppression, 40, 115
Voting Rights Act (VRA), 12, 14,
39, 111, 114, 116, 137
preclearance requirement of,
115, 116
Walker, Scott, 110
Wall Street Journal, 77, 103, 135
Wallace, George, 8, 9, 28, 163
Ward, Kelli 27
Watergate, 2, 16, 133
wealthy Americans, 3, 24, 39, 88,
89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 102, 103,
105, 106, 144, 145
weaponize the judiciary, 127
Webster, Steven 29
wedge issues, 35, 36, 40, 54, 145
Weekly Standard, 77, 78
welfare queens, 15, 65
welfare spending, 14, 15, 92
Whig Party, 33, 61
white Americans, 10, 15, 35, 36,
39, 41, 45, 54, 56, 59, 105, 106,
111, 117
white evangelical Protestants, 36,
38
White House Office of
Communication 65
white nationalism, 71, 78
white voters, 2, 35, 54, 119, 148
white working-class voters, 15, 39
whites-only primaries, 111, 117
Wikileaks, 73
Williamson, Vanessa, 69 Works Progress Administration,
Willie Horton ad, 17 89
Wilson, Pete 46, 118 Wyoming, 59
Wilson, Woodrow, 143
Wisconsin, 59, 110, 112, 113, 120 young adults, 2, 37, 48, 49, 50,
wisdom of crowds, 74 51, 53, 75, 80, 112, 148
woman’s right to choose, 11, 39 young voters, 32, 49
women, 11, 35, 42, 43, 44, 56, 62, YouTube, 70
71, 75, 80, 104, 136, 144, 151
working-class whites, 15, 16, 39, Ziblatt, Daniel, 110
40, 88, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107,
108

202
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