Opinion: The origin of our democracy crisis

A voter checks in at Suffield Middle School on primary election day, Aug. 9, 2022, in Suffield, Conn.

A voter checks in at Suffield Middle School on primary election day, Aug. 9, 2022, in Suffield, Conn. Jessica Hill / AP file

By PAUL LEVY

Published: 10-04-2024 6:00 AM

Paul Levy lives in Concord.

For 30 years after WWII, a strong bipartisan majority addressed embedded racism and economic insecurity by adopting major civil rights and social welfare laws. Votes on civil rights were nearly unanimous except for the nay votes of almost all congressmen from the 11 former Confederate states. Also, both Republicans and Democrats adopted key executive and court initiatives: Democrat Truman integrated the military, Republican Warren shaped a unanimous Court in Brown, and Republican Nixon established racial quotas for college admissions and big business hirings.

Large majorities, sometimes nearly unanimous but always with support of most Democrats and over half of Republicans, adopted such social welfare programs as Medicare, Medicaid, subsidized housing, lower and higher education acts, huge expansions in coverage and benefits of social security and the minimum wage, and such other laws as the Gun Control Act of 1968 and air, water, and environmental protection laws.

Four major groups organized backlashes to these bipartisan actions. White supremacists in the South launched a massive resistance campaign against school integration in the 1950s (the Southern Manifesto; 3,500 private, segregated academies and vouchers); and, in the 60s and 70s, Northerners followed with anti-busing campaigns. In the 1970s, Christian Fundamentalists challenged “secular humanism” (developments such as racial integration, feminist and LBGTQ advances, and the prohibition of school prayer), and soon many ministers became political. In a 1979 coup, extremists took over the Southern Baptist Convention (America’s second largest denomination next to Catholics), and that year the first Fundamentalist political movement, the Moral Majority, was launched.

Free-market enthusiasts also became active in the 1970s. The 1971 Powell Memo launched a massive effort to create free-market think tanks and many other entities to promote unfettered markets and oppose most government taxation, regulation, and redistribution. Second Amendment absolutists became much more political and extreme in the 1970s led by the Cincinnati Revolt at the NRA’s 1977 annual meeting.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan specifically and successfully wooed these four backlashes and they became the base of the GOP. He campaigned in the South on states’ rights rather than civil rights. He dramatically told a gathering of 15,000 Christian Fundamentalists, “I support you.” In his 1976 campaign for the GOP nomination, he wrote an article for Guns and Ammo Magazine in which he praised absolute gun rights including for purposes of insurrection. And, in his first term as president, he pursued most of the extreme proposals of the Heritage Foundation in its first Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025 is the ninth in the mandate series).

Since these backlashes, base group infrastructures have grown immensely in size and finances. Today, for example, there are several hundred free-market think tanks; thousands of issue-advocacy groups; dozens of PACs; tens of thousands of activist churches and ministers politicking from their pulpits; right-wing media like Fox; 3,000 Christian radio stations and major media networks like Trinity Broadcasting with 18,000 TV and cable affiliates often carrying right-wing news/talk shows; many conservative networks such as ALEC (conservative legislators), the Federalist Society (conservative lawyers), and the Council for National Policy which includes about 400 top leaders in the GOP and base groups; and many huge donor-funds and donors such as Barry Said who just gave Leonard Leo $1.6 billion to increase appointments of conservative judges, oppose “woke” companies, and slow climate change initiatives.

In 1984, John Saloma wrote Ominous Politics, the first book to identify the backlash groups and their already extensive infrastructures which he called “the labyrinth.” In his twenties, Saloma had been an ardent Republican. Concerned with the rise of Goldwater extremism, he founded the GOP’s Ripon Society in 1964. Then, as an MIT political science professor, he closely followed GOP developments and was led to abandon his party and write Ominous Politics.

The eminent historian, Henry Steele Commager, wrote the book’s introduction and explained the dangers he and Saloma saw. They saw supremacists, resisting equal power-sharing, a pillar of democracy, and promoting divisiveness. They saw ideologues undermining “pragmatism,” a shorthand for the democratic policymaking process of openly exploring issues, deliberating, shaping workable solutions, and compromising. And, though generally bothered by big money in politics, they were particularly fearful of big money feeding an immense, right-wing infrastructure that intensifies supremacy and ideology.

Saloma’s book warned of the democracy crisis we are witnessing. All major, nonpartisan assessors of democracy (Freedom House (U.S.), IDEA (Sweden), Economist Magazine’s Economic Intelligence Unit (Britain) report the dramatic decline in American democracy over the past decade, and they point primarily to examples of growing division and gridlock largely fomented by the GOP and its base.

America’s two-party democracy needs two, strong, national, pro-democracy parties. Human proclivities being what they are, if one party leans left and the other right, most of us will find a political home or toggle between the two. Historically, the GOP served as this right-leaning party, but it has been hijacked by extreme and divisive ideological beliefs and leaders. I hope democracy-loving conservatives use this national election to begin to retrieve their party.