Richardson: How Conservatives Abandoned Principle to Put Party and Power Above Country

Connecting the dots of right-wing extremism, from anti-FDR and pro-KKK zealots, through Reagan and Gingrich, to Trump and MAGA. Racism and sexism have infected its bloodstream throughout.

By Heather Cox Richardson /Letters from an American

“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” President Donald Trump wrote last week on social media.

He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump a few days later, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”

It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.

It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.

The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.

It was not always this way.

Repealing FDR. After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war.

Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.

As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him. After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.”

Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.

Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands.

They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.

Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government.

They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters.

Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.

Simmering racism and sexism. Ronald Reagan tapped into the Movement Conservatives in 1964, when he backed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency.

When he ran for the presidency in 1980, his promises focused on economic freedom, but the racism and sexism in the radical faction was always present; he deliberately appealed to racists with a promise to defend states’ rights and to the sexists trying to combat the women’s liberation movement with an appeal to religious traditionalists.

Reagan promised to put businessmen in the driver’s seat, but he depended on the votes of racists and sexists to win the White House.

Reagan’s tax cuts tripled the federal debt and left his successor, George H.W. Bush, facing a $171 billion deficit in 1990, along with the threat of automatic cuts of 40% across the board if the deficit wasn’t reduced.

Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes. Movement Conservatives signed on in private, but in public they attacked the deal as a betrayal of Reaganism and common people. Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its traditional base: those who believed in an active government. He accused anyone who stood against him of being a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.”

In 1994, Gingrich managed to flip the House of Representatives to the Republicans for the first time since 1954, and he set out to reshape the Republican Party into an instrument for destroying the modern government.

That effort would require destroying the Democratic Party by referring to its members as “corrupt,” “intolerant,” “sick,” “traitors”; by launching investigations of what he insisted—without evidence—was “voter fraud,” and by investigating and then impeaching Democratic president Bill Clinton.

By the end of the 1990s, leading Republicans no longer saw party differences as differences of policy. Party trumped country because they believed they were in a fight for the soul of America, and they were on the side of the angels.

Phony voter fraud purges. If keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified.

Republicans began to talk of purifying the voter rolls in the 1990s, and in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that purged from the system as many as 100,000 Black voters presumed to be Democrats.

This purge paid off in 2000, when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College. The contest came down to Florida, where a confusing ballot had siphoned about 10,000 votes intended for Gore off to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.

A hand recount had reduced Republican candidate George W. Bush’s lead from 1,784 to 537 when Republican operatives attacked the recount venue in Miami-Dade County to stop the recount, claiming there was “voter fraud.” The Supreme Court—led by five Republican-appointed justices—stepped in to give the victory to Bush.

When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans declared war.

On the night of Obama’s inauguration, Republican senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican leaders agreed over dinner to oppose anything that the new president proposed, regardless of whether they agreed with it.

“For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,” Republican senators told incoming vice president Joe Biden.

They also worked to make it easier for Republicans to win. In 2010 the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance laws to permit unlimited corporate and other outside money to flow into elections.

At the same time, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project, to take over statehouses before the redistricting after the 2010 census.

They won the statehouses of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Three years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by ending the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting preclear changes to their voting rules with the Department of Justice. Republican-dominated state legislatures immediately began to restrict voting rights.

Doubling down on racism. But the Republican economic program of slashing regulations and taxes was never popular, and the Republicans stayed in power by doubling down on the racism and sexism of their voting base.

After 1987, talk radio fed the rhetoric that racial minorities and women were ushering socialism into the United States, and after 1994 the Fox News Channel amplified it.

In 2016, Donald Trump rode to the White House by playing directly to that racism and sexism and asserting that white men should dominate women and people of color.

Establishment leaders backed him for the tax cuts he promised, but they no longer called the shots. The racist and sexist MAGA base did.

Trump and his loyalists took the idea that they had a right to rule to its logical extreme. When voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to the presidency, they tried to overturn that election with violence.

Now, back in office, Trump is dismantling the government as Movement Conservatives have wanted for decades.

But he has abandoned the small-government principles Movement Conservatives claimed to champion and is using state power to terrorize citizens. He has abandoned the due process of the law and states’ rights and is working to rig the system permanently in his favor.

And now he has abandoned the free-market principles around which the Movement Conservatives organized in the first place.

From the beginning, “Movement Conservatism” was anything but conservative.

Its supporters embraced the radical goal of dismantling a practical system that stabilized the country after the Great Depression and a devastating world war, a system that was based in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But now they are embracing something altogether different.

Bottom line. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo a few days ago explained on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.

Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930;s fascism.”

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