With ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the founders launched our American democracy. It did not satisfy the ideal of the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal," but it set the course for our country. For about a decade, following the Civil War and passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Reconstruction era brought us nearer to a multiracial democracy (at least for men; women gained the right to vote with passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920). Reconstruction was short-lived, coming to an end by 1877, replaced in fits and starts by nearly a century of Jim Crow in the Southern states (and restricted rights for black residents of the North as well).
With passage of the Civil Rights Act (in 1964) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the United States approached nearer the ideal of a multiracial democracy. These were bipartisan achievements. The Republican Party, founded in the mid-19th century to oppose slavery (and a Democratic Party committed to white supremacy), endorsed this expansion of democracy.
In fact, as noted in Chapter 4 of Levitsky and Ziblatt's Tyranny of the Minority, which describes how and why the contemporary Republican Party abandoned democracy, a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans, than Congressional Democrats, supported the 1964 and 1965 acts. This stance was consistent with the principles of the party of Lincoln (though it was discordant with Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign).
But with passage of these groundbreaking laws, the two political parties began to shift their allegiances (as Lyndon Johnson foresaw). Over the next several decades, the Solid South shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans, who began actively courting white Southerners with their traditional views of race and culture -- views which came to envelop the national GOP.
The story Levitsky and Ziblatt tell is a familiar one; nonetheless, it is shocking. While I am familiar with the story writ large, and much of the detail they present, the matter of fact presentation hit me with a start about two-thirds of the way through the chapter.
Consider a single paragraph, in the midst of the account of Trump's denying his November 2020 defeat:
But it wasn’t just Trump who refused to accept defeat; it was the bulk of the Republican Party. For weeks after the election, most GOP politicians refused to publicly recognize Biden’s victory. As of December 16, 2021 [sic], only twenty-five Republican members of Congress had done so. The Republican Accountability Project evaluated the public statements of all 261 Republican members of Congress, asking whether they expressed doubt about the legitimacy of the election. A striking 224 of 261 (or 86 percent) of them had. And on January 6, nearly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against certification of the results.
[The correct date: December 16, 2020, weeks after the November 3 election.]
There is nothing new in this paragraph. I follow American politics closely. I watched this drama play out in real time. Republicans have moved step by step toward accommodation of Trump, of his hateful rhetoric, and even of his lies. This has been obvious for all to see.
But for someone who grew up in this country, who became interested in politics as a teenager when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were passed into law, and even someone who has watched with consternation and disdain the transformation of the Republican Party over the past six decades, it is astonishing to recognize where the GOP has landed. Not just nutty backbenchers or Fox News trolls, but "the bulk of the party." Nearly every leader who remains in the party is on board. Most of those who have resisted the party's authoritarian direction have been drummed out of it.
For several years I have often said of Republican leaders (below the ultimate leader, Donald Trump), "There is never a bridge too far." No matter how outrageous Trump's conduct, how reprehensible, transgressive, undemocratic, even antithetical to American interests -- No matter: Whatever they say (or, often, decline to say) initially, finally, when Trump doesn't back down and the conservative media universe backs him up, dissent absolutely evaporates.
The headline in Ramesh Ponnuru's Washington Post column declares the 'big lie' the winner of the 2024 GOP primary. Ponnuru doesn't use that term, but his meaning is clear. He condemns Republican leaders for not squelching that falsehood before a majority of Republican primary voters came to believe it. "The elected Republicans who didn’t want Trump to be the nominee have allowed his narrative about 2020 to go unchallenged for the past three years. Or they have abetted it, letting sane complaints about voting procedures and media coverage cover for Trump’s fantasies about Venezuelan interference with voting machines and the like."
They know it's a lie. They know Trump is a liar. (They often wish he weren't their party's leader.) But -- publicly, when push comes to shove -- there is never a bridge too far. So we find ourselves with a political party that has turned election denialism into a campaign plank.
More shockingly, they are willing to go along with the next step: resorting to violence when they lose. They reveal this in another big lie: that the violent clash at the nation's Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not what we all witnessed. It was, instead, a peaceful protest, no more eventful than a "normal tourist visit." That lie is a subterfuge, an excuse for violence when the party loses a democratic election.