Current U.S. Politics and the Rise of Hitler, Part 3: When Civil Societies Aren’t Civil
Between the publication of Part 1 of this series and now, new public information about what the Republican Party is up to has hit the news. The New York Times had this headline: “Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025.” The title is very understated. This is a quote from it.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
That is a lot of words used to describe a dictatorship. Unfortunately, a look at the history of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the trajectory of our American history makes this turn of events painfully logical. In fact, for a portion of Republican donors, politicians, and operatives, it is arguable that this has been the goal for decades.
Some will immediately cry that what Trump is calling for is all on him — not on the Republican party. Yet, as noted by the history and public affairs professor, Julian Zelizer, the GOP’s push to consolidate presidential power has been going on since Nixon. What has been the unexpected twist for their goals has been Donald Trump. It’s similar to how the monarchists in Weimar thought that when Hitler came along they could use him for their agenda without him causing them a problem. As we know, they were wrong about that, just as today’s Republican elites and politicians have been wrong about Trump.
A Quick Refresher on Weimar’s Elite Class
Part two of this series explained the role of Weimar’s elites and political parties in depth. Here is a short version of the elites' role in Hitler’s rise to power.
1. The conservative elite were the old ruling class and new business class in Weimar Germany. (…) They believed that a return to authoritarian rule was the only stable future for Germany which would protect their power and money.
2. (…) As Hitler controlled the masses’ support for the political right, the conservative elite believed that they could use Hitler and his popular support to ‘democratically’ take power. Once in power, Hitler could destroy the political left. Destroying the political left would help to remove the majority of political opponents of the right-wing conservative elite.
3. Once Hitler had removed the left-wing socialist opposition and destroyed the Weimar Republic, the conservative elite thought they would be able to replace Hitler and appoint a leader of their choice
The above points are from the Wiener Holocaust Library’s resource site: The Holocaust Explained.
Now, try replacing “Weimar Germany” and “Germany” with “America,” “Hitler” with “Trump,” and “The Weimar Republic” with “American Democracy." That result will give you exactly what’s been going on in the U.S. with the Republican party — only the shift has been over decades instead of years. How has America come to this? It was with the use of Conservative groups, aka civil societies.
What is a “Civil Society”?
Civil: of, relating to, or involving the general public, their activities, needs, or ways, or civic affairs as distinguished from special (such as military or religious) affairs. — Merriam-Webster Dictionary
When people complain about America becoming less of a civil society, they usually talk about things like a lack of manners, the inability to have public disagreements without getting nasty, and the loss of common decency. This would be the first part of the definition. In the second meaning, the word civil is connected to the word “civic.” Thus, having a civil society isn’t only about the behavior of individuals in a public space. It is the distinction of our public space being separate from private spheres of influence such as religions, the military, or private businesses.
This would be how to use the second part of the definition in a sentence. “Contrary to the teaching of Christian Nationalists, America was founded to be a civil society, not a Christian one.” (Hence the importance of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause.)
Both of these are correct usage, but there is another one. It is when “civil society” is applied to organizations.
Civil society refers to a wide variety of communities and groups such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), labor unions, indigenous groups, charitable organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, and foundations that function outside of government to provide support and advocacy for certain people or issues in society.
Sometimes called the “third sector” to differentiate it from the public sector — which includes the government and its branches — and the private sector — which includes businesses and corporations — social society has the power to influence the actions of elected policymakers and businesses. (Thoughtco.)
It is this use that is meant when discussing the downfall of Weimar and the deterioration of American Democracy.
When Civil Societies Aren’t Civil
Civil societies do a lot of good in the world and are an integral part of democracy — but they can also become problematic. This happens when they stray from their role as the “third sector.” When a civil society loses its separation from business, government, and religion, it becomes a point of social division and destruction instead of one for social support.
The role civil societies can play in weakening democracy is something Sheri Berman, a professor of Political Science at Barnard College, first wrote about in her 1997 article, Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic, which she has since revisited. Her work shows yet another link in the connection between the collapse of Weimar and America’s current political state.
(…) German civil society contributed to the Nazis’ (NSDAP) success not only by helping undermine the social cohesion and unity necessary to make democracy work. Civil society also directly aided the NSDAP by providing the foundation upon which the organizational infrastructure and electoral coalition necessary for enabling the party to come to power could be built.(emphasis added)
Conservatives didn’t need civil societies to help undermine social cohesion. They were able to use cable television — which brought us Fox News. When social media came along the fracturing became even more acute. The way the American Conservative elite’s use of civil societies mirrors what occurred in Weimar is the bolded portion of the quote. Without the decades of work by Conservative civil societies, there would be neither a President Trump nor the fascist MAGA movement we are currently dealing with.
The History of the American Conservatives’ Dream of Plutocracy
Before getting into the GOP’s civil societies, it’s essential to be clear that these organizations that create division do so by the choices made by their creators. The direction they take may not reflect the thoughts of every GOP member. Many have been nothing but pawns in a political game being played by a select few. This is true for both Weimar then and America now. In both cases, those who created the damaging civil societies did not have benign intentions. They wanted to end democratic rule.
The desire of the GOP’s elite to make America a democratic republic in name only becomes clear when the trajectory of their activities is compared to the history of Weimar’s fall. What happened to the German Republic is easier to dissect because it occurred over less than twenty years in a brand-new democratic republic. Because America has had this form of government for much longer than Weimar did and is a much larger country, the process that has been undermining America’s government has been more difficult to see and acknowledge. It’s a classic case of the proverbial boiling frog syndrome.
Another element that has hidden this attempted Conservative takeover is that our political and economic class systems have not been as tightly aligned as they were in Weimar. In Germany, it was the “old ruling class and business class” who wanted to end the Republic and create a country under their autocratic rule. This group was found almost exclusively on the Right and Far-Right, which was housed in two political parties — the DVP and the DNVP.
In America though, not all financially elite people are tied to one side of the spectrum. There are billionaire Republicans and billionaire Democrats. This fact has led some on the far Left to claim that the Democrat and Republican parties are the same. They say this because of the role money and lobbying have come to play in American politics. After all, regardless of party, all elites seem to want to protect their money and have little government interference in their business matters. They use their money and influence to that end.
Nevertheless, as it was in Weimar, it is the American Conservative elite who sit on the right and far-right of the political spectrum who have fueled the GOP’s anti-democratic movement. As such, although there is an entire conversation to be had about the role of money in politics on both sides of the aisle, only the Conservative elite and their organizations in America have created the current threat to our democratic republic.
One tool they have used to do this is pushing their extreme views on “smaller government.” The idea comes from the same place that “states rights” did during the Civil War. Then, the Confederates wanted the right to continue with slavery (and continue to receive the wealth it gave slave owners ) regardless of what the federal government said. Yet, many would claim the war was about “states’ rights,” and not the specific goal of continuing slavery.
Today, the true reasoning behind wanting a smaller government is not about individual freedoms or efficiency. It is about exploitation. When there is government regulation, corporations spend a lot of time and money on infiltrating regulatory bodies and bending them to their will. It is cheaper to simply not have them.
With fewer regulations and rules for corporations and fewer protections for consumers and people in general, corporations can do what they want to increase their wealth without concern for how it affects the rights of individuals or the republic. Why say “people in general” and not just “consumers”? One of the latest pushes by the GOP is the rolling back of child labor laws.
Granted, extremes of anything tend to be a problem. There is such a thing as too much regulation creating inefficiency and waste while also squashing innovation. However, the heart of the GOP’s small government stance is to give large corporations an unfair advantage over consumers by allowing those corporations to exploit people and resources. They are willing to do these things regardless of the impact on individual citizens, or, as in the case of climate change, the world.
In fairness to these corporations, they are simply doing their job — which is to make as much money as possible. It is not their job to protect the general welfare of the American people. According to the Constitution, specifically in the Preamble, that is one of the Government’s jobs. Despite this, about half of the American public has come to see the U.S. Government — which the Constitution says is for the people, and run by the people via elected officials — as the problem. This stance leaves private businesses — in which citizens have no say — as the solution.
How did this way of thinking come about? Well, in modern U.S. history, this starts with the 40th president, President Ronald Reagan. (Although we will touch on Reagan’s presidency in this article, there will be a closer look at Reagan in part 4 of this series.)
The Decades Push to Undermine the General Welfare of Americans
Historically, the roots of the GOP have always been pro-business — it’s just that what that has meant has changed over time. As much as the moral issues of slavery were spoken about, the Industrial Revolution in the Northern industries had reached the point where an expansion of slavery into new U.S. territories would be bad for business. In a Forbes article discussing the book Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, Harvard University U.S. History Professor (and one of the book’s editors) Sven Beckert explains why this was so.
(…)slave owners had a very definite idea about the political economy of the United States, focused on the export of agricultural commodities to world markets, free trade, and the territorial expansion of the slave regime into the American West. That was quite distinct from the increasingly urgent and also powerful political needs of northern industrialists and bankers. They wanted tariff protection and the expansion of free labor into the American West. Both these political economies depended on the control of the federal government.
(For clarity’s sake, in this context “free labor” means workers who were not enslaved, but there is certainly a double meaning there worth exploring at some other time.)
The idea that the GOP was at one time against free trade and was for tariffs only makes sense when you realize that the party has always backed what was good for big industrial businesses. Thus, when tariffs were good for business, that’s what the Republican Party stood for. As for the party’s stance about the federal government stepping in for the public good, the first half of the 20th century was mixed. Notoriously there was the 31st president, Herbert Hoover. His background in humanitarian aid did nothing to help with the crisis brought on by the Great Depression. Yet, there was also the 34th president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did much to strengthen America’s public safety net. Although he was much slower in the area of civil rights, he did eventually come around.
However, starting with Reagan, the Republican stance has advocated for giving little to no government help for citizens, and no regulation on anything.
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” — President Ronald Reagan, News Conference, August 12, 1986
This quote demonstrates an idea that Reagan articulated in various forms from the start of his presidency. He must have never talked with anyone who survived a natural disaster, because help from the government is exactly what is expected. What is terrifying to someone dealing with the aftermath is the idea that help won’t arrive.
Reagan’s anti-government stance has become an even larger part of the GOP’s brand. It’s one of the ways that the party has been able to pry apart the bonds that created the United States. Part of the reason we even have a Constitution is that it became clear that a weak Central government led to chaos.
The first form of American government was The Articles of Confederation. With its structure, each state only looked out for itself, and the Federal government could do little for the good of the country.
For instance, before the Constitution, it was up to each state to decide if they wanted to fight to defend America. Then, in 1886, there was Shay’s Rebellion. Because the government wasn’t allowed to tax the states and couldn’t draft soldiers, they couldn’t put together an army to deal with the problem. It took a group of rich private individuals to decide to pay for a militia that would eventually stop the rebellion.
Apparently, Reagan and the GOP would prefer this kind of arrangement -one where private entities are required to handle public problems. Yet, as mentioned earlier, individuals and corporations owe no loyalty to the citizens of America. Their loyalties are to their shareholders and their bottom lines — as they should be. It falls under the unalienable Rights” of the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” idea that is found in America’s Declaration of Independence.
However, without a strong central government protecting the entity of the United States — including the welfare of its citizens — the country was on the road to self-destruction. This is why America’s Founding Fathers got together to create a stronger central government. There needed to be something in place to ensure that the individual pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, was balanced against securing the general welfare of the nation and its people. At the same time, they did not want to go back to anything that resembled a monarchy.
Instead, the Framers of the Constitution set up our democratic republic with a system of checks and balances. Three branches of government were created — the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, each with the means to check the other. They also made the republic stronger by having the people elect both the members of the legislative and executive branches.
Granted, the framers of the Constitution couldn’t quite bring themselves to just let everyone vote. The vote for the executive branch was filtered through the electoral college. They also left the rules and requirements for voting up to the states, which resulted in only white landowners being allowed to vote until about 1860.
It was not until after the Civil War and the passing of the 14th & 15th Amendments that a right for all citizens to vote — regardless of race — was guaranteed. Even with those in place, it would be much longer before women, and Indigenous Americans would be included in voting, and for all people of color to fully have the right to vote fully protected. Nevertheless, those protections wouldn't have been possible without having the fundamental idea of the people voting for their representatives being enshrined in the Constitution.
Of equal importance in our Constitution is how the purpose of the U.S. government is spelled out. The federal government is for the people, by the people, and is charged with defending the country and promoting the general welfare of the people. Again, this is said in the Preamble. Everything that comes after this is in the service of the aims listed in that opening statement.
What does protecting the general welfare of the people mean? There are many books and historical debates on this. In short, it has to do with the ability of the Federal government to spend money and to make laws that benefit the common good. Things such as Social Security and Federal Highways would fall under the “general welfare” of the people.
Whether it be to keep the government from acting like a monarchy or to protect individuals from each other, as a nation of laws — versus a nation of kings- our laws are to protect the people. The idea that there should be fewer laws and regulations, which is a GOP staple idea, is contrary to the reason we have a Constitution at all.
Time has shown that, if anything, America needs more government regulations, not less. A lack of market regulation was one of the things that led to the 1929 Great Depression and the 2008/2009 Great Recession. From lying to lobbying politicians to taking actions to gag the scientists speaking out against them, corporations are notorious for knowing the true dangers of a product and choosing profit over people. Who is going to protect the public? The corporations? That’s like hoping for a benevolent dictatorship — something that rarely occurs and if it does, never lasts.
Examples of the Republican Moves to Deregulate America
The Republican rallying cry for small government, deregulation, and a pure free-market economy can be seen in how, for decades, Republicans have wanted to privatize the U.S. Post Office — despite it being enshrined in the Constitution. Led by billionaire Charles Koch, Republicans would prefer it to be a cash cow for private enterprise, and they resent that it provides a solid middle-class lifestyle to a diverse group of people. Lately, there is also a GOP dislike for the role it plays in our voting system, but that is only since the 2016 election.
Other federal agencies are even more hated by the GOP. Despite being created by Nixon, Republicans have been trying to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for decades. This too is mainly about money. Businesses — from large corporations to small farmers — don’t want to have rules that can affect them financially. However, there is also an added racial and classist discrimination element to the Republican anti-environment rallying cries.
The GOP would also like to get rid of the Department of Education. Similarly to their feelings about the EPA, their reason is not only a financial one. While there is the desire to have federal money filtered into private schools, the primary dislike stems from racist ideology going back to the Supreme Court ruling of Brown vs. the Board of Education. Another point of contention for them is around the classist idea that free education is mainly to provide good laborers for the workforce — not to create, “active citizens who can participate and contribute to the democratic process and American society.” (Ideally, schools should do both.)
Overall, anything the federal government provides that creates a basic level of equality in our population and makes citizens less dependent on the whims of corporate America is something they oppose. Hence, there are many other federal programs that the GOP has long had campaigns against. Mainly, those programs are what they call “entitlement programs.”
The largest of these are Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides monetary benefits for food, and most recently, the Obama-created Affordable Care Act. Republicans have also used racism to push their campaigns against these programs. They do so by perpetuating the idea that these programs mainly benefit Black & Brown people — even though the majority of the people served by them are White.
Ironically, cutting government regulation also can give large corporations an advantage over small businesses, which is the leading group that smaller government is always touted to be helpful for. For example, small farms have suffered due to antitrust laws not being enforced and from having regulations that protected them rolled back by Republican administrations. This has been going on since Nixon. Small businesses are also often pushed out by large corporations via the so-called, “Walmart effect.” On top of that, large corporations benefit from corporate tax cuts and loopholes that they have lobbied for — but those don’t help small businesses at all.
American Democracy vs. American Oligarchy
Some may think that all of these statements about how conservatives have been operating are hyperbolic. They will claim that all of these pushes for deregulation are for the good of all Americans and American Democracy. When looking at the results of their policies and ideas it becomes clear that Conservatives have never been for the good of all Americans or American Democracy. Was it good for American democracy for then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to have Republicans not even consider Obama’s Supreme Court pick in the last eleven months in office? No.
That move by McConnell reflects the GOP’s lack of commitment to democracy. For instance, it is possible to show that the policies of Conservative elites have had much success in undermining U.S. democracy long before Trump came along. This can be seen in the conclusion reached by this 2014 study from Princeton and Northwestern universities.
“economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
There would later be some rebuttal on how wide the difference in influence is, but that rebuttal would be refuted in a 2020 analysis from Duke University.
Furthermore, as this article in The Atlantic articulates, there was never a rebuttal made to the effect GOP organizations funded (and sometimes founded) by Conservative billionaires and deep-pocketed business lobbyists have had on American politics and policies. There are many such organizations, but some of the first ones are also the most significant factors: The Heritage Foundation, ALEC, The Leadership Institution, The Federalist Society, and CPAC.
The GOP’s Civil Societies & the Planning of a Constitutional Coup
Before January 6, 2021, the idea of far-right forces actively trying to overthrow the U.S. Government was a bridge too far. If nothing else, seeing, in real-time, an insurrection in the service of an attempted coup opened the eyes of many. Still, once the immediate shock subsided, some in the GOP tried to call the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol a “protest” and the insurrectionists “patriots.”
A protest is a voicing of disagreement about something. It may even result in a riot — the violent destruction of property. What a protest does not do is attempt to interfere with the Constitutionally mandated counting of electoral votes while actively seeking to hang the Vice President. Trying to bypass the Constitution and keep a President in power beyond their elected time, is not the act of a patriot — it is that of a traitor. A patriot fights to uphold the Constitution — not to overthrow it.
Members of today’s GOP are a lost cause on this issue. What is difficult to watch is how other politicians are unable or unwilling to go beyond the obvious actions taken by Trump and his allies. Few, with a notable exception being Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have been calling other actions taken by the GOP as attempts at a separate-from-Trump non-violent coup.
For example, the engineered heavy tilt of the Supreme Court is something that was organized and built over decades. Its recently revealed levels of corruption seem directly linked to its willingness to throw out precedence and follow the far-right’s agenda. How is this not a slow-motion constitutional coup? The very possibility is something Bruce Ackerman has been sounding the alarm on ever since the Bush v. Gore 2001 Supreme Court case.
Looking at the facts, the GOP’s non-violent coup attempt has been mounted on several fronts, ranging from the creation of FOX News, to gerrymanding key states to get conservative control of state governments, to stacking the Federal judiciary with conservative ideologues. It has taken the work of several private organizations, aka civil societies, to make those ideas a reality, and it took all of these ideas to bring us to the point America is at now.
The Organizations that Have Been Planning a Constitutional Coup
What do these private organizations have in common? They all are founded and funded by people with the intent of undermining the American democratic republic and turning it into a de facto plutocracy. To see this, all one has to do is look at some of these organizations’ mission statements.
The Heritage Foundation
“Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institution — a think tank — whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” (Emphasis added.)
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a think tank that has a point of view. The problem begins when a think tank is working with other organizations to make end runs around the principles of American democracy by rolling back our laws and policies to 18th-century thinking. Much of this roll-back centers around issues of race and the roles of women.
The Heritage Foundation was founded by Ed Feulner, the late Joseph Coors (head of the Coors Brewing Company at the time), and the late Paul Weyrich. It was Feulner who got Coor to donate the 250 thousand dollars in start-up money. He also is the one who pushed the idea that a think tank was not just for researching ideas. For him, the point of a think tank was to create policies and sell them to legislators. In a 2007 interview with the Washington Examiner, Feulner stated the following two things.
“We always have had our offices on Capitol Hill so members can come in for a briefing and then return without missing any votes.” (…) “It doesn’t do us any good to have great ideas if we are not out there peddling our products.”
The full date of the Heritage Foundation’s founding — February 16, 1973, is less than a month after Nixon was sworn in for his second term. This timing makes sense because long before Watergate, Conservatives were having issues with the Nixon Presidency.
Nixon’s first term had his attempts to “slow down” the desegregation of schools thwarted by a Democratically controlled Congres and by the Courts. His attempt to nominate a strong Southern segregationist to the Supreme Court was also blocked by Congress, twice. Then, Nixon himself seemed to go a bit AWOL.
The man who had used the Southern Strategy so effectively somehow ended up helping schools desegregate (despite his loud protesting about busing) and supporting an Affirmative Action Plan for the awarding of Federal Contracts. It’s no wonder that Conservatives felt they needed more than just electing Republicans to get what they wanted. They needed to make sure their wishes would be followed by those elected. Doing this required the work of other soon-to-be-formed organizations. First, though, they needed to deal with getting their ideas into the states.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
Given the need to link Heritage Foundation ideas to state legislators, it isn’t surprising that in September of that same year, Weyrich would go on to found ALEC. This is their opening statement.
“The American Legislative Exchange Council is America’s largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets, and federalism. Composed of nearly one-quarter of the country’s state legislators and stakeholders from across the policy spectrum, ALEC members represent more than 60 million Americans and provide jobs to more than 30 million people in the United States.” (Emphasis added.)
ALEC essentially recreates the Heritage Foundation’s setup on Capitol Hill. Instead of the desired policy ideas being pushed at Federal legislators, it allows business interests to work with state legislatures for the sole purpose of crafting fill-in-the-blank bills tailored to state Constitutions and based on the ideas coming from the Heritage Foundation. The bills are designed to get around Federal regulations and help legalize conservative causes via state laws. They are distributed to Republican state legislators across the country.
This pairing of the Heritage Foundation and ALEC set up a donor-to-legislator pipeline, one financed by various conservative business tycoons & their heirs. The Heritage Foundation figures out what needs to happen to get the outcomes the donors want and then helps lobbyists connect with legislators on Capitol Hill to try and influence Federal laws being made. ALEC gets together state legislators and corporate donors to craft legislation based on the ideas of the Heritage Foundation to do the same for laws at the state level.
It was a good strategy, but another problem soon became apparent. Even with the legislation being drafted and distributed, in order to pass these bills that held unpopular ideas, Conservatives had to get enough Conservative Republicans into public office. Furthermore, they needed to figure out how to get the courts to uphold their laws, because the courts were striking them down. Their solution was two-fold. There needed to be a new way of interpreting the Constitution that would fit Conservative ideology and they needed people trained in that ideology to be seated as federal judges on the Supreme Court.
The Federalist Society
Addressing the above problems became the purview of the Federalist Society. Founded in 1982, it started at top law schools as a student legal society for conservatives and was grounded in the new legal theory of originalism put forth by Robert Bork in 1971. As this article in The Atlantic points out, the theory has its problems.
Adherents believe that the Constitution has a fixed meaning and that it should be interpreted as it would’ve been back in the 1700s. Critics have made many compelling arguments against originalism, noting that it lends itself to a selective reading of history and that determining the Founders’ intent is nearly impossible. (…) Nothing indicates that the original meaning of the Constitution was to create a judicial review or if it was, that it was meant to create an originalist judicial review. In fact, the evidence, including the Ninth Amendment, points to the contrary.
The idea that originalism, and the Federalist Society, have any purpose other than trying to roll back the steps toward equality for all in America is difficult to believe when you consider the first symposium of the Federalist Society. There Bork was a headlining speaker, as was the then-law professor Antonin Scalia. However, the speaker that spelled out what this fledgling society was about was Morton Blackwell.
The Beginnings of the Judicial Coupe
Blackwell is the founder of the still-active Leadership Institute, which is a conservative group that “prepares conservatives for success in politics, government, and the news media.” Founded in 1979, Blackwell’s Institute has been a very successful program for training young conservatives. One of the first people trained under Blackwell was Mitch McConnell.
This article in Politico outlines the talk Blackwell gave at that first Federalist Society symposium. It starts with him discussing his experience as a young “foot soldier” for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. His description of that time spoke to the profound sense of the conservative point of view being rejected — despite it “being right — in the sense of being correct.” Then he told the students at the symposium what this society they were forming should be focusing on if they wanted to implement their conservative point of view onto the country.
He made his point plain and ticked off a to-do list.
The path to victory ran through the law. Through the judiciary. (…) How to get the right people into the study of law. How to get into the right law school. How to succeed as a conservative in law school. Law student participation in politics and government. How to get better people on law faculties. How to get a good clerking job. How to become a judge. How to make sure the right people get to be judges.”
Making sure the “right” people become judges? Who are the “right” people and why should a private organization get to decide who sits on the court?
For Conservatives, the right people are lawyers who believe in the Conservative agenda of rolling back American social norms. It would be nice to say that it meant people who believed in the theory of Originalism, but as the recent striking down of Affirmative Action shows, the theory is only used when it’s convenient for enacting the Conservative agenda. After all, the originally understood intention of the 14th and 15th Amendments was that they would enforce the law of Black people being treated as equals and they would give the government the power to make sure that happened.
Federal judges are supposed to be chosen by the President and the Senate, both of whom are elected by the people to serve their interests. In theory, the government — including the court — should be a reflection of both the written law and the will of the majority. Unfortunately, that reflection has become distorted by conservative civil societies.
The Mission to Control the Vote
There are two things all of the above organizations have in common. The first is that they do not focus on trying to convert the country to their point of view. They focus on imposing their point of view on the country. More importantly, all of these organizations were — and are — very well funded by a relatively small group of private donors.
One of the crusades these three organizations — the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and the Federalist Society - had focused on for a long time was to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They wanted to do this so that states could bring back the voter disenfranchisement tactics that were in use before the Bill became law. This is because it had become clear to Conservatives that their ideas about things were unpopular with the majority of the country.
That voter suppression has been a core principle for these groups is hard to dispute. According to The Nation’s John Nichols, “Enacting burdensome photo ID or proof of citizenship requirements has long been an ALEC priority.” Back in 2011, The Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, did a detailed Washington Post opinion piece showing how ALEC turned that priority into reality.
At this point, the method used to enact voter suppression laws has become a conservative standard. A model of the law is created, one that can get around guardrails set up by both Federal and State Constitutions. That model is then given to different states to modify and get passed. The pretense of these particular laws was that they were needed to stop “voter fraud,” which then - as now - was a proven non-issue.
Going back even further, in 1980 Weyrich gave a speech at an evangelical conference where he infamously said the following:
“I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
This anti-democratic idea did not just surface in 1980, a fact that will lead us to the final piece needed for their judicial coup: the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
CPAC has been key to the Conservative agenda. You can not get hand-picked judges on the bench and carefully crafted state bills enacted if no one is voting for the candidates that will do these things. With their wildly unpopular ideas even voter suppression couldn’t get enough people to vote for Conservative candidates.
CPAC’s job was to create an electorate that would vote the way Conservative elites wanted. Without CPAC, Trump would not have the power over the Republican electorate that he does. The story of CPAC requires its own deep dive. It will be covered in part 4 of this series.
