To Understand New Extremism, Look to History

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/world/americas/interpreter-extremism-republican-gop.html

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The central question in American politics today is, I think, “what the *expletive my editor won’t let me use* is going on?!?”

During the primary campaign in 2015, many expected the Republican establishment to push Trump and his allies out of the mainstream party. Instead, the opposite has happened: Trump won the primary and then the presidency. Since then, Republican officials who attempt to combat such extremism from within the party have tended to find themselves pushed out instead. Representative Liz Cheney, who helped investigate the attack on the capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, lost a primary election this year. She is not alone: Of the 10 Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump over the attack, eight have retired or lost primaries.

And there is now a growing movement within the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in elections, a rejection of what is arguably the most crucial element of democratic governance.

Many of the explanations for these developments focus on the role of influential elites, including media figures like Tucker Carlson and, of course, Trump himself. Others focus on voters: I wrote in 2015, for instance, that voters with authoritarian personalities had sorted themselves into the Republican Party over time, creating a powerful constituency for politicians willing to cater to their demands. And researchers like Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins political scientist, have documented how partisan polarization has amplified political extremism on the American right.

Both of those components are important. But looking at the United States through a comparative lens, alongside other countries that have seen the rise of extremist movements within mainstream politics, suggests that a third element is also crucial to understanding the whole story: how the formation of the modern Republican Party itself may have left it institutionally weak, and vulnerable to a takeover by a faction that now appears to be opposed to fundamental aspects of American democracy.

To understand how parties’ past formation affects their stability in the present, it helps to go back in history — way back.

In Britain, the modern Conservative Party, often known as the Tories, was born in the 19th century from a parliamentary party that grew “from the center out,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard political scientist who is the author of “Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy.” That meant the Tory Party was relatively stable as an institution, able to exercise significant control over who rose to power within it and how they wielded power once in office.

Germany’s early 20th-century national conservative party, by contrast, developed as a “merger of right-wing forces,” he said, particularly in the Weimar period. It eventually taken over by right-wing nationalists who ultimately helped enable the rise of the Nazis. One of the party’s leaders was in the cabinet when Hitler came to power.

Because such mergers tend to lead to weakly institutionalized bargains between factions, rather than strong central institutions, “these kinds of parties tend to be vulnerable to radicalization,” he said.

At first blush, that might not sound like the story of the American Republican Party. After all, it has existed for more than a century. It was the party of Lincoln. Its nickname is the Grand Old Party.

But look a little more closely at the Republican Party’s development since the 1960s, and a very different picture emerges. In fact, for much of the 20th century, the southern Republican Party did not, in any meaningful sense, exist. During the Jim Crow era, southern states were run as single-party, segregationist regimes by the Democratic Party.

In addition to dismantling voting rights for Black Americans and sharply limiting them for white voters whose preferences were inconvenient for the ruling elite, southern Democrats used legal restrictions and extralegal harassment to repress opposition parties, Robert Mickey, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, wrote in his book “Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in the American South, 1944-1972.”

The result was that the G.O.P. had essentially no institutional infrastructure or electoral base in the Democrats’ “Solid South.” When the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act finally opened the region to competitive elections, the Republicans had to build state parties anew.

One of the most successful ways they did so was via mergers with breakaway contingents of segregationist politicians from the Democratic Party, said Angie Maxwell, the director of the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas, and the co-author of “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing Votes in the White South Changed American Politics.”

“It was hard, because there was virtually no Republican Party,” she said. “It took politicians, big-name politicians, standing up and switching parties, which Strom Thurmond was the first one to do. Deciding to just take the hit, and go ‘I’m going to be a Republican,’ and start building a party.”

States where politicians defected early, such as Mississippi and Thurmond’s South Carolina, became solidly Republican relatively quickly, she said. By contrast, Arkansas, where the modern Republican Party operation was spearheaded by the liberal Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, the brother of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, did not switch to Republican control until decades later.

So, as the national Republican Party welcomed the former segregationist politicians and the voters they brought with them into the fold, the resulting party was a merger between the old party apparatus and the new contingent of defectors from the segregationist, authoritarian South.

Starting in the 1970s, evangelical groups helped to forge ties between the broader conservative movement and white Southern voters by recasting the federal government’s efforts to desegregate Southern schools, which involved stripping white-only Christian academies of their tax-free status, as an attack on evangelical Christians’ freedom of religion. That helped Republicans win elections, particularly in the South, and but effectively transferred some of the party’s agenda-setting power to the evangelical movement, said Daniel Schlozman, a Johns Hopkins political scientist and the author of “When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History.”

As I wrote in my recent column about Sweden, it’s now common, across many countries, for far-right candidates to win approximately 25 percent of the popular vote. But in most systems that means they are either excluded from power or just one member of a multiparty coalition. In the United States, by contrast, such candidates can win control over a national party, and with it all three branches of government.

It was not always obvious that things would turn out this way. American parties have always been broad coalitions of regional and ideological interests, and for a time, it seemed like Southern voters and politicians would play a similar role in the Republican coalition to the one they previously had in the Democratic one, supporting the mainstream agenda of the national party even if local preferences looked very different.

But that’s not what happened. The development of the party worked as a kind of two-step process, Ziblatt told me. “In the first step, it was this active strategic set of moves made by political leaders to form these coalitions. For conservative Republicans to align themselves with Southern Republicans and create a conservative Southern Republican Party. But then once you create that coalition, then you’re kind of trapped by it. Because at step two, the voters matter.”

Changes to the primary system, which gave individual voters more power to select candidates directly, weakened the party’s control over its candidates, and by extension its agenda, still further, Maxwell said. And more recently, Southern states have moved their primaries earlier, increasing their influence over presidential nominations.

Republican primaries are usually winner-take-all. That means that candidates who can command a dedicated bloc of support, even if it is not even close to a majority of primary voters, can reach the general election.

And as voters have sorted themselves along geographical and educational lines in recent decades, it has become more difficult for liberal or moderate candidates to put together a primary-winning bloc of voters. Many people who might once have voted for them are now Democrats, or living in reliably Democratic cities.

Donald Trump, for instance, won his early presidential primaries with a third or less of the vote. But that was enough to win those states’ delegates, which soon forced other candidates to drop out, leaving him the front-runner. Because the United States is so polarized, partisanship was then enough to get him, and many other candidates from his wing of the party, across the finish line in general elections.

“There could have been some other strategic choices made by political leaders in the ’70s or ’80s,” Ziblatt said. “But once they made these decisions from the top down, now they’ve been trapped.”