The Conspiracy to end America

 Stuart Stevens, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving our Democracy to Autocracy, Hatchette Book Group, 2023, 225 pp.

A former Republican strategist, Stuart Stevens, decries a party that has gone off the rails and plunged into totalitarianism.

According to Lincoln Project senior adviser Stevens, the author of It Was All a Lie, five ingredients fuel “an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party.” These five, in order, are propaganda and its makers; a party willing to be twisted; piles of money and willing suppliers of it; legal theorists willing to distort the law; and a body of shock troops. No one surveying the political landscape would doubt that these five threads are broadly present in the Republican mix. On the first count, Stevens argues that Fox News did not create the current Republican Party—it was the other way around, with Fox propagandizing in the interest of the authoritarians, among its chief cheerleaders the now-departed Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs. The GOP also enabled Trump by responding to his false claims of election fraud by “humoring him” rather than insisting that he honor constitutional norms. It does no good to “imagine that there is a possibility for the Republican Party to become a ‘normal’ American political party once again”—not with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley roaming the land. Oceans of money are behind this authoritarian impulse, since the doctrinaire insistence on doing away with regulations is music to a capitalist’s ears. The Koch brothers’ political staffers alone, Stevens notes, number “three and a half times more employees than the Republican National Committee.” Crank lawyers and judges are busily eroding legal norms, and then there are the perpetrators and supporters of the events of Jan. 6—who, Stevens suggests without undue alarmism, will be back in even greater numbers come the 2024 next election. It all makes for a civil libertarian’s nightmare, but the author offers useful prescriptions for acting to counter the authoritarian impulse.

My Notes:

Pg. 5f:  Today’s Republican Party is not a ‘normal’ political party, it has become an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party.  Whenever a democracy slides into autocracy, there are five critical elements at work.  All five are active today in American politics.  This book is an urgent warning to examine collectively the power of these five forces working together to end American democracy as we know it.  The five elements at work, which have a chapter each in the book, are:

*Propagandists                                                                                      ,

*Support of a major party

*Financers

*Legal theories to legitimize actions

*Shock troops

 

Pg. 37:  Three Iowa State University sociologists conducted a detailed study of the thirty-one Iowa counties that flipped from Obama in 2008 to Trump in 2016, the most in the nation.  Their study concluded, ‘Economic distress nor globalization is a significant factor in explaining the shift in Iowa voters from Democratic to Republican between 2008 and 2016.  Instead, the nativist narrative about taking back America and the anti-immigrant sentiment became stronger forces.  Amazingly, those areas that had the fewest number of immigrants had the most fear of immigrants.

 

Pg. 38:  It is the failure to appeal to non-white voters in a rapidly changing country that is at the root of the transformation of the Republican Party into an autocratic movement. 

 

Pg. 42f:  In 1987 the Federal Communications Commission’s 1949 “Fairness Doctrine” doctrine was allowed to die.  With it any government effort to regulate political extremism on publicly licensed radio and television died with it.  That year, 1987, Rush Limbaugh began.  By 2000, trust in the media began to split sharply along partisan lines.  While Democrats trust in media remains at 70 percent, Republicans are at 14 percent.  This complete breakdown of trust in the media by Republicans allows them to live in an alternative reality, one of their own making. 

 

Pg. 72:  Once a political party in a democratic system abandons any moral or ideological rationale for its existence, it is on the road to autocracy. After the Republican Party accepted a platform that was nothing more than a fealty pledge to Trump, it surrendered any pretense of being anything other than an autocratic movement.  If Trump is not ultimately the party’s nominee in 2024, its loyalty will pass to the next leader.

 

Pg. 89:  Repeated efforts to change our system to limit the impact of money have largely failed.  Money in politics used to be intended to move our politics in an ideological direction.  That’s changed.  Today staggering sums of money are being spent not to change the policies of our democracy but to end democracy.  Most is happening in the open and is perfectly legal.

 

Pg. 91:  In over 90 percent of the campaigns for the House of Representatives, the candidate with the most money wins.  And overall, around 95 percent of incumbents win.  That was true in 1968 and was still true in 2022.

 

Pg. 96:  In 2008 Obama became the first presidential nominee from a major party since the federal-funding law began in 1976 to walk away from the voluntary system.  He raised and spent over $300 million in the general election, while McCain stayed in the system and spent only the $84 million allocated under federal-funding rules.  In 2012, both Romney and Obama rejected federal funding, and each raised and spent over a billion dollars.

 

Pg. 112:  On January 6, 2021, 65 percent of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, joined by eight Republican senators, voted not to certify the November election for president. 

 

Pg. 116:  Twenty-two Republican candidates for governor in 2022 who ran for office claim the country does not have a legal president.  This is now the mainstream position of the Republican party.  It is a fundamental rejection of the rule of law.

 

Pg. 140:  Bush v. Gore in 2022 became the gateway drug.  Once a presidential election is decided in court and not at the ballot box, it’s logical to view the legal system as an extension of a campaign, rather than the foundation upon which civil society is built. 

 

Pg. 146f:  With the Republican Party’s help, or its passive silence at best, Trump and Trumpism have attacked the Justice Department; the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the seventeen branches of intelligence gathering that agreed Russia helped Trump win; the independence of the military; the integrity of the entire judicial system; the voting process; the counting of votes; the certification of elections; and NATO.

 

Pg. 160:  In 2000 George W. Bush became president, with the Supreme Court help, despite losing the popular vote by 500,000 votes.  It had been over a hundred years since the winner of the popular vote did not win the presidency.  Then Trump won in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by 3 million.  Then in 2020, despite losing the popular vote by 7 million he nearly won again and would have if 44,000 or so votes in exactly the right places had switched.

 

Pg. 168:  A 1.6 billion political donation:  In August 2022 a billionaire named Barre Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of an electronics manufacturing company to a nonprofit controlled by Leo called the Marble Freedom Trust.  It then sold the company to an Irish conglomerate for $1.6 billion, an arrangement that shielded the transaction from taxes. This was the largest single donation ever given to a political organization.

 

Pg. 188:  Forty-three percent of the January 6 insurrectionists were white-collar workers such as business owners, architects, doctors, and lawyers.  Out of the hundreds of people arrested for breaking into the Capitol, only 7 percent were unemployed, about the national average at the time.  Normally, 40 percent of right-wing extremists have prior military service, whereas the Capitol rioters were about 15 percent.