Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Donald Trump in Las Vegas, September 13, 2024
The best thing I’ve seen in a very long time on the causes and possible cures for the assault on American democracy is Theda Skocpol’s James Madison Lecture, delivered earlier this month to the American Political Science Association, where she received APSA’s Madison career prize. You can read it for yourself here.
Skocpol, who teaches at Harvard, unpacks the Republican undermining of democracy into several elements. The first she calls “McConnellism”: using legal hardball to “stretch existing laws and rules to disadvantage partisan opponents.” The second approach “targets political competitors and government operations with extralegal harassment, threats of violence, even actual violence.”
All of this intensified under Trump, but the trend predates Trump, and will almost surely outlive him. Those who hope for a post-Trump reversion to your father’s Republican Party are likely to be disappointed.
Skocpol helpfully includes a chart, dating from 2000 to 2024, with 18 examples of legal hardball, beginning with the Supreme Court’s dubious 5-4 decision to stop the Florida recount, handing the presidency to George W. Bush (who very likely lost); and another seven examples of illegal violence, most notably but not exclusively the events of January 6, 2021. She says:
Legal hardball developments include partisan-targeted changes in rules about voting, ballot access, and procedures for counting ballots or certifying elections. This category also encompasses targeted efforts to undercut the organizational capacities of partisan opponents (such as those intended to disable labor unions) or to remove longstanding powers of a public office (for instance, laws taking powers from a newly elected governor of the other party) [and] steps taken to move policy decisions from electorally accountable to nonelectoral venues (for instance, by shifting final say to courts controlled by co-partisans).
For these trends, she blames both “plutocrats”—traditional Republican business elites who were supportive of the efforts to destroy democracy as long as it served their interests (deregulation, tax cuts, union bashing, etc.)—and “ethnonationalists” opposed to racial justice and immigration. Trump expertly fused these disparate groups into an electoral and governing coalition. But the unlikely marriage of convenience runs a lot deeper than Trump and explains the continuing threat to democracy, even if Trump is defeated in 2024 and he disappears from the scene.
Despite his apparent chaotic style, Skocpol observes, “Trump successfully operated from the White House and beyond to remake almost all levels and parts of the Republican Party as a synthesis of plutocratic McConnellism with violence-prone MAGA popular ethnonationalism.” And she fears that worse is to come: “Previous legal hardball victories—especially McConnellist manipulations of Senate filibusters to install a hard-right Supreme Court majority—may have set the stage for Republicans and allied groups to go for it all, provided they can just eke out one more round of electoral victories in the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandered House districts.”
Skocpol observes how easily Trump brought to heel the entire Republican apparatus to fall in line: “From 2016 on, Republican legislators, candidates, and allies fell in line with Trump or else retired or went silent. Often under grassroots pressure, local and state GOP organizations—and ultimately the Republican National Committee itself—purged foot draggers and installed new heads willing to do whatever Trump demanded at any given moment. By 2024, the RNC itself was turned into a family-run Trump patronage machine.”
Trump deftly managed to both channel those who were at war with establishment Republicans and to make the very same corporate establishment Republicans part of his machine. Skocpol points out that the dream of an anti-Trump Republican faction has collapsed:
Given that vocal GOP critics have been tossed out in primary elections or purged from government, most GOP dissenters keep mum or just retire to make money in the private sector … Even Senate leader Mitch McConnell crawled back, despite having denounced Trump’s January 6 actions and calling for his possible criminal prosecution in early 2021. Soon thereafter, McConnell helped block a bipartisan Congressional investigation of January 6, turned evasive for two years, and ultimately endorsed Trump’s comeback presidential bid in March 2024. The MAGA capture and remake of the Republican Party was complete well before Donald Trump was renominated for President in July 2024.
To me, the most instructive and alarming part of Skocpol’s analysis is the role of corporate and financial elites as being all too willing to sacrifice democracy and to get in bed with thuggish purveyors of street violence with whom they have little in common culturally or socially. Skocpol’s discussion called to mind one of my other favorite social and historical analysts, Karl Polanyi.
Writing about the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Polanyi observed that the German industrialists and plutocrats of that era opted to take their chances with Hitler rather than make common cause with anti-Nazi social democrats. When push came to shove, economic elites were all too willing to sacrifice political democracy. And until Hitler’s disastrous military miscalcuations wrecked it all and left Germany in smoldering ruins, German industry and finance profited handsomely from their alliance with the Nazis.
James Madison, for whom Skocpol’s APSA award and lecture is named, was the champion of checks and balances. Those guardrails have been substantially weakened in the past two decades, and not just by Trump. Yet Skocpol manages to end on a note of optimism. One reason is federalism, and Democratic strongholds in blue states and cities. “Although anti-democratic GOP factions will likely continue to use one of the nation’s two major political parties to their advantage, in the end they will not succeed in turning America into a close-minded regime and society,” she predicts.
Another reason is increasing Democratic success at grassroots organizing, beginning with the women’s marches of 2021 and energized by the enthusiasm created by Kamala Harris. Skocpol concludes, “With or without would-be authoritarians in charge of key institutions at given junctures, James Madison and the others Founding Fathers can rest in a measure of—uneasy—peace.”
Over the years, I’ve learned a great deal from Theda Skocpol. It almost feels as if this sunny conclusion, somewhat at odds with the details of the rest of her talk, is Skocpol’s effort not to succumb to despair. I’ve executed similar pivots myself, because defeatism just leads to defeat. Let’s hope that she has drawn the right conclusion from an otherwise depressing dossier.
