Here’s a tweet from a U.S. Senator in October 2020 that sums up the struggle in which we find ourselves…
Republican Senator Mike Lee, a Mormon from Utah, tweeted out that “Democracy isn’t the objective.” That’s no surprise. We can see the anti-democracy actions right before our eyes. Lee’s “Rank democracy” refers to majority rule.
So, whose “liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic]” is Senator Lee referring to? It certainly isn’t the liberty, peace, and prosperity experienced by most Americans.
Minority Rule & Oligarchy from the Beginning
Lee’s tweet is representative of the struggles Americans have had with identity from our beginning. The Founding Fathers wanted us to believe a myth that, in part, claims that our republic — our representative democracy — stands up for all of us (or, at least, for all men; our Founders were in a patriarchal society).
Voting Initially Limited to Mostly Landed Male Gentry
However, that wasn’t true then and isn’t true today. In 1789, most states limited voting to property-owning or tax-paying White males, which represented only 6% of the population. Many of our Founders feared majority rule, especially after a series of rebellions. They were afraid a majority would take away their homes, the enslaved people they owned, and other property. Additionally, there was concern about the powerful merchant class of people and their less enlightened values and greed.
As an answer to these fears and others, the Founders of our nation created the Electoral College that maintained the wealthy White, male minority rule. This “college” is a group of electors, who choose the president and vice president and have the power to vote against the winner of the popular vote. “5 Presidents Who Lost the Popular Vote But Won the Election.”
John Adams’s Fear of American Oligarchy
While many Founders worried about the majority, some, like second U.S. President John Adams, a non-slaveowner, feared an American oligarchy much more.
In the 2016 book John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville, author and lecturer of political philosophy at Boise State University’s Honors College, writes
And yet, for all of his worries about the rule of law and the unruly many, Adam’s chief preoccupation was with the danger posed by the wealthy and wellborn few. This preoccupation was evident as early as his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, in which the twenty-nine-year-old railed against a pernicious class of men descended from “high churchmen and high statesman.” The New England political order, argued Adams, had been built upon an explicit rejection of rule by an oligarchic elite. Through prolonged struggle, New Englanders had eliminated all homage, duties, and services paid to lords by landholders, and they had successfully replaced the priestly class of the Old World with an ordination process based only on “the foundation of the Bible and common sense.” Perhaps most important, they had thrown off the yoke of ignorance by diffusing knowledge such that “the education of all ranks of people was made the care and expense of the public in a manner that I believe has been unknown to any other people ancient or modern.”
The Founders knew how important education was to our republic.
Mayville continues,
Yet now, Adams observed, a new class of elites had set out to effect “an entire subversion of the whole system of our fathers by the introduction of the canon and feudal systems in America.” The emerging oligarchy had sought, among other things, to censure the public provision of education as “a needless expense and an imposition upon the rich in favor of the poor and as an institution productive of idleness and vain speculation among the people.” The class of men he referred to in the Dissertation as grandees would change considerably during his lifetime: from the would-be feudal lords of the mid-eighteenth century to the commercial elite of the early nineteenth century. What would not change, as we will see, was Adams’s preoccupation with elite power and the danger it posed to republican institutions.
Adams was spot on about the danger of oligarchic power to American democracy, especially corporate oligarchs because they now own our government. We’ve seen oligarchs arise at various points in our history, and they have always put our democracy at risk, like in the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. Only massive reforms have saved our democracy in the past, and they remain our only hope for saving democracy in the future. The majority of American people must rise up and demand reforms now, just as they did before.
Returning to the tweet posted by Senator Mike Lee, it’s important to understand that he is an oligarch seeking to overthrow our republic’s institutions to further his own personal interests and those of his stakeholders. While Lee claims he merely seeks liberty, peace, and prosperity, he stops short of defining who, among Americans, would benefit from his particular brand of these ideals.
So much of what is happening today is a mirror of the Old South and Confederacy. Democracy was not the plan. The goals of the wealthy and powerful have always been aimed toward retaining and expanding their personal holdings: to keep their enslaved “property”; to expand slavery; and to champion their own self-furthering brand of religion, economics, and political ideology – which reflect American conservatism today.
American Conservative Movement: Merging Religion, Economics & Political Ideology
Republicans and conservatives had fallen out of favor during the period encompassing the Great Depression through the early 1950s, but there remained some individuals who wanted to change the tide.
Father of American Conservatism
William F. Buckley Jr., himself a conservative and Libertarian, published a book in 1951 titled, God and Man at Yale. According to an NPR article, “William F. Buckley, Father Of American Conservatism,” which was based on an interview with biographer, Carl Bogus, the Buckley book “took the university to task for failing to promote Christianity and free market economics.”
The article states:
‘He collapsed in that book religion, economics and political ideology,’ Bogus says, ‘producing the mix of ideas we recognize today as conservatism: free-market capitalism, support for American military actions, libertarianism and social conservatism.’
This dangerous merging of Christianity, economics, and political ideology is exactly what our Founders, like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sought to avoid. Moreover, it is one example of the destructive influence of conservatism on the ideals that were propounded in the founders’ goals for separation of Church and State.
It was a shift in postwar conservative thought that Buckley took advantage of. In another article titled “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” from the Journal of American History, Kim Phillips-Fein writes,
The most influential synthesis of the subject remains George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945 .... He argued that postwar conservatism brought together three powerful and partially contradictory intellectual currents that previously had largely been independent of each other: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism. Each particular strain of thought had predecessors earlier in the twentieth (and even nineteenth) centuries, but they were joined in their distinctive postwar formulation through the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review. The fusion of these different, competing, and not easily reconciled schools of thought led to the creation, Nash argued, of a coherent modern Right.
Buckley capitalized not just on intellectual currents, but also on emotions resulting from a major inflection point in American history. In 1954, the Supreme Court made a monumental decision on Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. While the Brown ruling tried to rectify educational injustices due to race, it began a huge backlash, galvanizing conservatives and radicals in a way that nothing else had. In fact, Buckley started National Review in 1955.
School Desegregation & the Architect of the Radical Right
In the wake of Brown, a little-known Libertarian radical began forging a long-term, fiendish plot that oligarchs, like the Koch family, are using today to destroy democracy. Nancy MacLean, professor of history and public policy at Duke University, details this in her 2018 book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.
The publisher’s website says of this book:
Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The [laissez-faire] capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. The book names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
...MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
It’s important to note that “fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance” is a euphemism for the overthrow of democracy — the facade of democracy under an authoritarian system. They intend to alter the Constitution and how it is interpreted. This is a plot to preserve White patriarchal, oligarchic power. (Our fight is democracy vs. oligarchy.)
An Atlantic article, “The Architect of the Radical Right,” based on MacLean’s book, says,
Buchanan got his first plum teaching job at the University of Virginia, in 1956, during the single most crucial event in the birth of the modern conservative movement, the rise of the strategy of “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s mandate for school desegregation. Since the New Deal, conservatives like Herbert Hoover and Robert A. Taft had pushed back hard against the expanding federal government and its tentacular programs. But it was an uphill battle; the public was grateful for Social Security. Brown changed all that. More than the economic order was now under siege. So was a way of life, with its cherished “mores and folkways,” in the phrase favored by defenders of Jim Crow. A new postwar conservatism was born, mingling states’-rights doctrine with odes to the freedom-loving individual and resistance to the “social engineering” pursued by what conservative writers in the mid-1950s began to call the “liberal establishment.”
Indeed, Brown gave new hope to many conservatives and radicals: those who hated that the Democrats had held power for decades, that the New Deal was still popular, and that people of color and the poor stood a chance of gaining equality and standing. These were threats to the system that had maintained the rich White male, minority rule they wanted to protect.
In fact, Buchanan’s malignant ideology closely resembles that of Southern slaveholder John C. Calhoun, seventh Vice President of the United States and a U.S. Senator, among other high offices he held. Renowned, among other things, as father of the filibuster (a procedure to block majoritarian rule in the Senate through obstruction), Calhoun sought to keep the rich White, Southern planter class’s minority rule by blocking democratic reforms. Calhoun’s beliefs regarding states’ rights and other ideas greatly influenced the South’s secession from the Union prior to the Civil War.
Secretive Christian Nationalist Movement
The “secretive political establishment” that MacLean refers to in her book doesn’t just pertain to the wealthy. A secretive Christian nationalist movement that started in the 1930s began infiltrating the U.S. government in the 1940s to merge radical religion, economics, and political ideology. Buchanan didn’t begin formulating his strategy until the 1950s, which aimed to destroy democracy and prevent it from ever being re-created, the goal of the 1940s Christian nationalists. While today the Koch brothers, Christian nationalists, and others continue to advance this ideology, Charles Koch didn’t discover Buchanan’s democracy-destroying strategy until the 2000s, according to MacLean.
The Radical Right Networks
The road from the 1930s to today is long and complicated, resulting in a loose confederation of cabals: Christian nationalists, corporate and the super-rich, international, and other anti-democracy elites. Together, they are willfully dismantling democracy and leading America toward an authoritarian regime. The cabal leaders and influencers of the present era are oligarchs, just as Buchannan was. They have created advocacy groups, think tanks, umbrella organizations, and entire networks of institutes dedicated to the radical right’s stealth plan.
Two authors detail these networks in their important books. In 2016, Jane Mayer published Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. In 2020, Katherine Stewart published The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
John Birch Society & Conspiracy Theories
While many organizations have been created along the way, one of the oldest among modern conservative groups is the John Birch Society (JBS). The name was to honor John Birch, considered by many to be the first American casualty (1945) in the Cold War struggle against communism. Once considered a fringe element of the conservative movement, JBS is now the mainstream.
In 1958, retired, wealthy, Christian fundamentalist, businessman Robert H.W. Welch Jr. established JBS, a right-wing political advocacy organization dedicated to fighting for limited government and against what it believes is a major infiltration of communism into America. Welch used JBS to influence public policy and infiltrate American government at all levels.
In fact, according to the National Review article titled “The Inside Story of William F. Buckley Jr.’s Crusade against the John Birch Society,” by Alvin Felzenberg:
Welch decreed that the John Birch Society would be autocratic in its governance. Any other organizational method, he insisted, would leave the society open to “infiltration, distortion and disruption.” He proclaimed the very word democracy a “deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, and a perennial fraud.” The JBS would consist of clusters of chapters, each with about 20 carefully screened members. He set a goal of building a million-member force. Estimates of how many people actually became Birchers range from 20,000 to 100,000.
With an autocratic governance, Welch could be sure to propagate his fringe ideas and keep members in line. It’s a microcosm of what radical conservatives wanted to install in American government. Two members to note were Fred Koch, father of the Koch brothers, and Fred Trump, father of Donald.
Also, the tactics of JBS reveal how some organizations operate to take over all levels of the American government. The Felzenberg article says,
Welch had JBS run “stealth” campaigns to win seats on local government bodies, where it would work to counter “communist domination.” Its members paid close attention to book acquisitions by local libraries and pressed for the banning of certain titles.
The article also says that, in 1961, Welch “estimated that 50 to 70 percent of the United States was ‘communist controlled.’” Felzenberg gives us, perhaps, some insight into what Welch called “communism.” Besides the New Deal, it seems “communism” to Welch refers to things he didn’t agree with:
Of the various projects the JBS took on, its campaign to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren drew the most attention from the mainstream media. Welch pointed to a litany of actions the Supreme Court had taken under Warren’s leadership that facilitated a Communist takeover of the United States: its striking down loyalty oaths; its extension of First Amendment protections to Communists; its ban of school prayer in public schools; its imposition of the “one man, one vote” principle in legislative apportionment; and, above all, its overturning of the “separate but equal” doctrine, which put the nation on a path to desegregation. Welch turned his disagreement with the Warren Court and its decisions into a national crusade.
In the Roger Chapman book Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices, it says that Buckley attacked “Birchism” and “Randism” (Ayn Rand and her Objectivist philosophy) as extremist and harmful to conservatism. Buckley also railed at the “kooky” JBS conspiracy theories.
It’s not surprising that conspiracy theories are a huge part of the radical right, especially since organizations, like JBS, are now mainstreamed. American society has failed to educate the public appropriately, leaving people vulnerable to cult indoctrination. Republicans have been destroying public education for decades to aid this, and Democrats have not worked hard enough to stop it. Most people don’t understand concepts such as communism, fascism, oligarchy, and other authoritarian systems, or how socialism and capitalism are on a continuum. Also, America has never atoned for past sins, such as Native American genocide and slavery, nor has it created a new national identity and vision that brings together our pluralistic society to create a more perfect union for all.
Democracy requires an educated public. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his letter to Colonel Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816:
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
New research by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) as Salon reported on “found that nearly half of Americans who believe far-right news outlets like Newsmax and OANN, as well as one-third who trust Fox News, subscribe to the QAnon belief” called “storm,” to “sweep away elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”
The PRRI article describes who is most likely to believe in QAnon conspiracies:
[S]pecifically, white evangelical Protestants, Hispanic Protestants and Mormons are most likely to believe in QAnon. Americans without college degrees are three times more likely than those with them to believe in QAnon.
It’s important to realize that Hitler and the Nazis promoted conspiracy theories as a tactic to win over as many adherents to their ideology as possible. It worked then, and it’s working now. People are following leaders, not policies and ideals, so this is a cult of personality.
How Can We Work to Save Democracy?
Saving democracy requires demanding reforms and concurrently educating the public on why we need them, and a crucial improvement needed to save democracy is protecting voting rights for all citizens.
Passing voting rights legislation is not simple because the filibuster requires a supermajority. Sixty senators are needed. In a politically divided Senate without over-arching ideals, partisan politics prevail. The supermajority requirement is not in the Constitution because our Founders learned the hard way how a supermajority requirement nearly killed our democratic republic by 1787.
How did this happen? Read my article on what the Founders learned and a short history of the filibuster: “This Requirement Today Nearly Killed Democracy by 1787...Coincidence? No.”
Voting rights reform is not enough, as my article points out. We need a trifecta to help protect democracy.
Coming Up…
In the next article, we will more closely examine the ideology of the first anti-democracy cabal: Christian nationalists and their Dominionism.