I remember being struck, as a underclass man at Baylor University in the early 70s, a few things which have come to be true.
One, was that America was going down the wrong track, seduced by the siren song of Liberalism and Hollywood. Two, Evangelical born agains needed to not just commit to the tenets of the religion, but dedicate their lives to turning America around. Three, obviously running for office based on saying what you really think won’t win election. Therefore, for the righteous there are a different set of rules which justify lying in order to gain power.
I realized that this was not merely college student prideful silliness, but real when I saw Karl Rove move from being a national President of campus Republicans to showing up as a prominent political strategist and operative in key Texas races in the late seventies and early eighties. The famed East Texas strategy arose from this. Evangelicals had not been considered political much before that, but now mobilizing people in church became a prominent feature. This was the mass turnout matched with money from the Houston Ship Channel interests which were another name for the biggest oil companies that were headquartered in Houston.
As I observed this, I saw a backlash against the whole shootin’ match of progressive policies from the Johnson era and, just to add interest, to the FDR era as well.
The big one at the time was the Civil Rights legislation. In Texas and the rest of the South, it wasn’t just the Voting Rights changes, nor just the Civil Rights legislation. But under Johnson, the Justice Department sent in an army of young lawyers to go to every county courthouse and gather evidence which, after court judgments were handed down, broke the back of local institutions that sustained Jim Crow as a legal system and social order. Johnson told his side, Bill Moyers, at the time that in pursuing this policy he was giving the South to the Republican Party, for at least a generation.
In college less than ten years later, I could tell that kids who had come from families across the South were coming to grips with the shock of this cultural change and they were really hoping it could be reversed somehow. Those who went into politics saw that as a mission.
However, that would not have been long lasting as a political drive to fuel the movement we are seeing now. The agenda that brought the oil interests in was about environmental regulation. They felt betrayed that Nixon was the President who signed the EPA into law. They wanted the regulations somehow mitigated. They wanted this to be an agenda item for the marriage of convenience between oil money and evangelical mass mobilization.
Another element was feminism and women’s liberation.
this went against the traditional family model. The issue did not gain the mass energy it did, however, until Roe v Wade came down.
It happened that, in 1982, I helped run a school board race in Austin. The Moral Majority was running a two candidate slate we found ourselves running against. The voters in this progressive University of Texas town sent the organizers packing. However, in the years and decades since, the same right wing effort kept at it, winning school board elections in smaller towns and eventually taking over the State Board of Education. This body adopts textbooks for Texas’ classrooms as well as curriculum. Because Texas is a very large state, this affects every other state to some degree because the publishers want to sell books in Texas school districts.
School board elections have been vulnerable to organized efforts from national or statewide promoters of right wing agendas because they typically are the lowest of low turnout elections and spending is quite limited. What I have observed over time is that progressives, liberals or Democrats have tended to overlook what has been going on in this area, since school boards seem kind of beside the point if you have a whole system of higher education as the source of power behind American public education.
Lately I have been concerned that we are not concerned enough about purposeful efforts to undermine and erode support for education, for science and for critical thinking as basic to functioning adulthood.
I am not so much concerned about Donald Trump at this point. However, what has been revealed by his public antics and candidacy, is that there is a sizeable portion of American voters who have been appealed to for years and decades by a steady diet of right wing alternative universe storytelling shaped by a long term investment in the project that dates back to the late 60s. In Dallas, a radio station I could hear a hundred miles to the south in Waco, was probably the first offering right wing talk and commentary. Since then, AM stations that amount to a network across rural and small town America have been key to the creation of the political polarization that creates the red state voting phenomenon.
AM radio signals can reach a large amount of space relative to FM, which needs repeater stations to get very far from the usual college town footprints. Obviously Fox News is very influential. But less obvious is the role that evangelical churches have played in supporting and reinforcing messages. Also significant are the plethora of think tanks which work on memes that get repeated on social media and elsewhere, and which become the talking points used in AM radio broadcasts, candidate positions and Fox News commentary. I think if you look at the entire infrastructure investment from 1968, including lobbying at local state and federal levels, staffing think tanks and bill mills, all the conferences and influence spreading events, etc. that it could top a trillion dollars. This is not about advertising.
All this to push an agenda, most clearly articulated in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Mandate for Leadership, that would indeed move America as a society and as a democracy directed by the old time sensibilities that began as anti-progressivism, away from a progressive path for the balance of the 21st century.
Looking at all of this, I have to say that the persistence of this and the passionate Belief that drives it, could overwhelm the momentum of the enlightenment that has fueled progress for civilization for the past 1,000 years. The reason it might overturn the contemporary order is the conscious effort on the part of many folks who are made anxious by the sheer number of humans in the world, the presence of the internet with exposure to all the diversity of the world, and the availability of all knowledge, which we can’t get away from.
We could enter a new Dark Age because of corporate and billionaire greed working to fan the flames of fear of the future. All that is hard to get a handle on. But I have seen that thinking people in places like Chile or Argentina, Russia or other authoritarian countries have found themselves arguing about it from adjoining jail cells. I did not take too seriously the sophomores I was in college with when they talked about taking over America, but then some inherited major fortunes and others became GOP bigwigs over the decades after graduation.
The intentions that come with a lifetime of persistent, dedicated effort need to be taken seriously. Vote in those school board races. Get involved with the city council. Take it seriously and make paying attention a lifelong habit.