Ted Eytan
Half of the people in the United States are now officially second-class citizens, after the highest court in the land rolled back our right to control our own bodies.
The powerful feeling of alienation from our country that many of us are experiencing right now has been in the works for a long time. Rightwing forces have been playing a long game to take over—and very nearly to overthrow—the institutions of our democracy. Those of us who do not fit into their vision of a white, Christian, patriarchal society have been left far behind.
“Face it, you got your butts out-organized,” an exasperated activist told pro-choice Republican women back in 1996, when I was reporting on Pat Buchanan’s break-away rally outside of the Republican National Convention in San Diego. Establishment Republican women were gathered on a yacht to express their dismay that a working-class, Christian-right rabble had managed to get an anti-abortion plank into the party platform.
The Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson, had been hard at work taking over school boards and pushing its anti-LGBTQ+, anti-feminist agenda. The group, along with Buchanan’s angry, displaced workers, who were mad about global trade deals and ready to blame immigrants for stealing jobs, had created an energized, grassroots movement and accumulated new power, through Buchanan’s “culture wars.”
Now those same “peasants with pitchforks,” as Buchanan called his followers, have taken over the entire party and changed society in ways they couldn’t even have imagined back then, long before the rise of former President Donald Trump.
Who would have thought that, two and a half decades later, a mob of armed rebels would storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, egged on by the President himself? Thanks to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack, we now know that Trump demanded that the mob be allowed to carry their weapons past the gun-detecting magnetometers, or “mags,” at the Ellipse, near the White House. “They’re not here to hurt me!” he fumed, according to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “Take the effing mags away!”
Some establishment Republicans have been upset by Trump’s criminal behavior, just as the GOP establishment was wrong-footed by the rise of the Christian right in the 1990s. And some—even former Trump allies and members of his administration—stood up to his most outrageous efforts to steal an election and unleash a violent mob on the Capitol.
Still, the Republican Party’s uneasy coalition of culture warriors and business elites, working together, brought us to where we are today. Wrapping themselves in the U.S. flag, stoking white supremacist fantasies, and pushing their “God, guns, and gays” agenda, they made their bargain, set aside their differences, and got behind Trump—who is neither a model of Christian moral probity nor an establishment guy. And Trump got out of control. But he also delivered in a big way.
Trump promised to “Make America Great Again,” and he not only rewrote the tax code to give corporations and the wealthiest Americans a massive windfall worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but he also made the culture warriors’ longtime dream of reshaping the country according to their own extremist views a reality.
Trump got out of control. But he also delivered in a big way.
He finagled three appointments on the U.S. Supreme Court, with help from that wily old establishment pro, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky. Just after taking office, Trump nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch to the court after McConnell blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for almost a year, claiming it was too close to the next election to appoint a new Justice. On Trump’s way out, he and McConnell took the opposite position and rammed through Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 election. Together with Brett Kavanaugh, whose sniveling, raging display of wounded entitlement after he was accused of sexual assault set a new low for Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the rightwing justices united to drag our country backward.
The result is a parade of disastrous rulings that not only reverses five decades of settled law protecting women’s bodily autonomy, but also prevents the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, just as climate change reaches a new crisis point, and blocks state and local gun-safety regulations limiting concealed carry in the wake of two of the most horrific mass shootings in recent history. Another mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, is more bitter fruit from the same twisted tree.
It’s a messed-up country we are living in, and things are likely to get worse.
“America never was America to me,” the poet Langston Hughes wrote. Of course this country, conceived in genocide and violence, founded on the labor of enslaved Black people, which didn’t let women vote until the 1920s, and which tolerates childhood poverty and growing inequity, despite its enormous wealth, has never lived up to its ideals.
Lately, all of the ugly, repressed elements of our history are rushing in on us—racism, violence, misogyny, inequity, and rule by force.
The sheer thuggishness of Trump and his minions, revealed in the January 6 Committee hearings, ripped the mask off Republicans who pretend to be idealistic patriots, but who are really nothing more than cringing servants of a power-hungry narcissist.
They didn’t succeed in stealing the 2020 election, but a lot of damage has been done.
The people who will turn things around are those fighting the ongoing effort to steal the next election and doing their best to organize a resistance to the rightwing, authoritarian state.
The real patriots are people like the lawyers at the new public interest firm Law Forward in Wisconsin, who filed the first lawsuit in the nation against a group of fake Trump electors who were part of an organized conspiracy to overturn the legitimate election results.
The same players continue to look for ways to rig future elections and make it harder for people to vote.
Law Forward Executive Director Nicole Safar, who previously spent fourteen years working for Planned Parenthood, connects the Supreme Court decision that eliminated federally protected abortion rights to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. “There is a direct through line from the anti-majoritarian movement to overrule Roe and the anti-democracy efforts of the last decade,” she writes.
The way the right wins is by preventing the majority from getting its way.
The same bad actors, she notes, were at the center of the campaign to criminalize abortion and the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Indiana attorney Jim Bopp has long represented the National Right to Life Committee, helping the anti-abortion movement toward its goal of eliminating Roe v. Wade. The same Jim Bopp also represented Trump in election lawsuits in Wisconsin. Attorney John Eastman, who founded the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, whose mission includes “fighting to uphold the Constitution’s guarantees of natural rights—such as the Second Amendment, property rights, and the right to life,” is now famous as the legal architect of Trump’s attempted coup.
For years, rightwingers have been working on a concerted legal strategy to lock in minority rule, including through partisan gerrymandering in states, which makes the assertion by the Supreme Court majority that “the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives”—absurd.
Large majorities of Americans support abortion rights and gun control, and want to combat climate change before it’s too late. The way the right wins is by preventing the majority from getting its way. After decades of being out-organized, the best hope for a better future is a progressive push to restore the rule of law and democracy.
Biden made a gesture at defending abortion rights through an Executive Order that, among other things, attempts to ensure medication abortion is widely accessible. But it was too little, too late. Advocates want Biden to declare a public health emergency and directly assist patients who need abortions now. The fact that the administration was caught flat-footed and took weeks to respond to the Supreme Court ruling is galling.
Much of the fight is now in the states. We need to embrace and lift up the great advocates who are filing lawsuits to protect abortion access, to combat environmental racism, to impose limits on firearms in this gun-addled land, and to stop Republicans from stealing elections.
We need to hold each other up to fight back. Even though we’ve been out-organized, we still have public opinion and justice on our side. In states that have become laboratories for reactionary politics, we need to push for progress on every front, little by little. Because democracy is a long game.
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Editor's note: An earlier version of this article online and in print stated erroneously that James Bopp represented the anti-abortion domestic terrorism organization Operation Rescue in the 1990s. Bopp is not associated with that group and has denounced its violent tactics.