The Roots of Trumpist-GOP Authoritarianism
Before Gingrich or Nixon there was a Cheesehead named Paul Weyerich
The Hustings’ return to Substack these past few weeks has been a bit disorganized. It is meant to be a weekly newsletter, appearing on Tuesdays, the day for most elections in the U.S. I am no more politically astute than most of you, so please remember that the purpose of this newsletter is to drive readers and citizen pundits to the Editorial We’s humble little website, https://thehustings.news.
The time is ripe for The Hustings to become a viable alternative to X/Twitter, and you can help achieve that by contributing comments via editors@thehustings.news.
On this particular Tuesday, the second one in August, Ohio voters who are not preoccupied with summer vacation or travel go to the polls to vote on the state’s Issue 1 ballot initiative. If passed by vote of at least 50%, Issue 1 would require a 60% majority for all future ballot initiatives, including a codification of Ohio’s abortion rights on the ballot in November.
It should be noted that both legislative chambers in Ohio are run by GOP majorities, and the governor is a Republican, too. It’s also worth noting that Kansas voters turned down a ballot initiative there in August 2022 to ban abortions, 59% to 41%.
This particular Tuesday also happens to be the 49th anniversary of Richard M. Nixon’s televised address announcing he would resign the presidency the next day. This came more than seven months after the “Saturday Night Massacre” when both Attorney Gen. Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney Gen. William Ruckleshaus both refused Nixon’s demand they fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. The Justice Department’s third in-line, Robert Bork, carried out the task — perhaps the true origin of the term, “Borking.”
Whether you are conservative or liberal, you will have long recognized the potential for a parallel between Cox and current Special Counsel Jack Smith. If Donald J. Trump’s attorneys succeed in delaying his government documents trial, or the trial for his alleged attempts to obstruct the 2020 Electoral College count, or both, and the 45th president becomes the 47th, Smith will be “Coxed” on January 20, 2025.
Mainstream journalists and their media outlets (which is to say, not Fox News and those to its right) have become more overt in calling out the authoritarianism of Trump, his MAGA supporters and his Republican enablers recently.
Writing for New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Eric Levitz points out that conservatives argue that punishing coup leaders is authoritarian. Some of Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination, most notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy portray “wokeism” and “political correctness” as authoritarian control over the liberties of good American patriots.
But as Levitz writes, “There is little disagreement about whether today’s frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination tried to subvert democratic government in the United States,” even if Trump didn’t know what he was doing.
To that last point, Trump’s admiration for the world’s certified dictators, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Xingping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un might be traced back to Trump’s role as an ersatz CEO ruling the business world in The Apprentice.
Interest by the extreme right wing of the GOP in authoritarianism did not start with Trump’s ride down his golden escalator in 2015, however. Pundits uninterested in going back to Nixon’s Watergate era cite Newt Gingrich’s four-year stint as House speaker, beginning in 1995, as the first chapter of this origin story, followed up by Bush v. Gore in 2000 and then the rise of the Tea Party as response to the Obama administration.
As with most things political, the roots of the Republican Party’s authoritarian streak can be traced to a much more obscure figure. Paul Weyerich, a Wisconsin native, like me, and a onetime Milwaukee Sentinel reporter, like me (though he covered politics and I had a temp job there covering police, fire and weather) promoted the theory that widespread voting rights is not good for the Republican Party, Dan Kaufman writes in The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics. Weyerich, who went on to co-found The Heritage Foundation, Free Congress Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council worked on Sen. Barry “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. After Goldwater’s loss by a landslide to an incumbent who pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and was about to do the same with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it must have been crystal clear to the man who later coined the term, “moral majority” that the GOP would struggle to achieve “big tent” politics.
A decade and a half later, Ronald Reagan would prove that conservative Republicans could win the popular vote. What is now called either “traditional,” “RINO” or “anti-Trump” Republicanism (see: former Sen. Liz Cheney) never embraced Weyerich’s theory of limited voting. But there is a strong movement in Republican-controlled state legislatures to limit or cut voting-by-mail, early voting and even
poll hours. Any success in making it harder to vote could affect the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and for subsequent elections for years to come.