The evolution of the Republican Party
30 May 2024
This post by historian Heather Cox Richardson describes the evolution of the Republican Party after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Ruling, Brown vs. Board of Education that established that the U.S. government would use the Fourteenth Amendment to protect American citizens from discriminatory legislation written by state legislatures.
Excerpts follow:
Over the following decades, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws against interracial marriage and gay marriage, and to establish equal rights for women, including the right to abortion. It also ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, constitutional.
That new legal framework, embodied in Brown v. Board, both established the equal rights that were central to the modern era and sparked a backlash against them.
The federal requirement that states desegregate their public schools spurred southern state legislatures to pass laws and resolutions to block or postpone desegregation. In 1956, ninety-nine congressmen, led by South Carolina Democrat Strom Thurmond, wrote the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” quickly dubbed the Southern Manifesto, denouncing desegregation as unconstitutional.
Lawmakers also found ways to transfer tax dollars to private schools, which were not covered by the Supreme Court’s decision. Attendance at so-called segregation academies exploded. By 1958, more than 250,000 students had migrated to segregation academies, a number that jumped to a million by 1965.
Those opposed to racial equality made common cause with those businessmen determined to get rid of federal regulation of business. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr., the son of an oilman, started National Review, a periodical that promised to stand against an active government that protected labor and regulated business. Buckley said he would tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story.”
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When he ran for the presidency in 1980, former California governor Ronald Reagan courted those religious traditionalists, and in 1985 his people made them a key part of the Republican coalition. Americans for Tax Reform brought together big business, evangelicals, and social conservatives under the leadership of Grover Norquist, who had been an economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.”
In the following decades, Republican leaders used racist and traditionalist dislike of equal rights to turn out voters who would let them put their economic policies—cuts to taxes and deregulation of business—into place. But those opposed to equal rights found themselves out of step with a majority of voters and unable to get their policies enshrined into law as courts continued to uphold equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women.
The backlash against the federal protection of equal rights based on the Fourteenth Amendment entered a new era with the election of Donald Trump. In contrast to his predecessors, Trump let the racist and sexist voter base of the party drive policy. White evangelicals, especially, found in Trump an answer to their frustration at being sidelined by the courts and a majority of American voters.
Despite his own lack of personal virtue, Trump was willing to smash through the laws and court decisions that had supported equality since the 1950s, offering to center the country on traditional religion and racial hierarchies in exchange for power. Under him, traditionalists saw the courts stacked with extremists who would prioritize their evangelical faith across society, including by ending the federal protection of abortion rights. Source.
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