Shadow Network

CHAPTER 14

“DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA”

The Founding Fathers created a marvelously complex structure, a system of political bulwarks that allowed one strut to compensate for the weakening of another. Their system of checks and balances placed the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches as counterweights. The federal, state, and local governments balanced local values against national interests. The framers of the Constitution enshrined the rights of a free press as a watchdog on corruption and government malfeasance. But they may not have anticipated a prolonged assault on every institution at once.

At the end of 2018 a group of young Family Research Council staff members touted their achievements at the state and national level with a Facebook Live video.1 Matt Carpenter, deputy director of state and local affairs for the FRC, listed bills passed in the statehouses to support their causes, some of which drew on the support of partner organizations. “On the pro-life side,” Carpenter said, “we were able to help our state policy council in Kentucky get a dismemberment ban across the finish line.” In California, he reported, the FRC mobilized thousands of emails and phone calls to prevent the state from requiring universities to carry chemical abortion pills. Some victories represented the thin edge of a wedge. The FRC’s legislative assistant celebrated the introduction of “unborn child language” into the tax code for education accounts, in the form of “any homo sapien at any stage of development.”

Host Matthew Mangiaracina, FRC’s manager of digital strategy, exclaimed, “I can’t even keep track of all the wins, there’s so much winning going on!”

Over the first two years of the Trump administration, movement activists concentrated on their missions to roll back women’s access to abortion and civil rights for the LGBT community. In 2019 the Alabama legislature passed a law banning abortion altogether, except in cases where a woman’s life is in danger or the fetus has a fatal abnormality, making no exceptions for rape or incest.2 Other states have passed the so-called heartbeat law, prohibiting abortion after the fetus has a detectable heartbeat. This occurs around the sixth week of pregnancy, which is before many women learn they are pregnant.

There was little nuance in the antiabortion movement. The Susan B. Anthony List, seven hundred thousand strong, maintains that “life begins at conception.”3 In fact, the movement argues that life can even begin before conception: it is adamantly opposed to the morning-after pill, which pauses ovulation and prevents the release of an egg.4 The Family Research Council’s answer to it was: “Plan B No Substitute for Plan A: Abstinence!”5

The movement based its antiabortion propaganda on a falsehood: that Democrats support, in the words of Ted Cruz, “unlimited abortion on demand up until the moment of birth.”6 True to Robert Arnakis and the Leadership Institute playbook, its language and imagery became ever more distressing, beginning with campaigns to end “partial birth” and “birth day” abortions, and proceeding to the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.”7

Fearing an erosion of abortion rights under the Supreme Court, New York and Virginia passed laws giving women and their doctors increased latitude for their decisions, allowing them to address rare cases of nonviable pregnancies, severe untreatable abnormalities, and other dire contingencies. (One example is anencephaly, in which a fetus forms without a brain or entire skull.) Donald Trump exploited the issues by falsely claiming that these laws gave doctors and mothers the power to “execute” a newborn baby.

The Family Research Council and its affiliates declared war on Planned Parenthood, seeking to close down its health and contraception services for low-income women, as well as its abortion clinics. It has waged its battles by accosting patients with pictures of mangled fetuses, dispatching middle-school American Heritage Girls to protests, and harassing clinics’ landlords and their children.8 In 2019 the movement renewed its efforts on the cultural front, with the release of the feature film Unplanned. The film was an attack on Planned Parenthood, depicting its clinics as a craven venture bankrolled by “George Soros, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.”9 One character states that Planned Parenthood’s “business model” is simple: “Fast-food outlets break even on their hamburgers. The French fries and soda are the low-cost, high-margin items. Abortion is our fries and soda.”10

The film’s heroine, based on an actual Planned Parenthood employee, defects after she is told to double her “quota” of abortions. This is done by strong-arming tearful teenagers into getting abortions they don’t want, and by inflicting unsuspecting patients with life-threatening hemorrhages (through what are statistically safe and routine procedures). But statistics were of no interest; Unplanned was melodrama, and it worked. It opened on more than eleven hundred screens across the country and recouped its $6 million budget in the first week.

The film offered an organizing platform for the movement. CNP member Lila Rose, founder of the antiabortion group Live Action, had a cameo role as a television reporter, which was put to use in the publicity campaign. The Susan B. Anthony List promoted the movie on its Facebook page, Tony Perkins devoted a column to it, and Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump Jr. tweeted its praises.11

I watched Unplanned among a sparse audience at a theater in Times Square. I had a special interest in the film: it was shot in my hometown, and extras for the climactic antiabortion rally included students from my high school. I learned that the casting call emails had made no mention of abortion, Planned Parenthood, or the name of the film. Instead, they invited locals to appear in “an exterior scene” in a film called Redeemed, which was “based on a true story of a woman’s journey and God’s redeeming love and forgiveness.”12

The movement’s second crusade was to erode the rights of the LGBT population. It has already achieved some successes. Tony Perkins took credit for the push on banning transgender people from the military, which Trump announced in 2017.13 That year, Texas lawmakers introduced thirteen anti-LGBTQ “religious freedom” bills, including a ban on adoption from taxpayer-funded adoption agencies by same-sex couples.14 In May 2019 the Trump administration announced a new regulation in the name of “religious freedom,” allowing health care providers to deny services on religious or moral grounds. Opponents fear it could lead to withholding health care from women and LGBT patients.15

Many CNP partners, starting with the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, have been tireless advocates of conversion therapy. The Family Research Council defends what it calls “sexual orientation change efforts” as “effective and beneficial,” and looks to the Supreme Court to reverse the bans in the future.16 The same organizations have resolutely opposed same-sex marriage; the Family Research Council filed an amicus brief, which they claimed “debunks” the idea that homosexuals have the “fundamental right to marry.”17

Laws govern behavior, but they also shape public opinion. In many states the passage of same-sex marriage laws has led to greater public support for it, and diminished homophobia.18 But by the same token, as Dr. Dhruv Khullar pointed out in the New York Times, antigay laws can have the effect of poisoning public opinion toward the LGBT population, at the risk of increased discrimination and violence.19

There would be profound social consequences in carrying this crusade to its conclusion. As of June 2017, there were over half a million same-sex marriages in the United States, concentrated on but not exclusive to the East and West Coasts. Couples have been filing joint returns, bearing and adopting children, and serving as valued members of their communities for years. A large and growing majority of Americans support both same-sex marriage (67 percent) and the right to abortion “in all or most cases” (58 percent).20 Historically, once political and civil rights are enshrined in law, there are few successful examples of revoking them—and those have ended badly.

There are broader issues at stake. The United States is a large and complex society, navigating a turbulent period of history. Its leaders face urgent decisions concerning climate change, public health and education, and international conflict. How can the country countenance the reduction of its entire future to a litmus test on abortion and same-sex marriage—debated under false premises?

The circuit courts can exert a major influence on national policy. Trump has encouraged the overwhelmingly conservative Fifth Circuit Court, corresponding to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, to do away with the entire Affordable Care Act.22 Trump appointments achieved a Republican-appointed majority in the Third Circuit Court, covering New Jersey, Delaware, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and parts of Pennsylvania, and they are well on the way to flipping the influential Ninth Circuit Court, based in San Francisco.23 This court has attracted Trump’s ire by challenging the administration’s Muslim travel ban and other controversial measures.24

The new judges are distinguished by their ideology and their youth. In March 2019, for example, the Senate confirmed thirty-seven-year-old Allison Jones Rushing to the Fourth Circuit, with jurisdiction over Maryland and districts in the Carolinas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Rushing served as a legal intern for the Alliance Defending Freedom, and has publicly opposed the Supreme Court decision on behalf of same-sex marriage.25 As of March 2019, Trump was responsible for a fifth of the seats in the appeals courts, guided by the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the NRA. There were more than three dozen appeals and circuit court nominees in waiting.

The ideological litmus tests for court appointments grew starker. The American Bar Association, which instituted its ratings system at the request of President Dwight Eisenhower, gave more “not qualified” ratings to Trump nominees than to the previous four presidents combined.26

Some ideology tests were blatant, such as the appointments for the Board of Veterans Appeals, which adjudicated veterans’ issues under the aegis of the Veterans Administration. The appointments had always been nonpartisan, and the White House confirmation routine. But in 2018, for the first time, the White House required a slate of eight nominees to disclose their party affiliation and other political details. The candidates, already heavily vetted serving judges, were winnowed according to party: the three Democrats and an independent were rejected, the three Republicans and an independent who voted Republican approved.27 It was an unprecedented move.

But the Supreme Court represented the highest stakes. By blocking Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, the Republican Senate left one seat open for Trump to fill. The retirement of Anthony Kennedy left another. Trump’s appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, have not always agreed. But on June 27, 2019, they joined the court’s other conservatives in a 5-4 ruling that federal courts lacked the power to hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering, a practice that has increasingly stacked the deck on behalf of Republicans in a number of states. This decision would impact local, state, and national elections for years to come.

The electoral process faces other risks as well. The infrastructure of American democracy, like the country’s roads and bridges, is aging. The Constitution, however revered, was hammered out as a compromise among men defending very specific economic and political interests, over two centuries ago. The Electoral College undermined the principle of “one man, one vote,” and rewarded Donald Trump’s narrow victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over Hillary Clinton’s much wider margins in New York and California.28 The creation of the powerful institution of the Senate has resulted in a citizen in Wyoming exercising around sixty-seven times the voting power of a Californian.29 The nation has bumped along with these anomalies, but their liabilities are increasingly called into question.

The 2018 electoral map showed other aspects of the great divide. Once again, the Democrats won the coasts and the cities, while Republicans dominated the South and the Plains states. But the rift was even obvious in individual states. One example was Missouri, where Democrat Claire McCaskill’s victories in St. Louis, Kansas City, and the college town of Columbia marked three blue dots in a sea of red.

The crisis in the news media compounded the problems. The impact of Sinclair stations was extensively reported, but there has been equal concern over the partisan nature of Fox News. According to the New York Times, “the symbiosis between Fox News stars and the Trump administration means the network will not treat Democrats fairly.” (Fox News’s Washington headquarters are located in the Hall of the States building on North Capitol Street, the same office complex that houses the CNP’s.) The channel’s influence was growing. In April 2019, Fox News finished first among cable news channels with a prime-time audience of nearly 2.4 million viewers. That’s still well under 1 percent of the U.S. population—but the same month, CNN’s prime-time audience plummeted 26 percent, to 767,000.30 Televisions are permanently set to Fox News in bars, airport lounges, and waiting rooms through many stretches of the South and the Midwest.

Fox’s influence is multiplied across its many platforms. CNP member Todd Starnes is a good example. The FoxNation streaming service carries his program Starnes Country. In 2018 Fox News Radio announced that it was expanding The Todd Starnes Show to a full three-hour program every weekday. Starnes’s Facebook page—with a quarter of a million followers—states that “his daily commentaries are heard on more than 500 [radio] stations.”

The media organizations run by CNP members are less celebrated than Fox News, but they have their own impact, especially in the states where they are concentrated. Consider, for example, the case of Missouri, where Claire McCaskill lost a tightly contested race against Josh Hawley in 2018. The Bott Radio Network owns forty-eight stations in the state of Missouri alone. The CNP is well represented in its schedule, which carries Tony Perkins’s Washington Watch, James Dobson’s Family Talk, and Gary Bauer’s End of Day Report.31 National Public Radio, by comparison, had thirteen stations.32 Both of the state’s leading dailies endorsed McCaskill, but the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s combined circulation represented around 6 percent of the state’s more than six million citizens.33

The combination of partisan media and ground troops can be powerful indeed. McCaskill faced attacks from a battery of organizations run by CNP members. The Family Research Council excoriated her for supporting abortion rights and gun control.34 The FRC’s Watchmen on the Wall, boasting 1,927 Missouri pastors in its network, distributed iVoter guides in their churches labeling her as “very liberal” and linking to a Project Veritas video tying her to Planned Parenthood.35 (Project Veritas was launched in 2010 as a project to discredit news media and liberal organizations through sting operations. Its founder, James O’Keefe, had received training and modest financial support from Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute.36)

The NRA ran a campaign called “Defend Freedom. Defeat Claire McCaskill,” giving her an F in its ratings. Its app announced that its Missouri team was going door-to-door “to build support for Missouri’s Pro–Second Amendment candidates.”37

The Susan B. Anthony List went all out. Its press release announced that it had sent a “field team of 117 canvassers to visit more than 310,000 Missouri voters ahead of Election Day to elect pro-life Josh Hawley and defeat incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill. Additionally, it held eight in-state media events, reached 448,144 voters through persuasive voter contact mail and digital ads, made 90,399 live voter calls, and raised $34,392 in bundled contributions for Hawley’s campaign.”38

The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity–Missouri assailed McCaskill with a $1.8 million multimedia campaign, including television, cable, and digital ads.39 The national Americans for Prosperity organization ran five ads against McCaskill on Facebook in Missouri between August 31 and September 16 alone, informed by its powerful data collection.40

The Democrats’ response to this situation has been colored by troubles of their own. The party faces a generational divide between the traditional “white men” who have run the party in the past, and a newly energized generation that reflects the growing diversity of the nation. But both camps have been slow to grasp the realities of the new electoral map, a fact exemplified by Hillary Clinton’s failure to show up in Wisconsin, a major stop on what Nate Silver calls the “Northern Path” to electoral victory. The Democratic Party has taken its traditional constituencies for granted and missed the ground shifting beneath its feet. With their party’s headlong rush to diversity, Democratic activists tended to underestimate the role of the Electoral College in the swing states, but without the Rust Belt it was hard to make the math compute.

In the words of Atlantic senior editor Ronald Brownstein, the trigger for Trump’s victory was “a mass uprising by the GOP’s ‘coalition of restoration’ … the older and blue-collar whites, evangelical Christians and non-urban voters who in polls have consistently expressed both the most economic pessimism and cultural unease about a changing America.”41 This demographic sounded surprisingly similar to George Barna’s SAGE Cons.

The Democrats’ Rust Belt problem has often been ascribed to the loss of industrial jobs in the region, a major factor.42 But one should not overlook the impact of the massive targeted get-out-the-vote efforts conducted by CNP and Koch partners, combined with a multiplatformed media, advertising, and canvassing campaigns informed by state-of-the-art data and a keen understanding of their audiences.

The playing field was far from level—the military would call it asymmetrical warfare. The Democratic Party fostered a culture of infighting and debate, pitting candidates and constituents against each other and amplifying infractions and gaffes. These were aired in the traditional news media, which turned a critical eye on every candidate from every party. This played into the hands of the new Republicans, who imposed a high degree of discipline on their organizations, of which every component—including dedicated media operations—executed its appointed tasks.

One question that arises is the legality of certain actions of the CNP and Koch organizations, in view of the requirements of their tax-exempt, nonpartisan status. But it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on this question. These groups operated within a framework that was constructed under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Both parties bear responsibility for an American political system that has been increasingly corrupted by skewed campaign finance laws, undermining participatory democracy and surrendering power to wealthy individuals and corporate interests. The laws governing the political activities of nonprofits are soft and unenforced, benefiting special interests on both sides. The complex legal questions of campaign finance and data gathering are far from settled. But it should not be denied that the CNP and the Koch operations owe a large measure of their success to smarter strategies, stronger coalitions, and that abiding but often forgotten principle, “Know your audience.” Their approach was honed and informed by the likes of Weyrich and Barna: “God doesn’t need a majority.” Neither does the U.S. electoral system as it is currently constituted.

As the CNP members pursued their social policies, the Koch network advanced its economic plan. On December 22, 2017, President Trump signed the most radical revision of the U.S. tax code in thirty years, without a single Democratic vote. The Koch brothers, DeVoses, and their counterparts benefited—but at the cost of a massive national deficit. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projected that the shortfall for the fiscal year would approach $900 billion, about a quarter of which was the result of the new tax bill.43

Nonetheless, in March 2019, the Trump administration released its 2020 budget request, with large increases for defense and border security and cuts in social programs and federal agencies. Medicare, Medicaid, and student loans were all on the chopping block. The budget aimed for a 15 percent cut for the Department of Agriculture, including drastic reduction of its programs for food stamps and conservation. The Department of Education was slated for a 12 percent cut. At Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health would lose about 12 percent of its budget, and the Centers for Disease Control around 10 percent. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development would lose almost a quarter of their budget, and the Environmental Protection Agency nearly a third.44 “God’s wrecking ball” was on a tear, battering the institutions of the U.S. government.

Trump continued to turn to his CNP supporters to implement key policies. In June 2019 he appointed CNP member Ken Cuccinelli to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In a December 2018 op ed in the Washington Times, Cuccinelli had suggested, “The president could continue adding troops to the border and turn border security entirely over to the military.”45

Trump’s fundamentalist supporters girded themselves for the battle ahead. On June 16, 2019, the Washington Times published an account of Ralph Reed’s plans for 2020, “to register 1 million evangelical voters, knock on 3 million doors, and put literature in more than 117,000 churches in key states, with the hopes of contacting roughly 30 million people.” Reed reported, “It’s going to be roughly three times the level of what we did in 2016.46

The strategists of the CNP had long been cultivating right-wing Catholics such as Frank Pavone, seeking to expand their remit from evangelicals, or the “born again,” to conservative Christians. Now Reed told the Washington Times that, “when ‘faithful, frequently Mass-attending Roman Catholics’ are added in, conservative religious voters will likely total close to 40% of the electorate—larger than the Hispanic, black and union votes combined.” The article closed with a comment from E.W. Jackson, a Virginia pastor and a member of the CNP. “Yeah, I know he’s not perfect, but here again: It’s not Donald Trump or Jesus,” he stated. “It’s really Donald Trump or the devil in a way, if you know what I mean.”

What would the American pluto-theocracy look like? For a glimpse into the future, one can consider Oklahoma. The state government has long been heavily dependent on tax revenues from the oil and gas industry. In 2014, then governor Mary Fallin slashed the oil and natural gas gross production tax to 2 percent from its customary 7 percent.47 By 2017 the tax breaks were costing the state nearly $400 million a year.48

The first victim was public education. Oklahoma has cut general state funds for public schools by over 28 percent between 2008 and 2018, the largest drop in the nation.49 Oklahoma teachers gained the title of lowest-paid in the country.50 The results were tangible; I heard about them from friends and family every time I went home. In Tulsa a group of students from a well-regarded public high school told of walls with crumbling plaster that went untended for months. They studied from battered old textbooks with missing pages. A fifth of the school districts retreated to a four-day school week. A friend’s daughter, a dedicated teacher, had to move out of state to make a living. That wasn’t unusual; even Oklahoma’s 2016 Teacher of the Year, Shawn Sheehan, moved to Texas for the same reason. Other teachers took second jobs to make ends meet and held bake sales to buy classroom materials.51

In 2017 the Oklahoma teachers staged a walkout, and the following year sixty-five educators ran for the state legislature. They met keen opposition from the American Federation for Children, which was chaired by Betsy DeVos before she became secretary of education. The AFC’s mantra was “school choice,” which translated to diverting resources from public schools to private and religious schools, and opposing candidates who called for tax increases to fund public education. The goals coincided with the Council for National Policy’s position on public education, as expressed in a 2017 manifesto. The CNP’s “Education Reform Report” called for minimizing the role of the federal government in education, supporting religious schools and homeschooling, and using “historic Judeo-Christian principles” as an educational foundation.52

DeVos’s organization advanced the mission by supporting challengers to public school advocates in twelve states with money, ads, direct mail, and calls.53 In Oklahoma that translated into almost $45,000 spent on direct mail to oppose the teachers—over one week alone.54 Nonetheless, sixteen teachers, administrators, and support staff from the Oklahoma Education Association won seats in the legislature.55

Oklahoma’s crisis extended far beyond education. The waiting list for disability services lengthened to roughly ten years. Public health indicators were an ongoing disaster, and a quarter of the state’s children lived with hunger.56 In the meantime, the oil and gas industry counted among the largest beneficiaries of President Trump’s tax reform.57

At the same time these transformations were taking place, there were countercurrents—signs that some members of the Democratic fold were taking note of their deficits. In May 2019 Maggie Severns reported in Politico that the Democracy Alliance was shifting its strategy, cutting back on its funding for Washington-based organizations and directing new resources to grassroots organizations at the state level. Politico reported that the alliance had retained New Media Ventures to head its digital organizing, “spurred by concerns among Democrats that the GOP and Trump campaign deployed better digital advertising and organizing tactics in 2016 than they did.”58

The sands were shifting in the Koch empire as well. In 2018 David Koch withdrew from Seminar Network activities and resigned as chairman of Americans for Prosperity, citing poor health. The Kochs, never fans of Donald Trump, parted ways with the administration on various issues, including immigration and criminal justice reform. On May 20, 2019, the Washington Post reported that there were big changes afoot at the Seminar Network meeting in Indian Wells, California. The leadership announced that the Seminar Network would henceforth operate under the name Stand Together. Freedom Partners, which formerly aired campaign commercials, would disappear, and Americans for Prosperity would take over all political and policy operations.59

The meeting followed on the January session, which stressed financial support for mainstream nonprofits and charities. The network declined to announce a target amount for spending in the 2020 elections, and only three politicians attended (all Republican, but stressing bipartisan credentials).60

But the Koch campaign was far from over. The report on the May meeting noted the Kochs’ intention to pursue a “comprehensive approach” toward four institutions: “the education field, the business world, community organizations, and politics/policy-making.” They were expanding their media portfolio as well. Following the 2016 elections, Koch organizations offered a number of grants to cash-starved journalism organizations, including the American Society of News Editors and the Newseum in Washington, D.C.61

In April 2019 the venerable Poynter Institute, a leader in the field of journalism development, announced a new partnership with the Charles Koch Institute to train young journalists and place them in the newsrooms of leading news organizations.62 The grants provoked debate among the recipients, who noted the Kochs’ attempts to discredit reporters who published critical accounts of their operations: the salient example was Jane Mayer, whose book Dark Money revealed the Kochs’ disinformation campaigns on climate and environmental issues. The Kochs’ increased investments in education and journalism posed troubling questions, but it was too soon to say where they would lead.

The situation of the National Rifle Association was more transparent. The NRA had long been a critical partner of the CNP, and a prominent client of the Kochs’ i360 data platform. Between 2016 and 2017 the NRA’s revenue dropped by tens of millions of dollars, forcing it to carry out drastic cutbacks. In 2019 it experienced a full meltdown. Russian operative Maria Butina was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for her role in infiltrating the NRA and brokering relations between its leadership and the Putin government. The association was named in a lawsuit filed against the Federal Election Commission for failing to respond to alleged campaign law infractions. The New York attorney general launched an investigation of the legitimacy of the NRA’s nonprofit status.63

In April the NRA sued its Oklahoma City–based advertising agency of thirty-eight years, Ackerman McQueen, accusing it of withholding billing information and breach of contract. This action sparked an ongoing feud between NRA president Oliver North and executive vice president Wayne LaPierre—both members of the CNP. Much of the suit revolved around the agency’s handling of NRATV video service and a multimillion-dollar contract with North to host a series. Then the Wall Street Journal revealed that North had accused LaPierre of receiving over $200,000 toward designer suits (reportedly from the Beverly Hills outlet for Ermenegildo Zegna), purchased through Ackerman McQueen. LaPierre was also accused of using Ackerman McQueen to charge another $240,000 for lavish trips to Hungary, Italy, the Bahamas, Palm Beach, and Reno.64

There were promises of more revelations to come. The NRA’s annual convention in Indianapolis erupted as North tried to banish LaPierre. LaPierre fought back, winning reelection by the board, and North was informed that he would not be renominated as president.65 The NRA tried to divert attention from the disaster by publicizing President Trump and Vice President Pence’s presence at the convention. On April 29, North was replaced by CNP member Carolyn Meadows, and the saga continued.

As Americans looked toward the 2020 elections, much of the debate centered around the question of impeaching Donald Trump. It’s possible that impeachment held little terror for the CNP—its favored son, Mike Pence, was next in line. The news media made surprisingly little mention of Pence, who had an uncanny ability to fade into the woodwork. Few pundits listened to Pence on Washington Watch, or attended to his role in striking the fundamentalists’ bargain with Trump in 2016. Pence had long-standing ties to Tony Perkins and the CNP’s membership, and a far better working knowledge of Washington than Trump. It’s easy to imagine that the CNP would prefer him as president; an impeachment might work to their advantage. Trump provided the fire, the fury, and the spectacle, but impeaching him could improve their situation.

It was time to step back and take a hard look at the fault lines of the American political process. The ties that once connected the nation had frayed, including journalism. National news organizations parachuted reporters into communities to report on catastrophes or curiosities; in 2017, for example, the Huffington Post embarked on a million-dollar “Listen to America” project, which sent staffers on a bus tour across America to record interviews and produce reports in partnership with local news media.66 But this was a profoundly different process from sharing a community’s life and representing its interests. In the meantime, the colony collapse of the noncoastal news media has continued. In October 2018 the University of North Carolina released a new study reporting that about 1,300 U.S. communities had totally lost news coverage.67

The perspective of Middle America wasn’t reaching the coasts. Coastal Americans who knew every European port of call were often curiously ignorant of their own country. Not everyone in Iowa grows corn; not everyone in Oklahoma herds cows. Our lesser-known states boast brilliant scientists and inventors, artists and musicians, entrepreneurs and scholars, but they often remain in obscurity.

The bias extends to religion. As I researched this book, when I told friends I was attending services at charismatic and fundamentalist churches, the reaction was often “They’re all a bunch of racists.” I found that some of the most racially integrated spaces I’ve experienced have been in nondenominational megachurches, whether in Oklahoma or Times Square. The Council for National Policy includes various African American pastors, and the Family Research Council promotes Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece Alveda as a spokeswoman.68 It’s complicated. The only useful response to oversimplification is inquiry.

But the 2016 election clearly demonstrated how the mechanics of democracy could be manipulated to produce antidemocratic results. The choice of America’s evangelical population as the lever for power is telling. According to a 2014 study by Pew Research, evangelicals are 76 percent white and 84 percent third-generation American or higher, leaving them susceptible to fears of immigration. Seventy-eight percent don’t have college degrees, and 57 percent have household incomes under $49,000 a year.69 They take pride in their family farms and factory jobs, and those are disappearing. An entire way of life is eroding, and there’s no solution on the horizon. They are ripe for manipulation, even if the end result is detrimental to their health, their well-being, and the future of their children.

The CNP and its partners have spent over four decades studying their audience and mastering the written and unwritten rules of American politics. Its moralists have little regard for the rights of minorities; its financiers lack concern for social welfare; and its strategists have no respect for majority rule. If it is fully realized, their combination of theocracy and plutocracy could result in a dystopia for those who fall outside their circle.

History teaches us that a nation neglects its democratic institutions at its peril. The “associations” lauded by Alexis de Tocqueville require constant renewal. The challenge of modernity is to use technology and organizations not to exploit divisions, but to seek common ground.