Chapter 3

ORGANIZING THROUGH OUTRAGE

THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA FIRST AROSE as democracy struggled to take root in societies marked by huge divides between the rich and the rest. It has reappeared in our day as America’s new superrich have pulled away from everyone else. Then and now, the basic question for conservative leaders was the same: how to reconcile their allegiance to wealth and power with the need to attract the electoral support of voters without much of either. Their answer, then and now, carried profound implications—for their party’s survival and, in our era, for the well-being of American society.

The modern Republican Party’s choice to side emphatically with those at the top narrowed its options. With plutocratic priorities dictating the party’s economic agenda, its electoral appeals shifted toward cultural issues. In the next chapter we will explore why and how racial appeals took center stage. Before doing so, we need to understand how the party developed a political infrastructure that could mobilize mass support, even as its alliance with the wealthy constrained the form that infrastructure could take.

The party’s embrace of the plutocrats had two major consequences for that mobilization strategy. First, it reduced the range of issues on which the party could compete and thus the range of voters it could reach. Without broad or deep popular backing, Republicans’ pocketbook agenda was increasingly insufficient. Second, it made maximizing engagement and emotion among the party’s core voters—while finding ways to recruit new voters who could be similarly stirred—even more essential. The party needed groups that could rile voters up and reach deep into communities, and they needed groups willing to do so on terms compatible with the party’s embrace of the plutocrats. As that embrace strengthened, Republicans cast about for willing and capable allies.

They found them in a set of organizations that came to form the backbone of white electoral backlash. Following the 2016 election, journalists would rush to the bars and diners of “flyover country” to interview voters who had sided with Trump. Yet the explanations that these aggrieved voters offered did not suddenly emerge out of a single campaign, much less from a single voter’s mind. Just as the transformation from a reasonably moderate party into one dedicated to plutocracy required decades of organization-building on the economic right, the rise of a party built on the kinds of incendiary appeals that Donald Trump would employ required decades of organization-building on the social right. The process wasn’t planned in advance, much less fully orchestrated from above. It involved trial and error, internal disputes, accommodations, and course corrections. Yet over a generation, it not only changed the priorities of the Republican Party’s base; it changed the party itself.

IF FINDING GROUPS REPUBLICANS COULD RELY ON to navigate the Conservative Dilemma took time, it was time well spent. For the groups that aligned with the GOP proved unusually skilled at creating durable shared identities that motivated citizens, and then getting those citizens to show up, not just on election day, but whenever big shows of strength were needed. These were groups, in short, that could rally their troops, creating sharp lines between friend and foe and instilling a sense of threat. And what best rallied those troops, they discovered, was outrage.

The early specialists in outrage-stoking were the Christian right and the NRA. Racial backlash helped propel both movements: white resistance to desegregation fueled the defense of Christian schools; white fear of black city dwellers motivated the case for unregulated gun ownership. Yet Republican outrage-stoking came to encompass a constantly renewable set of threats. Pioneers in the politics of resentment, the Christian right and the NRA scaled up new technologies of outreach (Christian broadcasting, direct mail) and new strategies of recruitment and certification (church-based mobilization, candidate loyalty “scores”) that proved highly effective at generating intense, albeit narrow, support. Soon they would be joined by another powerful set of organizations: the rapidly growing “outrage industry” of right-wing media.

These groups had little interest in the conventional approach to party-building. Parties generally seek to reach out to the uncommitted or weakly committed, the swing voters who decide close elections. Parties generally thrive on ambiguity that allows many factions to gather under one big tent. Outrage groups care first and foremost about survival (or, as social scientists put it, “organizational maintenance”). They gain the members and money they need to survive by building ranks of passionate followers and ramping up those followers’ sense of threat. They disdain swing voters and ambiguity. They seek to tear down big tents.

Thus, like some ill-fated conservative parties in the past, Republicans came to depend on extreme factions that provided valued resources but also pulled the party further toward the fringe. Each new ally offered the party an inroad into precincts of the electorate it might otherwise lose. But each new ally came at a price. By contracting out the task of persuasion, the GOP increasingly lost the capacity to shape its own agenda and fight elections on its own terms. Indeed, the Republican Party itself eventually became a weaker part of the Republican coalition, spending less than powerful private interests allied with the party and doing less to mobilize voters. Surrogates and their extreme agendas came to permeate the GOP so completely that it became increasingly difficult for party leaders to chart a moderate course. By the time a true master of outrage came along, a party that had outsourced identity-building would be easy prey.

THE FERVENT SUPPORT OF WHITE EVANGELICALS is the bedrock of the modern Republican electoral coalition. In recent campaigns, white evangelicals have made up roughly a quarter of the nation’s electorate. Almost four out of every five of those votes have gone to the GOP. Without strong backing from this community, no Republican presidential candidate can win the party’s nomination, let alone the presidency. No recent Republican candidate has been able to pick a running mate—or, if elected, a Supreme Court nominee—who doesn’t garner evangelical backing too.

That a disproportionately conservative, rural, and Southern demographic would find a comfortable home in today’s GOP may appear to have been inevitable. Yet while prescient observers envisioned the coalition-to-come in the early 1970s, the picture didn’t come into sharp focus until the mid-1990s. What’s more, the alliance had to be repeatedly reconstructed, because the modern history of the Christian right has been marked by personal scandals, financial implosions, and the rise, fall, and reinvention of a dizzying array of organizations and leaders.

This turmoil can obscure a basic truth about the GOP-evangelical alliance. To work for both sides as inequality skyrocketed, it had to be built along particular lines. Many of the regions of greatest evangelical strength are also those that are most rapidly falling behind—regions characterized by increasing social dislocation and decreasing opportunities for economic mobility. Against this backdrop of deep economic stress, the basis for the alliance between party and movement nonetheless needed to lie elsewhere, ideally with an emphasis on threats depicted as existential.

In a secularizing culture, conservative Christians had reason to see their cultural commitments as endangered. Yet the history of the alliance makes clear that racial antagonism was the primary catalyst for the mass mobilization of evangelicals and, eventually, for their tight alignment with the GOP. Racial resentment has continued to act as a binding agent, leading to rhetoric and policies that work for plutocrats and religious conservatives alike. But at the same time, racial resentment had to be tamed and redirected to serve as a foundation for the Christian right’s comfortable GOP home.

While the contours of what would become the Christian right were hazy in the early 1970s, the cornerstone of the movement was already in place: tens of thousands of churches, including almost 35,000 within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) alone. From abolitionism to prohibition to the civil rights movement, churches have been central to grass-roots politics. They offer a roof under which the like-minded and similarly situated can gather, build solidarity, and deepen conviction. These trusted and rooted local institutions offer a potent mix of face-to-face activities, while a loose, clergy-based network makes it possible to aggregate these local energies into national action.¹

If churches provided the initial sites for evangelical organizing, by the mid-1970s new technologies amplified the influence of religious voices, bringing them beyond the walls of churches into families’ living rooms. Cable television had opened the possibilities for religious broadcasting on an international scale, and “televangelists” were beginning to attract huge audiences. By one estimate, roughly 20 million American households watched religious programming in the 1980s.²

The organizational resources that sustained the religious right’s push into politics were of unparalleled scale. These resources supported a sequence of powerful leaders, including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson. By the late 1970s, Falwell’s Lynchburg, Virginia, church filled its 4,000 seats every service and had a membership of 17,000, while his Old-Time Gospel Hour had a weekly audience in the millions.³

As Falwell’s organization faded in the late 1980s, Pat Robertson’s savvier Christian Coalition would emerge. It was run on a daily basis by the skilled operative Ralph Reed, who had ties to Republican elites (despite an impressive trail of scandals, Reed is now the head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition). Robertson’s TV empire was far larger than Falwell’s. By the 1980s, his satellite network was the third largest in the country after HBO and the Turner Broadcasting Network, extending to Latin America and Asia and reaching 30 million households. In time it would make Robertson a very wealthy man, as it purchased rights to a collection of wholesome shows that were eventually spun off, taken public, and sold for nearly $2 billion.⁴

In turn, as the Christian Coalition faded in the mid-1990s, James Dobson would become the leading figure on the religious right. Though not a pastor, he had extraordinary reach among conservative Protestants. His radio show had a domestic audience of over five million families; his books sold over sixteen million copies. Focus on the Family, the organization Dobson headed, had a staff of more than a thousand at its peak, and its magazines a combined circulation of three million. Each year, 200,000 people visited its huge campus in Colorado Springs, which had its own zip code and freeway exit.⁵

In the mid-1970s, much of this lay in the future, but political operatives could see the vast potential. As Gary Garmin, lobbyist for one of the early conservative evangelical organizations, Christian Voice, put it: “The beauty of it is that we don’t have to organize these voters. They already have their own television networks, publications, schools, meeting places and respected leaders who are sympathetic to our goals.”⁶

The initial challenge, in fact, was mobilizing those sympathetic leaders. A striking feature of the Christian right’s early history was the crucial role that movement conservatives from outside the evangelical community played in bringing this powerful force into partisan politics. Two of the central figures were Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, both experienced conservative activists with strong linkages to the Republican Party. Viguerie was a campaign specialist and innovator of direct mail fundraising. Weyrich, who called himself a “political mechanic,” was wired into the formidable network of emerging groups pushing a radically conservative agenda. He had worked as a Republican staffer in the Senate, then used funding from hard-right beer magnate Joseph Coors and other benefactors to establish the first major right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation. He was also a cofounder of ALEC.

Both Viguerie and Weyrich were Catholic, but they recognized the opportunities for movement-building among evangelicals. In 1976, Viguerie prophesied that “the next major area of growth for the conservative ideology and philosophy is among Evangelical people.” Focusing on those who led those people, he and his allies worked to translate this potential into a broad and emphatically conservative movement.⁷

Viguerie and Weyrich lobbied Falwell in particular—it was Weyrich who suggested the name “Moral Majority.” Falwell had a mailing list of two million and, by 1980, his organization’s annual revenues were $50 million and its staff nearly 1,000 people. And he was ready to fight. “The local church,” he proclaimed, “is an organized army equipped for battle, ready to charge the enemy.” It was Falwell, Frances FitzGerald concludes in The Evangelicals, who “introduced the fundamentalist sense of perpetual crisis, and of war between the forces of good and evil, into national politics, where the rhetoric has remained ever since.” In 1979, Falwell launched the Moral Majority to fight what in one sermon he had called a “war . . . between those who love Jesus Christ and those who hate Him.”⁸

Reading this history backward, it is easy to imagine that the Christian right emerged as a backlash against the secular and sexual revolutions of the sixties (in part because this is the story Falwell and other key figures told). Yet historians have thoroughly debunked this account. For most prominent evangelicals in the mid-1970s, abortion was not a central concern. Their positions on the issue, when offered, tended to recognize the case for allowing abortion under limited circumstances. Robertson, in 1975, called it “purely a theological matter.” Falwell did not give a full sermon on abortion until 1978. The SBC reacted mildly to Roe v. Wade, rejected anti-abortion resolutions in 1976, and did not adopt a strong anti-abortion stance until 1980.⁹

Race was far more central. The Southern Baptist Convention had been founded in 1845, separating from northern Baptists over the question of whether missionaries could own slaves. A century later, fundamentalists and many evangelicals, including Jerry Falwell, had defended segregation. Bob Jones Jr., the second president of the conservative Christian university that bore his father’s name, gave George Wallace an honorary degree.

Race became a catalyst for political mobilization in 1978, five years after Roe. That year, the IRS issued a ruling that put the tax-exempt status of segregated Christian schools in jeopardy. The “Seg Academies”—private and nearly or completely segregated—had proliferated as the desegregation of public education progressed. Many churches, including those associated with prominent figures such as Falwell and Tim LaHaye, maintained such schools. The case that led to the IRS ruling concerned Bob Jones University, which had been entirely segregated. Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian Academy counted just five African Americans among its 1,147 students.¹⁰

For many evangelical churches, the IRS ruling represented a profound threat, and it pulled them into politics. Weyrich later acknowledged as much, while erroneously attributing it to “Jimmy Carter’s intervention”: “What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools.” In the 1960s, Falwell had chastised pastors such as Martin Luther King Jr. for their civil rights leadership; as he put it, “preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners.” Now he declared that the “idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix’ was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”¹¹

The entry of white evangelicals into organized politics coincided with the migration of white southerners from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. It was the goal of Weyrich, Viguerie, and other activists to make sure these two transformations converged. George Wallace had hired Viguerie to help him pay off his 1976 campaign debt. Having noticed that roughly half of the letters Wallace received invoked religious themes, he accepted Wallace’s mailing list as part of his compensation. He and others searched for ways of framing the political contest that would mobilize evangelicals but were compatible with the GOP’s existing constituencies and aspirations.

Explicit appeals to race would no longer work. They alienated white moderates and foreclosed the possibility of modest but useful inroads among nonwhite voters. Hostility to the power of the federal government, by contrast, was a natural rallying cry. So was abortion, soon enough. Due in part to the teachings of the popular theologian Francis Schaeffer, abortion, once a “Catholic issue,” was becoming a principal focus among evangelicals. Doctrinal squabbles had often prevented cooperation even among conservative Protestants, but Schaeffer argued that evangelicals should find common cause with “co-belligerents” who shared their hostility to abortion. The ambition to build bridges to other denominations and faiths proved crucial. It not only brought together Catholics and Protestants, but also—especially for many otherwise liberal Catholics—provided a compelling entryway into the broader world of conservative politics. By the early 1980s, abortion was a focal point for organizing on the Christian right.

The GOP needed to catch up. In the late 1970s, the two major parties’ positions on abortion were hardly distinct. Gerald Ford was a moderate on the issue, and his wife Betty had hailed Roe v. Wade as well as the Equal Rights Amendment. Ronald Reagan had moved to a strong anti-abortion stance, but he had once signed liberalizing abortion legislation as the governor of California, and his 1980 running mate, George H. W. Bush, had battled him for the GOP nomination as a pro-choice candidate. The party’s voters were divided, too; in fact, it was not until 1988 that Republican voters were, on average, more hostile to abortion rights than Democratic voters.¹²

The terms of the alliance emerged primarily from the top down, especially as the Christian right’s focus on abortion intensified. In 1979, conservatives defeated moderates to take the SBC presidency. They soon launched a successful takeover of the broader organization, including its seminaries, service agencies, and organized representation in Washington. Reagan’s about-face on abortion (Bush followed suit when he joined the ticket) delivered a clear message about the direction the GOP was heading.

Christian right leaders got the message. According to one survey, the percentage of SBC ministers identifying with or leaning toward the Republican Party skyrocketed: from 27 percent in 1980 to 66 percent in 1984 to 80 percent in 1996. The most conservative clergy, and those who described themselves as more conservative than their congregations, were the most likely to become politically active. As FitzGerald concludes, “The conservative SBC clergy did not simply ride the groundswell of popular reaction to the social revolutions of the 1960s; they helped create it.”¹³

The challenge was to identify a set of positions that would work for both the Republican Party and evangelicals. Abortion motivated and unified social conservatives. By contrast, school prayer—a major evangelical concern—antagonized “co-belligerents” fearful of Protestant hegemony. Although some prominent evangelicals angrily rejected a “big tent” alliance, the majority accepted demographic and political realities. To maximize their clout, religious conservatives needed to stick together. By 2012, four-fifths of evangelical voters could support the Mormon Mitt Romney’s candidacy; by 2018, four of the five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices would be Catholics.

The increasing focus on issues related to sexuality had an additional advantage: it was compatible with a court-led policy agenda. If Christian conservatives saw themselves as a besieged minority, Republican politicians understandably feared associating themselves too closely with a social agenda the majority of voters rejected. (The exception, for many years, was the issue of gay rights—and gay marriage in particular—which did not attract popular support until well into the new millennium.) The cross-pressures could be significant. In his insurgent 2000 campaign, John McCain distanced himself from prominent figures on the Christian right. He described Robertson and Falwell as “agents of intolerance” and chastised George W. Bush for “pandering to the outer reaches of American politics” when Republicans should be building “a party as big as the country we serve.” McCain, of course, lost. To capture the nomination in 2008, he made amends by doing a lot of pandering himself. No leading Republican candidate has tried a similar move to the center since. Instead, the GOP has found itself increasingly whipsawed between the Christian right’s clout within the party and the unpopularity of its agenda.¹⁴

A consistent theme in the Christian right’s short history is its frustration with the GOP’s unwillingness to get behind conservative social legislation. It is a chronicle of deflection, delay, and half-hearted symbolic measures. For good reason: In 2005, the spectacle around Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been brain-dead for fifteen years, revealed the political danger for Republican officials. Egged on by Dobson and other religious activists, leading Republican figures—including President George W. Bush and his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush—aggressively intervened in the heartbreaking case to overrule the decisions of Florida’s courts. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a doctor, chimed in with an optimistic diagnosis of Schiavo’s health gleaned from video. The backlash was immediate. An overwhelming majority of the public saw the intervention as politically motivated; in one poll, 82 percent said Congress and the president should not have intervened. Even evangelical voters strongly disapproved.¹⁵

Focusing on the courts was a safer course. While of intense interest to activists, judicial politics generally receives little notice from voters. Yet, as Dobson recognized, “religious liberty and the institution of the family [and] every other issue we care about is linked in one way or another to the courts.” After 1980, Republican Party platforms dramatically increased their emphasis on the constitution and the courts, reflecting and reinforcing the growing emphasis of the Christian right on judicial nominations. By the time of George W. Bush’s election in 2000, social conservatives could claim an effective veto over GOP court appointments. In 2005, Bush’s surprise nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers hung in the balance while he attempted to rally leading social conservatives. Many, including Dobson, were reassured—until a speech surfaced that suggested she had once expressed sympathy for abortion rights. Support for her nomination instantly collapsed.¹⁶

The evolution of Republican judicial appointments demonstrates the carefully crafted terms of the solidifying alliance between the party and the Christian right. There were to be no more mistakes, no David Souters or Anthony Kennedys, Republican nominees who proved lukewarm (at best) about evangelical priorities. An increasingly coordinated and extremely well-financed network of culturally and economically conservative groups, led by Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive vice president, now vets judicial nominations. Leo has connections to both the plutocratic and social conservative wings of the coalition—neither of which felt it had to give much ground to accommodate the other.

A judicial philosophy that combines a retreat of the state on economics and the advancement of the state to protect and sometimes enforce the views of religious conservatives was the logical endpoint of the long effort to merge the agendas of the Christian right and the GOP’s plutocratic paymasters. Nominees needed enthusiastic backing from both social conservatives and the party’s plutocratic allies. A focus on the courts gave each side ample opportunity to pursue coveted yet unpopular policies in the venue least accountable to public opinion and best able to accommodate both agendas simultaneously.

The flip side of this development was the Christian right’s abandonment of its earlier interest in economic issues. Conservative activists of the 1970s had argued, along the broader “forgotten man” lines sketched by Nixon and his aides, that supporting working people should be part of the GOP’s platform. In the early 1990s, the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed—the politically savviest of the movement’s leaders—stressed that “people care about their pocket-book. Jobs, taxes, educational issues are important to them.” Reed warned against being “ghettoized by a narrow band of issues like abortion, homosexual rights, and prayer in school.” He argued that to extend their “limited appeal,” social conservatives be more inclusive and pursue “specific policies designed to benefit families and children,” including an expansion of IRAs for homemakers and a tax credit for children.¹⁷

Few of these proposals made much progress, however, especially if they carried a substantial price tag. The inclusion of a child tax credit in the GOP’s 1994 Contract with America was the main exception, and it proved a lonely one. As the political scientist Daniel Schlozman puts it, “The Christian Right offered social conservatism in a form maximally acceptable to big and small business alike.” Evangelical leaders themselves placed less and less emphasis on demands for lunch-pail initiatives. In the run-up to the 2004 campaign, the SBC’s Richard Land led an “I Vote Values” registration and education drive, featuring an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer driving from church to church. “We want people to vote their values and convictions over economic issues,” Land insisted. David Barton, a long-time Bush associate from Texas hired by the Republican National Committee as a consultant, gave three hundred briefings to pastors around the country. The capital gains tax, the estate tax, the progressive income tax, and the minimum wage—all were affronts to Christian values against which the Bible, Barton explained, “takes a very clear position. All these are economic issues that we should be able to shape citizens’ thinking on because of what the Bible says.”¹⁸

For his part, James Dobson was comfortable with the GOP’s economic agenda. He was fixated on social issues, especially the perceived threat of gay marriage, which was, in his words, “poised to deliver a devastating and potentially fatal blow to the traditional family.” (“With its demise,” Dobson warned, “will come chaos such as the world has never seen.”) Revealingly, Dobson’s proposed solution was a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage, and he made support for this idea a prerequisite for any politician who desired the backing of his empire. After an initially hesitant George W. Bush acceded to this demand, Dobson reciprocated, offering his first explicit endorsement of a presidential candidate.¹⁹

Over the course of Bush’s presidency, the Christian right began to lose some of its organizational coherence. After evangelical turnout disappointed in the 2000 election, Karl Rove hired Ralph Reed to work directly on the president’s reelection campaign. In 2004, evangelical voters heard political appeals primarily from the Bush campaign itself. The year before, Dobson had stepped down from the presidency of Focus on the Family (he resigned as chairman of the board in 2009). No clear successors emerged, leaving the Christian right more fractured than in decades. Even more alarming for GOP and Christian leaders was the demographic decline of Christian conservatives. Just as mainline Protestantism had declined in earlier decades, white evangelicals were now experiencing the same slow but steady fall in numbers. From 2008 to 2016, white evangelicals fell from 21 percent to 17 percent of the US population. SBC officials estimated that, if the trend continued, membership would fall by half by 2050.²⁰

These developments only strengthened the Christian right’s perception of threat and its identification with the GOP. While an organized movement had ushered evangelical voters into Republican politics, they could now take their cues from local church communities, which have become overwhelmingly Republican, as well as from right-wing and religious media. Eager to squeeze every vote out of a declining but fiercely loyal demographic, Republican elites have increased both the stridency and intensity of their outreach. Between 1996 and 2016, references to religion in GOP platforms increased nearly five-fold. According to surveys, the share of Republican activists who come from evangelical traditions has risen from around 20 percent in the early 1960s to 47 percent in 2008. The share of Republican convention delegates with such commitments increased slowly into the early 1990s, but then jumped from 15 percent to over 30 percent by 2012.²¹

Evangelicals’ sense of grievance has also grown. Just before the 2016 election, two-thirds of white evangelicals said the growing number of immigrants in the nation threatened American values. Almost as many (63 percent) said discrimination against whites was as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. And three-quarters—more than any other demographic—said that things had changed for the worse in the United States since the 1950s. Devout evangelicals are now far more conservative than other Republican activists. They are prone to depicting politics as a struggle between good and evil and to denigrate compromise. They are now a powerful radicalizing force within the party in their own right.²²

The same is true of another influential GOP-aligned group, one that brings an essentially religious fervor to an ostensibly secular issue.

THE MODERN HISTORY of the National Rifle Association has been almost as tumultuous as that of the Christian right, involving mass firings, coups, financial crises, and credible accusations of conflicts of interest and widespread graft. Yet for all the turmoil, there is a clear narrative: after the NRA reinvented itself as a social movement organization in 1977, it rapidly expanded its organizational strength and political capacity. As it did so, it built a formidable and fateful alliance with the Republican Party.

It would be easy to mistake this alliance for a straightforward transactional pact between a political party and a single-issue group. The GOP would toe the NRA line on guns; the NRA would deliver votes for the party. But the relationship intensified over time, gradually changing both the GOP and the NRA. An ever-tighter alliance with Republican elites was an essential part of the NRA’s remarkably successful (and lucrative) effort to make gun rights a symbol and cornerstone—the “first freedom”—of a broader social identity. That identity dovetailed perfectly with the GOP’s hardening stance on cultural and social issues. Leaving behind its sporting club roots, the NRA became a vehicle for the party’s rebranding of itself as the defender of embattled nonurban whites—and especially white men—against the malign forces of government, liberal media, metropolitan elites, and racial minorities. As with the emerging Christian right, the shrill anti-government cultural agenda of the NRA proved an ideal match for the shrill anti-government economic agenda of reactionary plutocrats.

It was not always so. The first century of the NRA’s history reveals little hint of the radicalized political juggernaut it would become. Formed in the aftermath of the Civil War by former Union officers dismayed by the poor marksmanship of their troops, the organization focused on sporting and hunting. It forged ties with the federal government, which sponsored shooting competitions and provided cheap access to surplus military weapons. It displayed its motto—“Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation”—outside its headquarters in Washington, DC. The NRA periodically involved itself in national politics, such as during the debates over the National Firearms Act of 1934, but gun regulation was rarely much of a concern. When it was, the NRA showed a willingness to countenance moderate regulation of firearms as an appropriate responsibility of government.

Like so much else in American politics, things changed rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. Rising crime rates and urban unrest, along with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy as well as two unsuccessful attempts on the life of President Gerald Ford in just over two weeks in 1975, led to calls for gun control. There was little partisan division over the issue. California governor Ronald Reagan signed major gun control legislation; Richard Nixon and other leading Republicans generally equivocated. George McGovern was an opponent of stronger gun laws.²³

However, the prospect of substantial gun regulation did unsettle the NRA’s leadership. In 1975, it responded by establishing the Institute for Legislative Action to act as a lobbying wing. What followed should have been a warning signal for a generation of moderate conservatives. The new organization-within-an-organization quickly became home to a more aggressive cadre who clashed with the established leadership. The conflict came to a head in the “weekend massacre.” Hoping to put down the internal challenge, the NRA’s leadership fired eighty employees in October of 1976, including the entire staff of the Institute for Legislative Action. It made plans to move the NRA headquarters from Washington, DC, to Colorado, in the hopes of recommitting the organization to recreation rather than politics.

The leadership wanted a decisive break, and they got one. The rebels who had been sacked reorganized. At the next national NRA convention in 1977, they bused in supporters to stage the “Revolt at Cincinnati.” In less than twenty-four hours, the old guard had been voted out; the militants were now in charge. One of the first orders of business was to reverse the planned move to Colorado. The NRA would stay in Washington, and it would fight. The entry to the DC headquarters would carry a new message: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not be Infringed.” (Unsurprisingly, it left out the Second Amendment’s immediately prior reference to a “well-regulated militia.”)²⁴

The NRA’s reinvention was an immediate and spectacular success. Now conceived as an organization committed to beating back threats to gun ownership, it tripled its membership, from 1 million to 3 million, between 1977 and 1984. With ebbs and flows it would increase to 4 or 5 million in the decades to follow. Revenues grew (in 2018 dollars) from $36 million in 1964 to $183 million in 1986 to $284 million in 2001.²⁵

In 1991, the NRA lobbyist Wayne LaPierre, who had once volunteered for McGovern’s presidential campaign and been offered a job on the staff of rising congressional Democrat Tip O’Neill, was named executive vice president, a position he still held in 2019. LaPierre oversaw much of the organization’s impressive growth, its savvy marketing (including the famous “I am the NRA” campaign), its growing stridency—and its fervent embrace of the GOP. An administratively skilled if uncharismatic figure, LaPierre was not an obvious public face for a gun group celebrating the frontier spirit. This was true even before recent scandals, which revealed he had supplemented his generous salary with five-star European vacations and over $200,000 worth of suits.

LaPierre’s reign has not always been smooth. In the mid-1990s, he faced a serious factional challenge during a time of financial tumult. He beat back the upstarts and allied with the actor Charlton Heston, who would soon become NRA president. Heston was that obvious public face, a symbol of rugged individualism and moral clarity. At the NRA’s 2000 convention he made a famous, flintlock-wielding declaration that the government would have to rip that gun from his “cold, dead hands.”

Heston effectively delivered the core message of the new NRA: in a time of existential threat, it was an organization dedicated to the protection of freedom itself. Since the 1977 revolt, the NRA had moved toward ever more sweeping portrayals of the stakes in the fight over gun regulation, first by making a highly contentious reading of the Second Amendment central to its mission, and later by emphasizing that the right to bear arms was not just one right among many but the decisive issue in a struggle between good and evil. Heston observed that “the gun itself is just a symbol. It’s individual freedom we’re fighting for.” As he insisted, “The right to keep and bear arms is the one right that permits ‘rights’ to exist at all.”²⁶

Heston employed the most incendiary analogies, including comparisons between Jews in Nazi Germany and gun owners in America. His rhetoric was typical of the organization. Most notoriously, LaPierre in a 1995 fundraising letter referred to government officials as “jack-booted thugs” and insisted that in Bill “Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” Kayne Robinson, Heston’s successor as president, argued that “We’re at war today, against disguised, deceitful, stealthy, all-but-invisible enemies of freedom. We’re at war at home and abroad. We’re at war for no less than our very freedom as Americans.” And the war was to be waged on a broad front. Proposals for campaign finance reform were treated as an attack on the NRA’s free speech rights: a “senatorial jihad against the NRA.”²⁷

For the NRA—and, increasingly, the Republican Party—this kind of incendiary rhetoric was a feature, not a bug. The NRA’s formidable clout is sometimes attributed to its political spending. But while the organization’s wealth has made it an influential player in federal elections, the NRA’s greatest impact comes from its ability to motivate voters.

Like the Christian right, a key source of the NRA’s capacity to mobilize is its reach into local communities. The NRA buttressed its political messaging with a grassroots infrastructure built on recreation and gun safety education. Every year, 750,000 Americans receive firearms training from NRA-affiliated instructors. The spread of concealed carry laws in GOP-controlled states furthered these efforts, as the laws generally mandated training—training typically conducted by NRA-certified instructors, using NRA-designed curricula. Sociologist Jennifer Carlson, who joined the NRA and closely observed its training practices, noted that the course design includes an entire unit “dedicated to explaining the NRA’s unique role in fighting for Americans’ right to self-defense.” Through these courses, “the NRA shapes the political rights and moral responsibilities that gun carriers attach to their firearms.” Many instructors include NRA memberships in the cost of the course or offer memberships at discount. Estimates suggest there are now between 8 and 11 million concealed carry licenses in the United States.²⁸

The NRA’s organizational imperative is to translate support among ordinary citizens into political action. Kayne Robinson has described the NRA as a “motivational organization” that tries to get “free-riders” to join the “gun movement.” Mobilization depends on intensity; intensity often depends on a perception of threat. As LaPierre puts it: “People respond when there’s a threat.” And if there is one thing the NRA excels at, it’s generating that threat response. Though the high point of efforts to pass gun regulation was in the early 1970s, the NRA has kept the rhetoric of imminent crisis going for a generation. The warnings increased even as the Supreme Court broke with long-standing precedent to confer constitutional protections on individual gun owners in its 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision. They increased even as Democrats retreated to weaker and weaker proposals. And they increased even as the NRA over the past quarter century won consistently in statehouses as well as Congress. Most states have enacted “shall-issue” laws permitting concealed carry, and a majority have passed stand-your-ground laws as well.²⁹

Fearmongering has gone hand in hand with alliance-building with the GOP. As late as 1992 more than a third of NRA campaign contributions went to congressional Democrats; today, virtually all its spending goes to Republicans. Democratic presidents, however, became the NRA’s best recruiting and fundraising vehicle. The NRA seized on Bill Clinton’s modest initiatives, including his signing of the (extremely popular) Brady Bill for expanded background checks and the banning of some assault weapons. “Clinton,” LaPierre observed, “is mobilizing gun owners at record rates.” When the forty-year-old Democratic majority in the House came to an end in 1994, Clinton called the NRA’s mobilizing efforts the single biggest factor in his defeat. ³⁰

As the GOP drew closer to the plutocrats in the 1990s, the NRA became a vital organization within the new, more radical Republican coalition. Its fiercely anti-government posture reinforced the rhetoric of reactionary plutocrats, while its policy demands were entirely compatible. A feedback loop emerged: the NRA fed off of and reinforced a kind of apocalyptic partisanship, in which freedom was at stake every election and every day in between.³¹

Advocates of gun control often note, correctly, that when asked most Republican voters still support basic regulations like universal background checks. But more revealing are questions that ask voters to choose between protecting gun rights and gun regulation. Here, views have become starkly more polarized since 2000, with the big change taking place on the Republican side. Roughly 75 percent of Democrats have said consistently that effective regulation is the more important aim. But while a slight majority of Republicans agreed with that statement in 2000, 80 percent said protecting gun rights was the higher priority by 2017. Most of the increase took place during the Obama presidency, as the NRA hyped the threat from the administration’s very modest policy proposals.³²

The NRA’s rhetoric has occasionally become so extreme that it has provoked a reaction among conservatives. Reagan (along with other former presidents Nixon and Ford) broke with the organization to back the Brady Bill. George H. W. Bush wrote a very public letter of resignation in reaction to LaPierre’s “jack-booted thugs” comment, terming it “a vicious slander against good people.” (Just days after LaPierre’s fund-raising letter went out, Timothy McVeigh, who signed letters with an “I am the NRA” stamp and linked his actions to his views on gun rights, blew up a federal building that housed an ATF office in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including nineteen children.)³³

Yet Reagan and Bush broke from the NRA only after they were no longer running for office. GOP leaders grew wary of too public an embrace—after Reagan’s 1983 appearance, no sitting Republican president would address an NRA convention until Donald Trump did so in each of the first three years of his presidency. Yet the private alliance became ever closer. Appearing before a gathering of NRA members during the 2000 campaign, Kayne Robinson announced that “gun rights advocates would have ‘unbelievably friendly relations’ with a Bush White House . . . if we win, we’ll have a Supreme Court that will back us to the hilt. If we win, we’ll have a president . . . where we work out of their office.’” NRA membership rates among 2008 Republican National Committee delegates were almost 50 percent higher than in 2000. The NRA not only poured more and more dollars into federal elections. It shifted from supporting sympathetic legislators in both parties to concentrating its donations on the few pivotal races that might give the GOP control in the closely divided Senate.³⁴

In 2015, even before he launched his campaign, Donald Trump brokered a visit to the NRA’s annual meeting. The urban real estate developer who had once supported a waiting period for gun purchases and a ban on assault weapons declared, “I promise you one thing, If I run for president, and I win, the Second Amendment will be totally protected, that I can tell you.” Just as evangelical leaders would concern themselves more with Trump’s political reliability than his personal values, LaPierre and his team liked what they heard. In May 2016, the NRA embraced Trump, the earliest endorsement of a presidential candidate in the organization’s history.³⁵

IN DECEMBER 1994, the huge cohort of newly elected Republican members of Congress gathered in Washington for the first time. Their party had won an astonishing victory, sweeping away the Democrats’ seemingly impregnable House majority. Billed as an orientation, the gathering was essentially a rally to celebrate the birth of a new, aggressive, and much more conservative Republican Party.

The capstone event, held in luxury boxes at the Baltimore Orioles’ Camden Yards, featured red meat and apple pie against a baseball backdrop. But the new House members weren’t there just to bask in Americana. They were cheering their champion: not Newt Gingrich, but radio shock-jock Rush Limbaugh. They declared their “majority maker” an honorary member of the freshman class. Vin Weber, one of Gingrich’s top advisers but now retired from Congress and embarking on a second career as a lobbyist, introduced him: “Rush Limbaugh is really as responsible for what has happened as any individual in America. Talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide.” Limbaugh’s response to this lovefest was in character. He suggested that after remaking the country, House Republicans might want to “leave some liberals alive” so “you will never forget what these people were like.”³⁶

Twenty years later, Weber’s tone would be less celebratory. He lamented that Republican politicians had become so terrified of attacks from their right that they could scarcely govern. He and some others who had been part of that Republican surge now saw right-wing media very differently. “Conservative media has become . . . much more powerful than John Boehner and Mitch McConnell,” explained Matthew Dowd, a strategist for George W. Bush’s campaigns. Prior generations of leaders, he noted, did not have to “confront them every time they took a turn.” Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, another veteran of the Gingrich revolution, now complained that “if you stray the slightest from the far right . . . you get hit by the conservative media.”³⁷

Recent social science research has corroborated these assessments. Right-wing media has moved voters to the right. It has moved members of Congress to the right, too, and likely encouraged them to think their constituents are more conservative than they are. Efforts to isolate the impact just of Fox News—a single, albeit powerful, outlet—indicate that it has had a notable impact on the electorate, bolstering the GOP. As Fox’s audience has grown and the network has moved even further right, its impact has increased.³⁸

Yet the true effect of right-wing media goes deeper. In fact, of the groups that have carried the GOP toward extremism and tribalism, arguably none has been more significant. The world of conservative media is its own ecosystem, with its own rules. And it is something new in the United States, and perhaps in modern democracies. Fox and other major outlets are closer to being a new kind of social movement, albeit one geared for profits, than a set of traditional news organizations. Conservative media hasn’t just become a vital source of GOP persuasion and electoral strength. It has changed the Republican Party, inflaming tribalism and extremism among both its audience and the politicians who compete for its favor.

The conventional question is whether people are more conservative because they consume right-wing media. They are, but this effect is secondary. The biggest consequence of Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other conservative media stars is their profound impact on the kind of “news” this audience consumes—and the kinds of news it no longer consumes. Republican voters increasingly trust only a handful of movement outlets, rejecting any dissonant information coming from the “lame-stream” media. As conservative outlets ramp up intensity and shut out competing voices or inconvenient facts, previously unthinkable actions—including personal corruption, abusive or authoritarian moves, and abject fealty to plutocrats—all become possible, so long as the new conservative kingmakers provide a cover story.

The development of this distinctive ecosystem began on the AM radio dial. Talk radio emerged from the confluence of deregulation and the shift of music from AM to FM radio. In the late 1980s, AM stations desperate for marketable content began airing Rush Limbaugh’s show. Four years later, it was heard by 14 million listeners a week, and Limbaugh’s audience would eventually grow to 20 million. Few outside forces have so rapidly altered politics. By 1993 a National Review cover would crown Limbaugh “the leader of the opposition.” The year after that, the party’s traditional leaders would be giving him the hero treatment at Camden Yards.³⁹

Talk radio was divided, essentially, between voices of the hard right and those of the harder right. Limbaugh was just the loudest of the many loud voices who would quickly join him, including Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and Michael Savage. All of them took similar approaches—a man-of-the-people (or, rarely, woman-of-the-people) persona, flattery of listeners, a tendency toward outrage, attacks on elites, ridicule of the opposition, and scorn for the mainstream media. At least 90 percent of the market for political talk radio was and is conservative, an ideological imbalance reflecting the demographics of AM radio audiences (older white men), the greater cultural diversity on the left, liberals’ greater comfort with mainstream media, and the greater appetite on the right for the distinctive style of shock jocks. Liberals in time would develop a taste for left-leaning comedy news, but they never fell into anything like the tight media orbit of a few favored outlets that took hold on the right.

Fox News brought the conservative media model to TV in 1996. Like talk radio, Fox (along with the televangelists) was the beneficiary of a technological shift, in this case the spread of cable. The rapid proliferation of television options shattered the cozy world of three virtually identical mainstream TV networks. Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch recognized that in this shattered world a network could profitably pursue a less mainstream audience and that conservatives represented the largest underserved market.

Right-wing media efforts had faltered in the past not only because establishment gatekeepers and regulatory constraints marginalized the far right, but because they had failed to make money. Following Limbaugh’s lead, Fox president (and long-time Republican operative) Roger Ailes changed that. With the right technology, the right format, and a favorable political climate, it turned out you could build an organization that would make you rich and help construct an arch-conservative movement. The same formula that could drive profits—isolation, loyalty, emotion—could change American politics. Ailes would build a media juggernaut that would play a critical role in pushing the GOP both rightward and toward a particular resolution of the Conservative Dilemma.⁴⁰

Isolation was essential. From the start, a striking feature of right-wing media was the immense energy devoted to attacking alternative sources of information and expertise, especially traditional media. Whatever one’s view of organizations such as PBS, CNN, and the New York Times, the sheer volume of vitriol directed toward them seems like a strange priority for a news network. Yet it was the foundation for all that followed. It allowed right-wing media, especially Fox, to build an extraordinarily loyal following and to wield formidable influence over conservative political discourse.⁴¹

Creating a loyal and insular audience has powerful effects. In the modern world, we are all overwhelmed by complexity and flooded with information of highly uneven quality. Figuring out what is happening and why is a constant struggle. We cannot develop anything resembling expertise on more than a small slice of reality, and thus we depend on others for guidance. Another psychological limitation compounds the problem: we are prone to “motivated reasoning”—that is, to believe what we want to or already believe. The more our views are tied to our identity, the more skilled we are at sucking in information that confirms our views and shutting out information that doesn’t.

Alongside other key institutions such as universities and scientific bodies, news organizations play an essential role in helping us cope with complexity and our vulnerability to bias. At their best, they help us separate what is known from what is not, what requires attention and what does not, what is true and what is not. They encourage us to wrestle with uncertainty, with uncomfortable facts, and with a range of plausible interpretations of those facts. Even at their best, news organizations are far from perfect: they too are prone to bias, conflicts of interest, and error. Yet they try. More important, they operate within competitive systems that generally reward accuracy and punish mistakes. Reputation depends on demonstrating that you are striving to illuminate the truth and that when you make a mistake, you will acknowledge it and attempt to correct course.

From the beginning, right-wing media turned all this on its head. Motivated reasoning wasn’t a limitation to be overcome; it was a vulnerability to be exploited. Biases weren’t just confirmed; they were cultivated. Viewers were told that their loyalty was a sign of their independence: “We Report, You Decide.” Posing as a clear-eyed teller of “tough truths” became the defining persona of right-wing media stars, even though these “truths” were wholly palatable and typically flattering to their audience—and often not true at all.

This approach has been astonishingly successful. Attitudes toward the media and patterns of media consumption are now very different on the left and right. Among Democrats, general trust in the media has fallen moderately over the past few decades (it has risen again since 2016, presumably in response to Donald Trump’s attack on mainstream outlets). Among Republicans, trust in mainstream media has simply disappeared. The collapse did not come gradually, but in two revealing plunges. In the post-9/11 period leading up to the Iraq War, as Fox took off and George W. Bush began to face questioning from mainstream sources, the share of Republicans expressing trust in the media fell from 49 percent to 31 percent. The second wave came during Donald Trump’s campaign. By election day 2016, just 14 percent of Republicans said they generally trusted the media.⁴²

Not coincidentally, as conservatives lost trust in most of the media, they became highly trusting of a very small number of sources. Moderates and liberals interested in public affairs generally trust and consume news from sources spread across the spectrum from center to left. Conservatives are far more concentrated on the right side of the spectrum, and especially around Fox. In 2014, 88 percent of consistent conservatives reported trusting Fox News, and 47 percent of those conservative respondents said Fox was their main source of news about government and politics. Right-wing outlets, and Fox in particular, have captured their audiences.⁴³

The crowding of conservative audiences into a narrow, extreme, and exclusive media space is not only a departure from the past; it is also highly unusual in cross-national perspective. Researchers looking at a wide range of countries have found that American conservatives distinctively combine intense loyalty to their chosen sources and disdain for all others. They found a similar “trust gap” only among supporters of the right in Hungary and Israel. This is not the most reassuring company. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has been a pioneer in scapegoating the mainstream media, fueling a culture of intense tribalism. Hungary’s right-wing populist leader Viktor Orbán has led a stunning process of democratic backsliding. His governing party has gradually captured the press (now loved by his supporters and rightly distrusted by others), as well as packing the courts and gerrymandering parliament.⁴⁴

As in these nations, the “trust gap” among conservative audiences in the United States has undercut the incentives for right-wing media to provide reasonably accurate information and correct mistakes. Instead, sources on the right are quick to disseminate thinly sourced but sensational claims that, as Stephen Colbert’s fictional right-wing pundit once put it, “feel true.” Fox and talk radio have peddled an endless list of conspiracy theories, and conservative audiences have proved highly vulnerable to such messages. Research shows that in general citizens with basic political knowledge (Who’s your member of Congress? How many justices are on the Supreme Court?) are less likely to believe conspiracy theories than the sizable share of Americans who cannot answer these questions. Yet this is not true among conservatives with low levels of trust in the political system. Among distrustful conservatives, those with basic political knowledge—which likely means those who consume a lot of conservative news—are more likely to believe conspiracy theories.⁴⁵

The false narratives boosted by right-wing media generally have two characteristics: they incite tribalism and they escalate a sense of threat. Audience capture provides an ideal foundation for both. Right-wing audiences hear about a litany of horrors linked to the right’s enemies. Information that would cast doubt on these narratives is dismissed or goes unheard. The emphasis on tribalism and threat parallels the movement-style efforts of the NRA and the Christian right—groups very different from right-wing media but just as eager to stir up mobilizing emotions. Like conservative media, these groups have unusual power and reach on the American right. Not only do they attract and mobilize a devoted audience that overlaps considerably with the right-wing media audience. They also use their resources to promote virtually identical themes.

As with other GOP surrogate groups, right-wing media is also a formidable ally of the plutocrats. Much as is true of the Christian right, the alliance is practical, not doctrinal, and rarely made explicit—for good reason. Recall that the Conservative Dilemma involves a profound tension between the GOP’s economic agenda and its mass electoral base. One of right-wing media’s most vital contributions is its ability to direct the attention of that base toward certain subjects and away from others. Prominent (and typically quite wealthy) media figures often adopt a working-class persona, but it is a cultural rather than economic one. In centering the agenda on racial and cultural themes, fear of criminals and terrorists, and opposition to immigration, conservative media sources direct attention away from the stark economic realities associated with rapidly increasing inequality. Conservative media features plenty of attacks on “elites.” But despite including the occasional liberal billionaire in the category, the focus is on figures conservatives can condemn without acknowledging plutocracy, let alone questioning it: public workers, left-leaning media types, community organizers, politically correct college administrators, and, of course, Democratic politicians, however inconsequential they may be.

But the focus of right-wing demonization goes well beyond “elites.” The conservative media ecosystem has long been a critical conduit for the injection of racialized language and appeals into national politics. As within the Republican Party, these efforts have become more overt and frequent. Fox, of course, gave Trump’s political aspirations a vital boost. Beginning in 2011, it provided the bellicose billionaire a weekly platform from which he could lie about President Obama’s citizenship—a lie that Roger Ailes actually believed, according to John Boehner. Long before Birtherism and accusations that Obama was a closet Muslim, the kinds of highly racialized themes that Trump now promotes figured openly and prominently in right-wing media, from the portrayal of America’s cities as hotbeds of black crime, to the notion that voter fraud committed by nonwhite citizens is a major threat to American democracy, to the blanket association of one of the world’s great faiths with terrorism, to the fear-mongering about immigrants “invading” across the Southern border. Many of these racialized images and claims directed ire not just at minorities, but also at government, linking political leadership on the left with the right’s two great bugbears: handouts to the poor and coddling of the lawless—shady groups that were seen (and meant to be seen) as threats to “real America.”⁴⁶

Indeed, media outlets on the right have begun to replace coded racial appeals with explicit efforts to galvanize white identity. The “dog whistle” invoking racialized themes has given way to the bullhorn. The conservative outrage industry has been perfectly positioned to facilitate this transformation. The use of images allows cable TV to racialize narratives without relying on explicit language—producers need only focus viewers’ eyes on dark faces. Because they do not need to build a majority electoral coalition, niche media have far more room than politicians typically do to experiment with racism. If they go “too far”—for example, alienating advertisers—they can pull back or reprimand the particular host involved, without any serious long-term damage. The impact of all this is difficult to measure, but one recent study reports a striking pattern: controlling for other factors, in areas with higher viewership of Fox, elected judges issue harsher sentences, especially on drug crimes and especially for black defendants. These same communities also feature a disproportionate number of racist Google searches.⁴⁷

The growing role of new media outlets like Breitbart, along with social media, has further reduced restraints on incendiary and conspiratorial content. Studies of traffic on Twitter and Facebook reveal that in 2016 Breitbart played a central role in shaping discussions on the right, seriously threatening the dominant position of Fox.⁴⁸ Some of that traffic moved directly from white-supremacist sites onto Breitbart, before getting picked up by other conservative outlets. And some of it was directed by provocateurs who would go on to play a central role in promoting the Trump candidacy; one of the most prominent, Stephen Miller, would become Trump’s main adviser on immigration policy after the election.

Over the course of a generation, right-wing media became a formidable tool of conservative political elites. Long before Trump, conservative sources coordinated closely with Republican leaders to win victories and energize voters, with the two sides often sharing talking points and action plans in advance. In 2010, Fox News would play an explicit role in mobilizing backlash to Barack Obama, urging viewers to attend Tea Party rallies. Fox did not just report the events (as mainstream outlets did); it touted them in advance while noting that Fox News hosts would attend. Fox operated, in the words of two sociologists, as “a kind of social movement orchestrator, during what is always a dicey early period for any new protest effort—the period when potential participants have to hear about the effort and decide that it is likely to prove powerful.”⁴⁹

Yet, if Republican elites used right-wing media, right-wing media also used Republican elites. And as right-wing media grew more powerful, one of the great dangers associated with the Conservative Dilemma re-emerged. Outsourcing mobilization strengthens voter intensity, but it also weakens gatekeepers, shifts power toward extremists, and pulls power away from party leaders. Today, conservative outlets offer Republicans free airtime and fired-up voters; they also discipline and punish conservative politicians who fail their tests of purity.

In a classic “be careful what you wish for” story, ambitious Republicans spent years feeding the right-wing media beast. Doing so raised their profile among the GOP faithful and gave them greater leverage over their colleagues. It also validated extreme sources and gave these sources the power to portray these very same Republicans as traitors when, inevitably, they could not deliver on their promises. As the GOP’s new inquisitors gained influence, the interplay between movement media and politicians became a one-way ratchet, increasing the hold of extremist voices and forces on the party. Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum pithily summarized the new reality: “Republicans originally thought Fox News worked for us and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”⁵⁰

That this dynamic is now widely recognized—and, among Republicans who’ve suffered from it, widely lamented—doesn’t make it any less extraordinary. Repeatedly, top Republicans have found themselves caught in the squeeze, until they were yanked from their positions or quit in disgust. Virginia Republican Eric Cantor had a very conservative record, was second in command in the House, and was poised to rise further when he committed the sin of signaling openness to compromise on immigration. In 2014, he became the first sitting House majority leader to ever lose a primary (the position was created in 1889), falling to an unknown Tea Party candidate with strong talk-radio support who accused him of favoring “open borders.” The next year John Boehner—a conservative lieutenant in the Gingrich revolution—faced similar unrelenting attacks from the extreme right. On September 23, 2015, Fox News released a poll indicating that 60 percent of Republicans felt betrayed by their leaders. The next day the Speaker announced he would retire at the end of his term. Two years later, following a similar onslaught, it would be his successor Paul Ryan’s turn to announce he was quitting.⁵¹

By 2016, the ratchet had tightened sufficiently to squeeze Fox News. The network faced a growing challenge from upstarts. By far the most important was the Mercer-family-financed Breitbart News, which was even more sensationalist and played a growing role in driving conservative discourse. Fox had given Donald Trump a platform, but like many figures within the GOP orbit, leaders at Fox were skeptical of his prospects and fearful he would drag the party down. When Fox hosts—most prominently Megyn Kelly—confronted Trump, Fox viewers, urged on by Breitbart, rebelled. Ultimately Fox would recover (and Breitbart would fade), but only when Fox had followed its viewers, fully embracing the GOP’s new standard bearer.⁵²

TO HOLD POWER WHILE PURSUING an increasingly plutocratic agenda, Republicans needed to gain the backing of voters who had little interest in that agenda. Their response was not to take up positions or seek out allies who would help them respond to these voters’ economic concerns. It was to turn to groups that could bring those voters into the GOP electoral coalition with incendiary non-economic appeals.

These groups proved highly skilled. They found that building strong, locally grounded networks elicited trust and loyalty. They found that this trust and loyalty provided a platform for effective messaging. And they found that their most effective messaging combined tribalized invitations to outrage with a clear sense of threat. They delivered what Republicans wanted: intense and committed voters willing to go along with the party’s plutocratic turn.

But they also delivered more than Republicans bargained for, which is why we’ve invoked Pandora’s box. Most of the time, parties try to balance the demands of their most intense believers with the more moderate views of the rest of the electorate. Movement organizations, focused on gaining and holding a loyal following, do not face the same constraints. Nor do the strange hybrids of movement-building and profit-seeking that have emerged in the conservative media ecosystem. For both types of conservative groups, success has entailed building an extremely loyal following—and for both, that has meant stoking anger and fear.

Yet anger and fear are hard to control. It is easy to turn the dial up. It is much harder to turn it down. Republican elites thought they were harnessing conservative groups to resolve the Conservative Dilemma. More and more, however, they found the groups were harnessing them. As John Boehner’s chief of staff put it, “We fed the beast that ate us.”⁵³

The right-wing beast increasingly looks like the monster plant in Little Shop of Horrors that kept demanding “Feed me!” Unfortunately for its victims, the more the plant ate the more it grew, and the more it grew the more it needed to eat. As fans of the 1986 film version all know, its (sort of) happy ending was not the one originally filmed. In the first cut, the monster plant wasn’t vanquished; it spread and destroyed the earth. Test audiences hated it, and the filmmakers rewrote and reshot the final scenes.

American voters have had their own mixed reactions to the growing extremism of the Republican Party. GOP leaders, however, have mostly ignored the unfavorable reviews and instead relied even more on the mobilizing energy of negative emotions. These tactics facilitated the construction of a voting base that could support plutocratic populism. They were unlikely to produce a happy ending.