Tag: Sledgehammer

A group of reactionary Republicans sided not with the cosmopolitan eastern Republicans who came around to the New Deal but with Ohio senator Robert Taft, a proud representative of small-town, traditional America who maintained that the New Deal undermined liberty and snaked socialism into the nation. They hated government rules and laws that protected their workers, and the need for new taxes to pay for bureaucrats and welfare programs. The Taft-Hartley Act outlawed closed union shops and weakened union political activism. But Eisenhower’s policies extended some opportunities to people of color, and race gave the Taft Republicans a wedge to begin razing the activist state. Equality of opportunity for African Americans could only be achieved through the use of state power, and that would cost tax dollars. But this scheme has created a crisis in American democracy Using this formula, the reactionaries split the liberal consensus and, in 1980, put Ronald Reagan into the White House. After the American people did not condemn the Democratic president Bill Clinton as Republicans expected, the Republican party has maintained control by gaming the system. Since 2000, Republican policies have suppressed Democratic voting; since 2010, Republican gerrymandering has given the Republicans a heavy systematic advantage in Congress; and the last two Republican presidents have won the White House while losing the popular vote to their opponents. While the Janus ruling strikes at the power of public unions, the other, limited decisions reinforce the cultural parameters of the 1920s: traditional religion and the president’s power to determine immigration, a power rooted in a law from 1924. When congressmen working with industrialists dismantled that era’s popular government, they, too, could retain power only by gaming the system, suppressing votes and packing the courts.