How We Got Here

How did the Far Right sweep the civic table and move America SO close to a fascist, autocratic, white Christian fundamentalist state?

The simple answer is The Leadership Institute (LI), based in Arlington, Virginia. They have built cadres of alligned leaders and a deep talent pool with abundant resources that has consistently won elections for decades.

“LI provides training in campaigns, fundraising, grassroots organizing, youth politics, and communications. LI teaches conservatives of all ages how to succeed in politics, government, and the media.” Since 1979, more than 330,000 conservative students, activists, and political leaders have received LI training. “Alumni include Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon, Senator Mitch McConnell, Vice President Mike Pence, James O’Keefe, members of the 113th Congress, and elected officials in all 50 states.” They offer hundreds of trainings annually and their 2022 revenues were over $45 million. Their top 15 leaders total compensation was $3.9 million.

Their training starts in our colleges. From a 2005 article by Jeff Horwitz, “The Leadership Institute has succeeded, in part, because it’s had little to no competition from the left. College campuses may still be havens for liberal thought, but the right-wing students are the ones organized enough to win major battles…they built an infrastructure outside the Republican Party dedicated to promoting talent, not winning the next election…” From the LI website: “College campuses are ground zero in the battle to save America. That’s where leftists concentrate most on indoctrinating students, and ‘canceling’ those who refuse to go along. The Leadership Institute knows it all starts on college campuses. That’s why the LI team works with thousands of conservative student leaders across the country. And fosters a unique nationwide network of more than 2,700 local campus conservative groups.”

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The Results

Read this account of the defeat of liberal, pro-arts, pro-environment, pro-labor, and pro-environment Congressman John Cox (IL-16) by a Christian Coalition backed candidate that I wrote in January of 1993. They were just getting started…

POLITICAL ANALYSIS

The Right has mastered the fundamentals of America civics. The way we see it, our civics follows a simple formula. The civic infrastructure they have built and maintain follows these universal steps:

1. Meaning – We always start a movement with powerful basic values.
2. A powerful and insprirational Message flows from those values which motivates people to become active.
3. People who become active – who have paid attention then become Members who contribute ideas, money, and time to the civic effort at heand.
4. Money is then generated on an ongoing basis as more Members join the effort. Clever Members create products and fundraisers and also donate time and services.
5. If enough Members are participating, we now have created a sustainable Means for perpetuating this work over time and space. We have now created structure and an ongoing and evolving civic appartus or machine, if you like, to further the civic goals, based on our sharede values.
6. And so a Movement forward across time with evolving goals has been created and sustained. Think of this as a living and evolving ecosystem that is intentionally nourished and stewarded. A successful ecosystem will move forward in time and evolve as needed – learning, growing, deepening. We have failed here. They have not.

The Far Right, the Republican Party, Big Business, and their allies are pretty much on the same page ideologically and have managed to move America towards their view of what we should be.They seek to return America to the conditions of 1830. What they seek:

• The Christian Bible (a particularly cruel version) is trhe basis for their Meaning and becomes the law of the land. There is no separation of church and state in their America.
• Free Market capitalism is also a basis for Meaning. This means no strong central government. It’s every family for themselves (except for a powerful army to protect borders and project force and capture markets).
• No federal taxes.
• No restrictions on business.
• Labor is free or costs next to nothing (return to chattel slavery would be ideal). White people (read “maless”) are superior to all others and are supposed to rule everyone else.
• Women have restricted rights (if any, at all). The 19th Amendment will be repealed. Divorce and birth control will be illegal. Gay marriage will be repealed. Homosexuality and other forms of “nonconformity” will be crimalized.

We will offer our ideas about to build and sustain an infrastructure and civicv ecosystem of our own. But we want this to be a collaborative movement. Email us with you own ideas and offers of collaboration-> [email protected].

CULTURAL ANALYSYS

Dr. Robert Putnam spoke at Temple Sholom on May 4, 2025. Perhaps America’s most well known political scientist and civic historian, Dr. Putnam’s 2000 book “Bowling Alone,” showed how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures– and how we may reconnect. His remarks covered the sweep of American civics since the late 1880’s and offers tremendous insights to How We Got Here. One of his main points is that Donald Trump did not, by himself, create the current civic situation. Rather, he recognized and took advantage of the dynamics of American civic life that have been forming over decades.