From Tyranny of the Minority (Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, 2023) pp115-6
For most of the twentieth century, racial resentment wasn’t a partisan matter. Both parties counted racial conservatives-defenders of traditional racial hierarchies— among their rank and file. Indeed, many conservative southern whites remained Democrats through the 1990s. But Republican politicians spent four decades recruiting southern, conservative, and evangelical whites into a single tent, establishing the GOP as the undisputed home for white Christians who feared cultural and demographic change. According to the political scientist Alan Abramowitz, the proportion of white Republicans who scored high on survey-based “racial resentment” scores increased from 44 percent in the 1980s to 64 percent during the Obama era.
The Republican Party was not, of course, a monolithic entity. Not all Republican voters were racial conservatives. But by the Obama era, racially conservative whites had become a solid majority in the party. This mattered a lot: the Republicans radicalizing voters exerted influence through primaries, where extremist challengers many of them backed by the Tea Party-either defeated mainstream Republicans or pulled them to the right. The process of radicalization was facilitated by the evisceration of the Republican Party leadership. The rise of well-funded outside groups (sponsored by the Koch brothers and other billionaires) and influential right-wing media such as Fox News left the party especially vulnerable to capture.
Confronted by an activist and primary voter base that one Republican pollster described as “angry about everything,” GOP leaders struggled to steer away from white grievance politics. Republicans in Congress tried to rally the party behind immigration reform, the 2013 autopsy report’s main policy recommendation. The soon-to-be House Speaker, Representative Paul Ryan, pleaded with right-wing media figures to accept a bill that offered undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. In a telephone call with Rush Limbaugh, however, Ryan was rebuffed. Limbaugh “cut him off immediately,” telling him, “Paul, I know where you’re coming from. But at the end of the day my listeners don’t want to hear it.” Indeed, surveys showed that most Republicans opposed legislation that provided a path to citizenship. After Majority Leader Bric Cantor lost a primary to a Tea Party activist who campaigned against immigration, House Republicans gave up on immigration reform.
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