In its first two months, the administration of President Donald Trump has sparked critical questions with moves that have defied constitutional laws and norms. What are the limits of executive power? Where is Congressional oversight? How did we get here?
Faculty from the University of Michigan offered their expertise on these issues at a February “teach-in” panel at Angell Hall to help students understand how recent policy changes have been made and why they matter for democracy.
So how did we get to this point? And where do electoral politics go from here?
At the February teach-in, political scientist Robert Mickey highlighted the role of America’s history of white supremacy and focused on the story of party elites, and the evolution of the Republican Party “from the mainstream, conservative party committed to democracy, into something very different.”
Republican Radicalization
Robert Mickey’s account began with the observation that US democracy is young, given its slow, historical turn to secure voting rights for all adults and the civil rights and liberties needed to make elections free and fair. Following the Civil War, efforts to build a biracial democracy were eventually turned back, with Jim Crow segregation in much of the country underwritten by state-sponsored violence. As Mickey describes in his book, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944-1972, the 11 states of the Confederacy remained enclaves of authoritarian rule, sustained by the federal democracy and the national Democratic Party, with Democrats “maintaining a stranglehold on nearly every elected office in the region for seven decades.” America’s history of racist and xenophobic appeals to white voters should make the current wave of party-led democratic backsliding less surprising, said Mickey.
The rooster icon and banner, “White Supremacy for the Right,” served as the emblem of the Alabama Democratic Party from 1904 to 1966.
The current threat to American democracy has links to the authoritarianism of the preceding century but with novel features. Focusing on the last one-half century of stable democratic rule, Mickey argued that three trends have combined in recent decades to lead us to today’s challenging moment.
The first is elite polarization. The move of culturally conservative Southern whites to the Republican Party in the 1970s widened partisan disagreement, and that party’s members of Congress have become much more extreme over time. Following their elites, growing numbers of voters have viewed the opposing party with increasing social antipathy, hatred, and distrust. And with Congress passing fewer bills every year, voters have become more tolerant of antidemocratic behavior by their own party’s politicians, Mickey said.
Second, increasing economic inequality over recent decades has motivated the rich to defend their wealth, principally through massive campaign contributions. This “wealth defense” has transformed the Republican party; its mega-donors have demanded radical cuts to the regulation of business, the decimation of popular government programs, and the nomination of judges who support these goals.
Neither of these trends alone necessarily threaten democracy, said Mickey, but they have dangerously combined with “a growing panic about the country’s ‘ownership’ among millions of white Americans.” That panic is worsened by the country’s approaching “majority minority” milestone and the “reaction of many whites to the mere fact of Obama’s presidency.”
The result: Republicans, constrained by their donors from changing their economic appeals to white voters, have opted to invoke cultural issues. The precursor to MAGA is the Tea Party revolt of grassroots conservatives more than a decade ago who “talked a good game about being upset about budget deficits and debt” but were actually much more united on and energized by the issue of immigration, said Mickey.
“These trends have combined to radicalize the Republican Party into an organization that’s no longer committed to democracy,” said Mickey. “Right now, it’s an uneasy combination of white nationalism and libertarianism.”
We now see evidence that the party is backing away from democracy in several ways: Since 2000, state-level Republicans have worked to make it harder to vote, Mickey said. Second, a large majority of House Republicans refused to certify Biden’s election, even after the invasion of the Capitol. Third, Republicans now in Congress have refused to conduct oversight of the executive when their own party leader occupies the White House.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Looking ahead, Mickey closed on the point that an organizationally “hollow” Democratic party – in his view, a “feckless gerontocracy” that failed to strengthen even modestly the Voting Rights Act in 2022 – can’t save U.S. democracy. Even more important, in a two-party system, both parties have to be committed to democratic rule. As political scientist Adam Przeworski tells us, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” For Przeworski, democracies remain stable only when its major parties accept the results of elections, content to pursue office another day.
“Republican [candidates] who lose their races are increasingly likely not to concede,” said Mickey. “Thus, the Republican party has to remake itself for American democracy to be safe.”
“That will probably require multiple defeats to reset their incentives,” said Mickey. A party committed to democracy must be strong enough internally “to push out their extremists: The Nazis, the Kanyes, the Jewish-space-laser believers, and they need to take their oversight responsibility seriously…. Democracy-loving conservatives don’t have the party home that they deserve, and they need to rebuild one immediately.”
Robert Mickey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor in Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies. Both are affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
This post is part of a series that focuses on the 2025 teach-in held at Angell Hall that also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965. Recordings of the talks are available on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Robert Mickey. The second of two complimentary posts on this topic, Vincent Hutchings shared the key insight in Pt. 1 that U.S. election outcomes often hinge on attitudes toward salient social groups, and, especially, Black Americans.
