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[AUDIO LOGO] [AUDIENCE CHATTER]
SUZANNE METTLER: Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm thrilled to see you all here today. And so that I don't forget to tell you this one detail, there is a reception immediately following this lecture. And it's in the Klarman-- What do we call it?-- Atrium right over here. So please join us for that afterwards.
Cornell's first president, AD White, had noted that Cornell's location was, and I quote, "remote from great cities and centers of thought and action and could cause our community to become disconnected and provincial in spirit." So he proposed a system of non-resident professors. At the university's 100th anniversary, the AD White Professor-at-Large program was formally established to bring the world's greatest scientists, artists, and scholars to campus in order to advance our intellectual and creative life in a manner that transcends traditional boundaries of academic disciplines.
It's a great honor for me today to introduce you to AD White Professor Theda Skocpol, who is full-time the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Professor Skocpol studies the roots and results of sociopolitical transformations. She is recognized as one of the most-cited and widely influenced scholars in the modern social sciences.
Now, I know that several of my students are here who've taken courses with me in recent years. And you know that you can't get out of any course with me without having read some Skocpol on the syllabus, sometimes a few times. And at my last count, Professor Skocpol is the author of 13 books, 12 edited collections, and more than seven dozen articles.
Her work has contributed to the study of comparative politics, American politics, comparative and historical sociology, US history, and the study of public policy. To give you a sense of the range of her work, I'm just going to mention a few of her many award-winning books. States and Social Revolutions-- A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China is one. Another is Protecting Soldiers and Mothers-- The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. And then there was Diminished Democracy-- From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, and on and on.
Professor Skocpol's academic honors are numerous. She's been elected to all three major US interdisciplinary honor societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. And she has served as the president of the American Political Science Association, 14,000 of us in that organization.
In addition, Professional-- Professor Skocpol is active in civic life. She's the co-founder and the current director of the Scholars Strategy Network, whose mission is to improve public policy and strengthen democracy by encouraging public engagement by university-based scholars. And the organization has dozens of regional chapters now across 46 states.
One of my favorite descriptions of Professor Skocpol is that she's a national treasure. And that's my view. And that's why I'm so pleased to introduce her to you today. So please join me in welcoming Professor Skocpol.
[APPLAUSE]
THEDA SKOCPOL: Thank you very much. And I have to say that in my classes, there's a lot of Suzanne Mettler read as well. And I'm honored to be here.
And I read a little bit about AD White, who I-- I knew about Ezra Cornell. But I didn't know as much about AD White, and I'm honored to hold a professorship here in his name. Among other things, he was an abolitionist, and good for him. He wanted to site this University in Syracuse, but it is very beautiful here. So glad to be here.
All right, so I'm going to be talking today about what I've been mulling for months, which is what is going on in American politics, and particularly on the right, which is what I have been studying in various slices, with various teams of collaborators for about a decade now. And I'll just start by this image that I'm sure we've all seen recently, which was the first mass rally that Donald Trump conducted after becoming the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee. And just before the Ohio primary, he led a salute to the violent insurrectionists who had attacked the US Capitol and then delivered his usual lengthy rant of election lies, ethnic slurs, threats of violence and retribution, and promises to pardon some of the people who committed these acts.
Now, to me-- and I'm going to be arguing today that Donald Trump is an intervening variable, neither the cause nor the propellant of what's going on right now because the significant thing for me about this event was that leading Republicans were cheering at Trump's side, US Representative Jim Jordan, Senator JD Vance, Ohio GOP Senate nominee, soon-to-be, Bernie Moreno. And that's even in a state, Ohio, where there had been a certain amount of resistance put up by what we would have thought of as very conservative Republicans a decade ago. Nevertheless, the Trumpists won big in the primary, and they are in control of the vast majority of the Republican Party and its surrounds now. And they celebrate violence and threats.
So this is an alarming turn of events, and that's what my topic is for today. I'm asking how it's come to this. And of course, a lot of people out there, including many whose work I draw on, are contemplating that issue.
So let me just signal that a lot of answers concentrate on Trump's persona and rhetoric. A lot of them talked about anti-majoritarian institutions that have been with us in America for a long time, about recent decades of polarizing geographic divides and societal trends. And all of these matter. They're all going to enter into the analysis I offer.
But I'm focusing much more precisely on recent shifts in the organization and goals of the Republican Party, one of two major parties in the United States, and allied groups around it. And my interpretation is very much inspired by Daniel Ziblatt, who I'm co-teaching with this semester, a course on democratic backsliding, because in his comparative historical work, he highlights what can happen when conservative political parties that have to deal with electorates either fail to establish the ability to be competitive or lose their competitiveness or fear that they are and seek to reverse their fortunes by embracing proto-violent ethnonationalist partners. And I believe that is what has happened to the Republican Party in recent years.
So I'm going to be probing how and why Republican Party politicians and affiliated groups have come to pursue not just minority authoritarian governance by legal means, what's called "lawfare" by some scholars, but also to embrace ethnonationalist groups that are engaged in persistent threats of violence and other kinds of threats. My argument is going to be that far-right multi-billionaires hollowed out and redirected the 2000s Republican Party and inadvertently, not deliberately, opened the door for popular and elite ethnonationalists to move in and push from below against both the Republican Party that they had remade and the Democrats, of course, remaking one of two major parties in the United States in a way that literally puts our constitutional system and the post-World War II American-led international order on the ballot this November.
So here's my argument. I'm going to go through these steps. I'm going to talk about how the GOP first took the legalistic minority-rule route in the early 2000s, then how grassroots ethnonationalists revolted against both Obama Democrats and GOP elites.
Then I'll talk about how Trump came on the scene and leveraged popularly rooted networks with us-versus-them beleaguered worldviews already in place, knit them together enough to win the White House, and from the White house, proceeded to remake the Republican Party and its agendas. And of course, the final step in this is the turn toward a-- toward threats of violence, which now most Republican Party leaders and allied groups have refused to condemn. And so they're, in effect, enabling it. I will work that through chronologically, but then at the very end of my talk make some very brief cross-national comparisons to help clarify what is and is not really going on in the United States to contemporary Hungary, to some historical precedents in the United States, and to the 1920s in Europe, as Europe, some of the European countries, slid into fascism.
So let me just start around 2000s, and the Clinton presidency just before that, because I think we have to understand that right-wing people in and around the Republican Party learned a series of lessons in this early period. They learned during Bill Clinton's presidency that there was the threat of universal-- some kind of universal health insurance in the United States that would require higher taxes. And you do have to understand that in an era of rising income and wealth inequality, the thing America's multi-billionaires fear the most is higher taxes. They-- they're obsessed with making sure that those don't go up. And they think that continuing Social Security and Medicare or adding new mass entitlements that include the middle class as well as the very poor will result in higher taxes.
Of course, in 2000, they also learned that the electoral college and the Supreme Court could deliver them a minority presidency. So that highlighted the value of those levers. After 2000s, we know from research that the states that had the most competitive situation, with minority voters become more and more important, were the ones where Republican-led states started instituting vote-discouragement measures of all kinds, affecting who could register and who could get to the polls.
Nevertheless, President Bush was there, Bush Junior, but he ended up really disappointing the business-as-usual Republican elites because he agreed to a costly Medicare drug benefit. And from the left, it doesn't look good enough. But from their perspective, it looked like one more thing that was going to cost a lot of tax money.
So-- and this is a crucial step in the whole drama that my colleagues and I have researched. And I think it's our unique contribution to the discussion. From 2004 on, the Koch network was set up as a federated organizational system to outflank the Republican Party on the right and redirect it even further in the direction of anti-government, low tax, anti-regulatory policies than the Bush/Rove chamber of commerce version of the GOP that was in power before that.
And this research I've talked about before. I won't dwell too long. But I'm a scholar who studies things organizationally.
And it was along with some of my collaborators, like Alex Hertel-Fernandez, that we realized that maybe if we were going to study things organ-- maybe we ought to look at organizations. So we went out there and gathered data on organizations in and around the Republican Party in 2002 and 2014. We picked dates that were not presidential years so that we could just get an idea of where the budget dollars were going. Most of these are from donors in one way or another.
And you can see that the red lines, the solid red in 2002, there's quite a shift by 2014 toward-- away from Republican Party committees. They have-- they control less of the dollars there. And non-party funders and constituency organizations that are non-party are much more important.
And it turns out that when you look at it in detail, it was the coming together of a constellation of organizations under the direction of what became up to 400 millionaires and billionaires, who met twice a year under the direction of David and Charles Koch. There were other things at the edges of this. But this was the new formation.
And these were two brothers who had started out in the way political formations often do, fostering ideas-- they still do-- setting up issue advocacy groups to fight health care reform and advocate for cutting back on entitlements. But by the time you get to the 2000s, they've created these twice-yearly meetings of wealthy people so that they can herd them together and get them to not just scatter their dollars to various politicians but actually put their dollars into organizations that are going to pursue an ideological set of objectives that are tightly focused on cutting back government's role in the market economy.
I mean, my friend Jack Goldstone says they are actually perfectly willing to go along with patronage politics with those dollars. And I think there's some truth to that. But they certainly don't want government to be involved in redistribution or taxes or anything like that.
And so those kinds of organizations, the Koch seminars, the bank that channeled the money, Freedom Partners, Americans for Prosperity above all, are-- come online from 2004 on with really very generous and increasingly generous funding. In fact, by 2016, the Koch network was channeling more dollars than the Republican Party committees themselves. And the research that we did was about Americans for Prosperity, which is the animal, which is the innovative animal in this forest.
It is run with military-style centralization and close focus on the core anti-government free market objectives. But it has a federated structure that parallels the Republican Party on the far right. And the darkest areas are the places with paid state directors between 2004 and '07. As you get lighter color, but not gray, you've got paid state directors who can direct money, who can direct volunteers and bring in paid staff for particular campaigns.
The important thing about-- and when I visited Wisconsin in 2017, there were three party offices on Main Street, not just the Republicans and the Democrats, but Americans for Prosperity. So the argument that I want to make is that AFP bolstered the Republican Party, a certain version of the Republican Party, redirected its agendas, but it also weakened it in ways that are important for putting this into the Daniel Ziblatt framework. So let me just mention a few of these things and present a little bit of data.
It combines at-will central direction with the federated organization. It deploys grassroots activists, lobbyists, media, money, all kinds of things continuously, not during-- just during elections but for policy campaigns after the Republicans are elected to office, to hold their feet to the fire, for example, to make sure that they didn't vote to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, even though there was a lot of money involved that many business groups wanted. It helps to elect the ultra-free-market conservatives and then prods them to enact the promised agenda.
And here's a significant thing that I found in my field interviews with Republican Party leaders in counties and states. AFP paid better, so they could attract talent away from the Republican Party and use it to prod the party from outside. This caused irritation on the part of many very conservative Republican Party operatives.
So it boosted the Republicans in the sense of helping to elect more people, especially in 2010, 2014. But it also reduced the capacities of the Republican Party, per se, to balance different kinds of interests in their constellation. Now, these interests are mainly pretty conservative, but they included business interests that would occasionally like to spend some money on roads or might want Medicaid expanded under Obamacare because it would bring hospital money in to states that desperately needed it.
The Koch network made sure that didn't happen. And so it reduced the flexibility of the Republican Party to appeal to not just most Americans, but even to many in their own base. And the Koch network keep-- kept-- has kept the focus very much on things that the rich want, not the things that many popular supporters of the Republican Party want, which is the cessation or reversal of immigration, changes in racial and gender issues, that really do matter at the grassroots to many Republican identifiers.
We did some research on the careers of people. And we showed that, in fact, if you track careers, AFP was pulling people out of Republican staffs, governing staffs and election staffs. But it was not sending them back.
The green arrows are where they go afterwards. They did not go into electoral politics. So this is a non-electoral, small L leninist-style operation that outflanked and strengthened and weakened the Republican Party.
Now, they pushed Republicans into doing things most Americans did not want. They also pushed them often into doing things or blocking things that a lot of business allies, chamber of commerce-type people, would have wanted. And that's where our analysis differs somewhat from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, who see this is all one big business conspiracy. We actually think that individual multi-billionaires, particularly ideologically motivated ones, are not necessarily always pursuing exactly the same right-wing goals as people who run businesses.
So a key question, and this is a pivot point in my talk, so here's the key question. Once that kind of outflanking and radicalization happened-- and it did. Under Obama, the Koch network grew very strong and was able to block a fair amount of what Obama wanted to do, not everything. Why didn't it stop there?
And why didn't it stop with what I'm going to call McConnellism in honor of the about-to-depart GOP leader because McConnell, by the way, was there in attendance at all those Koch seminars. And McConnellist approach to Republican Party reorientation and rule is to institutionalize minority-- legalistic minority rule through court appointments, through taking advantage of the electoral college and the Senate filibuster. And he was very much on board with the Koch network agenda.
And so the question that we have to ask if we take Ziblatt's work seriously is, Why didn't it stop there? I mean, that would be bad from the point of view of many people. I'm not going to speak to that. I'll just say that many people would think legalistic minority rule in the United States as far as the eye can see, which remains a threat no matter what, would not be good for democracy. But it's different from threats of violence, and-- which is where we're at now.
And so my question is, Why didn't it stop there? And the answer is that in many ways, Koch-McConnellism had obstructive successes. But it also left a lot of ordinary grassroots Republican activists and voters very unsatisfied.
So I'm going to talk about that for a while. It proved-- it created a gap that proved vulnerable to ethnonationalists. And here are some of the points I'm about to lay out. Koch pressures and inducements hollowed out their party's internal balancing capacities-- I've already talked about it-- and pushed agendas that were not just unpopular with most Americans but with a lot of grassroots conservatives who voted for Republicans.
Even when Sarah Palin was accepted by John McCain to run with him, that wasn't good enough. It wasn't good enough to win. And it wasn't good enough to propitiate the ethnonationalists who were her big supporters.
Once Obama and the Democrats swept the federal offices in 2008, the Tea Party erupted as a series of protests and a series of ongoing volunteer-led groups that my colleagues and I studied. And we-- the Kochs did not fund those groups. I don't care what any leftist muckrakers say.
These were people who organized themselves. They're good, old-fashioned Americans who get up and go and organized things for themselves. A lot of them hadn't even heard of AFP. And they were-- they pushed their own agenda.
And they pushed a lot of the wave victories that happened in 2010, but also elected Republicans who started to refuse compromise of any kind with Obama or with congressional Democrats, and didn't even go along when the Koch network types would like something to happen. So that's what Donald Trump inherited. That's where I'm headed here.
The societal trends that others have pointed to really did matter as a backdrop to all of this. We had a lot of us-versus-them networks and worldviews out there by the middle of the 2010s and certainly activated-- their fears activated by Obama's victory in 2008. And pastor networks, with white evangelicals who could turn out voters far beyond the share of the electorate that these voters are. Gun organizations and clubs, the Fraternal Order of Police, all of these are things that are going to turn out to be important for Trumpism.
And the social trend that I think is the most important as the final ingredient in the ethnonationalist revolt against both the Republican Party establishment and the Democrats is a byproduct of the opportunities offered to politicians who choose to take those opportunities of rapid immigration that played out in the United States between 1965 and 2008. It was pretty much over by then. But immigrants from Central America, Mexico, Africa, Asia had spread out all over the country by the time Barack Obama was elected president. And they provided the fuel for ethnonationalist popular groups and, ultimately, Trump.
So let me just remind us a little bit about this. In a way, it started early. Congress has been trying to come up with bipartisan compromises to combine tougher enforcement at the borders with a path to citizenship for undocumented people who are part of American life and work. And after the failure of some of those efforts, in 2005 the House passed crack-down legislation that helped to spur nationwide immigrant-rights protests.
And it turns out that those probably were an important contributor to the Tea Party revolts two years later and to the rise of Trump later on. Just by looking at the sequence of things-- and the available studies mainly go out there and study the immigrants-rights protesters themselves and talk about how wonderful it is that they're activating American citizenship or protests on behalf of the undocumented. But of course, at the time not as well researched, because a lot of social scientists don't like to research the right, there were a lot of conservative people out there in the country who were getting really scared.
There are some interesting sociological field studies that tell us that people who thought of their immigrant neighbors as hard-working family people suddenly realized they might be voters, and they might be protesters. And that aroused a certain kind of anger that bubbled into Republican Party politics. My research colleagues and I have looked at the platforms across 50 states that are available now. And we found that in the 2000s, suddenly some very severe anti-immigrant planks started appearing in GOP state platforms, particularly in states along the border, but not only, also in states in the interior, in the Midwest, and the upper South, where many immigrants were settled by then.
Two years later, when the Democrats are elected-- and I have to say that when I did interviews with grassroots Tea Partier people, they weren't all upset about the fact that Obama was Black. Many of them were. But they were upset about the fact that he was a college professor, really bad category in Tea Party land. And they were even more upset by his middle name, Barack Hussein Obama. And they thought of him as somebody who wanted to bring immigrants into the country to vote for Democrats and keep him in power.
So the Tea Party protests that greeted Obama's presidency were all over the country. And they gave way by the summer of that first year to 1,500 to 2,000 local Tea Parties. And my research group has the names and the locations of every one of them that we've put together. And these groups were not easily controlled from above because they were spontaneous, organized expressions of anger, particularly about immigration.
Those are the rallies. The Tea Parties, by the spring of 2011, when Vanessa Williamson and I published our book, were all over the country, but especially dense on the ground or large in the more Republican-leaning areas of the country. But they were everywhere.
By 2010, Tea Party-identified or Tea Party-appealing candidates were running in large numbers. So you see a big uptick in the 2010 midterms. There will later be a similar uptick in the midterms under Trump in 2018.
And using our data of the location of Tea Parties all over the country, and then later anti-Trump resistance groups, we've put together a chart that looks at the density in relation to the various kinds of districts. And I've circled the part of this chart that shows that Tea Parties were especially dense on the ground in districts that either flipped to the Republicans, the red bars in 2010, or were already very Republican and simply remained or replaced Republicans already there. So the way to think of this is that the Tea Party movement created a pull to the grassroots ethnonationalist right from 2010 on that reverberated into Congress.
And the argument that I'm making about polarization here is that polarization has been unfolding in layers, in waves for, I don't know, 75 years now. First, there's the pulling apart of the parties, as measured by their national and state platforms, on issues of racial equality, as the two parties reorient regionally, the Democrats becoming more of a Northern and Western party, the Republicans more of a Southern party. And Eric Schickler's work shows that this started in states first and then happened at the national level, as we can tell from platform provisions.
Then from the 1970s on, the Christian right becomes activated and becomes an anchoring group, as Daniel Schlozman puts it, for the Republican Party. And that, too, starts in some states, some of the recent platform research shows, and spreads to the national level. Only in the 2000s do the parties polarize on immigration issues. Before that, they were divided internally, both Democrats and Republicans, on who should be allowed to immigrate, what to do with people who were here already undocumented, a whole series of other issues about immigration. And the positions were often tied to labor versus business.
But in the 2000s, simultaneous polarization occurs in party platforms, the two parties spreading apart. And those-- there's a slight lead in state-level provisions on the Republican side. This matters because the way to think of this is like a layer cake in which we get, by the 2010s, to a situation in which American voters identified with the two major parties are at odds over visceral issues about race and racial equality, about women, men, children, families, and finally, about the very meaning of America itself.
Is it a country that welcomes immigrants? I would call it the greatest machine the world has ever seen for taking people in from everywhere and turning them into NFL fans.
[CHUCKLING]
Or is it a country that has to drop the moats, build the walls, and pull in? That's the fight. And that is existential. It's an existential battle, particularly on the side of people who feel they might be losing if elections are free and fair.
So by 2015 and '16, large shares of GOP-leaning voters were repudiating their own party's leaders. Remember, these are Kochified leaders. These are the Koch-McConnellists for the most part, especially in the Senate, because they thought they'd mishandled socially charged issues, particularly same-sex marriage and illegal immigration.
They also were unhappy about government spending, and that took The New York Times in. They thought this was all about government spending. I can tell you from the field research I did that this was all about spending on poorer people or low-income people through Obamacare. But the question isn't precise enough to pin that down.
Among all Republican-leaning voters, the most-- those most worried about immigrants and social diversity were the more supportive ones of Trump in the 2016 primary election cycle, people who thought that the growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens US values, people who were upset about Islam and don't consider it really a religion. That's what one of my Tea Party interviews told me. He said, it's a political position. It's not a religion.
And bad for the country that Blacks, Latinos, and Asians will be a majority of the population. Those people were much more inclined to support Trump than other conservatives and Republicans. And you can see the same thing here in the vote for the primaries that led into the Trump 2016 election.
So the bottom line here is that President Trump didn't create the popular ethnonationalist revolt that rocked both Democrats and the Republican Party, the Kochified Republican Party. But he did centralize and focus it. So that's my point about him being an intervening variable, a crucial intervening variable, a showman, someone who could pull together the various kinds of resentful and fearful networks and particularly give expression to the anti-immigrant strand of ethnonationalism.
He, as we know, gleefully insulted and dispatched 16 experienced office-holding Republicans who were his competitors in the primaries, the kinds of people who would have been automatically installed, one of them, as the candidate in the Republican Party that existed just a few years before. And he, at the 2016 Republican Convention-- Who can forget this visual?-- dramatized what Trumpism would mean-- strong man, ethnic nationalist appeal, combined with commitments to eliminate Obama policies, nominate judges who support the preferences of the NRA, gun networks, and the Christian right.
It was a minority of people who elected Trump. But they were well networked and well positioned in the electoral college. And as Suzanne Mettler and her collaborators have shown, they were disproportionately from the outer suburbs out, in medium cities, small cities, rural areas.
So Trump's victory in 2016 may turn out to be a permanent turning point in American history. I don't want to scare you too much, but it's possible because what he did from the White House was to create a synthesis of the originally separate elite and popular radicalizing strands that have played out in the 2000 Republican Party. Both houses of Congress and the presidency were controlled for two years. And during that time, free-market ideologues, ethnonationalists, and the religious right all claimed mandates, and they divvied up the parts of the federal government.
And while Trump was watching TV all the time, they determined policies and judicial appointments. The Koch network actually provided a lot of the personnel that staffed much of the federal government that had to do with business and environment. The Federalist Society, of course, handed Trump the lists of judges to appoint to create the current 6-3 majority.
And wealthy funders and politicians in the Republican Party who were initially put off by Trump's uncouthness-- one Koch network billionaire I interviewed said, well, you know, we really don't like what he's doing about immigrants. But that's what his base wants. And otherwise, we thank God every day that he's there because he's so good for our business. That view, they learn to leverage grassroot anger and to reap policy wins for tax cuts, regulatory eviscerations, and far-right judges.
By one year in, the big tax cuts had passed. And this is Charles Koch at the first big meetings. The Koch network had refused to endorse Trump going into 2016, although they poured money into the Senate battles, which is really the same thing. It turned out the same voters. But see how happy he was. He thought, happy days are here again at that first meeting.
Now, just to flash forward to where we are now, after Trump lost reelection in 2020, we all know he denied Biden's victory. That started even before. And he stoked supporters to disrupt the state as well as congressional certifications.
A majority of the House GOP supported those efforts. And the Senate GOP leadership, under Mitch McConnell, refused to convict him in the impeachment. That left him free to do what we have seen over the last two to three years, which is to continue to remake the Republican Party, to purge anybody who is not fully supportive of his new political blend, which I will describe in a minute, and to get ready to contest for the presidency again.
Republican leaders and plutocrats are the key players here. They have turned out to be OK with threats to US democracy. And in some ways, I step back at times and I say, Well, why should anybody be surprised?
I mean, the US presidency is such an important lever. It's such an important prize. It helps to shape the judiciary. It can stop most of the things these people want to stop and probably get through tax cuts.
So we know that the corporations that promised to stop giving to people who supported the insurrection turned around almost in every case within a year. Republicans in Congress who voted for impeachment were either-- or for an honest investigation were either forced into resignation or lost their primaries. And that moves Congress to the right, particularly the House, but also, to some degree, the Senate for the Republicans.
And after the failure to find a convincing alternative that they could sell to grassroots voters-- I mean, who would have thought that Ron DeSantis would not be appealing?
[CHUCKLING]
I mean, oh. They didn't find anybody. And so now they're all back on board, donating, including John Paulson, who Harvard named its engineering school after.
So the Republican Party by now has been overwhelmingly taken over by election subverters. And it's not just that they're telling fairy stories about the past. The party apparatus has been turned into paying Trump's legal bills as he challenges the legal system. And state election procedures and local and state election officials are in the crosshairs and are being replaced or threatened on the Republican side.
And in the interviews that I've done in the field over the years, I know two really very solidly conservative Republican county chairs who have quit because they were threatened by people further to the right, simply for being willing to run honest elections in overwhelmingly Republican areas. So threats against election officials and replacements of them by people who will be willing to hold up the count or falsify it in 2024 are very far along. They are very far along in 40 out of 67 counties in Pennsylvania alone.
Whether Trump enablers of the kind I have just discussed will admit it or not, they are signing on to political operations that deliberately encourage popular threats and spot violence. This is the part of the story that I think is the most alarming. We know from the research of Robert Pape at the University of Chicago that the 20-- January 6 attacks may have involved some militia units, the Proud Boys and the-- Who were the other ones? I'm forgetting.
AUDIENCE: Oath Keepers.
THEDA SKOCPOL: The Oath Keepers. But mostly, they were the usual get-up-and-go Americans who piled into the car with a few of their friends and drove to Washington. So this is a call-and-response system that's been set up by Trump and those around him to put out calls to attack people or threaten them. And they're responded to spontaneously.
This creates threats of violence and actual violence from time to time. It's very hard to track, very hard to pin down, and very terrifying to the various kinds of political elites and judicial system people and criminal justice people who are subjected to it. And as I said, a lot of replacement of election workers is happening in preparation for 2024.
So I think the bottom line now is that attacks next year on congressional certification are unlikely. There are new legal procedures, and I don't think that the drama will play out the same. But widespread intimidation of voters and election workers at the state and local level that could disrupt state certifications in the first place are very likely if the election is at all close.
And I just want to point out something that I think Brian Beutler has recently put out in a piece called "The Political Economy of Normalization" that center-right-- center-left institutions in the United states, liberal, mainstream institutions, have been hesitant to draw the line. And this is an important ingredient in all of this. The delay in legal cases directed against the top leaders of the threat-- the violence-threatening turn and the willingness to just bring in somebody, despite what they're part of, which our universities have been party to and NBC tried before its-- many of its people rebelled with Ronna Romney McDaniels.
So let me just close up now by briefly pointing to what we can learn about this very dense story that's unfolded quickly in the United States. Hungary-- as many of you know, in 2010, Viktor Orbán's Fidesz Party won a slight majority. But because of the rules of the game in Hungary, that translated into a supermajority in parliament. And because the constitution could be changed by that supermajority, they quickly started modifying the constitution's rules governing elections, judges, media regulation, and all kinds of other ingredients that go into building an authoritarian-- a legally installed authoritarian regime.
Now, in a way, Hungary's completely different from the United States. It's a very, very centralized political system since the departure of the communists. It is-- whereas the United States is a divided powers federal system. And the Constitution is virtually impossible to change in the United States.
So the first time I read about this case, I thought, well, phew, it's-- the worst that's going to happen here is that the Heritage Foundation is going to send its teams over to learn how to do ethnonationalism better from Orbán. And that is happening. But I think a new article that just appeared in Democracy argues that, really, the key changes in Hungary were to the party itself long before 2010, in which Orbán took over what was originally a group of young anti-communists, purged all the dissenters, created a highly nationalized party, and then turned it in the direction of ethnonationalists popular appeals.
So that's much closer to what has happened on the Republican Party side in the United States. And it suggests that the Trumpist purge and refocus of the GOP has been the crucial step in bringing the USA to the verge of an authoritarian fusion of party and government powers that would use legal means where they could, but also threats of violence where they couldn't, to accomplish something similar. We can, of course, look across American history. And the crucial thing I want to say about particularly right-wing mass movements in the United states, but sometimes left as well, they always proceed with a combination of top-down encouragement and bottom-up get up and go. It's always meeting in the middle, a kind of call and response.
That kind of synthesis is the way the Civil War was fought in this country on both sides, volunteerism from below, direction from above. The rollback of reconstruction in the South happened that way after the Northern Congressional Republican Party divided and lost the will to Black-- enforce Black rights. And the federal courts started gutting the Civil War amendments, a process that you may have noticed continues to this day. The people of the Federalist Society do not believe that the Civil War amendments are legitimate.
Anti-immigrant movements in the United States have played out again and again, including the repression of German cultural groups and elites around World War I, where lots of people knew that it wasn't a fair thing to do to remove an orchestra director because he was German. But they went along with it because popular groups from below were pressing for it. So the Trumpist takeover of the GOP has been accomplished through toking of volunteer threats against internal party dissidents, and then against ethnic and political enemies. The same formula is used against liberals and Democrats. And the question we face in the United States today is whether today's pro-liberal constitutional supports have more unity and staying power to fight back than the post-war reconstruction groups did.
And that brings us finally to what happened in Germany, Italy, and other parts of Europe in the 1920s. I don't know as much as some experts in the room here about Italy. But Italian elites seemed to have decided to take a chance on Mussolini, in part to try to control chaotic violence they had not been able to control through constitutional parliamentary means.
In Germany, we know that Hitler and other fascist leaders attained executive power by running, getting pluralities in elections, and getting invited into power by existing conservative constitutional authorities who, not believing they could appeal to the electorate themselves, thought they would borrow the Nazi appeal to a plurality of Germans, disproportionately non-metropolitan Germans, and believed they could control Hitler in the process. So a combination of elite myopia and opportunism and conservative electoral weakness invited the Nazis to power. And I don't think it's going to end up the same way. But we see a similar story playing out with the Trumpist purge and buy-off of the GOP and the relative passivity and lack of determination to stop the advent of a victory quasi-electoral this year.
Now, in Germany, center-left forces were divided and hesitant. And I would say that that was not just in elections and parliamentary maneuvers. It was also in 1932. And since I'm somebody who studied revolutions, I always look at the means of coercion. I'm interested in the means of coercion.
And in 1932, prior to Hitler's takeover, prior to him being installed legally in power, national authorities, conservative authorities, invoked emergency powers to take over the professional police force and civil service in Prussia, which was the largest of the German federal states. It was governed at the time by social democrats and Catholic centrists, who were committed to constitutional democracy. But they responded only with a few unsuccessful lawsuits. So that means that when Hitler finally did take over, he didn't have to deal with the full force of resistance in a federated polity because he had a nationalized police force and bureaucracy all ready to turn into the Gestapo and to use, along with street violence, to complete the takeover.
Right now, we know that US networks and think tanks around Trump are planning to use the Insurrection Act to deploy presidential authority to direct or neutralize state national guards. And my question is, Are governors and pro-democracy forces thinking ahead about this possibility and how to deal with it? Let me just stop with two What can be done?
What can be done before 2024 November? Well, actually, the picture here is much better than it was in 1920s and '30s. US pro-constitutional democracy forces have a lot more going for them. We're not in the middle of the Great Depression.
The Democratic Party is relatively unified. It's not a story of the social Democrats versus the communists. I don't think that-- Who is my former Harvard colleague who's about to name his vice president?
He's not going to manage. There's always JFK. Who knows? But-- I mean, RFK. Who knows?
But in any event, the Democratic Party is relatively unified. And it has been buoyed in recent years by college-educated white and Black women, who have pushed the-- led the way and pushed back against Trumpism and have spread the party's voice into many more districts. And the SCOTUS overturn of Roe may be a powerful mobilizing force. You may have noticed today that the Supreme Court, in-- the day after Trump said, leave it to the states, the Supreme Court in Arizona said, well, let's go back to 1864. So that's going to be a mobilizing force.
But-- and I just want to say, I do think many institutions have been late or hesitant to sanction Trumpist leaders as opposed to foot soldiers. And that has definitely emboldened this next round of GOP MAGA efforts. And I think people have to encourage folks to volunteer to help run honest elections at the state and local level, particularly young people. The little old ladies that usually do this are probably not going to be enough.
We have to-- everybody who cares about American democracy has to start-- stop talking in academic language and start talking in concrete language about what the lack of democracy means to the economy, to the ability to throw the bums out if things go bad, to what happens if your immigrant neighbors who run the restaurant down the street are taken away. We just have to make it concrete because abstract discussion of democracy appeals to the college educated, but for understandable reasons, is not front and center for many other people.
And I'll just say that on the Middle East, I think one has to say, Who do you want in power when Netanyahu finally goes? He's not going to go till 2025. And who do you want there when that happens?
If Trumpists win in the fall, I think there are some things to be done, now and in the interregnum between November and January 20, 2025. And here, the governors of the non-Trump states are the key players. I'm hoping-- and I asked one of my journalist friends whether he knew. I'm hoping that they have got some quiet aid talking with people across state lines about what they would do about efforts to control the National Guard because that could be the first crunch that comes. And probably, an appeal to the Supreme Court (WHISPERING) is not going to be good enough.
[CHUCKLING]
It's just a guess. I think center-left civil groups have to concert their thinking about what should happen. And they did this before January 6. I believe there was an understanding that pouring into the streets that day would just give an excuse for the Insurrection Act. So that kind of thinking has to go into what happens if the election is won or legally stolen, and so thinking through something to do besides pouring into the streets and filing lawsuits.
And then I think the important thing to realize is that in the United States, as in many other countries across the world that have been more or less secure democracies, the fault line is between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. And that means that the people who are trying to capture central state authority to impose ethnonationalist priorities and control of women in new ways on the population as a whole are doing so from a position of relative economic weakness. They are attacking the centers of economic vibrancy.
Now, we can't count on business to stand up. American business has a very long history. David Vogel had a brilliant piece years ago about how American businessmen can never see beyond the end of their noses. They can never concert in time to realize the stakes they have in maintaining rules of the game.
So I don't think you can count on them. But economic leverage, after all, lies in tax paying and going to work. So maybe the kinds of resistance that might make more sense would be rolling short strikes, failure to file income taxes on time, which if you've cut back the IRS, it's going to be a little hard to crack down on that.
But in any event, persistent ways to shift, to do something that liberals in the United States are going to find almost impossible to think of, which is we've-- for 75 years, liberals in the United States have channeled tax money through the federal government and expected it to go down. Well, if the federal government falls into the hands of people who want to use that money for a coercive ethnonational state and block any kind of economic redistribution and dismantle taxes and entitlements, then you've got to think of a different fiscal model that will enable states to work together, including with cities that are areas of pro-democracy in red states to handle government functions and government funding and expenditures in a new way.
I don't have the answers here. But these are the kinds of questions people should be thinking about if this turns into a long, grinding struggle, as it has in Hungary. So let me stop. And we're ready to stop and take your questions. I'm sorry for going on so long.
[APPLAUSE]
SUZANNE METTLER: So you can put your hand up with questions, and I will try to get around to call on various [INAUDIBLE].
THEDA SKOCPOL: And I hope people will identify themselves. And I-- you know, this can be a discussion [INAUDIBLE].
SUZANNE METTLER: And introduce yourself.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Dr. Skocpol. My name is Sarah Rosenblum. I'm a postdoctoral associate at the Brooks School of Public Policy. I'm a public health scholar and political scientist by training, originally from Paris, which is why I have a slight accent.
I just want to go back to what you said at the beginning of the presentation, which I thought was really interesting, when you were talking about the differences between legalistic strategies and threats to authoritarian governance. And I wonder if there's-- if Trump is not pursuing, actually, a hybrid strategy, where he's combining both--
THEDA SKOCPOL: Oh, yeah, he's doing both, of course.
AUDIENCE: And in terms of like, for example, one thing I was thinking about that you didn't really address in your presentation-- but you addressed many very interesting things, so that's totally fine. He's talked a lot about removing job protections for civil servants and instilling a climate of fear and intimidation inside the bureaucracy. I'm just wondering how that plays out in your analysis.
And the second thing I want to mention here, and I don't know if that's something you're looking at, is something that I worked on for my dissertation, is how Trump is creating ad hoc governance bodies, which operate outside of traditional oversight mechanisms or accountability mechanisms, which pretty much do whatever they want and create rules, new regulations without operating the way bureaucracy normally would do, and which are staffed by these allies that he's appointing.
THEDA SKOCPOL: People in the White house, usually, or groups connected to the White House.
AUDIENCE: Right. So I was wondering if you had any--
THEDA SKOCPOL: Well, I mean, we know that the Heritage Foundation, working with think tanks from Hungary, has laid out plans to quickly capture control of the federal civil service. So that is already in place and probably will start happening the afternoon of January 20 if he wins.
Now, I want to be clear. I don't think Donald Trump himself-- he's a showman, and he's savvy. And he has a certain political savviness. And he certainly has a communication apparatus for this call and response to a widespread following.
But he's going to be concerned about stopping the lawsuits against himself and rebuilding his family's fortunes. The thing that's different this time, though, is that he is a sort of a-- he's got a whole bunch of organized planners around him. He's got the Stephen Miller group planning the crackdown on immigrants that could involve sending the National Guard into blue cities.
He's got the people at Heritage, who are laying out the plans to take control of the civil service. And those include changing the civil service rules, but also putting in acting director-- acting cabinet officials, who do not have to be voted in, even by a Republican Senate. They don't have to be approved. He prefers those.
And it's not just him. You have to think of him right now as a kind of node that's brought together all of the authoritarians. And do they-- will they use every legal means? Of course, they will, particularly since lawsuits that wend their way over many months to the Supreme Court are, in many ways, a kind of chimera. Sure, you can win in the circuit. But what happens when you get to the six folks up there?
So I think we just have to recognize that he's got a lot of people who have glommed onto him now because he has transformed the Republican Party much more than in 2016, and because all the people who have the projects they want to carry through, from the Koch network to the ethnonationalist people, to the people who want to control the federal government and make it-- purge it of Democrats and African-Americans, frankly, and from civil service, they know what they're doing this time. And they will be ready to do it quickly.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
THEDA SKOCPOL: OK, yes.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Professor Skocpol. Thank you for-- my name is [? Garza. ?] Thanks for a very interesting talk. I wanted to ask you, I guess, I mean, your talk focuses so much on the influence of the Koch foundation on--
THEDA SKOCPOL: Network. It's not a foundation.
AUDIENCE: The network on the Trump presidency. I guess I wanted to maybe push you a little further and say, Do you think it's accurate in some ways to say that Trump is, in some ways, the Koch network president? And if that is-- and, I mean, based on the kinds of policies that he's been pushing, isn't what's happening a form of class warfare? And I guess--
THEDA SKOCPOL: Sure.
AUDIENCE: I guess, I mean, so then what are the-- I mean, what are the prospects of pushing back against that? Because it seems like the Democratic Party doesn't have any interest in really pushing back against that. I mean, as far as the Progressive Caucus is concerned, they're so undermined within their own party. What do you think are the prospects for pushing back against this form of class warfare, if you think that is?
THEDA SKOCPOL: Well, look, I don't think of major social changes as usually flowing for only one master class. Think about states and social revolutions. It was about a conjuncture of international circumstances that divided elites and weakened the bureaucracy and the military and opened the door to peasant revolts from below and, to some degree, working class revolts.
In this case, the Kochs did not set out to enable Donald Trump or anti-immigrant ethnonationalism. They like immigrants. They're cheap workers. They have never been the spearhead of anti-immigrant efforts.
But what they did do-- this is my argument-- is weaken the Republican Party's ability-- remember, America has two parties. They're both cross-class. They both have to put together lots of different elements to win elections.
The Republicans are a little bit luckier because they don't have to win as many states that are swing states. They've got some of these structural advantages. But they still have to put some stuff together.
And what the Kochs did was to pull them so far away from what grassroots Republicans wanted that they weakened their ability to control the nomination process and the policymaking agenda in ways that start to revolt against-- I'm not saying good guys versus bad guys. If you're thinking good guys versus bad guys, history isn't that way. History is good guys and bad guys on both sides, many of whom are doing things they do not fully understand and are leading to results that they didn't necessarily intend.
Now, once Trumpism and the-- Tea Party and then Trumpism are rolling along, the Koch network and other wealthy multi-billionaires, not all of whom are in the Koch network, will take advantage of that. And they're super confident that they can. They're like the German elites in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
They think, oh, these people are boorish. We can use them. We can use their energy and then dispose of them when we don't want them anymore.
Well, maybe that's true of Donald Trump, who is not exactly the most competent person in the world when it comes to organizing things. But it's not necessarily true of the various forces that have coalesced around him. So that's the argument here.
As for the Democrats, look, when you get to this kind of situation, only a broad alliance from the center to the left can stop it. That means a lot of policies that the far-left wants will not happen. And I have to say, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party recognizes that. They have been remarkably willing to get all they could get and support the fight to reelect Joe Biden.
Did you see Bernie Sanders standing up there with him? And my colleague from-- former colleague from Harvard should be standing up there with him because he won't like it if Donald Trump is the one elected. So I don't think the Democratic Party is anywhere near as hopeless as you say.
I think it has sponsored some fairly major redistributive things. And I think it is doing quite a bit within the bounds of the US legal and constitutional system, which is biased against it. It is biased against the Democratic Party now because they're concentrated in big cities and in college towns. And that's not enough to win the electoral college on its own. Yep.
SUZANNE METTLER: I would love to call on some undergraduates, if there's some who would like to ask questions. Yes.
AUDIENCE: Yes. Hello, I am an undergraduate senior in the College of Arts and Culture.
THEDA SKOCPOL: Where are you from?
AUDIENCE: I'm from New York State.
THEDA SKOCPOL: Great.
AUDIENCE: A few hours away. So now, I was curious, you mentioned a little bit about the connection between Viktor Orbán's party in Hungary and the Heritage Foundation and their plans for here in America. Now, Viktor Orbán, obviously, predates Trump by a number of years. And so do other leaders, like Benjamin Netanyahu, who have done things similar to what Trump is doing.
THEDA SKOCPOL: Very much so.
AUDIENCE: Now, would you frame what Trump has done in this past term and what he may do in the future as part of a larger global surge of populist politics? And if so, in a sense, is it necessarily being orchestrated by all these [INAUDIBLE] groups? Or are they just taking advantage of this global [INAUDIBLE]?
THEDA SKOCPOL: I prefer the term "ethnonationalist" to "populist" because I think "populist" is simply there are left populists and right populists. I'm not quite sure what it means. But in any event, you probably know what you mean.
Yes, these are global tendencies. We are in an era where particularly the movements of populations, through immigration and refugee flows, have opened opportunities. Now, I want to say that again, opened opportunities. That doesn't determine anything. It just offers opportunities to politicians who want to stoke divisions along racial and ethnic lines and build fear about social change.
Now, there are a lot of social changes happening. I think a lot of people out there have, in-- not-- I have. In my lifetime, I've seen huge changes in legal race relations in the United States. I've-- changes in the roles of men and women. I would not be standing here if these did not occur.
And we know that throughout American history, at the end of every period of waves of newcomers to the United States from different parts of the world, it's really just a different part of the world than was there before. It was Germans and Irish. And then it was the South-Central Southeastern Europeans.
And then there was a hiatus from 1924 to 1965. But since 1965 up until about 2008, and still from Central America, we have newcomers coming. And that can be culturally very unsettling to people. I think the cultural side of it is lived reality for people in communities. It's not just job competition.
And so politicians can take advantage of that. And Trump is very good at taking advantage of all of those tensions. I believe that his appeal has been anti-immigrant, obviously anti-Black power, not Black people, but Black political power, which is what scared the Tea Partiers.
And he doesn't care for women who are professionals. Let's face it. We're not his idea of what he wants for his daughter and his wife and everyone else.
So he's good at giving voice to those fears and resentments, and including the sense that entire parts of the country have been left behind by economic development and growth. And so I think this is similar to what's happening in many other countries. But it's playing out in a two-party system, rather than a parliamentary system. And that makes a difference.
It's playing out in a federated polity. And it's playing out in a polity where political power has always been a combination of this top-down, bottom-up. So that's where the threat of violence and the threats of violence come in.
And I think they are an important additional ingredient. I don't think this is just stretching the law as far as it will go. That's McConnell. But notice where he's-- he's [INAUDIBLE].
And the Tea Partiers that I interviewed hated McConnell. They hated him from the beginning. He's not enough.
So the sense that liberals and immigrants and empowered Black people are a threat to America is viscerally felt by large sectors of the electorate and has glommed onto Trump and as their tribune. And when he suggests people should be threatened, that unleashes internet threats, and for some people, violence. And that's frightening.
And it adds an ingredient to all of this, which causes a lot of others to say, well, maybe I should just resign from Congress rather than fight this battle. Or maybe I shouldn't run for office. Or maybe I should drag that case out a little further in courts. Or maybe we should bring in somebody to name the school after [INAUDIBLE] in the hope of propitiating those who cannot be propitiated.
So it's taken another look. It has. And I'm not saying that the legalistic strategies aren't continuing. And they may be what's left when-- if and when the Trumpist threat goes away.
But remember, there are lots of many Trumpists now. There's Josh Hawley. There's Elise Stefanik from your state and my university. There's-- who's the guy out there in Arkansas?
AUDIENCE: JD Vance.
THEDA SKOCPOL: Oh, there's JD Vance. I mean, wow. So-- and these are not uneducated people. These are not stupid people. They know exactly what they're doing. And we haven't even talked about the right-wing media set.
SUZANNE METTLER: OK, who's next? Yeah, Emma.
AUDIENCE: Hi. So you were just recently speaking about the new Trumpists, so to speak, that are within the House and the Senate. And yet we're seeing frequent changes within House GOP leadership, sporadic changes in not only policy positions but policy priorities, and then confusion as to what the agenda is going to look like, A, during the 118th Congress and then B, during the 119th Congress.
So I'm curious how you, [INAUDIBLE] see and predict the future of the party that clearly identifies Trump and Trump-like tactics as successful and as uniting for the party, as he did win the 2016 election, but also recognizing that they need to figure out another part of the strategy, either a change to the strategy or a continuation of said strategy?
THEDA SKOCPOL: I don't think they do. Remember, this has all been unfolding in Congress from 2010 on. There is good research that shows a switch to basically wanting to be on the TV and send out tweets rather than do anything that would involve actual legislating or coming up with budgets.
When your purpose is to blow up the status quo or to block things from happening, chaos can be your friend. And we shouldn't kid ourselves about the current speaker of the House. He's one of the most extreme ethnonationalist Christian fundamentalist Republicans, who has been working for a long time to use state power to impose a vision of America and of family and gender roles on all of us.
Is he successful right now? No, but he's listening to Trump. He's stopping things.
Immigration bargains have been stopped for a long time. In many ways, the crucial thing that I didn't talk about, because I talked about too much, happened in 2014, when the last attempt to have an immigration bargain was blocked. And remember Eric Cantor? He was one of those three young guns that was on the cover of that book, the future of the Koch Republican Party.
[SHOMP]
Some obscure college professor who appealed to right-wing Tea Partiers who were riled up about immigration, and then they dropped it. And ever since then, immigration is a rile-them-up issue, not an issue to be addressed. So I think there are important advantages to those who want to grind the whole thing to a halt or blow things up.
That's what's so remarkable about what the Democratic Party that everybody thinks isn't good enough has actually accomplished. It has accomplished some things, not enough, perhaps. But it has accomplished some things in this landscape.
And the bet that Joe Biden was kind of-- you know, old-fashioned, romantic, old-fashioned guy-- thinks is that if we can show Americans that we can do things, that will help. I hope so, but I don't know about that because a lot of people are kind of fed up.
And in many ways, Trumpist rhetoric feeds on itself at this point. A lot of those poll responses where people say things aren't going well in the country are people simply saying, I don't like this. I don't like this anger. I don't like this constant turmoil or destruction.
[INAUDIBLE].
SUZANNE METTLER: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Very stimulating [INAUDIBLE] and terrifying.
THEDA SKOCPOL: Yeah, it is.
AUDIENCE: And I like the image that you used early in your talk about the kind of layer cake of policy issues and policy cleavages that Trump built upon. And as you were talking, I asked myself, Is the correct response to that kind of a layer cake to fight Trumpism with opposing policy proposals or policy proposals in different areas, abortion being one of the most promising for the Democrats? But at the same time, when your talk was finished, I was reminded that Suzanne and her colleagues this weekend are holding a conference about regime cleavages.
Now, democracy is a regime. It's not the collection of policy issues. It's a way of governing. And I'm wondering if no matter how many policy responses the Democrats come up with, it is not going to address the fundamental issue that you raised, and that is the attack on democracy.
THEDA SKOCPOL: Well, I don't think it will. I don't think politics is a bunch of issue positions. I think it's, in many ways, who we are and who they are.
And I do think that you're seeing Democrats over the last four or five years trying to talk about the stake that we as a country have in the different kind of politics and in democracy. I just think it's got to be made a lot more concrete. I mean, I'll tell you what I say at my diner at 6 o'clock in the morning to a non-academic audience.
I say, How's it going to feel when the economy goes bad and you can't throw the bums out? Just, you know, it's not a policy proposal I'm talking about. It's just What does democracy mean? Because I think a lot of people in America think, oh, that's a bunch of academic procedure talk. So it has to be made concrete.
I do think the immigration thing, for all that we've been trained, many of us, to think that that's a big winner for the right, I don't think it really is. And a lot of the field work that I did, I-- in Trump towns, I found conservative people divided among themselves about immigration. For one thing, immigrants are really important to the economy. And in many cases, they're part of people's schools and churches.
And we know. We've known now for-- ever since the 1930s, ever since opinion polling started in America, that the more abstract the issue, the more it favors right-wing positions. The more concrete it is, the more it favors commonsense liberalism.
So the way the immigration thing should be discussed is not running out there and saying, Donald Trump frustrated our effort to get a big bill through Congress. Nobody else would send the bill anyway. It's saying-- it's going to be saying to people, think of the people you know who are immigrants here. And what's it going to be like if their families are disrupted?
They are pushed out of a job. The restaurant closes. Your kid's soccer team is suddenly gutted, which it will be in Lewiston, Maine, I can tell you right now.
[CHUCKLING]
And just make it concrete. And I think if you do that, and a lot of people with medium-level institutional leaders, people in schools, people in churches, people in-- just talk that way. Now, you're up against the constant scary abstractions that are out there night after night after night in right-wing media. And I didn't talk about that. But that's a major ingredient in all this, constant scare talk and often running the same tape over and over again of somebody going crazy in Portland, Oregon. Yeah, you've had your hand up a bunch of times.
AUDIENCE: My name is Patricia Fernandez Castro. And I-- for eight years, I was the president of the county Latino association. I've been working on things to do with migrants and their work and life conditions in this county. They are the mainstay of the economy around us, outside of the town and the city of Ithaca. Most of our farmers depend on--
THEDA SKOCPOL: Of course, they do.
AUDIENCE: --undocumented migrants, and to a lesser extent, documented migrants. I'm very concerned about multiple things. One of them is that even-- and I'm a migrant myself. So I've experienced interactions with non-- with Americans that are not migrants, both in and around the city and here on campus because I work here on campus.
My husband was a very well-known faculty person. So I've had a chance to interact with trustees and the like as much as I do interact with farmers. And I've noticed a lot of-- I've been surprised many times to talk and realize that even well-educated people who think they are very liberal have swallowed a lot of the information about a lot of these stereotypes about immigrants and the damage they do to the country and the fact that they're undocumented-- that they have not followed the rules, that they should-- that there is a path for them, when there is none, really. It has been all designed to keep them undocumented.
I have also spoken with a lot of farmers whose livelihood depends on their work, but will turn around and vote for someone like Donald Trump and are anti-immigrant in every single aspect of their lives except when it comes to abusing the person who works for them. I have heard people in very well-located positions in this university think and say when they forget-- because I don't have that much of an accent and I'm not dark skinned. And I've heard them say what they really think about immigrants and about people from my country, which is Mexico. And I'm-- in addition, so this is very much--
THEDA SKOCPOL: What's your point? Because what you're saying is true. But it's not most Americans who think that way.
AUDIENCE: That's almost not my experience.
THEDA SKOCPOL: Well, it may not be your experience, but in the big picture [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: But let me just add a couple of things that I'm worried about. So you have--
SUZANNE METTLER: So let's go right to a question, though, because we're actually at time. And we're going to a--
AUDIENCE: Just two seconds.
SUZANNE METTLER: --reception.
AUDIENCE: I'm thinking of Congresswoman [INAUDIBLE] working to undermine Joe Biden's candidacy. And I'm thinking of global warming, which will bring increased waves of immigration. So regardless of whether Trump wins or not this time, this is a problem that is going to stay with the country for a long time because we will see increased waves of immigration.
THEDA SKOCPOL: Of course, it will. And it has been an issue for a long time. The best research shows that efforts to fortify the Southern border have backfired because people get here.
There isn't a will right now to work out the solutions that could be worked out. And I-- all I can say is even though it is not a majority position of Americans to hate immigrants or to believe that they are not a positive contributors to this country, if Trump wins, he will unleash violence against immigrants and communities that try to protect them. He's made that very clear.
And so that's the immediate threat. And it is a somewhat new threat. It's not through-- new in the whole sweep of American history, but it's certainly new right now. And so that's what I've been talking about.
I do think that the Southern border is a challenge. Historically, it wasn't really regulated much at all. I mean, people came and went. A lot of people sent money back home or went back home for Christmas and Easter and grandma's funeral. And the research shows that when that stopped being possible, families moved throughout the heartlands of the United states, creating the kinds of opportunities that I have described for ethnonationalist-pedaling politicians.
But at the same time, in my research and conservative counties, which I visited eight of them in the years after Trump was first elected, I found profound ambivalence among conservative people. For example, one of the Wisconsin counties I visited, a man said this to me. He said, when they first came here 20 years ago-- he was talking about people from Mexico-- they vote-- they spoke so many different languages-- he was referring to the kind of mountain languages-- not just Spanish, that our high school Spanish teacher could not understand what they were saying.
They were young men. They were here to work in these God-awful meatpacking plants, of which there was one in the county. And every Friday night, they would get drunk and loud. At that time, I felt, send them all back.
Now, it's 20 years later. He said, they're-- the ones that are here now are family people. They've settled in. Their kids are in the schools. They're part of my church.
I don't like it that Trump is sending in the IRS agents and not even notifying the local police chief, who complained to me. He said, I have more trouble with the locals than I do with the immigrants. And they don't even tell me when they're coming in to grab somebody's cousin or uncle.
And as you know, families are mixed. So this man was very worried that his family's 100-cow dairy farm was going to collapse if-- I can't remember the name of the young man who was in charge. But he says, if he can't come to work, his cousin comes. The entire family is part of our operation. If they get up and go because one of their members might be rounded up and sent back, and not be able to return to the United States-- those are the current rules-- our farm will collapse.
Now, will he vote against Republicans? I don't know, and I didn't ask him that. I don't ask things like that in interviews. I'm there to listen.
But I heard all kinds of ambivalences that effective and local Democrats and local immigrant-supporting groups can talk with their neighbors about. And that's the kind of politics that works. Pronouncements from Washington don't work. But local people talking to local people, that can work.
SUZANNE METTLER: That's a perfect note to finish on.
[APPLAUSE]
Theda Skocpol, A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, presents the public keynote talk, “Rising Threats to U.S. Democracy-Roots and Responses ,” on Tuesday, April 9, at 4pm, at Lewis Auditorium, Golden Smith Hall. This event is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is cosponsored by the Dept. of Government.
Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University where she previously served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2005-2007) and Director of the Center for American Political Studies (2000-2006). She is considered to be one of the most prolific, widely respected, and highly influential scholars in social sciences today by making key contributions to the study of comparative American politics particularly in respect to health care, civic engagement and inequality. Her scholarship in sociology has been historically informed and very influential in studies of the history of states, social welfare, and gender. She is also currently Director of the Scholars Strategy Network, which she co-founded in 2009.
Skocpol was elected in 2015 to the A.D. White Professor-at-Large program, which was established in 1965 to bring the world’s greatest scientists, artists and scholars to Cornell to advance the intellectual and creative life of the campus and community.
