The standard explanation for Trump’s 2016 victory is that it was the culmination of a long-term right-wing capture of the Republican Party. However, in 2016, the most consistently right-wing candidate was Ted Cruz. Trump was unusual in that he was the candidate of no faction. Rather, Trump’s low-cost populist strategy, in which he relied on mass rallies and social media, was effective because the factions who backed his opponents could not coalesce to keep him out. Trump won the GOP primary with an historically low share of the vote. This chapter also shows that Trump was not the first to successfully pursue such a strategy. In the wake of the reforms of the early 1970s, a little-known Jimmy Carter was similarly able to capture the Democratic nomination in 1976 on the basis of a low-cost direct-communication strategy. The Democratic Party adapted then to keep future populists out. Whether the Republican Party will do so after Trump remains unclear.

Chapter 13 analyses how profound socio-demographic changes in America have contributed to a shift from the faith-driven culture wars of the twentieth century to a more secular identity politics between liberal cosmopolitans and populist communitarians in the twenty-first century. This trend appears closely linked to the rapid decline of American Christianity, which along with globalisation, individualisation and rapid ethnic change has led to an identity crisis in parts of the white working class. Given the relative unresponsiveness of the traditional party system to this development, Donald Trump succeeded in capitalising on this crisis of identity through a ‘hostile takeover’ of the GOP by the alt-right, and a gradual ‘Europeanisation’ of the American right, which shifted from a faith-based social conservativism to a more identitarian and populist white identity politics.

Given the Trump administration’s ambiguous approach to religion discussed in the previous chapter, Chapter 15 explores how American Christians have reacted to it. It finds that although there initially appeared to be a certain level of religious immunity among practicing Christians against Trumpism, this religious ‘vaccination effect’ against national populism has since diminished and even reversed to the extent that, unlike in Europe, American Christians have become one of the populist right’s most loyal constituencies. American Christians’ ‘conversion’ to Trump appears, however, to be less the result of a shift in their attitudes than of supply-side factors. Specifically, a perceived lack of political alternatives as well as the inability and unwillingness of Christian leaders to publicly speak out against Trumpism seem to have contributed to this development.

Chapter 2 presents the federal response to violence against women. We begin the chapter with a brief overview of the history of domestic violence in the United States. We then analyze the response of Congress to the domestic violence epidemic as compared to the Supreme Court’s response. This detailed presentation reveals the gaps that federal laws havr created by leaving states the option to enforce them and relegating nearly all of the enforcement of domestic violence law to local authorities. This chapter underscores the role and limi, of federal policy in remedying the inequities among women in their personal protection from domestic violence. The lack of a cohesive federal response contributes to all four levels of gender inequality in domestic violence policy.

Using quantitative data, we construct an explanation of the adoption of policies that address the intersection of firearms and domestic violence. Removing guns from perpetrators of domestic violence, including domestic violence among unmarried couples, decreases intimate partner deaths. Beyond the very positive effects that laws on DV gun ownership by domestic violence perpetrators can have to make women safer, the sponsorship and passage of these laws over the last thirty years have increased. Using our original dataset of domestic violence firearm law (DVFL) enactments, we analyze the circumstances under which states adopt these laws. We find evidence that state and federal factors that influence policy adoption employ a set of political and demographic indicators as independent variables, particularly, the number of gun-related homicides, legislative partisan control, citizen ideology, federal legislation, and election years influence the likelihood of DVFL enactments. We also find support for the effects of vertical policy diffusion but not for horizontal policy diffusion across states. We found no effects associated with support for gun ownership or the percent of women state legislators.

The central claim of this chapter is that racial politics, stemming from the racial realignment between the Democratic and Republican Parties that began much earlier than many scholars appreciate, has played a critically important and yet undernoticed role in the breakdown of constitutional norms in recent decades. An increasing number of American legal scholars are writing about the importance of constitutional norms, also sometimes called constitutional conventions. Such norms are not legal in status, but they impose obligations of compliance on government officials that can be as great as legal obligations – they guide and constrain how officials “exercise political discretion.” Although constitutional norms are not required by the letter of the US Constitution, they are appropriately denominated “constitutional” because they help vindicate the spirit – or the purposes – of the Constitution. To violate a constitutional norm without sufficient public-regarding justification is not unconstitutional, but it “is anticonstitutional.” Constitutional norms were placed under great pressure during the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Fierce partisan conflict in the United States is not new. Throughout American history, there have been polarizing struggles over fundamental questions relating to the meaning of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the relationship between the two. These struggles over ideals have become all encompassing when joined to battles over what it means to be an American – conflicts that have become more regular and dangerous with the rise of the administrative state. The idea of a “State” cuts more deeply than suggested by Max Weber’s definition of “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Beyond the powers of government, the State represents a centralizing ambition (at least for progressive reformers) to cultivate, or impose, a vision of citizenship. In Randolph Bourne’s words, the State is a “concept of power” that comes alive in defense of or in conflict with an ideal of how such foundational values of Americanism as “free and enlightened” are to be interpreted and enforced. The ideal is symbolized not by the Declaration and the Constitution but rather in rallying emblems such as the flag and Uncle Sam.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is good at using democracy to advance its agenda. Over the course of many decades, the United States’ foremost advocate of gun rights has built substantial political power by cultivating a politically unified and engaged base of grassroots supporters. The political intensity of US gun owners – and the NRA’s ability to mobilize them into action – has enabled the organization to consistently defeat proposed gun regulations and is a key reason that it has become a central pillar of the contemporary Republican Party.

Chapter 2 provides a brief history of the Republican Party – which explains in part how it became the Party of Trump. It describes the Republican demographic, how it differs from the Democratic demographic, and how it was possible for Trump essentially to take over what only recently was an establishment conglomerate. One better known for its institutionalist orientation than its outrageous attacks on political norms – norms that in most cases go back to the beginning of the Republic. The chapter further explores the links between the Republican Party and the house that Roger Ailes built, that is, Fox News. As the book makes clear, the importance of Party media, and for that matter Party Money, to the Trump phenomenon is impossible to overestimate. Above all the chapter begins to explore the party’s remarkable fealty to a man who demanded it with every fiber of his being, but who at an earlier moment in Republican Party history would have been dismissed with the flick of a wrist.

To Frederick Douglass, the Civil War was a holy fight for freedom fought through speeches and writings on three main subjects. First, slavery was sin and abolition was the will of God. Second, abolition would require violence. Third, African Americans merited full inclusion within the United States. Douglass’s analyses are marked by both moral clarity and capacity for contradiction, which allowed him to convey equal and opposite truths about a Civil War as revolutionary as it was incomplete. Both the moral clarity and the ability to encompass opposites grew directly from Douglass’s understanding of God – merciful and wrathful – at work in the war. While Douglass’s embrace of violence and conviction of God’s will might give us pause, Douglass teaches that things can be opposite and true – a war can both transform a nation and fall short – at the same time.

Shows that secularism is a dividing line between the parties, thus suggesting that the United States is moving toward a confessional party system, in which religiosity–secularity is a dividing line between the parties. The religious–secular divide between Republicans and Democrats is illustrated through the use of data from party convention delegates, as well as from the mass public.

Shows that although Secularists are concentrated in Democratic ranks, secularism and nonreligiosity both matter within the GOP as well. Among Republicans, there is a small but vocal group of Secularist libertarians. Like the Secularists on the political left, they have sharply defined ideological views. Even larger is the number of Non-Religionists who found favor with Donald Trump – less consistently ideological, perhaps, but no less passionate.

In 1976, the Iowa caucuses launched a Georgia governor and peanut farmer into the White House. In 2008, Barack Obama ran up delegate scores across the country during the Democratic nomination contest in caucus states characterized by high-intensity voting. The presidential caucuses have long been a staple of American democracy. In 2020, however, only three states—Iowa, Nevada, and Wyoming—hosted a presidential caucus. Overnight, the caucuses suddenly became obsolete. This chapter explains how and why this happened.

The major parties have repeatedly tinkered with the presidential nomination process over the past two hundred years. Since the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when rioting over an exclusionary nomination process led to a series of important reforms (primarily to the detriment of caucuses), the major parties have sought to balance ways to include ordinary individual voters in the nomination process while not necessarily excluding the party establishment.

Chapter 4 ties the themes of the first three chapters together and develops a theory of how the rights discussed in those chapters operate together to advance a particular form of active, participatory citizenship championed in the early Republic by the Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The chapter’s first key point is that the rights of the Democratic First Amendment are distinct but, to use the Supreme Court’s word, “cognate.” They operate together and share a common purpose of advancing democratic self-governance. In particular, these rights are generally most effective and most important when exercised in tandem, such as through speech and petitions advanced jointly by associations. Second, these rights together were meant to create a new form of democratic citizenship. In particular, during the great battles of the 1790s between the Federalist and Republican parties, especially over the Democratic Republican Societies, the Republicans came to appreciate why the principle of popular sovereignty that drove the American Revolution necessitated a wholly new and more active role for citizens vis-à-vis their elected officials than the more hierarchical and passive model championed by the Federalists, and how the First Amendment supported that model.

What role did the Republican Party play in the South before the mid-1960s? On the national side, Republican presidents and presidential candidates engaged in near continuous attempts at winning Southern states. In addition, a number of Republican presidents – including Hayes, Arthur, Harrison, Harding, Hoover, and Eisenhower – invested significantly (though, most often unsuccessfully) in rebuilding local party organizations in the South. Importantly, we show that every single Republican president between Grant and Nixon relied on some form of a “Southern strategy” aimed at winning (re-)nomination at the national convention and/or strengthening state party organizations in the South. This corrects a misconception in various historical accounts that Republican presidents effectively gave up on the South by the early twentieth century. At the state level, executive (federal) patronage, and the considerable profits that could be gained from controlling it, inspired frequent contestation over control of the local party organizations. That is, while many Republican state parties no longer functioned as regular political parties – often failing to even run candidates in state elections – control of the state party organizations continued to be valuable to local party elites. Initially, these contests largely involved different mixed-race groups surrounding (former) elected officials and federal office-holders. But over time, contests began to take on an increasingly racial hue, as Black-and-Tans (a faction of black and white Republicans) vied for control with Lily-Whites (a faction of white Republicans that sought to ban blacks from leadership positions in the party).