Of the three decisions the US supreme court handed down this week, the gay wedding cake case and travel ban cases were the latest battles in the culture wars that Republicans long have waged. The Janus decision declaring that public sector employees cannot be required to pay fees to the unions that represent them went beyond culture to the very meaning of the American government and how Republicans define it.

Since the 1930s, when then president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to break the hold of moneyed men on the government and broker “a new deal for the American people”, a cabal of reactionaries resolved to destroy the new government Democrats created. Roosevelt’s New Deal regulated business, protected social welfare and promoted national infrastructure on the principle that the role of government was not simply to protect the property of the wealthy, but rather was to promote equality of opportunity for all. The popularity of both Roosevelt and his agenda showed that Americans recognized that the government must rein in the runaway capitalism that had brought the nation to its knees.

But not everyone was on board. A group of reactionary Republicans sided not with the cosmopolitan eastern Republicans who came around to the New Deal but with Ohio senator Robert Taft, a proud representative of small-town, traditional America who maintained that the New Deal undermined liberty and snaked socialism into the nation. They hated government rules and laws that protected their workers, and the need for new taxes to pay for bureaucrats and welfare programs. Above all, they rejected the idea that workers should have a say equal to theirs in what the government did. They loathed the Wagner Act, which empowered workers to unionize and bargain collectively.

The “completely one-sided” Wagner Act, they complained, enabled labor leaders to challenge business leaders. In 1947, when Republicans regained control of Congress, their first step in their quest to roll back the New Deal was to weaken the political power of unions. The Taft-Hartley Act outlawed closed union shops and weakened union political activism. It passed over then president Harry Truman’s veto.

Taft-Hartley seemed destined to be the last gasp of reaction in the face of the overwhelming popularity of the newly active government. Republicans rejected Taft as their standard-bearer in 1952, turning instead to Dwight Eisenhower, who launched the “Middle Way”, his version of the New Deal. The Middle Way included the largest public works project in American history: the Interstate Highway system, which updated American roads for a driving generation with leisure time on their hands, but expanded the federal government’s purview.



But Eisenhower’s policies extended some opportunities to people of color, and race gave the Taft Republicans a wedge to begin razing the activist state. Equality of opportunity for African Americans could only be achieved through the use of state power, and that would cost tax dollars. Equal rights, Taft Republicans insisted, simply redistributed wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving people of color.

Now, ​Donald Trump is achieving their dream. But this scheme has created a crisis in American democracy

Using this formula, the reactionaries split the liberal consensus and, in 1980, put Ronald Reagan into the White House. True to their ideology, Reagan announced in his inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. His administration began destroying the New Deal state and slashing taxes. The process accelerated when the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, purged Eisenhower Republicans – people he called “Rinos” (Republicans in Name Only) – and replaced legislative aides with lobbyists.

And now, Donald Trump is achieving their dream. But this scheme has created a crisis in American democracy. New Deal-era programs are as popular now as they were in the 1950s, and voters have come to recognize that Republican policies have hurt them. After the American people did not condemn the Democratic president Bill Clinton as Republicans expected, the Republican party has maintained control by gaming the system. Since 2000, Republican policies have suppressed Democratic voting; since 2010, Republican gerrymandering has given the Republicans a heavy systematic advantage in Congress; and the last two Republican presidents have won the White House while losing the popular vote to their opponents.

Movement conservatives have always known their program appealed to only a minority of Americans, and from the start they have worked to pack the courts with allies. Reagan named more than 375 federal judges, and while Trump has let vacancies eat holes throughout the government, he has concentrated on filling judicial vacancies. That strategy is now paying off. While the Janus ruling strikes at the power of public unions, the other, limited decisions reinforce the cultural parameters of the 1920s: traditional religion and the president’s power to determine immigration, a power rooted in a law from 1924. FDR promised “to restore America to its own people”, and the coffin seems to have closed on that principle.

But perhaps not. Reactionaries tried this strategy before, in the 1890s. When congressmen working with industrialists dismantled that era’s popular government, they, too, could retain power only by gaming the system, suppressing votes and packing the courts. By 1900, it seemed they had won, thanks to a pro-business supreme court that strengthened the power of business owners, crippled labor unions, and declared the income tax unconstitutional. But all of those decisions – Plessy v Ferguson, Lochner v New York, in re Debs and Pollock v Farmers Loan – were overturned in a progressive backlash to their extremes, and now lie ignominiously in the ash heap of history.