The business boom of the 1920s had increased worker productivity by about 43%, but wages did not rise. Those profits, along with tax cuts and stock market dividends, meant that wealth moved upward and in 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income.
In 1932, voters turned for Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised them a “New Deal”. As soon as Roosevelt was in office, Democrats began to pass laws protecting workers’ rights, providing government jobs, regulating business, and banking, and beginning to chip away at the racial segregation of the American South. They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety.
But while most Americans of both parties liked the new system that had helped the nation to recover from the Depression and to equip the Allies to win World War II, a group of businessmen with ties to new economies overseas insisted that the system had been corrupted by communism. They inundated newspapers, radio, and magazines with the message that the government must stay out of the economy to return the nation to the policies of the 1920s.
Their position got little traction until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. That decision enabled them to divide the American people by insisting that the popular new government simply redistributed tax dollars from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving minorities.
It fueled the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 but by 1986 administration officials recognized that tax cuts that were driving the deficit up despite dramatic cuts to social services. So, Reagan backed the creation of an organization that brought together big businessmen, evangelical Christians, and social conservatives behind his agenda.
By 1989, Ralph Reed turned evangelical Christians into a permanent political pressure group. The Christian Coalition rallied evangelicals behind the Republican Party, calling for the dismantling of the post–World War II government services and protections for civil rights—including abortion—they disliked.
As Republicans could reliably turn out religious voters over abortion, that evangelical base has become more and more important to the Republican Party. Now it has put one of its own Mike Johnson (R-LA) in the House Speaker’s chair, just two places from the presidency.
Since then, his past has been unearthed, showing interviews in which, he asserted that we do not live in a democracy but in a “Biblical republic.” He told a Fox News Channel interviewer that to discover his worldview, one simply had to “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
Johnson is staunchly against abortion rights and gay rights, including same-sex marriage, and says that immigration is “the true existential threat to the country.” In a 2016 sermon he warned that the 1960s and 1970s undermined “the foundations of religion and morality in the U.S.” and that attempts to address climate change, for example, are an attempt to destroy capitalism.
Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson and Pamela Chambers M.Ed., N.B.C.C.