It’s not a coincidence that the decades-long right-wing campaign against abortion rights was led by forces deeply hostile to democracy and civil rights. Around the world, women’s rights are often among the first things authoritarians target, usually cloaked in the mantle of traditional family values and religious piety. We’ve seen this in Russia, Hungary, Iran, Afghanistan, and many other countries. These attacks are like the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.
In the United States, the Republican Party was not always opposed to abortion. When I was growing up, in the pre-Roe era, abortion wasn’t really a polarizing political issue, and many Republicans cared more about protecting individual freedom than imposing a particular cultural agenda. That was true of my dad, a World War II veteran and anti-communist Republican. It was also true of Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative’s conservative.
Since I followed my dad’s politics in those days, I was an enthusiastic “Goldwater Girl” in the presidential election of 1964, even wearing a straw cowboy hat with the slogan AUH2O (the periodic table symbols for “gold” and “water”). In retrospect, Goldwater was wrong about many things. But he was right to support abortion rights. And he wasn’t alone. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent Republican governors like Spiro Agnew, Nelson Rockefeller, and even Ronald Reagan signed bills legalizing abortion in their states. Surprising, isn’t it? But abortion wasn’t a red or blue issue. In fact, in 1972, the year before Roe was decided, a Gallup poll asked voters if they believed abortion should be a matter left to a woman and her doctor—not the government. Two-thirds of Republicans said yes. (Even more surprising is that the Southern Baptist Convention supported “legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion” in certain cases. The convention reaffirmed that position post-Roe in 1974 and again in 1976.)
In that same era, however, several key factors came together to turn the Republican Party against both abortion and democracy itself. This may feel older than the dinosaurs, but it’s worth understanding because it helps explain the threats we face today. Let’s look briefly at three big, mutually reinforcing drivers: money, race, and religion.
First, follow the money. The Republican Party has always been the party of Big Business and a vehicle for the super rich to advance their economic agenda. Everything else is secondary. And by the early 1970s, right-wing business leaders were losing patience with democracy. They hated paying taxes to fund programs they opposed and even some they didn’t. They also hated new laws to protect consumers and the environment and restrict abuses by corporations. In 1971, Lewis Powell, whom Richard Nixon was about to appoint to the Supreme Court, wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce laying out a strategy for corporate interests to take control of American politics “aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment.” That’s exactly what happened. Corporate political spending skyrocketed. And a small number of ultra-wealthy right-wing families—including the Kochs, Scaifes, Olins, and Coorses—contributed astronomical sums of money to help create a web of organizations and initiatives to reshape the political landscape at every level. The Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and many others emerged from this effort. Later, Rupert Murdoch and former Nixon advisor Roger Ailes created Fox News to give the Far Right a powerful national media platform.
Undermining democracy was at the heart of this decades-long project. These forces invested heavily to restrict voting rights, remove restrictions on corporate money in politics, and prevent the moderate majority of Americans from stopping their extreme agenda. Paul Weyrich, a key leader of these interlocking right-wing groups, put it bluntly in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote…. Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Another important element of their strategy was to use divisive social issues to mobilize blue-collar white voters who might otherwise not have supported right-wing economic ideas—even persuading them to vote against their own economic interests.
That brings us to race. I won’t belabor this, but it’s important. After Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he accurately predicted that white working-class Americans, especially in the South, would abandon the Democratic Party and move to the Republicans. Goldwater and other conservative leaders made a cynical decision to welcome racists into their party. He voted against the Civil Rights Act and infamously advised Republicans to “go hunting where the ducks are,” meaning appeal to supporters of segregation looking for a new political home. Over the decades that followed, Republicans pursued what became known as the “southern strategy” but was really an aggressive appeal to white backlash voters all across the country. They used coded racial appeals on issues such as school busing, crime, and welfare. When in office, they gutted civil rights enforcement and anti-poverty programs that disproportionately aided people of color. They also campaigned relentlessly to make it harder for Black people to vote.
All this was fundamentally at odds with the principles of democracy. When the Republican Party became the party hostile to civil rights, it was inevitable that it would become more anti-democratic. You can’t be both the party of freedom and the party of repression. (In 2005, Ken Mehlman, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who would later publicly come out as gay, formally apologized for the southern strategy. But the party only accelerated efforts to restrict voting rights targeting people of color.)
Two things can be true: Deep-pocketed factions stoked backlash to the achievements of the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements to advance their own ideological and economic interests, and there was a genuine rise in reactionary fervor among social conservatives who had previously been less engaged in politics, especially evangelical Christians.
Here’s where religion—and abortion—enter the story. The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe inflamed Christian conservatives who opposed abortion on religious grounds and gave opportunistic right-wing leaders a chance to channel that anger into a broader movement that would reshape politics and end up consuming the conservative movement and the Republican Party. At the vanguard of this backlash were people who believed that Christians should take control of American government, business, and culture: activists like Anita Bryant, who launched a nationwide crusade against gay rights; anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, who helped derail the Equal Rights Amendment; and Moral Majority co-founder Jerry Falwell, who declared war on homosexuality, abortion, and direct democracy (the name was a phrase coined by the same Paul Weyrich who said, “I don’t want everybody to vote”).
Today, extremists who believe God has called certain Christians to exercise dominion over every aspect of American life are often called “Christian nationalists.” They believe that there should be no separation between church and state and that their white supremacist version of Christianity should trump the Constitution. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana who displays a Christian nationalist flag outside his office on Capitol Hill (the same flag carried by many insurrectionists on January 6 and flown by Justice Samuel Alito’s wife at the couples’ New Jersey vacation home), said the separation of church and state is a “misnomer.” That’s a dangerous claim that is hostile to pluralism, liberty, and democracy.
Christian nationalists are particularly hostile to women’s rights and empowerment, some even vocally envisioning an America where women don’t vote and are subservient to their husbands, stay home to rear children instead of pursuing an education or career, and have their most personal medical decisions dictated by biblical edicts. For them, the dystopian Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t a cautionary tale; it’s an aspiration.
They’re not even trying to hide it: North Carolina’s Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, said at an event hosted by the Republican Women of Pitt County that he wants “to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.” (Interesting electoral strategy, Mark.) While advocating for an anti-abortion bill in Oklahoma, Republican state legislator Justin Humphrey said pregnant women’s bodies aren’t their own because they are “hosts.” Steve Pearce, a former congressman and current chairman of New Mexico’s Republican Party, published a book in 2014 in which he declared that a “wife is to voluntarily submit” to her husband. These ideas all fit together. In the Christian nationalist worldview, women should know their place, and it’s not to have a career or a say in the direction of the country; it’s to serve men and procreate. That’s it.
Now, I want to be clear that I’m not saying that the majority of churchgoing, God-fearing Christian Americans are Christian nationalists, racists, or authoritarians. As a Christian, I believe strongly that Christian faith and teaching are not themselves at odds with democracy. Quite the opposite. Much of our most significant progress in American history has been inspired by Christian advocacy and led by big-hearted, open-minded people of faith, including the abolition of slavery, civil rights, and women’s suffrage. My own Methodist faith influences my belief in equal rights for all and doing all the good we can for all the people we can.
But we should not be shy in saying that Christian nationalism is not what I was taught in Sunday school, not what my reading of the Bible teaches me, and not what I believe Jesus preached in his short time on earth. Instead, this selective, partisan version of Christianity is a naked power grab using religion to impose political control. Just look at how Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow was smeared by Republican opponents as a “groomer” for supporting LGBTQ+ rights. I loved her impassioned speech at the state capitol when she said her mother taught her faith is “about being part of a community, about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we can to be of service to others—especially people who are marginalized, targeted, and who had less, often unfairly.”
People with religious convictions and deeply held moral beliefs have every right to decide for themselves whom to marry, whether to seek abortion care, or if they want to send their kids to a secular public school or a private religious one. But it is anti-democratic and anti-freedom to impose your religious beliefs on everyone else, especially at the expense of other people’s rights and freedoms.
As Christian nationalists gained power within the conservative movement, old-school conservatives like Goldwater were appalled by what they had helped unleash. “To see the party that fought Communism and big government now fighting the gays, well, that’s just plain dumb,” he said near the end of his life. He also said abortion was “a decision that’s up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right.”
Ronald Reagan managed to hold together both strands of conservatism, despite the contradictions, claiming big government was at the root of our nation’s problems while empowering Christian nationalists who wanted to use the government to impose their authoritarian cultural agenda. Trump—no one’s idea of a devout Christian—ended up reconciling this tension by abandoning the GOP’s traditional skepticism of state power and fully embracing Christian nationalism as a means to consolidate his own power. A growing number of Trump’s Christian followers believe he was appointed by God to rule America and frame the 2024 election as a battle over our spiritual destiny.
We should take seriously and literally that Trump is amplifying this dangerous rhetoric, that his supporters want to twist the federal government to their purposes if he’s reelected, and that a Supreme Court dominated by extremists who don’t represent the majority of Americans may continue their crusade by overturning same-sex marriage, IVF, and even the right to contraception.
To see how all these pieces fit together, pay attention to people like Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer and activist who likes to call herself the “consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy.” Mitchell has worked closely with everyone from the National Rifle Association to Ginni Thomas, the right-wing activist and wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. Mitchell is an outspoken critic of the women’s movement and abortion rights, and she has helped lead the American Legislative Exchange Council, co-founded by Paul Weyrich and funded by the Kochs and other corporate backers, which teaches state legislators how to draft new abortion bans and other laws to restrict freedom and deregulate corporations. She is an architect of the Right’s long assault on voting rights, pushing restrictions that disproportionately impact people of color, young people, and poor people all over the country. She was also deeply involved in Trump’s effort to overturn Biden’s free and fair victory in the 2020 election. She was an active participant in the phone call after the election in which Trump tried to bully the Georgia secretary of state into “finding” enough votes to reverse the outcome. “All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” Trump said.
Mitchell’s line about “the vast right-wing conspiracy” is meant as a joke, but it’s not a funny one. That phrase is something I said back in the late 1990s when I was trying to describe the web of dark-money-funded political groups that was not yet widely understood or recognized as a threat. I was mocked for being hyperbolic, even hysterical. But events have shown my words to be accurate. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy that seeks to advance an extreme agenda at the expense of everyone else. They succeeded in overturning Roe and stripping away abortion rights from American women. Democracy itself is in their crosshairs. This is no laughing matter. It’s deadly serious.
There’s a passage in Elaine Weiss’s book The Woman’s Hour about the struggle for women’s suffrage where she writes, “Everything the Cause had accomplished—every state won, every piece of legislation, every change of heart and shift in policy—was once considered utterly impossible. Until it wasn’t.”
That’s how I feel about the struggle ahead of us. Our rights are vitally important, but they are nothing without the power to claim them and defend them. The other side understands power. They’re obsessed with it. We need to be equally clear and determined about what’s at stake and how to effectively build and wield power.
History tells us that a well-funded, highly motivated minority (in this case, Christian nationalists) can prove more politically potent than a complacent majority. That’s why we must vote and win in overwhelming numbers, just like Kansans did. It seemed impossible at the time. But what started as five people strategizing in the public library in Lawrence to protect abortion access turned into a multimillion-dollar campaign and coalition of longtime activists, first-time voters, Christians and atheists, and people across the political spectrum protecting the constitutional rights of Kansans. They knocked on doors, wrote postcards to get out the vote, fundraised, and phonebanked. They talked to neighbors, parishioners, coworkers, family members, and friends, urging one another to vote for freedom. One of those changemakers was Colleen Boeding, a seventy-three-year-old Catholic woman who volunteered for the Democratic Party for the first time in her life. She even planted a VOTE NO sign in her yard—her first public stance on abortion rights. “For a lot of us,” she said, “it was more than abortion. It was them wanting to rule our bodies and tell us what to do.”
A year later, two million Ohioans from across parties and geography went to the polls for many of the same reasons. “This is about so much more than abortion,” said Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine and Blue, a group of suburban women mobilizing voters. “It’s about more than reproductive rights. This, too, is about: ‘Will the majority be able to be heard?’ ”
Republicans, no doubt, will keep trying to silence us. So here’s what we do: We defeat Trump and elect more women who believe in the Constitution. Is it any surprise that states with the most restrictive abortions laws also have the least women in statewide and legislative office? We must also call on Congress to codify the protections of Roe into federal law, defend medication abortion, and strengthen access to IVF and contraception—all policies the Biden-Harris administration supports—and add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution so women’s rights are once and for all enshrined. And while we mobilize to remove barriers to abortions nationwide, we must work to ensure that patients who self-manage abortions or obtain abortions in states where it’s illegal are not criminally prosecuted. And finally, we must stay engaged and informed. It can sometimes feel overwhelming, but it’s more important than ever that we stay focused on anti-democratic efforts in our back yards and across the country so we can organize quickly to thwart them.
It’s hard to have hope in a moment like this. But we have come through dark times before. When I was growing up, American women couldn’t open bank accounts in their own name or take legal action against sexual harassment, let alone legally access birth control or abortion. My mother was born before American women could vote. They were completely powerless to determine the laws that impacted them. All that changed because brave and determined Americans recognized that women’s rights, opportunities, and participation in our economy and society are crucial to our democracy, and they fought hard to make the dream of equality a reality.
Reproductive freedom has never been about reproduction alone. It’s about power. Power over women’s bodies, yes, but also over our dreams, careers, and how expansive and fulfilling our lives are. So if you find yourself tired, or discouraged, or filled with anger, remember: We’re not just fighting against these attacks on our rights. We are fighting for a future where everyone has access to the care they need, to free and fair elections, and to the power and freedom they deserve to determine their futures. That’s a future worth fighting for.
TEACHING CRISIS
“This isn’t a Taylor Swift concert.” I’m not often compared with the nearly six-foot-tall blond pop star, but twenty minutes into my first class at Columbia University, my teaching partner, Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, stopped our lecture because students were snapping photos and recording videos like we were performing “Cruel Summer.” She reminded them that they were there to learn and gave everyone a five-minute grace period to take all the photos they wanted, then put their phones away.
To be fair, I was as excited as the students. It was my first time back in the classroom since I joined the University of Arkansas School of Law faculty in the 1970s. For many of us, no matter how far we get from our own school days, autumn is blank notebooks and sharp pencils. The promise of a new start. That was true for me in September 2023 as I returned to teaching for the first time in fifty years. And just like millions of students around the country, I was meeting new people, making friends who would shape my perspective, and learning new things.
Our classroom was an auditorium, the largest in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), on West 118th Street in Manhattan. At the front was a stage with two white armchairs in the center, a lectern on either side, and a blue backdrop. To the side was a big screen. As Keren and I walked on-stage that first day, students applauded. Every seat was filled. Keren and I were both a little giddy; the class we’d been envisioning for months was finally a reality. The energy in the room was electric.
My journey back to teaching started in 2017, when Lee Bollinger, then president of Columbia University, invited me to an event at his house, a stately brick building across from campus. That night it was filled with Columbia professors and all kinds of interesting New Yorkers. We discussed a range of issues affecting the university and whether I would be interested in some kind of affiliation. Of course, I knew a little bit about teaching at Columbia, because Chelsea, who has her PhD in international relations with a focus on global public health from Oxford and co-authored a textbook in the field, taught for twelve years at the Mailman School of Public Health. I admired her dedication, academic rigor, and concern for her students who introduced themselves to me all over the world to tell me Chelsea had been their professor.
My discussion with Lee continued on and off for the next few years, and then in the fall of 2022, he introduced me to a woman with dark hair and impeccable style. “I thought you two should meet,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. It was Keren Yarhi-Milo, dean of SIPA and a globally recognized scholar on the psychology of leaders facing crises. I had read one of her books and was glad to have the chance to talk to her about her research and insights. What I couldn’t anticipate was how fast we would click.
Holed up in Lee’s library, we talked about everything from Kim Jong Un to the protest movements of the Arab Spring. Keren’s career was in academia and mine in public service, but we found that we shared similar experiences. We’d both been the only woman in many rooms. We were both frustrated by conversations about peace and security, international economics, or climate change that excluded women. And yes, we bonded over Taylor Swift, but only Keren is a true Swiftie.
We shared a desire to see greater connections between academia and the real-world policymaking process. Over my years in government, whether debating legislation in the Senate or steering diplomacy as secretary of state, I’d seen that the latest research and ideas from academics rarely get the attention they deserve. Some politicians stigmatize anything that comes from the “ivory tower” and reject expertise altogether. Others just don’t have the bandwidth to seek out or absorb dense academic writing. It doesn’t help that many scholars do not work at the speed required by policymakers facing fast-moving crises. And too often, their research is hard to translate for lay readers—even for experienced practitioners. Neither politicians nor professors have all the answers to the increasingly complex challenges we face as a country and an international community, but we’d be better off with more dialogue in both directions.
As Keren and I talked, the seeds of a plan were sown. I would join SIPA as a professor of practice in January 2023. We would teach together and launch a new Institute of Global Politics. It would be a place where we could convene some of the smartest people in academia and politics to talk about shared challenges and train the next generation of leaders.
Keren and I recruited people I knew like former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to participate. We organized events and public discussions around the war in Ukraine, the crisis in the Middle East, human rights, artificial intelligence, and more. And, most exciting of all, we designed a course to co-teach.
Keren’s academic specialty is crisis decision-making, and I’d logged many hours inside the White House Situation Room managing crises and watching leaders make the hardest decisions imaginable. There was so much to talk about. We decided to call the class Inside the Situation Room. In the context of Keren’s studies, crises are defined largely as situations where leaders have to decide whether to take military action, overt or covert. Based on my experience, I thought we could define “crisis” more broadly for the purposes of the class, to include issues like the climate crisis and crackdowns on human rights. So that was the first merging of our academic and practical experiences as we began to hammer out the approach we would take. We started lesson planning in earnest in the spring of 2023, and by early summer we had an outline for all thirteen class sessions.
