We’ve been building to this moment for a long, long time. The moment when the political right in America literally tries to destroy the federal government.
One way to understand this moment is to understand that “slashing government” has been a rallying cry of the far right for decades. But until lately little happened, even when Republicans held the White House and Congress.
To cite just one example: Then House Speaker Newt Gingrich had a small bore run at eliminating the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in 1995, and he failed, even while creating a good deal of chaos in the process. Still the urge to “burn it all down” has continued, often featured in conservative rhetoric that specifically targets low income, elderly, minority and health care challenged Americans.
Yet, until Trump’s second term Republicans largely rejected the the idea of killing off much of the federal government. When they actually had the chance to make big cuts by enacting reduction in congressional spending bills they blinked after discovering that every program has a constiuency and ever line in the federal budget is there by virtue of a vote of Congress.
Still, many Republicans never grew tired of feeding the message to their voters that there was way too much government drowning in “waste, fraud and abuse.”
So now we have cut the Forest Service, lay off Social Security workers, cancel grants funding research on disease, stop support for the food banks that feed hungry Americans, deny FEMA assistance to states managing natural disasters, end funding for NOAA that provides storm warning information.
So much waste, fraud and abuse.
It is a lie, but a powerful lie. And an old one, too.
A search for an origin story of the modern Republican Party - and the party’s eventual embrace of Donald Trump and the politics of “burn it all down” - could rightly focus on a conservative young firebrand named Terry Dolan. Dolan was one of the founders, in 1975, of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). He became a power in the post-Nixon conservative movement at the tender age of 25.
I published a book in 2021 - Tuesday Night Massacre - about NCPAC’s aims and tactics, tactics that now constitute much of the playbook of the modern Republican Party.
NCPAC exploited the Supreme Court’s interpretation of post-Watergate campaign finance law that allowed “independent” expenditure committees to raise and spend unlimited money on federal campaigns as long as a committee did not coordinate its efforts with a party or a candidate. Dolan succeeded - barely - in skirting the legal lines around illegal coordination. Yet as I documented in my book on NCPAC’s efforts in several 1980 Senate races, the skirting that had more to do with the failure of the Federal Election Commission to enforce the law than any effort by Dolan to follow the law.
Earlier DOGE Bros
Another NCPAC founder was Roger Stone, Trump pal, convicted felon and self-proclaimed dirty trickster. Charles Black, who became a prominent D.C. lobbyist and later partnered with Paul Manafort, the one-time Trump campaign aide convicted of illegal foreign lobbying, was involved in the creation, as well.
In a way these guys were early versions of Elon Musk’s twenty-something DOGE Bros except that Dolan and his associates were hard core political operatives, not tee-shirt wearing coding geeks. They were determined to do nothing less than take over the Republican Party.
For the most part, with 2016 being the critical election, they succeeded.
Dolan was the front man of NCPAC, attractive, articulate and at times outrageously outspoken. Dolan wisecracked in soundbites. He was available to reporters. And seemed to love the limelight.
When asked about the potential danger of a group like his, Dolan said this in 1980:
“We could be a menace, yes. Ten independent expenditure groups, for example, could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics.”
Dolan understood, long before many others, that independent expenditure campaigns could attack a political target to the benefit of a favored conservative candidate and in doing so allow that candidate to stay above the nasty name calling.
“We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn’t have to do anything, A group like ours could lie through it’s teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.”
Independent expenditure campaigns have become so prevalent in our politics that it seems almost quaint to realize that they barely existed until Dolan and a few like-minded New Right conservatives shaped them into a fundamental tactic of almost every political contest.
In four Senate campaigns in 1980 Dolan perfected the independent expenditure attack, laced with just the kind of conspiracy, grievance and fear that now makes up the overriding message of American conservatism.
As I wrote in Tuesday Night Massacre:
[Dolan] disdained “elites,” was anti-abortion and pro-school prayer, and he discovered that by calling a Democratic politician “an out of touch liberal” and then repeating the phrase often enough, he could turn a once proud political label into a damning slur.
Perhaps the feature Dolan and his running mates share most with the modern GOP is a visceral hatred for government. Long before Trump talked about the “deep state” and all the waste and fraud that he imagines, Dolan was peddling the same line.
As Washington Post reporter Myra MacPherson noted in a profile of Dolan, “his theories often have an interesting simplicity.” His theories, like Trump’s, weren’t smart, but they were simple.
After slashing the federal budget, Dolan proposed that government should spend “99 percent for defense - keep America strong - and 1 percent on delivering the mail. That’s it. Leave us alone.”
Every Democrat, in Dolan’s view, was a free spending radical, every government program was “wasteful,” the social safety net was a “handout” to someone unworthy.
So, “burn it all down.”
At the hight point of his influence, Dolan attacked Democratic senators in 1980 with a toxic mix of anti-elitism, character assassination and flat out lies. George McGovern, the South Dakota Democratic senator, was a decorated World War II bomber pilot, so Dolan impugned his patriotism. McGovern was also a wasteful spender.
Frank Church, an anti-abortion Democrat from Idaho who refused to support a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion, was labeled by Dolan (and others) “a baby killer.” Dolan boasted that Idaho voters would be casting a ballot against Church and not even remembering why. Church was also a wasteful spender.
Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, first elected with Dolan’s help in 1980, is now 91 and chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee. When the influence of NCPAC began to become an issue in Grassley’s campaign against Democrat John Culver, Grassley asked Dolan’s group to leave Iowa, but not until after Culver had been pulverized by an aggressively negative campaign. NCPAC lied through it’s teeth, Grassley largely stayed above the fray and won easily.
Echoing Trump, a major issue in Dolan’s 1980 attacks involved the Panama Canal. Treaties returning control of the canal to Panama were ratified by the Senate in the late 1970’s with bipartisan support, but to hear the New Right - and Ronald Reagan - tell it the treaties were a disgusting concession by sell-out American politicians who were helping advance a Marxist agenda. A give away to a third-rate country.
Above all the NCPAC storyline pushed the evils of government by stoking the grievance of what the group’s pollster called “low information voters.”
Dolan was also instrumental in bringing evangelical Christians firmly into the Republican camp where they have remained, and indeed substantially expanded their influence since 1980.
Today perhaps more than any segment of the American electorate self-described evangelicals embrace the politics of “burn it all down.”
From the latest Pew Research Center survey:
Three-quarters of White evangelicals approve of Trump’s actions to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in the federal government. The same share approve of Trump’s cuts to federal departments and agencies. And two-thirds of White evangelicals support substantially increased tariffs.
Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican Party is based on a very old playbook. What is different with Trump, however, is that until now not one Republican president, not even Reagan, has so broadly implemented the “burn it all down” approach to government.
While so much of this approach is based on recycled, simple and baseless theories about how government really works that reality apparently matters little to many conservative Americans who seem convinced all government services are a sham that they find terribly unfair.
These voters have long been radicalized by the white hot grievance that Trump and Musk and their enablers are fanning right now - all those lazy, overpaid federal workers doing jobs that don’t need to be done; all that waste and fraud; all those freeloaders on Social Security or Medicaid; all the Marxist indoctrination at liberal colleges; all the fear of people who aren’t like us.
Burn it all down, even if the reasoning doesn’t add up.
Case in point: USAID funding that has been decimated. As yourself - why?
Terry Dolan, the New Right “pit bull,” died in 1986. He was 36 years old. Having grown skeptical that Ronald Reagan, a one-time idol, would push the conservative movement far enough to the right Dolan finally dismissed the Republican Party as “a fraud … a social club where rich people go to pick their noses.”
Language not too far removed from the rhetoric of the House Freedom Caucus or hard right activists who complain of RINO’s - Republicans in Name Only.
Officially Dolan’s cause of death was congestive heart failure, but the underlying cause was AIDS. The irony in that is both profound and sad.
A deeply closeted gay man who almost certainly would have publicly supported the current slashing of AIDS funding at home and around the world, Terry Dolan contributed as much as anyone to the “burn it all down” climate that in the hands of the Trump Administration is today destroying large parts of the federal government.
