Publisher Description
A new understanding of the slow drift to extremes in American politics that shows how the antiabortion movement remade the Republican Party
"A sober, knowledgeable scholarly analysis of a timely issue." —Kirkus Reviews
The modern Republican Party is the party of conservative Christianity and big business—two things so closely identified with the contemporary GOP that we hardly notice the strangeness of the pairing. Legal historian Mary Ziegler traces how the anti-abortion movement helped to forge and later upend this alliance. Beginning with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Buckley v. Valeo, right-to-lifers fought to gain power in the GOP by changing how campaign spending—and the First Amendment—work. The anti-abortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in US politics and persuaded conservative voters to fixate on the federal courts. Ultimately, the campaign finance landscape that abortion foes created fueled the GOP's embrace of populism and the rise of Donald Trump. Ziegler offers a surprising new view of the slow drift to extremes in American politics—and explains how it had everything to do with the strange intersection of right-to-life politics and campaign spending.
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About Mary Ziegler
Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, and author of half a dozen books on the law, history, and politics of abortion and American conservatism. She lives in Sausalito, CA.
About Teri Schnaubelt
Teri Schnaubelt is a Chicago-based stage, on-camera, and voice actor as well as oil painter and photographer. An Earphones Award–winning narrator, she has voiced over a hundred books for New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors, in addition to helping independent authors get their stories heard.