Their plans come together The conservative base may be driven by what it “knows” in its gut, as Stephen Colbert’s alter ego once observed, but conservatism’s real movers are far more strategic. The left, not so much, despite pretensions to the contrary. Thomas B. Edsall asked several authors and academicians how strategists of the right pursue their ends and by what means. Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor of political science and sociology, tell him what we see today in the states is the result of careful, long-term planning and organizing by the right’s strategists, particularly the Federalist Society, to produce “minority authoritarianism” inside a nominally democratic government. Their base may dream of establishing a Christian nationalist theocracy, but for the right’s brain trust, turning the U.S. into a right-wing demockracy will do: That harkens back to the infamous 1983 Cato paper, Achieving a “Leninist” Strategy. The authors argued for a long-term, divide-and-conquer strategy for undermining support for Social Security using incremental changes to move the public toward private accounts. It might take years, but if that’s what it takes…. Similarly, Skocpol argues, incremental law changes mean that “behind a bare facade of ‘constitutionalism,’ [Republicans] can render majority-elected officials, including the President and many governors, officials in name only.” Decades of conservative tweaks to election laws have worked to threaten the franchise of millions of Americans. That they have become more brazen about it over the last decades is a sign both of the those incremental changes bringing American democracy to…