In 2016, David Daley published his first book, “Ratf**ked,” an eye-opening account of how numerous Republican-dominated states, beginning in 2010, had dramatically redrawn their voting districts to lock in control of state legislatures and U.S. House districts.

These examples of radical gerrymandering, engineered through a sophisticated program called REDMAP (Republican Majority Project), led to substantial Republican majorities in the House in 2012 and again in 2014, even as Democratic candidates collected more than 1 million more votes in 2012 and about 4 million fewer in 2014, Daley noted.

Daley, a writer and freelance journalist from Haydenville, found these circumstances more than a little disturbing. In numerous formerly politically competitive states, millions of Democratic voters appeared to be disenfranchised, penned into a few convoluted districts in which they had overwhelming majorities, while most districts were drawn, against all sense of basic geography, to ensure smaller but solid Republican majorities.

But Daley was cheered by his second book, 2020’s “Unrigged,” a lively portrait of citizen groups, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, which formed to fight gerrymandering in their states in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as U.S. president.

As he told the Gazette in a 2020 interview, the work of these grassroots, non-partisan groups went a long way “to restoring my faith in democracy.”

But four years later, Daley sounds down again.

In his newest book, “Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections,” he takes a deep dive into the extended effort by Republican activists, strategists and politicians to stack the nation’s courts with conservative judges and undo longstanding federal laws designed to ensure fair elections, most notably in Southern states where African Americans for decades had been largely barred from voting.

In 2013, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, overturned a principal section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), one that required states and voting districts with previous histories of discrimination against Black voters to get approval from the U.S. Department of Justice before making any changes to their voting policies.

Since the Roberts court gutted that rule, Daley notes, a large number of Republican states, primarily in the South, have instituted new rules seemingly designed to suppress Black and other mostly Democratic voting blocs, such as eliminating voting precincts and early voting options, restricting voting hours, purging voter rolls and enacting stringent Voter ID laws.

And Roberts, Daley says, had the VRA in his sights from his earliest days as a lawyer, serving with the Department of Justice during the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s. There he wrote copious memos and talking points for his boss, Attorney General William French Smith, urging that the administration not support the VRA when it came up for renewal in 1982, saying it was no longer needed because the South “had changed.”

Indeed, Roberts emerges as one of the principal villains of Daley’s new book, a hard-line conservative who has hidden his antidemocratic views behind a false mask of judicial modesty. The man who told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, when he was being considered for the Supreme Court, that his job was simply “to call balls and strikes” has arrogantly widened or shrunk his strike zone depending on the political tenor of many of the cases before him, Daley argues.

Roberts, writes Daley, has “a much more radical approach to the bench. Each landmark decision begins with a smaller case that invites the next big question. It allows Roberts to look like an incrementalist when he is really a patient bulldozer. Precedents would be overturned, strikes would be called balls, but there would be no sudden lurch.”

The long game

In that sense, Roberts symbolizes the general arc of “Antidemocratic,” published by Mariner Books, in which Daley examines a movement started by a relative handful of conservative activists, in the early 1970s, to push back against the growth of liberalism in the country in both politics and legal thinking.

What was needed, they said, was a whole new system, designed from the ground up, that would challenge liberal policies not at the voting booth, where those policies generally had support from a majority of Americans, but in the courts.

To that end, activists like Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society, and ex-liberal turned conservative lawyer Michael Horowitz, helped build an extensive network of trained lawyers and judges – like John Roberts – who would reframe constitutional law around the philosophy of “originalism” and center American life back within its white roots, moving away from the nation’s growing racial and ethnic diversity.

Part of that effort would involve identifying voting policies in different states and locales that could be challenged with lawsuits, the goal being ultimately to bring those cases before a conservative Supreme Court that could use them in turn to overturn or weaken federal laws such as the VRA.

Daley points out that one of the original proponents of this philosophy was Lewis Powell, a native of the segregationist South who before becoming a conservative Supreme Court justice in the 1970s wrote an influential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; he urged corporations to push back against what he saw as anti-free enterprise sentiment in the public sphere, an attitude he likened to socialism.

The memorandum by Powell, who also urged conservatives to use the courts to reshape federal policy, subsequently became a blueprint for the rise of right-wing think tanks and lobbying groups.

This legal movement, funded by gobs of money from wealthy donors and front groups, has been extraordinarily successful, Daley says, steadily and patiently built by conservatives playing a “long game,” as he puts it, to erode voting rights.

Indeed, the Federalist Society has nurtured, vetted, and helped place hundreds and hundreds of conservative judges in courtrooms across the country, including the Supreme Court, which in the last 14-odd years has overturned long-standing precedents on abortion and voting rights, environmental protection, corporate money in elections and more – decisions that all went against majority public sentiment.

In 2018, the Roberts-led majority also declined to issue any ruling on gerrymandering, negating lower-court decisions that said Republican-dominated states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina were flagrantly – and illegally – gerrymandered.

Perhaps worse, Daley notes, is that this antidemocratic notion – that majority rule “could be subverted via election law and the courts” – has moved “from the fringes of the law to the heart of the Republican Party … [which] no longer pretends to care about winning elections through old-school practices such as winning more votes than the other side, or sustaining a popular mandate for its policies.”

As just one example of that, Daley highlights the chaos and ferocious partisanship that’s become institutionalized in states like Wisconsin, where the Republican-majority legislature in the last several years has handcuffed Democratic Governor Tony Evers by rewriting long-standing state laws on gubernatorial power, while defying majority public opinion on a number of other issues.

A former Wisconsin Republican judge, Richard Niess, tells Daley he’s appalled at what his party has become, especially the conservative members of the state’s Supreme Court (they were all approved by the Federalist Society), who he says invoke originalism in their decisions as a cover for the pursuit of “pure, raw, political power.”

“Antidemocratic” is at times a dense read, but it’s a passionately argued and well-researched one. Daley, a former editor-in-chief for Salon magazine, interviewed scores of people, including many of the conservative activists who helped build today’s Republican-dominated court system, and he says it’s based on reporting and writing he began almost 10 years ago.

One of the book’s saddest anecdotes concerns an interview Daley couldn’t really pull off, when he briefly spoke to former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who sometimes sided with the court’s liberal judges on social issues such as same-sex marriage. But Kennedy, who retired from the court in 2018, voted with Roberts to gut part of the VRA and to open elections to unlimited dark money in the Citizens United decision of 2010.

When he knocked on the door of Kennedy’s suburban Virginia home in June 2022 to ask him if he had any regrets or second thoughts on those votes, Daley writes, Kennedy barked “Regrets? No! What is there to regret?” and slammed the door shut.

That seems as apt a symbol as any for the state of our fractured politics, where the party whose presidential candidate has lost the popular vote in every election save one since 1992 – and whose candidate this year will almost certainly lose that vote again in November – has gained political control of so many aspects of the country.

“We will only undo our antidemocratic present,” says Daley, “with more democracy.”

Steve Pfarrer, now retired, is a former arts and features reporter for the Gazette.