Dollars for Life

A new understanding of the slow drift to extremes in American politics that shows how the anti-abortion movement remade the Republican Party A timely and expert guide to one of todays most hot-button political issues.Publishers Weekly (starred review) A sober, knowledgeable scholarly analysis of a timely issue.Kirkus Reviews [Zieglers] argument [is] that, over the course of decades, the anti-abortion movement laid the groundwork for an insurgent candidate like Trump.Jennifer Szalai, New York Times The modern Republican Party is the party of conservative Christianity and big businesstwo 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 Courts landmark decision in Buckley v. Valeo, right-to-lifers fought to gain power in the GOP by changing how campaign spendingand the First Amendmentwork. The anti-abortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in U.S. politics and persuaded conservative voters to fixate on the federal courts. Ultimately, the campaign finance landscape that abortion foes created fueled the GOPs embrace of populism and the rise of Donald Trump. Ziegler offers a surprising new view of the slow drift to extremes in American politicsand explains how it had everything to do with the strange intersection of right-to-life politics and campaign spending.