It didn't start with Trump: The decades-long saga of how the GOP went crazy

[Nevilledog]

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David Corn
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JUST POSTED: The @MotherJones cover story adapted from my forthcoming book "American Psychosis," which chronicles how the GOP has long exploited and encouraged extremism. Please read and RT to help get the word out. The book hits on Tuesday!

motherjones.com
It didn’t start with Trump: The decades-long saga of how the GOP went crazy
The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.
6:04 AM · Sep 9, 2022

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/09/it-didnt-start-with-trump-the-decades-long-saga-of-how-the-gop-went-crazy/


In May, during an Aspen Institute conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the audience, “I want the Republican Party to take back the party, take it back to where you were when you cared about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment…This country needs a strong Republican Party. And we do. Not a cult. But a strong Republican Party.” Her comments echoed a sentiment that Joe Biden had expressed during the 2020 campaign: If Donald Trump were out of the White House, the GOP would return to normal and be amenable to forging deals and legislative compromises.

Both Pelosi and Biden have bolstered the notion that the current GOP, with its cultlike embrace of Trump and his Big Lie, and its acceptance of the fringiest players, is a break from the past. But was the GOP’s complete surrender to Trumpism an aberration? Or was the party long sliding toward this point? About a year ago, I set out to explore the history of the Republican Party, with this question in mind. What I found was not an exception, but a pattern. Since the 1950s, the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice, and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections. Trump assembling white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, and others who formed a violent terrorist mob on January 6 is only the most flagrant manifestation of the tried-and-true GOP tactic to court kooks and bigots. It’s an ugly and shameful history that has led the Party of Lincoln, founded in 1854 to oppose the extension of slavery, to the Party of Trump, which capitalizes on racism and assaults democracy.

Since the 1950s, the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice, and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections.

In my book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, I lay out this sordid history in great detail. But even a highlight reel makes it clear that the GOP has bowed to, depended on, and promoted far-right extremists and conspiracists for the past 70 years. Trumpism is the continuation, not a new version, of Republican politics.

The General and the Scoundrel

Dwight D. Eisenhower surrendered to Joe McCarthy on a train.

In October 1952, Ike, the heroic World War II general who nabbed the GOP presidential nomination running as a moderate, was campaigning in Wisconsin with the nation’s No. 1 Red-baiter. Two years earlier, Wisconsin’s junior senator had claimed he possessed a list of 205 Communist Party members “working and shaping policy” in the State Department. That was a lie. But McCarthy helped trigger a national panic over supposed commie infiltration and became a powerhouse within the GOP. His reckless conspiracy-mongering reached a new height in 1951 when he accused the Truman administration of scheming to deliver the nation “to disaster” with an “immense” conspiracy. And McCarthy fingered the ultimate villain: George Marshall, the secretary of defense who had helped create the postwar recovery program for Europe known as the Marshall Plan. McCarthy alleged that Marshall was deliberately weakening the United States so it would fall to the Soviet Union.

*snip*

[underpants]

1. 👀

Looks like a good read. Thanks

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[Turbineguy]

3. If we are lucky

trump will only want to steal the treasury empty.

[Pinback]

4. This will be a must-read

Corn is an excellent journalist.

[crickets]

6. Agreed. nt

[Ponietz]

5. My take--Nixon presided over a pivot from external enemies to the Democratic Party

McCarthyism didn’t work domestically after 1954, so they couldn’t split Democrats that way anymore.

In February, 1972 Nixon went to Beijing.
In May it was Moscow.
Nixon was emboldened—the Watergate break-in was in June.
In January, ‘73 he sent Kissinger to Paris.
With external threats mollified they dedicated themselves to destroying Dr. King’s legacy.

The Watergate story only broke in June of ‘74, and the fiasco that followed led to almost 50 years of unceasing domestic political warfare.

[Duppers]

8. TY for posting this!

[usonian]

7. If you don't want to wait for the book

“Democracy in Crisis: We’ve Been Headed Here for Decades.” Part 1of 8
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/6/2044226/-America-2021-The-Good-the-Bad-the-Ugly
Read all 8 to get the "plan" in detail.

[Warpy]

9. They were always wrong about nearly everything

but some of them remained reachable and the work of Congress mostly got done until Gingrich and his brand of pseudo Christian tribalism showed up. That was really the beginning of the end for them.

They could have survived Nixon and the racists. They won't survive Christian nationalism. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

10. The radicalized Republican party has self-selected for extremism over decades.

It's a coalition of left-overs -- people who want a government that protects and helps all who are within its jurisdiction do not want to be a part of the party of hate and destruction.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

11. K&R