We are now in a post-fact world. I can’t even talk to a lot of friends and family members and people I care so much about and I have for my whole life. It was never this bad. How did it get this bad? – Joe Scarborough
It’s alway been this bad.
Almost came to blows with a neighbor but we quickly cooled down. He is heavily armed and I am fragile with a lead allergy.
Plus he was in the wrong.
To placate matters, as I turn to go, he says. “Want you to know I’m not voting for Trump again. He’s just too crazy.”
Took you long enough to notice.
“I wanted to shake things up,” he says. “No more of the same old bullshit.”
Oh, yeah. Nothing shakes things up like rejecting the first woman ever in favor of the forty-fifth consecutive male.
1956.
My first campaign was Eisenhower’s re-election. I was nine. Still remember the campaign tune: “Whistle while you work, Stevenson’s a jerk. Eisenhower has the power. Whistle while you work.” Catchy, huh?
Ironically, Ike was the last good Republican president.
Although I liked America much much more before the federal interstate highway system.
But wait, what’s this?
When Dwight D. Eisenhower was running for president in 1952, he spent a day campaigning with Sen. Joe McCarthy in Wisconsin, McCarthy’s home state. He considered adding to a speech he would give that evening a brief denunciation of McCarthy and his reckless Red-baiting.
Yet top GOP officials, horrified at the idea of castigating a Republican whose outlandish and fact-free conspiracism was resonating with millions of fearful voters, persuaded Ike not to do it. Instead, Eisenhower delivered an address that echoed McCarthy’s demagoguery.
Eisenhower passed on the chance to condemn McCarthy and McCarthyism. Ike is a hero. He refused to say a damn thing about it, and there are parallels to that and where we are today.
Bingo. This Eisenhower moment might be considered the “original sin” of the modern GOP, when a leader went along with craziness that he knew was both wrong and dangerous for the nation because of “political transactionalism.”
One thing I noticed – long before age nine – was often grown-ups would not tell the truth.
2023.
From my lanai, I can see a different neighbor’s flag – Joe Biden Is Not My President.
The difference over a long lifetime – instead of lying to others, they now also lie to themselves.
And they are proud about it. Loud about it.
Maybe they really did think they were conservatives with family values who believed in a sane fiscal policy and a strong national defense. I never thought that.
I never thought that because I have watched the actions and behaviors of the Republican PARTY over seven decades now. You can see a lot in 70 years of watching carefully. If you listen closely.
Another neighbor’s banner proclaims Jesus Is My Savior Trump Is My President.
And I can’t help wondering if they believe those truths of theirs equally.
If only the Republicans could get rid of Donald Trump, it could return to normal. This is a common refrain they you often hear from pundits and members of the political class, or maybe from a relative or friend. Trump, in this view, is a dangerous aberration, and all that is needed to de-Trumpify the GOP is for Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and other establishment Republicans to display some guts, coalesce behind another GOP 2024 contender, and give the indicted ex-president the boot. Such a sentiment is both magical thinking and ahistorical.
It’s a fantasy because a majority of the Republican base—tens of millions of Americans—remain enthralled with Trump. Have you seen the “Trump or Death” banners? These cultists cannot be herded by GOP graybeards into another camp. For them, Trump is a theology, and you can’t challenge faith with facts. After the Trump-incited January 6 riot, McConnell and McCarthy took baby steps toward nudging the party out of Trump’s clutches, but they soon realized their voters were sticking with Trump and his lies about the 2020 election and everything else. They turned tail.
As recent polls show, a majority of Republicans desire a Trump restoration. For the GOP deep state, resistance is futile. To move against Trump would ignite a civil war within the party. That’s not a battle the Washington sticks-in-the-mud would likely win. And they certainly are not martyrs.
The dump-Trump-and-return-to-your-father’s-GOP sentiment is also an affront to history. I can say that with confidence, having written American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller that is coming out this week in a new and expanded paperback edition. One key point of the book is that your-father’s-GOP is largely a myth. Trumpism—or a version of it—has been a critical part of the Republican Party for seven decades. As American Psychosis shows, since the 1950s, the GOP has always encouraged and exploited extremism.
Through McCarthyism, Barry Goldwater’s alliance with the nutjobs of the John Birch Society, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy partnership with racists, the New Right and the Religious Right, Reaganism, both George Bushes’ embrace of antisemitic conspiracy-monger Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sarah Palin, the tea party, and, finally, Trump, the party has long nurtured a relationship with far-right radicals, bigots, fundamentalists, and, yes, kooks.
It did so by recklessly and relentlessly stoking the paranoia, fear, resentments, and grievances of conservative voters.
Often this was considered a side-hustle by the GOP establishment, an action necessary to achieve electoral victories that would then allow its officials to govern in a more respectable manner. Court the wingnuts during the campaign but then return to Washington as responsible statesmen.
Think of Mitt Romney in the 2012 race enthusiastically accepting Trump’s endorsement, even though Trump was best known politically at the time as the champion of the racist birther conspiracy theory. (A former Romney aide tells me that seeking Trump’s embrace was considered a necessary evil to bolster Romney’s standing with right-wing GOP voters and that after it was secured the campaign wanted nothing else to do with Trump.)
But then Trump came along as a candidate in 2015 and tossed all pretenses aside. He made outreach to the extremists a central component of his campaign. He even went on Alex Jones’ show to talk directly to the wackos.
Comprehending this history is crucial for understanding the present moment and the political crisis that grips America. Crisis? Yes, it’s a crisis. A fellow who tried to overturn an election, who incited insurrectionist violence to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, who has called for suspending the Constitution, who has endorsed the batcrap crazy QAnon conspiracy theory, who has vowed to lock up his political foes, and who has declared his authoritarian intentions is at this moment an even-money bet to win the 2024 election.
Despite this peril, there persists within the political media world that notion it might be possible to bounce Trump, flip a switch, and return the GOP to its days of presumed non-craziness. American Psychosis shows that is improbable.
There has never been a time when the modern GOP was free of hateful and irrational extremism.
Two years after the Trump virus caused a violent eruption that threatened American democracy, little has changed within the party—and its base. Millions of Trump-worshipping Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was rigged and that January 6 was a false flag operation.
Should Trump disappear from the scene today, this irrationalism—this psychosis—will not vanish.
He’s not the cause of the GOP’s sickness; he’s the symptom.
If that is not fully recognized, there will be no effective treatment or cure.