When Donald Trump launched his campaign for president in 2015, he consciously used the rhetoric he believed would resonate with the Republican party base that he needed to win the GOP presidential nomination. As he announced his presidential bid he declared, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Throughout his campaigns and presidency Trump attacked immigrants, Muslims, communities of color, journalists, liberal Hollywood actors and intellectuals. Trump won overwhelming Republican support by tapping into the racist and xenophobic sentiment that had long been part of the subtext of the Republican party’s message machine. While previous Republican candidates often sent that same message with a quieter dog whistle, Trump used a bullhorn to rally his supporters, stoking hate and fear, while often provoking political violence that culminated in the deadly Jan. 6th Capitol insurrection to overturn the 2020 election.
While some political pundits were shocked by Trump’s authoritarian behavior and “in your face” support for right-wing extremism and white supremacist ideology, Mother Jones Magazine’s Washington bureau chief David Corn wasn’t surprised. In his new book, “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy,” Corn chronicles how the GOP has consciously cultivated and exploited racism, paranoia and conspiracy theories for at least seven decades — stretching all the way back to the red-baiting days of Dick Nixon and Joe McCarthy. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Corn about his research into the roots of Republican extremism seen in today’s MAGA and QAnon activists — and how civil society can effectively fight this fascist movement hell bent on destroying America’s multi-racial democracy.
DAVID CORN: The book is a history of the Republican party’s relationship with far-right fanaticism. Over the last 70 years, it has encouraged and exploited right-wing extremism which can be racism, bigotry, paranoia, conspiracy theory, tribalism and all sorts of other types of defensive ideology. The point of the book is to show that this has always been part of the Republican party DNA.
It hasn’t always been fully acknowledged. It hasn’t always been fully recognized by journalists at the time and historians of the period. But yet it has always, always, always been there — a part of the modern Republican party. And here’s a little back story. The book traces the Republican party from Lincoln and the days of the party being reportedly a progressive force against slavery for its maverick opportunity to becoming the party of business and isolationism and sort of crashing in the 1940s after the Great Depression at the end of World War II, with the advent of nuclear and nuclear terror and the ideas brought about by the beginning of the Cold War.
There was a lot of fear and paranoia for the Republican party to exploit and capitalize on, which did this with the Alger Hiss case, as a sign the government and the elites were riddled with an internal enemy, subversive forces that wanted to destroy the United States from within. But he was quickly surpassed by this guy named Joe McCarthy, the junior senator of Wisconsin who claimed he had a list of 206 commies in the State Department. It was a complete lie, but all this resonated with millions of Americans and in some ways got the Republican party back into the game with this notion that they were fomenting and promoting that the real threat to America was not necessarily the Soviet Union from a military perspective — although people didn’t believe that — but it was this internal subversion, the radicals within the country.
This base notion that the way to win elections is to accuse the other side of being an eternal enemy and whipping up fear became a crucial part of Republican strategies. And you could see it with Goldwater working with the John Birch Society in ’64. You see with Nixon on the Southern Strategy. You could see it with Reagan in the late ’70s, embracing the new right and the religious right, which were at the time pioneering this thing called direct mail, which they would send out millions of pieces of literature playing on people’s paranoia saying the liberals, Democrats, the gays were coming to destroy America and Christianity.
That was their plate. I could go on. But every iteration of the Republican party, there was some embrace of this extremist strain, the paranoid style of politics and that embrace often encouraging this view of the world as well.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, David, you know, with demographic changes, it seems like the Republican party goal right now is to impose minority rule. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. How do you think U.S. civil society should respond to today’s Republican party semi-fascist threat as President Joe Biden put it? What are the lessons from history in terms of creating a big tent, broad-based anti-fascist movement to both educate voters and mobilize people to challenge right-wing extremists when they attempt to take over libraries or school boards or state legislatures and the federal government through gerrymandering, voter suppression laws and subversion of election results, which seems high on the list of priorities for Republicans these days?
DAVID CORN: I think that’s the $64,000 question. And maybe, rather than calling it anti-fascist, call it the pro-democracy movement. It sounds a little more inviting and proactive and more positive. Right now, my guess is 30 percent of the public are people who are strongly or close to strongly in the Trump Big Lie-Obama Wasn’t Born Here category, maybe 25 percent or 20.
And I think those people are beyond reach in terms of public discourse. And they’re going to act on that, which means if they get elected as secretary of state of various states, they will make sure that the Democrats don’t win because they believe the Democrats only win when they cheat. So it’s a real pressing threat.
The goal, I think, of the pro-democracy movement here has to basically make sure the other 70 to 80 percent of the American public is aware of what’s happening. And to forge what they used to call a popular front — that no matter what your ideology is, no matter what you agree or disagreements are on any matter, fundamentally, we need to preserve the democratic system to which we then can have debates and fights, discussions about what best to do about the economy, housing, health care, foreign policy, whatever you want to argue about.
And I think right now that portion of the public is not coalesced into that type of robust coalition. And it’s unfortunate that that hasn’t happened going to the run up to the midterms, because that allows the anti-democratic forces more opportunity to win seats and take over a portion of the U.S. government, maybe one if not both houses of Congress.
For more information, visit David Corn’s Facebook page at facebook.com/
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with David Corn (31:55) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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