I’m finding that I like reading David Corn’s stuff on the Motherjones.com website. His latest is “It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy.”
Most of it is a pretty blatant shill for his upcoming book, “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy,” which I can either take or leave when writers use their regular “space” to promote themselves. But this one piqued my interest enough that I’ve already pre-ordered the book. Here’s the premise, in a nutshell:
“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.
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.”
If you like folks who back up what they are saying with exhaustive research, and use actual, REAL “facts,” (as opposed to all those alternate-facts the current crop of republicans seem to think rational people will believe) you’ll at least be intrigued. Whether you buy the book or not, the article is worth the time. It’s a clear reminder of why the current Republican Party really is an “elephant in a rubber room.” That image is perhaps Corn’s way of saying that most – if not all of them – are bat-shit crazy.