Republican Exremists are Mainstream

A Facebook post by Ann Taylor today, Thursday May 4, 2023

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.

In October 1952 a man named McCarthy was the nation’s No. 1 conspiracy theorist. He claimed he possessed a list of 205 Communist Party members “working and shaping policy” in the State Department.

That was a lie.

Still, McCarthy helped trigger a national panic over supposed commie infiltration and became a powerhouse within the GOP.

This conspiratorial nuttery—designed to prey on Cold War paranoia—struck a chord with millions of voters, and McCarthy became the GOPs candidate.

As we know— McCarthy lost his presidential run, but his promotion of unhinged paranoia had become baked into the GOP’s DNA.

Then in 1961 Senator Barry Goldwater asked the editor of the National Review to “go easy on the far-right kooks gaining sway within the GOP, in particular Robert Welch.”

Robert Welch was a conspiracy theorist who was donating lots of money to the Republican Party.

In private Goldwater called Robert Welch and his followers kooks.

But publicly Goldwater was supportive of Welch and his group noting he was “impressed by the type of people in it.”

Goldwater ran for president in 1964 and Robert Welch’s group of conspiracy theorists enthusiastically donated and volunteered for him.

President Lyndon Johnson used Goldwater’s embrace of extremism to thrash him in the general election, and pundits claimed the GOP and the conservative movement were all but finished.

But Goldwater had brought a flood of radicals into the Republican Party—and they weren’t leaving.

Then came 1968and Nixon.

Nixon blocked Reagan and won the nomination. He chose Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew, an experienced race-baiter, as his running mate.

Nixon proclaimed, “I won the nomination without paying any price or making any deals.”

That was a lie.

He had won the nomination battle by kneeling before the segregationists and adopting racism as a key ingredient in the GOP’S recipe for electoral success.

In 1980 it was Ronald Reagan’s turn.

His first campaign stop was in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where 16 years earlier the Ku Klux Klan had murdered three civil rights workers.

At a county fair, he gave a speech declaring, “I believe in states’ rights”—the mantra of Southern segregationists. It was an unambiguous sign that Reagan would continue the Republican practice of appealing to racists.

At the end of August 1980, he appeared at a Dallas gathering of thousands of Christian fundamentalists, including 4,500 pastors, which was underwritten partly by oil tycoon Nelson Bunker Hunt, an ardent follower of Robert Birch.

The speakers’ lineup was a who’s who of the far right: Falwell, Schlafly, televangelist Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye (a popular evangelist who had been a John Birch Society member), and others.

During the campaign, President Jimmy Carter tried to call attention to Reagan’s ties to extremists. But the political press accused Carter of being mean and divisive.

This dark side of the Republican Party has often been obfuscated, allowing Biden, Pelosi, and others to suggest there was once a day when the GOP was an honorable entity. Yet the history is undeniable: The party has consistently sought to exploit the worst of America and foment hate and suspicion.

Trump didn’t invent this malevolence. He just USED it.