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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.
By David Corn
Joe Biden expressed a sentiment during the 2020 campaign that if Donald Trump was out of the White House, the GOP would return to normal and be amenable to forging deals and legislative compromises.
Biden has bolstered the notion that the current GOP 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.
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.
Presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower surrendered to Senator Joe McCarthy in October 1952. Eisenhower, the heroic World War II general and the GOP presidential nominee running as a moderate, was campaigning in Wisconsin with McCarthy, 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.
In 1951, 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.
This conspiratorial nuttery — designed to prey on Cold War paranoia — struck a chord with millions of voters, and McCarthy was lionized at the GOP convention the following year. Eisenhower believed McCarthy to be a dangerous demagogue and fabricator. Yet in the 1952 campaign, Ike was expected to campaign side by side with — and legitimize — this scoundrel who was up for reelection.
Eisenhower considered a public strike against McCarthy and had asked a speechwriter to add a short riff to a major speech in Wisconsin that would defend Marshall and assail McCarthy’s attack on him.
When top Republicans on the campaign train caught wind of Ike’s intention, they became alarmed. McCarthy had millions of supporters. Many were Catholic, which gave the GOP an opportunity to break the Democrats’ hold on the Catholic vote. Plus, the party might need Wisconsin to win the election. A senior Eisenhower adviser explained this political calculus to Ike. “Are you telling me this paragraph should come out?” Eisenhower asked. Yes, the aide replied. Eisenhower deleted the paragraph.
That night, in his speech, Eisenhower cautioned against the “spirit of violent vigilantism” in the fight for freedom. But he decried left-wing “contamination” in “virtually every department…of our government” and called for “the right to call a Red a Red.” Rather than assail McCarthyism, he sounded as if he were defending it. The Milwaukee Journal observed, “The general went far toward surrendering ethical and moral principles in a frenzied quest for votes.”
Eisenhower, who decisively won the election, would later regret his decision to cut the anti-McCarthy paragraph. As president, he continued to loathe McCarthy, but refused to directly confront him — though behind the scenes he encouraged criticism of the senator. Eventually, McCarthy’s own excesses did him in, and he was censured by the Senate and lost his power and influence. Eisenhower snickered that McCarthyism was now “McCarthywasm.”
But Ike was wrong; others in
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Victimhood and Vengeance
The contemporary rise of Christian nationalism in the US is a reactionary response to the country’s liberalization over the past half-century.
We tend to think of Christian nationalism, the political ideology based on the belief that the country’s authentic identity lies in its Christian roots and in the perpetuation of Christian privilege, as having burst upon the scene to accompany and facilitate the rise of Donald Trump. But as Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry explain in The Flag and the Cross, Christian nationalism—white Christian nationalism, to be more accurate, since the ideology has no place for nonwhites—is “one of the oldest and most powerful currents in American politics.” They trace it back to the New England Puritans’ wars against the indigenous groups who dared to stand in the way of the claim by self-described chosen people to their new Promised Land, and follow it through the Lost Cause of a post–Civil War South destined to “rise again”—a Christological narrative of crucifixion and redemption “crucial to understanding contemporary claims of Christian victimhood and vengeance among white Christian nationalists.” The drive for western expansion, aptly known as Manifest Destiny, was widely understood as part of a divine plan handed to those who would “civilize” an entire continent.
According to a recent Pew Research poll, 60 percent of Americans believe the country was founded to be a Christian nation, and nearly half (including 81 percent of white evangelicals) think it should be one today. Whether that has changed over the course of US history is beside the point: what’s new is the contemporary political and social salience of Christian nationalism. As mainline Protestantism has faded, David Hollinger observes in Christianity’s American Fate,
Christianity has become an instrument for the most politically, culturally, and theologically reactionary Americans. White evangelical Protestants were an indispensable foundation for Donald Trump’s presidency and have become the core of the Republican Party’s electoral strength. They are the most conspicuous advocates of “Christian nationalism.”…Most of Christianity’s symbolic capital has been seized by a segment of the population committed to ideas about the Bible, the family, and civics that most other Americans reject.
How did this happen? Gorski and Perry, Hollinger, and David Sehat in This Earthly Frame agree that the answer lies in white evangelicals’ response to the profound cultural changes the country experienced during the second half of the twentieth century. That may sound obvious, but with varied approaches, these three books offer insights that are both illuminating and alarming.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/02/09/victimhood-and-vengeance-t
he-flag-and-the-cross/
The three books can be downloaded for free:
1. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy,
by Philip S. Gorski https://libgen.unblockit.ink/search.php?req=The+Flag+and+the+Cross
2. Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular
by David A. Hollinger https://libgen.unblockit.ink/search.php?req=Christianity+American+Fate
3. This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism
by David Sehat https://libgen.unblockit.ink/search.php?req=This+Earthly+Frame
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Both parties have extremists — but those on the left are less extreme, relatively few, and none of them in key leadership roles. On the right, they are the majority (well over half voting not to certify the 2020 election) and they set the agenda.
Their party is controlled by extremists. (Bring back the good old days when it was controlled by the wealthy and corporations! Or even the good old days of Barry Goldwater.) Yet they’ve been highly effective at portraying the views of a tiny few as “the Democratic agenda.”
For example: Only a tiny few Democrats actually want to “defund the police.” In reality, Biden and Congressional Democrats and Democratic mayors and governors are all about increasing police funding . . . while making needed reforms. (Can anyone favor instances of police brutality? Favor killing unarmed men as they are running away? Favor sending police, unassisted, to handle mental health issues?)
And consider a fourth colossal difference — what the extremes want:
> On the left, “The Squad” want things like Medicare for all. You may oppose it, or believe we can’t afford it (somehow, every one of our industrialized allies can); but is it pernicious to want everyone to have access to decent health care? Or to want workers to be paid a living wage? Or to want to keep Earth habitable for future generations?
> On the right, those who wrested effective control of the House from Kevin McCarthy favor 18-year-olds’ being allowed to buy assault weapons without universal background checks; oppose a higher minimum wage for the working poor; favor government control of women’s bodies even in cases of rape or incest; oppose funding IRS enforcement of tax law on billionaires; oppose citizenship for DACA kids; oppose capping the price of Insulin . . . and more.
I think those positions are pernicious.
https://andrewtobias.com/giant-gaping-glaring/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Both parties have extremists — but those on the left are less extreme
No. The Democratic party as a whole has moved so far to the left that they are all extremists.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Why The Rich Are Inevitable
Physicists normally study the physical world. But they started using their methods to study economics – a field now dubbed econophysics. They looked at how two people might interact in a transaction, and then modeled how that might play out on a large scale. This helped them model wealth distribution.
In 2002, physicist Anirban Chakraborti published a paper that laid out the "Yard-sale" model.
To be clear, econophysics gets its fair share of criticism. But the Yard-sale model isn't meant to model the real world with exacting precision. Tufts University math professor Bruce M. Boghosian compared the Yard-sale model to an "X-ray" described as follows:
We believe that this purely analytical approach, which resembles an x-ray in that it is used not so much to represent the messiness of the real world as to strip it away and reveal the underlying skeleton, provides deep insight into the forces acting to increase poverty and inequality today.
—Bruce M. Boghosian
The Yard-sale model can be useful as a way to think about the general "trickle-up" characteristics of a free market. It's contrary to what many conservative politicians have argued for decades – that wealth trickles downward. They've said the government should just get out of the way to let the wealthy create jobs for the rest of us. This ideology has led to massive tax cuts for the rich, from Ronald Reagan's tax cut in 1981 to Donald Trump's 2017 tax cut.
In his 2002 paper on this model, Chakraborti wrote, "Wealth concentration can be prevented, for example, by government intervention via taxes." So what if we run the "Yard-sale" game again, but every turn we take a percentage of money from everyone and redistribute it evenly?
This time players will be willing to bet 20% of their wealth each game. After each round, we'll tax every player 0.5% and disperse it evenly to all players.
People playing with redistribution fare better compared to people playing without redistribution. From the simulation you can see that even a small amount of redistribution stops a single uber wealthy person from emerging.
This is similar to what Boghosian and his colleagues did in a 2017 paper, where they modeled real-life redistribution with far more accuracy than in the "Yard-sale" version. They were able to match the wealth distribution in the US and Europe to within 2 percent. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S037843711730081
X
Currently in the US, the wealthiest 20% of families own about 70% of wealth. But this doesn't capture the true wealth disparity in the US: If the US population was represented by 1,000 people in a room, the richest one person would have four times more money than the poorest 500 people.
One more thing in this simulation: Even with redistribution, the wealthiest person in the game is exponentially richer than the poorest. And this emerged out of complete luck. But imagine what would happen if we played this game with real people: Some of the wealthy players would inevitably argue that they deserve to be rich because they're better at guessing the result of a coin flip.
More at https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/
And also at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
Is Inequality Inevitable?
Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model suggests.
Although the origins of inequality are hotly debated, an approach developed by physicists and mathematicians, including my group at Tufts University, suggests they have long been hiding in plain sight—in a well-known quirk of arithmetic. This method uses models of wealth distribution collectively known as agent-based, which begin with an individual transaction between two “agents” or actors, each trying to optimize his or her own financial outcome. In the modern world, nothing could seem more fair or natural than two people deciding to exchange goods, agreeing on a price and sha
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A horror show of technological and moral failure
Book Review: “Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo and the Road to the Atomic Bomb”, by James M. Scott
On the night of March 9, 1945, almost 300 B-29 bombers took off from Tinian Island near Japan. Over the next six hours, 100,000 civilians in Tokyo were burnt to death, more possibly than in any six hour period in history. James Scott’s “Black Snow” tells the story of this horrific event which was both a technological and a moral failure. It is also the story of how moral failures can result from technological failures, a lesson that we should take to heart in an age when we understand technology less and less and morality perhaps even lesser.
The technological failure in Scott’s story is the failure of the most expensive technological project in World War 2, the B-29 bomber. The United States spent more than $3 billion on developing this wonder of modern technology, more than on the Manhattan Project. Soaring at 30,000 feet like an impregnable iron eagle, the B-29 was supposed to drop bombs with pinpoint precision on German and Japanese factories producing military hardware. . . .
When pinpoint precision bombing was ineffective, enter Gen. Curtis “The Demon” LeMay. As a pilot in the European theater, he quickly advanced through the ranks through sheer grit and gumption, often leading seemingly suicidal missions against Germany himself. His philosophy in life was simple – never give up. That philosophy metamorphosed into a very different philosophy for winning wars – “The way to win wars is to kill people. And if you kill enough of them, they give up.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the war against Japan reached a crescendo, Curtis LeMay replaced Gen. Haywood Hansell.
LeMay quickly found out that Hansell’s strategy for precision bombing was ineffective, but unlike Hansell he had no moral qualms to take the next giant step. In a moment of inspiration he had an idea: take the B-29, strip it of unnecessary antiaircraft defenses, drop it down from 30,000 feet to 5000 feet and load it up to its gills with incendiary bombs containing napalm, a substance discovered by a Harvard chemist in 1942. Napalm burns with a demon-like ferocity and resists attempts to put it out. LeMay knew the damage it could do, but he knew something more important. He knew that more than 90% of the houses in downtown Tokyo were made out of wood. A mock Japanese town, complete with restaurants, hospitals and single-family homes with bedrooms and cribs was set up at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The ominous nature of the destruction of infant cribs and hospitals probably did not register in the minds of planners who wanted to end the war as quickly as possible.
More at https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/01/a-horror-show-of-technol
ogical-and-moral-failure.html
Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.ink/search.php?req=James+M.+Scott+2022
Personal note: my father flew B-29s on firebombing missions over Japan. He never talked about it, but my mother did after he was dead. The only souvenirs from that war in the family are a photo of my father in uniform with his B-29 aircrew, a Distinguished Flying Cross, both kept by my eldest sister, and a US Army 45 caliber semi-automatic pistol I kept.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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FairTax, the GOP plan for a 30 percent national sales tax, explained
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to put a radical plan to remake the tax code up for a vote.
The FairTax, at its heart, is simple enough: it would take almost every federal tax and replace them with a fat 30 percent sales tax on everything. Virtually every American would get a monthly check from the government to cover the cost of paying the tax on essentials. It’s a radical idea, but one which since its first introduction to Congress in 1999 has been a favorite of conservative Republicans. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) already has 23 cosponsors for the current iteration. Prominent party figures like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain have all championed the idea over the years.
So, how big is this FairTax?
It’s 30 percent! And it would apply to just about everything, from groceries to health care to rent and home purchases to interest on your credit card.
I assume the FairTax people have … a response to this?
They do. For one thing, they don’t like it when you refer to their tax rate as “30 percent.” While it increases the cost of, say, a $10 item by 30 percent, or $3, they argue that because $3 is 23 percent of the $13 post-tax cost, it’s actually a 23 percent tax.
Wait … seriously?
Yes, it’s stupid.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that FairTax proponents insist they want to tax more sales than just about any sales tax currently existing in the real world. Gale estimates that about 91 percent of household spending would be hit by the FairTax. Meanwhile, a recent Tax Policy Center study found that state sales taxes in the US only cover 39 percent of spending; most states tax much less than half of spending, with California taxing 36 percent and Texas 38 percent. Value-added taxes in other rich countries, which generally work better than retail sales taxes because they also tackle business-to-business transactions, only hit 56 percent of consumption.
It’s of course possible that Congress would pass the FairTax without including a multitude of exemptions for things like food and medicine and cars and other things that people don’t like to see taxed. However, this is Congress we’re talking about, so this will not happen.
Thousands of more words at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/26/23563563/fairtax-nat
ional-sales-tax-kevin-mccarthy
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Virtually every American would get a monthly check from the government to cover the cost of paying the tax on essentials.
...
It’s of course possible that Congress would pass the FairTax without including a multitude of exemptions for things like food and medicine and cars and other things that people don’t like to see taxed. However, this is Congress we’re talking about, so this will not happen.
You got any more info on the amount of the monthly check, how it would be administered, and what hoops you'd have to jump through for it?
i.e.: Would it be a blanket amount that every American would get (which would be likely be extremely unfair and inequitable), or would you end up having to keep receipts of everything and send them in every month for your check (which would be a ridiculous proposal and would likely require the Government to open up a new alphabet branch just to administer the system, while at the same time end up being a glorified REBATE program which most people would be too stupid and/or lazy to cash in on every month if you make it incumbent on the individual taxpayer to handle it)?
Sounds like a huge pain in the ass to do, and I think everybody would just rather see ESSENTIALS be exempt from the tax in the first place.
However, I don't necessarily disagree with a value added tax system if it TRULY doesn't impact actual essentials, like food, gas, heating/electric, your 1st vehicle, repairs on your first vehicle (and two vehicles, if your taxes prove that two adults in the home need a vehicle to drive to work), etc.
The idea is not too far off from how Indiana taxes brand new vehicles hard with the yearly registration, and the EXPENSIVE brand new vehicles SUPER hard, while charging less tax on these vehicles every year for the first 10 years until it's almost nothing for the tax.
This additional money generated by taxing people who make the choice to keep buying new and expensive vehicles goes a very long way to keeping property taxes in the state down for people who either can't afford and/or have no interest in owning a brand new expensive vehicle.
This could be a way of encouraging Americans to be more judicious about their spending, and rewarding people who don't spend their days buying a ton of shit they don't need.
But as the article says, "this is Congress we’re talking about", so I'm sure they'd find a way to fuck it up and screw everybody.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:You could read the whole bill if you want: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/25/text?r=18&a
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You got any more info on the amount of the monthly check, how it would be administered, and what hoops you'd have to jump through for it?
mp;s=1
It won't pass into law, so don't worry about reading it. Meanwhile, there are many things that Republicans in Congress could do, but won't because, you know, Republican voters would start making accusations of creeping Communism:
Is it great to be a worker in the U.S.? Not compared with the rest of the developed world.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/07/04/is-it-great-to-be-a-wor
ker-in-the-u-s-not-compared-to-the-rest-of-the-developed-world/?utm_term=.033a3ba1cb08
The U.S. labor market is hot. Unemployment is at 3.8 percent, a level it’s hit only once since the 1960s, and many industries report deep labor shortages. Old theories of what’s wrong with the labor market — such as a lack of people with necessary skills — are dying fast. Earnings are beginning to pick up, and the Federal Reserve envisions a steady regimen of rate hikes.
So why does a large subset of workers continue to feel left behind? We can find some clues in a new 296-page report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of advanced and advancing nations that has long been a top source for international economic data and research. Most of the figures are from 2016 or before, but they reflect underlying features of the economies analyzed that continue today.
In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.
Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.
Joblessness may be low in the United States and employers may be hungry for new hires, but it’s also strikingly easy to lose a job here. An average of 1 in 5 employees lose or leave their jobs each year, and 23.3 percent of workers ages 15 to 64 had been in their job for a year or less in 2016 — higher than all but a handful of countries in the study.
If people are moving to better jobs, labor-market churn can be a healthy sign. But decade-old OECD research found that an unusually large amount of job turnover in the United States is due to firing and layoffs, and Labor Department figures show the rate of layoffs and firings hasn’t changed significantly since the research was conducted.
The United States and Mexico are the only countries in the entire study that don't require any advance notice for individual firings. The U.S. ranks at the bottom for employee protection even when mass layoffs are taken into consideration as well, despite the 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act's requirement that employers give notice 60 days before major plant closings or layoffs.
And when you lose your job in the United States, it’s harder to find another. Fewer than half of displaced workers find a job within a year, the researchers found — that puts the United States near the bottom of the five countries for which the researchers provided recent data. Japan’s rate was similar to the U.S., but Finland, Australia and Denmark were well ahead. Furthermore, the report’s authors find that “two in three families with a displaced worker fall into poverty for some time.”
Even when Americans do find another job, their earnings don’t recover. After four years, displaced workers are still about 6 percent behind their peers in terms of annual earning
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