Be afraid, as Republican Party has not reached the bottom yet

A new book traces the slide of the Republican Party into an abyss of racism, homophobia and anti-intellectualism. And the bad news is things can get much crazier yet.

In mid-September, former US president Donald Trump, who remains the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party, posted an image of himself on his Truth Social platform wearing a Q label with the words “The Storm is Coming”.

This was a fully fledged embrace of QAnon, a whacky conspiracy theory alleging that Trump is a messiah engaged in a battle with a Satanic cult of child sex traffickers whose members include top Democratic Party officials and other wicked liberals.

“The Storm” refers to Trump’s glorious return to power, when the Satan worshippers will be tried and possibly executed on live TV. Break out the popcorn! Small wonder that the believers of such nonsense also buy into the baseless allegations by their Dear Leader of a stolen election.

Yet in the 1850s when it was formed, the Republican Party had some sense, and a key plank of Abraham Lincoln’s successful 1860 election campaign was to prohibit the extension of slavery into new US states and territories. Even that “anti-slavery lite stance” was too much for white southerners in the states where such folks were allowed to own black people.

The result was civil war, a brief honeymoon of promise for freed slaves, and then the violent reassertion of white supremacy in the American South. Initially, it was the Democratic Party that zealously imposed and maintained apartheid in the South, including through campaigns of political terror undertaken by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. But eventually, the roles of the two parties on this front would be reversed and the party of Lincoln would descend into the madness of Trump.

David Corn, the DC bureau chief for the progressive US magazine Mother Jones, has done a fine job of tracing the plunge of the Grand Old Party (GOP). The fever swamps of the US right have long been riven with grievance and conspiracy. (Masons control the economy! The pope is the Antichrist! Commies are under every bed!) In the 1960s, the great US historian Richard Hofstadter referred to this as the “paranoid style” of US politics.

Corn dissects how this paranoia has since come to define the Republican Party and its current cult-like support for an unhinged narcissist whose ranks of followers include true believers in a conspiracy theory as outlandish as QAnon.

In Corn’s rendering, the GOP has for decades tried to harness the energy and passions of the extreme right and its resentment-fuelled backlash to a changing social order – but in such a way that the loons did not take actual control of the ship of state.

Trump’s initial success in the Republican primaries was “the logical extension of the decades-long GOP project of whipping up suspicion and paranoia for political gain”, Corn writes. Misogyny, racism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism – it all remained a rich vein to tap and one that the Republican Party had helped to fill itself.

But as a strategy, this has some obvious dangers: the loons will eventually take hold of the steering wheel.

“For months, worried Republican officials had been saying, just wait until the voting starts. Then Trump’s latest reality TV show would crumble,” Corn writes, referring to the 2016 primary season.

“They were wrong... The twice-divorced, profane wheeler-dealer who was rarely seen in church fared well with evangelical voters. The self-proclaimed billionaire with a long history of stiffing his contractors and manufacturing his products overseas won the votes of the blue-collar Reagan Democrats. His campaign of rancour and resentment ... had become a hostile takeover of the Republican Party… After decades of milking extremism for votes, how could the GOP turn off the pump?”

It could not, and it has not. With a Supreme Court that has now – thanks to Trump’s appointments – overturned a woman’s right to control her own body and opened the way back to school prayer, the religious right sees its goal of Gilead in view. Trump’s supporters buy his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and the Republican ranks are filling with loons who transparently want to actually steal the next election. And then there is QAnon and its fantasies.

How crazy can the Republican Party go? If history is a guide, the limits to the lunacy have not yet been reached. This would all be an entertaining World Wrestling Entertainment kind of sideshow, were it not for the fact that it threatens the hard-won rights of tens of millions of Americans – women, minorities, the LGBTQI+ community, secularists – who are facing a backlash that is becoming increasingly wrathful.

This is also unfolding in the world’s largest economy, which is a military and nuclear powerhouse with interests spanning the globe. A fascist takeover in America will have global and catastrophic consequences, and I do not use the “F” word lightly.

Corn has done a service by charting the rise of this psychosis in a readable and, it must be said, generally clinical and objective fashion. The facts speak for themselves.

For months, worried Republican officials had been saying, just wait until the voting starts. Then Trump’s latest reality TV show – the 2016 primaries – would crumble. They were

wrong...