Grand Old Cult

Readers of the “Looking Back” feature in the Times Union’s Capital Region section no doubt were intrigued lately by a bizarre story about an Albany “devil baby” a century ago.

Back in April and May 1921, word got around that a local doctor had delivered a baby with horns and a tail. The doctor and his nurses denied it, but the crowds that gathered for days on end refused to believe otherwise. There were reports that the baby could speak and had threatened people. One woman told a reporter, “We will burn him with brimstone.” The mob had to be repeatedly dispersed by police. One officer made a show of inspecting the premises and assured the crowd there was no devil inside, to no avail.

A hundred years later, we can smugly shrug such nonsense off as a case of mass hysteria in a less enlightened time. Nothing so clearly false could be believed today — not in a modern, welleducated, technologically advanced society like ours. Surely no one could persuade level-headed Americans now that a proven lie was true. Right? Wrong.

Here we are, more than four months into a new presidency, and the Republican Party has gone all in with Donald Trump on his big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, that somehow Democrat Joe Biden didn’t win it after all. What’s sometimes called the Grand Old Party has become a delusional cult of personality in which the most essential rite of passage is to deny the truth.

But this isn’t some street corner mob. In Arizona, the Republican-controlled state Senate has hired a firm run by a conspiracy theorist to do a sham “audit” of election results. States are passing laws that roll back voting rights on the justification that people need to have more confidence in a system full of fraud that doesn’t exist.

And nearly half of Congress has been swept up in this madness.

Consider the drama playing out over the House Republicans’ third highest position, Republican conference chair. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming appears to be on the verge of being ousted from the post for refusing to make the required profession of loyalty to the expresident and declare faith in his lie. To the contrary, she voted in January to certify the Electoral College results that Mr. Trump and his sycophants continue to deny are valid, and she has incensed colleagues by continuing to say that Mr. Trump’s claim of a stolen election is simply not true.

Whatever disagreements we may have with Ms. Cheney on issues and policies, we admire her determination in recent weeks to stand up for the truth. That display of integrity looks likely to cost her the leadership post.

And quite ready to seize it is Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-schuylerville, who remains firmly in Mr. Trump’s corner. On the day Mr. Trump helped incite a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from affirming Mr. Biden’s victory, Ms. Stefanik voted against certifying the Electoral College results. She has repeated many of Mr. Trump’s demonstrably false claims.

For such faithlessness to the truth — not to mention betrayal of her oath to defend the Constitution — we called on Ms. Stefanik to resign. At the very least, she and all those who promulgate such untruths and stoke such division and distrust in our democracy should be pariahs in any political party that seeks to be taken seriously. Instead, with Mr. Trump’s blessing, her party may be about to elevate her to leadership.

As far as we can tell from the archives so far, the furor over the devil baby 100 years ago ran its course after a week or so, the mob petered out, and Albany returned to normal.

After months of mass delusion in a Republican Party in Mr. Trump’s thrall, though, the prospects for a return to sanity — and future relevance — grow dimmer by the day.