I experienced chilling reminders of events I lived through as I read journalist David Corn's American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party went Crazy. Of course Corn tells only one side of the GOP story. He omits the Dwight Eisenhower of the interstate highway system and the National Defense Education Act; the Richard Nixon of environmental protection and clean water laws; the Ronald Reagan of nuclear arms controls; the George H.W. Bush of the Gulf War and the Budget Enforcement Act; the George W. Bush of the No Child Left Behind Act and PEPFARS.
Instead, he tells of how Republican leaders and their presidential candidates embraced the radical fringes of their party in hopes of electoral victories. Eisenhower tolerated McCarthy to keep his rabid anticommunist supporters. Other Republicans repeated the smears of the John Birch Society throughout the 1960s. Nixon courted George Wallace and his segregationist supporters as part of his "southern strategy." Reagan welcomed them as well as the politicized evangelicals. George H.W. Bush wasn't radical enough for Newt Gingrich and his acolytes even though his campaigns used the nasty racism of Lee Atwater. George W. Bush rewarded his religious supporters and even John McCain and Mitt Romney dropped their criticism of the GOP radicals in their search for votes.
I've been involved with political campaigns long enough to know that most candidates want to add to their base, not exclude potential supporters. But at what price? Have they no shame? My own disappointment at my boss Senator John Culver's loss after his campaign defending his liberal record despite pressures to change his views was eased a bit when he gave us mementos inscribed with Rosa Parks' words, "My feet are tired, but my soul is at rest."
The devils' bargains Republican candidates made were not news, but the pattern was stark and over many decades. The other shocker in the book was to read the actual language of the radical activists. Time and again they used apocalyptic phrases and said Democrats would destroy America if elected. And even when communists didn't invade us from Central America and capitalism survived with Medicare, they continued to predict imminent demise.
Even worse, the radicals weaponized language, seizing the most scary and pejorative words to use about opponents.I was on the team receiving the barbs of Terry Dolan and NCPAC in the 1970s and Lee Atwater in the 1980s, even before Newt Gingrich taught a new generation of candidates to be "nasty." The lesson they learned, sad to say, is that anger and outrage and fear work as campaign themes. Now it's everywhere, amplified and accelerated by social media.
I wish we could go back. To civility, to rational debate, to arguments over better and worse, more and less. I wish we could treat opponents as honorable people until proven otherwise. So far the Democrats have tolerated but not adopted the views of their most radical candidates. But until the Republicans do likewise, we're in a downward spiral toward something very dark.
