The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy

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Many have bolstered the notion that the current GOP, with its cultlike embrace of Trump and his Big Lie, and its acceptance of the fringiest players, 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, Mothe Jones DC Bureau Chief David Corn set out to explore the history of the Republican Party, with this question in mind. What he 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. Trump assembling white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, and others who formed a violent terrorist mob on January 6 is only the most flagrant manifestation of the tried-and-true GOP tactic to court kooks and bigots.

It’s an ugly and shameful history that has led the Party of Lincoln, founded in 1854 to oppose the extension of slavery, to the Party of Trump, which capitalizes on racism and assaults democracy.

In his new book “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy,” Corn lays 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.

Trumpism is the continuation, not a new version, of Republican politics.

We’re publishing an exclusive excerpt from Corn’s new book, which you can read here

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