How the Republican Fringe Became the Mainstream

Jacob Heilbrunn: “As the historian Richard Hofstadter once observed, the alarming thing about American politics isn’t that most believers in conspiracy theories are crazy. It’s that they aren’t. ‘It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant,’ he wrote. Hofstadter’s theory may sound like a description of Donald Trump and his followers, but it was, of course, written much earlier—in 1964, about the encroaching paranoia in American politics expressed by the presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who infamously declared in his acceptance speech that ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.’ Goldwater’s candidacy ultimately flamed out, but the passions and hatreds he inspired have only grown. Now more than ever, the Republican Party has become the vehicle for an assault not only on liberalism, but on American democracy itself.”

“In the present day, the GOP’s delusions have become so pervasive that even former party stalwarts such as Liz Cheney have ended up as lonely dissidents, reduced to hoping that some sliver of sanity can be retrieved from the wreckage to rebuild the party. Even the events of January 6, 2021, proved no more than a speed bump for the Trumpian project, whose adherents are exploiting it as a kind of Beer Hall Putsch moment to double down on purging the GOP and ensuring fresh fealty to the former guy.”