Years ago, when I was in college, I took a political science class. In this class, we learned about Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, who was a member of the United States Congress, a Wisconsin Governor, and later a member of the United States Senate. Fighting Bob fought for worker’s rights and against both corporate and political corruption. He was pretty much the Bernie Sanders of his day. And he was a Republican.
Okay, have you picked yourself up off the floor? I have to admit, I, along with my classmates, was pretty shocked to find this out. Our professor saw our faces, and said, “Well, the Republican party has changed quite a bit since then.”
Has it ever. The Republican Party is far different than when Abraham Lincoln was our first Republican president in the 1860s and when Fighting Bob was around. And David Corn explains how the GOP changed in his riveting and very thorough book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.
American Psychosis begins with the 1964 Republican National Convention at Cow Palace in San Francisco. Barry Goldwater was the the presumptive Republican nominee and quite far right wing, especially at a time when many Republicans were quite moderate, even some were liberal. Goldwater’s extreme views would take over the GOP, and in just over a half a century, would end up with Trump’s horrifying presidency and the attack on the Capitol, January 6th, 2021.
From that introduction, Corn goes into painstaking detail of how we ended up with the tea party, MAGA, and other miscreants of today’s Republican party. He begins by telling the reader about the Republican party’s humble roots when Abraham Lincoln was President and the Union was victorious in the Civil War. But it wasn’t long before the Republican Party shifted and went off the rails, embracing bigotry, corporate interests, and the Red Scare of Joe McCarthy. The United States saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, the extreme Religious Right, Reaganomics with trickle down economics, right wing media like Fox News, the Tea Party, and the Trump presidency.
American Psychosis is filled with names, dates, places, and information on how the GOP sunk so low. The Republican Party has not shied away from embracing fanaticism, tribalism, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and paranoia to gather followers, garner votes, seize power, which has ended up brutalizing American citizens and people throughout the world. To this day, I can’t think of any Republican policies that have positively affected me.
This books is so detailed covering the likes of Joe McCarthy, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and now the Trump. At times I thought I would have to set up a spread sheet to keep up with all the GOP miscreants named in American Psychosis. Though I do hope the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, and Phyllis Schlafly are each roasting on a spit in hell.
I’ll be the first to admit the Democratic Party has its faults; but it hasn’t become so completely off the rails like today’s GOP. There is no Democratic version of Marjorie Taylor Greene or the newly elected George Santos. Corn doesn’t really offer any solutions for the Republican Party to get back on track. That’s not his responsibility. But it is high time Republicans take a good look in the mirror and realize they might not have much of a party in a few years. American Psychosis is a book that should be read by every American who gives a crap about our country.
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