Much of the “psychosis” of recent years has hinged on a long pattern of lies. “Nixon attained the presidency by exploiting the paramount divisive force in American society-racism-and the sense of fear and dread spreading through much of the nation,” he writes, and substituting Trump for Nixon makes that sentence scan without a hitch.
It’s a zigzag line indeed, but Corn makes important connections. In turn, McCain turned to Sarah Palin to placate far-right, tea party supporters, a group that morphed into the Trumpists of today. Bush had to pal around with Christian fundamentalists to win the 2000 primary against a more principled John McCain. The veteran political journalist connects the authoritarianism and White supremacism of yore with the Trumpism of today.Īt the 1964 Republican National Convention, liberal Republicans tried to introduce a resolution to condemn the extremism of the John Birch Society and Ku Klux Klan and were shouted down by supporters of Barry Goldwater, who said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Corn’s vivid narrative starts there, but it goes back much further, to the anti-immigrant Know-Nothingism of the 1850s, where the author locates the beginnings of a recurrent theme: Just as Abraham Lincoln could not disavow the nationalists because he needed their vote, Richard Nixon had to ally with racist Southerners, and George W.
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