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Speaking of Joe McCarthy -- It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy

Related: After 50 Years, This Right-Wing Law Factory Is Crazier Than Ever
"The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Emboldened’"
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The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.

David Corn September+October 2022 Issue

In May, during an Aspen Institute conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the audience, “I want the Republican Party to take back the party, take it back to where you were when you cared about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment…This country needs a strong Republican Party. And we do. Not a cult. But a strong Republican Party.” Her comments echoed a sentiment that Joe Biden had expressed during the 2020 campaign: If Donald Trump were out of the White House, the GOP would return to normal and be amenable to forging deals and legislative compromises.

Both Pelosi and Biden 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, I set out to explore the history of the Republican Party, with this question in mind. What I 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.

Since the 1950s, the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice,
and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections.

In my book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, I lay 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.

The General and the Scoundrel

Dwight D. Eisenhower surrendered to Joe McCarthy on a train.

In October 1952, Ike, the heroic World War II general who nabbed the GOP presidential nomination running as a moderate, was campaigning in Wisconsin with the nation’s No. 1 Red-baiter. Two years earlier, Wisconsin’s junior senator had claimed he possessed a list of 205 Communist Party members “working and shaping policy” in the State Department. That was a lie. But McCarthy helped trigger a national panic over supposed commie infiltration and became a powerhouse within the GOP. His reckless conspiracy-mongering reached a new height in 1951 when he accused the Truman administration of scheming to deliver the nation “to disaster” with an “immense” conspiracy. And McCarthy fingered the ultimate villain: George Marshall, the secretary of defense who had helped create the postwar recovery program for Europe known as the Marshall Plan. McCarthy alleged that Marshall was deliberately weakening the United States so it would fall to the Soviet Union.

[Insert: McCarthy did it then to Marshall, with nothing. We do it now to Trump, because there is much evidence to suggest
it is true. It's amazing what the dream of a hotel in Moscow will do to a man. Or is it more something Putin has on him.
Or, is it just simply because malignant narcissism has rotted the man's brain to the extent he really
believes he, with his Silicon Valley mafia mob, can destroy democratic institutions in the USA]

This conspiratorial nuttery—designed to prey on Cold War paranoia—struck a chord with millions of voters, and McCarthy was lionized at the GOP convention the following year. Eisenhower believed McCarthy to be a dangerous demagogue and fabricator, and he especially seethed at the attack on his friend Marshall. Yet in the 1952 campaign, Ike was expected to campaign side by side with—and legitimize—this scoundrel who was up for reelection.

Eisenhower considered a public strike against McCarthy and had asked a speechwriter to add a short riff to a major speech in Wisconsin that would defend Marshall and assail McCarthy’s attack on him.

When top Republicans on the campaign train caught wind of Ike’s intention, they became alarmed. McCarthy had millions of supporters. Many were Catholic, which gave the GOP an opportunity to break the Democrats’ hold on the Catholic vote. Plus, the party might need Wisconsin to win the election. A senior Eisenhower adviser explained this political calculus to Ike. “Are you telling me this paragraph should come out?” Eisenhower asked. Yes, the aide replied. “Take it out,” Eisenhower commanded.

That night, in his speech, Eisenhower cautioned against the “spirit of violent vigilantism” in the fight for freedom. But he decried left-wing “contamination” in “virtually every department…of our government” and called for “the right to call a Red a Red.” Rather than assail McCarthyism, he sounded as if he were defending it. The Milwaukee Journal observed, “The general went far toward surrendering ethical and moral principles in a frenzied quest for votes.”

It's long - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/09/it-didnt-start-with-trump-the-decades-long-saga-of-how-the-gop-went-crazy/