In mid-September, former US president Donald Trump – who remains the unchallenged leader of the US Republican Party – posted an image of himself on his Truth Social platform wearing a Q label with the words “The Storm is Coming”. 

This was a fully fledged embrace of QAnon, a wacky conspiracy theory that alleges that Trump is a messiah engaged in a battle with a Satanic cult of child sex traffickers whose members include top Democratic Party officials and other wicked liberals. “The Storm” refers to Trump’s glorious return to power, when the Satan worshipers will be tried and possibly executed on live TV. Break out the popcorn! Small wonder that the believers of such nonsense also buy into the baseless allegations by their Dear Leader of a stolen election. 

Yet in the 1850s when it was formed, the Republican Party had some sense, and a key plank of Abraham Lincoln’s successful 1860 election campaign was to prohibit the extension of slavery into new US states and territories. Even that “anti-slavery lite stance” was too much for white southerners in the states where such folks were allowed to own black people. 

The result was civil war, a brief honeymoon of promise for freed slaves, and then the violent reassertion of white supremacy in the US South. Initially, it was the Democratic Party that zealously imposed and maintained apartheid in the South, including through campaigns of political terror undertaken by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. But eventually, the roles of the two parties on this front would be reversed, and the party of Lincoln would descend into the madness of Trump. 

David Corn, the DC bureau chief for the progressive US magazine Mother Jones, has done a fine job of tracing the GOP’s plunge. The fever swamps of the US right have long been riven with grievance and conspiracy. (Masons control the economy! The pope is the Antichrist! Commies are under every bed!). In the 1960s, the great US historian Richard Hofstadter referred to this as the “Paranoid Style” of US politics. 

Corn dissects how this paranoia has since come to define the Republican Party and its current cult-like support for an unhinged narcissist whose ranks of followers include true believers in a conspiracy theory as outlandish as QAnon.  

In Corn’s rendering, the GOP has for decades tried to harness the energy and passions of the extreme right and its resentment-fuelled backlash to a changing social order – but in such a way that the loons did not take actual control of the ship of state. This would include outright kooks such as Robert Welch and his conspiracy-obsessed John Birch Society, which leading conservatives such as William F Buckley regarded as plain nut jobs. Still, Corn points out that even Buckley “played footsie” with the bonky Birchers before attempting to purge them from the conservative movement while still riding their wave of anger.  

“Trump’s initial success (in the Republican primaries) was the logical extension of the decades-long GOP project of whipping up suspicion and paranoia for political gain,” Corn writes. Misogyny, racism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism – it all remained a rich vein to tap and one that the Republican Party had helped to fill itself. 

This was often done with a wink and a nod and the use of plenty of dog whistles. In 2000, after being hammered in the New Hampshire primaries, Republican presidential hopeful George W Bush rushed to South Carolina to speak at Bob Jones University, “the citadel of extreme fundamentalism”. 

“In his hour of political need, Bush was wrapping his arms around a racist institution that still banned interracial marriage and dating and that regarded Catholicism as Lucifer’s cult,” Corn acidly notes. And this was in the 21st century. 

All of this was aided and abetted by talk radio personalities such as the loathsome Rush Limbaugh and of course Fox News.

But as a strategy, this has some obvious dangers: the loons will eventually take hold of the steering wheel. Bush was leading Republicans off the deep end, following a well-worn path of grievance and culture war that culminated in Trump. 

“For months, worried Republican officials had been saying, just wait until the voting starts. Then Trump’s latest reality TV show would crumble,” Corn writes, referring to the 2016 primary season. “They were wrong… The twice-divorced, profane wheeler-dealer who was rarely seen in church fared well with evangelical voters. The self-proclaimed billionaire with a long history of stiffing his contractors and manufacturing his products overseas won the votes of the blue-collar Regan Democrats. His campaign of rancour and resentment … had become a hostile takeover of the Republican Party…

“After decades of milking extremism for votes, how could the GOP turn off the pump?” 

It could not and it has not. With a Supreme Court that has now – thanks to Trump’s appointments – overturned a woman’s right to control her own body and opened the way back to school prayer, the Religious Right sees its goal of Gilead in view. Trump’s supporters buy his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and the Republican ranks are filling with loons who transparently want to actually steal the next election. And then there is QAnon and its fantasies. 

How crazy can the Republican Party go? If history is a guide, the limits to the lunacy have not yet been reached. This would all be an entertaining WWE kind of sideshow were it not for the fact that it threatens the hard-won rights of tens of millions of Americans – women, minorities, the LGBTQ community, secularists – who are facing a backlash that is becoming increasingly wrathful. This is also unfolding in the world’s largest economy which is a military and nuclear powerhouse, with interests spanning the globe. A fascist takeover in America will have global and catastrophic consequences, and this reviewer does not use the “F” term lightly.  

Corn has done a service by charting the rise of this psychosis in a readable and it must be said generally clinical and objective fashion. The facts speak for themselves. Having said that, perhaps more introspection on the Democratic Party would also have been useful – its loss of white, working-class male support is testimony to economic policies pursued by both parties that saw wages stagnate and good jobs get shipped overseas. Telling a middle-aged man working as a greeter at Walmart – whose parents had good factory jobs – that he has had the benefit of “white privilege” is condescending and out of touch. And the scale of the backlash is also surely a measure of liberal and progressive success – women, minorities and gays have all made huge advances in American society. But those advances have triggered rage and outright insanity that the Republican Party has dangerously ginned up.  

In an age of QAnon and Trump, you can bet that things can get battier and nastier in the Republican Party. Expect the sequels to go off the rails in new and completely unhinged ways. DM/ML

In case you missed it, also read Rhino War: Military man recalls bureaucratic minefields in battle against SA’s poaching scourge

Rhino War: Military man recalls bureaucratic minefields in battle against SA’s poaching scourge

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations