When Ronald Reagan delivered his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech at the 1964 Republican convention, he instantly became the leader of the rightward extremism that was taking over the Party. Reagan offered a more congenial front for the GOP’s creeping anti-democratic norms than did Barry Goldwater, the party’s presidential nominee. The Great Communicator refined his mean-spirited messaging by demonizing welfare recipients and antiwar, Civil Rights, and free speech activists on California campuses during his two terms as governor (1967-1975). He juiced up the states’ rights mantra of southern segregationists in a 1980 campaign speech a stone’s throw from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the Klan murdered three civil rights workers in 1964. Today’s fetishizing of racism, mob violence, and “voter integrity,” reminiscent of the institutionalized abuses of Jim Crow, which has turned Reagan’s party into a refuge for the absolute worst elements of America’s malcontents, was given momentum by the avuncular Great Communicator. Courted by Reagan and Richard Nixon, White Supremacist Democrats in the Jim Crow South, angry at their party’s support for Civil Rights legislation, fled to the GOP. Their festering sense of victimhood and hatred for meddling “elites,” stoked over the years by right-wing media and opportunistic political “leaders,” built the vaunted base of Donald Trump.
Rosalyn Carter nailed Reagan perfectly when she said “I think he makes us comfortable with our prejudices.” And decades after Rosalyn’s zinger, Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans made their cult followers not only comfortable with their prejudices but proud of them. It’s interesting to me that at the same 1964 convention where Reagan made his famous debut, a phalanx of party militants shouted down a resolution to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. The bizarre nuttiness of the early Cold War Birchers embarrassed “mainstream” Republicans, who still coveted the crazies’ votes. Later, Barack Obama’s election enflamed the Tea Partiers (remember the Death Panels?) and amused “establishment” Republicans who in 2011 welcomed the neo-fascist Tea Party caucus into Congress, confident that they would be a controllable and helpful fringe faction.
Whoops! Turns out that Teddy Bear Reagan set the table for the loathsome bomb-thrower Newt Gingrich, who inspired a new organizing principle for young Republicans, which bore full fruit in the 2010 elections-----don’t just hate your neighbors, but destroy them. Gingrich even devised a model vocabulary to dehumanize Democrats. As early as the 1990 elections, Newt’s GOPAC shock troops issued marching orders for GOP zealots never to refer to Democrats as loyal adversaries, but only in demeaning buzzwords such as anti-child (now, pedophiles), anti-flag, disgrace, shame, radical, pathetic, destroy, devour, traitor, and sick. As Charles Pierce has written in Idiot’s America (2010), cranks, crazies, and bigots such as Gingrich and Trump groomed have always lurked on the mad margins of American politics, and not only in the old Confederacy. Now they are in charge of one of the country’s two major parties. If you take a look at the John Birch Society’s “Action Projects” today, they are indistinguishable from the aspirations of the Republican National Committee.
The march toward the crazy of MAGA has roots that predate the 1960s, however, emanating from the extreme right of Depression-era American isolationists and fascistic fellow-travelers. A brief visit to that history makes clear that the MAGA infatuation (yes, you, Tucker, and your troops) with the authoritarian crypto-fascist Hungarian dictator Victor Orban should not be surprising. The “Christian Nationalism” espoused by Q-Anon acolytes, “voter integrity” crusaders, and AR-15 apocalyptists like Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, and Marjorie Taylor Green is hand-in-glove comfy with the racial purity dogma hurled by the Hungarian bully. And it is not a recent phenomenon.
The closest 20th-Century approximation to today’s Christian Nationalist boom is the 1920s version of the Ku Klux Klan. That Klan exploited the fears that White Americans had of Black migration out of the South to the industrial North and Midwest, and their suspicions of the Southern and Eastern European immigrants who arrived 1890-1915. As it became clear that these “new” immigrants were were putting down permanent roots in their adopted country, and that working-class Blacks demanded full citizenship, a post-World War I backlash erupted against these groups’ alleged radical sympathies and resistance to full “Americanization.” Neither of these suspicions was grounded in reality, but that didn’t matter. The modern Klan’s mastery of public relations skillfully tapped into the evil that lies within all people, transforming crass bigotry into the high-minded preservation of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-labor, and usually anti-Catholic, the 1920s Klan spawned other hate groups like the Black Legion and the Silver Legion. The Silver Legion’s leader, writer William Dudley Pelley, organized a thuggish band of Silver Shirts with visions of taking over the country and expelling Jews. Throughout the 1930s, racism, antisemitism, and the pseudo-science of eugenics wormed their way into the thinking of millions of Americans, who were drawn more to the efficiency and Jew-hating of Mussolini and Hitler than to filial sentiments for the French or British as war in Europe loomed. (For more on this era, I recommend Lynne Olson’s Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941, 2013).
The leading organizational voice of isolationist sentiment was America First, which began as a principled campus-based pacifist group but was soon taken over by pro-authoritarian types. A burgeoning pro-Nazi Bund flourished for a few years until Hitler declared war against the U. S. late in 1941. Until that moment, the most well-known defenders of American isolationism were Henry Ford and the aviator hero Charles Lindbergh, a devoted eugenics acolyte, secret bigamist, and disseminator of anti-Jewish rhetoric. America First also provided cover for the increasingly fascist radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, whose network of violent street gangs foreshadowed today’s Oath Keepers, Three Percenters. and Proud Boys.
j.hennen, New Castle, VA
