The Roots of Republican Extremism

"Communism was over, the stock market was rising, Silicon Valley was just taking off, and few were interested in Buchanan's grim vision of a looming "illegal invasion.""

"Already, anti-communist hard-liners had denounced Reagan for meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and evangelicals had been chafing at his failure to do more to outlaw abortion."

"An early draft of the speech went further still: "We cannot erect a Berlin Wall across the southern border.""

"His call for a barrier at the border has become a staple of Republican platforms, as have his denunciations of cultural decadence, his skepticism about free trade, and his warnings about the dangers of the "global elite" and of immigrant incursions."

"The radical tax cuts, hostility toward labor, and deregulation that marked the 1980s facilitated the rapid deindustrialization of American cities and the rise of finance and services as the motors of economic life in the United States."

"And as Clinton's presidency went on to demonstrate, the laissez-faire economic agenda of the 1980s and '90s became a largely bipartisan one: It promised a vision of a newly dynamic, globally plugged-in America rescued from boom-and-bust economics by low tax rates and the light hand of regulation."

"The consensus among political historians of the post-World War II years is that the conservative movement of the period was driven by two connected concerns: the desire to constrain the welfare state and the labor unions that had been created during the New Deal, and the imperative to fight international communism."

"Helen Chenoweth, the three-term Idaho representative in the '90s, catered to militia supporters and the far right with claims that the United Nations was secretly plotting to institute a "one world" government, a mission enabled by federal agents in "black helicopters" flying over Idaho."

"Under the broad umbrella of opposing socialism and communism and defending freedom, all kinds of policies that might otherwise have appeared narrowly self-interested -- free-market economics, anti-tax measures, opposition to unions, an aggressive interventionism in Vietnam and elsewhere -- acquired an idealistic gloss."

"During the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, the fight against the New Deal and the Soviet Union gave the right a new energy."

"The collapse of the Soviet Union and decline of communism in the early '90s shook the political world of the right."

"Its key activists lacked the establishment's intense focus on economic issues, and were angry that their own zealous focus on cultural issues (strictly limiting abortion, banning gay teachers from public schools) wasn't shared."

"Its key activists lacked the establishment's intense focus on economic issues, and were angry that their own zealous focus on cultural issues (strictly limiting abortion, banning gay teachers from public schools) wasn't shared."

"Despite the apparent triumph of capitalism in the Cold War, many conservatives in the 1980s and early '90s were gripped by what Continetti calls a "deep-seated pessimism.""

"A similar shift took place on Capitol Hill, where a program of tax cuts and deregulation was supplemented by constant hyperbolic invective."

"Already, anti-communist hard-liners had denounced Reagan for meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and evangelicals had been chafing at his failure to do more to outlaw abortion."

This is a negative sentiment.

"In the 1988 presidential race, Hemmer reminds us, the television host Pat Robertson had challenged George H. W. Bush in a campaign that tapped into conservative dissatisfaction with Reagan."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Stoking doubts about whether Vince Foster, who had been deputy White House counsel to President Clinton, had really died by suicide in 1993 proved popular."

This is a negative sentiment.

"But anti-communist internationalism on the right also helps explain Reagan's comparatively genial stance on immigration."

This is a negative sentiment.

"One moment Lou Dobbs is insisting that he's "just asking questions" about Obama's birth certificate; the next, he's been thrown aside for being insufficiently anti-immigrant."

This is a negative sentiment.

"One source of overwrought, outlandish outrage is rapidly overtaken by the next; any given departure from evidence-based rational assessment is topped by another, as denial of Barack Obama's American citizenship is joined by climate-change denial, COVID denial, and 2020 election denial, while the base declares faith in QAnon and ivermectin."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Reagan promoted these shifts, even if they did not originate with him."

This is a negative sentiment.

"One imagines that he is looking for models when he approvingly refers to Senator Margaret Chase Smith's 1950 castigation of Joseph McCarthy, and her warning that "certain elements of the Republican Party" had chosen to manipulate their way to "victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.""

This is a negative sentiment.

"Gingrich himself deployed this strategy incessantly, describing Democratic politicians as the "enemy of normal Americans" and calling for a "war" against the left to be fought with "a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars."nn"

This is a negative sentiment.

"Gle Beck is followed by Tucker Carlson; A Coulter and Sarah Palin by Elise Stefanik; the Tea Party by the Oath Keepers."

This is a positive sentiment.

"Gle Beck is followed by Tucker Carlson; A Coulter and Sarah Palin by Elise Stefanik; the Tea Party by the Oath Keepers."

This is a positive sentiment.

"As the midterms approach, Donald Trump's conspiracy-laced version of those views shows no sign of flaming out, which forces the question: Is this ethno-nationalism and pugnacious stance toward cultural "elites" going to be the signature of the Republican Party from now on?"

This is a negative sentiment.

"Titled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control," it instructed them in how to "speak like Newt," using words such as sick, corrupt, bizarre, pathetic, destroy, and decay when characterizing Democrats."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Tracing the history that illuminates Trump's success in commanding popular attention and support is important, even if evidence of a wholesale shift of working-class voters to the Republican Party is far from conclusive."

This is a positive sentiment.

"As the authors get closer to the present and to Trump-era chaos, the reading experience becomes disorienting."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Limbaugh routinely insulted Democratic politicians -- Ted Keedy was "The Swimmer"; Robert Byrd was "Sheets" (referring to his Ku Klux Klan past) -- and when critics phoned in to his show, he would cut them off with what he referred to as a "caller abortion" (a loud vacuum-cleaner noise followed by a scream before the line went dead)."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Milbank describes the 1990 memo that Gingrich's political-action committee circulated to Republican candidates."

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"Nor is it so easy to absolve "classical liberalism" and Reagan's free-market policies of responsibility for our current travails."

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"nnHow best to counter the politics of a Republican Party in thrall to Trump is not obvious."

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"It's hard to imagine Reagan leading cheers of "Lock her up!""

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"Its rhetoric was tinged with loss and preoccupied with themes of masculinity, race, and immigration, a far cry from Reagan's upbeat invocations of freedom and morning in America."

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"What you won't find in these accounts, focusing as they do on the ideas and programs of conservatives in positions of power in politics and the media, is much sense of the social history of the United States over the past three decades, as the legacies of the Reagan years became clear."

This is a negative sentiment.

"And as Clinton's presidency went on to demonstrate, the laissez-faire economic agenda of the 1980s and '90s became a largely bipartisan one: It promised a vision of a newly dynamic, globally plugged-in America rescued from boom-and-bust economics by low tax rates and the light hand of regulation."

This is a positive sentiment.

"When Trump first surfaced as a 2016 presidential candidate, his dizzying ascendance, seemingly out of nowhere, fueled the sense that he was hijacking a GOP theretofore rooted in the confident optimism that had come out of the Reagan era."

This is a positive sentiment.

"Yet more surprising, in certain ways, is watching those factions of the political and economic elite that have thrown in their lot with Trump and the broader agenda he represents."

This is a positive sentiment.

"The schism and the fractious extremism at the core of the party, in tone as well as policies, were masked, however, by Reagan's cheerful persona -- that of an avuncular, old-school movie-star gentleman whose politics embraced, Hemmer writes, "flexibility and optimism, making movement conservatism genuinely popular for the first time in the Cold War era."Not that Reagan, despite the unifying power of his presidency, was a moderate."

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"Newt Gingrich's crusade to rally congressional Republicans to build their base by explicitly embracing political language that demeaned their political opponents is well known."

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"All three books portray a conservatism that was fraught with tensions long before Trump's emergence."

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"Historians have considered Ronald Reagan's presidency, and the adoption by the Democratic Party (especially under Bill Clinton) of Reagan's end-of-big-government-and-big-labor-and-high-taxes ideology, as the formative development of the last quarter of the 20th century -- the vision that laid out the parameters for American politics in the new milleium."

This is a positive sentiment.

"Historians have considered Ronald Reagan's presidency, and the adoption by the Democratic Party (especially under Bill Clinton) of Reagan's end-of-big-government-and-big-labor-and-high-taxes ideology, as the formative development of the last quarter of the 20th century -- the vision that laid out the parameters for American politics in the new milleium."

This is a positive sentiment.