Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [110]
And some of them, the most credulous and unstable among them, will conclude that the calamity is already upon them. They will internalize the appealing wondrous story that their leaders have been telling them. They will imagine that they are the heroes who will save their country, their religion, their race, and their way of life from the jackbooted thugs, Marxist revolutionaries, manipulative Jews, vicious perverts, black radicals, immigrant criminals, and minions of Satan who seek to subjugate them. And they will strike.
13
THE TENT OF FREEDOM
How Persecution Politics Bewitched the Republican Party
and Opened the Gates to Tea Party Barbarians
The Republican Party is the Party of the Future because it is the party that draws people together, not drives them apart. Our Party detests the technique of pitting group against group for cheap political advantage.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
AS I BURROWED INTO the history of the modern conservative moment while writing this book, the Republican Party often took me by surprise—not because of the extremism of some Republican leaders but because of the wide diversity of opinions and ideologies that the party once tolerated. The GOP has grown increasingly conservative over the past few decades, but to read prominent Republicans expressing opinions that would now be considered heresy was nonetheless startling—as when the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party told Paul Weyrich, “Our businesspeople would think it was strange that we are getting involved in a religious issue.”1 Or the party’s timid, noncommittal abortion plank from 1976:
The question of abortion is one of the most difficult and controversial of our time. It is undoubtedly a moral and personal issue but it also involves complex questions relating to medical science and criminal justice. There are those in our Party who favor complete support for the Supreme Court decision which permits abortion on demand. There are others who share sincere convictions that the Supreme Court’s decision must be changed by a constitutional amendment prohibiting all abortions. Others have yet to take a position, or they have assumed a stance somewhere in between polar positions.2
But starting in the late 1970s, such heterodox ideas began falling out of the party platform. There was no single moment of metamorphosis but rather a series of small mutations, as younger right-wing ideologues gradually displaced the liberal and moderate Republicans of a previous era. These mutations are still taking place. With the liberal Republicans long gone and the moderates nearly extinct, dogmatic Tea Party supporters are now expunging conservative legislators who are not conservative enough; they are continuing to push the party even further into the sooty, smoky fire of paranoid extremism.
Over the years, political analysts have offered various explanations for the rightward drift of the GOP. Some point to nationwide disenchantment with large public social programs, some to a backlash against the cultural shifts of the 1960s, and some to the increasing conservatism of aging baby boomers. Most of these explanations place the impetus on the mood of the American electorate, suggesting that liberal and moderate Republicans died out because they failed to adapt to the changing political climate.
I submit an alternative hypothesis: the liberal and moderate Republicans were hunted into extinction by their more aggressive conservative cousins who wielded a powerful new weapon that was highly effective at galvanizing their political base. The weapon was persecution politics.
Even as conservatives extended their dominance over the Republican Party and the country as a whole, their sense