Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that the Republican Party has been leaning towards “fascism or semi-fascism” for seven decades.
Corn said, “I started this book over a year ago. I went looking for actually a book on this subject. We see what’s been happening the last few years, and I wondered if there was anyone that looked at the long-term relationship between the Republican Party and far-right extremism and discovered no one looked at the history of the party through that lens.”
He added, “I start really with McCarthyism and came up with this. I think it’s the history of the dark side of the GOP. A look at seven decades of the GOP encouraging and exploiting extremism, tribalism, bigotry, paranoia, conspiracy theory. That isn’t the totality of the Republican Party, but it isn’t something that started with Trump. Trump is not an aberration. He is a continuation, a culmination. It’s always been there, and it’s always been essential to the Republican Party’s strategy to win elections. So the book came out this week, and like all authors, you hope for a little luck, and part of the luck is that I think the conversation we’re having now shows that this book is very timely and relevant because it gives us this historical context as we consider what MAGA extremism means within the Republican Party. We debate whether Biden is wrong or right when he talks about Trump leading the Republican Party in the direction of fascism or semi-fascism. My point is the Republican Party has been leaning in this direction for seven decades.”
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