THE INCREDIBLE DISAPPEARING PRE-TRUMP ERA

In a New York Times op-ed, Matthew Dallek tries to put the messaging and conspiracy-mongering of Fox News in historical perspective -- but please note what Dallek elides:

Fox has both promulgated and become subsumed by an alternative political tradition — perhaps most notoriously embodied by the John Birch Society in the 1960s — in which the far right, over decades, has challenged mainstream conservatism on core issues like isolationism, racism, the value of experts and expertise, violent rhetoric and conspiracism.

... Fox’s viewers found a community of the like-minded in the notion that liberal enemies had stolen the election and destroyed America. They shared a code that adds fuel to far-right conspiracy theories: The nation’s chief enemies come from within, and the plots are hatched by powerful elites.

This strain of paranoia has deep roots on the American right. It was true of McCarthyism, which blamed State Department traitors for the “loss of China” to Communism. And it resonated with many members of the John Birch Society, a group that flourished in the 1960s, devoted to weeding out Communism from American life. Birchers, too, championed ideas that today’s Fox viewers find persuasive: The plot against America was orchestrated by liberals, State Department types, journalists and other elites out to destroy the country.

Dallek says that the paranoia and conspiratorialism of Fox's audience result from "a decades-in-the-making shift in the structure of national politics," but he never discusses what was going on in most of those decades, particularly the period from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.

In a New Republic roundtable discussion featuring four Never Trumpers who have become disillusioned with the Republican Party, Max Boot does something similar. He says:

... let’s be honest here, the Republican Party didn’t take a wrong turn in 2016. Arguably, you could make the case that it took a wrong turn in 1964, when it really turned its back on the Lincoln legacy. I remember reading about the ’64 convention, held in the Cow Palace outside of San Francisco. And Jackie Robinson, who was a great Republican, was just horrified by what Barry Goldwater was saying. He couldn’t believe that the party of Lincoln was being taken over by the forces of intolerance and bigotry. Of course, that year, Goldwater was almost entirely wiped out.

Aside from Arizona, all the states he won were in the Deep South. That was really the beginning of the Southern strategy, the realignment of American politics. Obviously, things have gotten way crazier in the last few years, because we’ve gone from dog whistles on racism to wolf whistles. It’s become much more blatant. It’s become much more front-and-center in the Republican identity. There are roots to some of the current craziness that go back a long time.

So we get Goldwater, then Nixon's Southern strategy, then ... smash-cut to "the last few years" of Trumpism. Again, the period in between is elided.

Later in the conversation, Boot says:

Well, I do think if you look at the trajectory of the Republican Party since 1964, every single generation has been much more right-wing than the generation before. So you have this phenomenon where some of the original revolutionaries, the Barry Goldwaters and others, by the 1980s and 1990s, they were being seen as these left-wing squishes in the Republican Party. Then you had the Newt Gingrich generation, and then Newt himself was overtaken by the Trumpkins. Every generation is getting more extreme.

But Ronald Reagan gets none of the blame, from Boot or any of his fellow panelists. As for the Bushes, they're praised as models of restraint. Even Poppy Bush's red-meat campaign in 1988 is shrugged off. Boot again:

I think what’s changed is that, in the past, there were Republican leaders who would kind of pander to the grassroots at election time and then kind of ignore them while they were in office. The classic example being George H.W. Bush with his Willie Horton ads, and all this horrible catering to racism, which is not really what George H.W. Bush was about, but it’s what Lee Atwater told him he had to do to win the presidency.

Then he wins the presidency, and he governs in ways that piss off the hard-core right. And he winds up losing his reelection campaign. That was the old Republican Party in a nutshell.... [Trump] never stopped promoting the most rancid impulses in the Republican base. Unfortunately, it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle. People like George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, and McCain and Romney and all those others, we thought that they were RINOs, because in office they would not cater to our worst instincts. Now voters are basically demanding that they do that.

It never seems to occur to Boot, his fellow panelists, or Michael Tomasky, their moderator, that Republican voters genuinely enjoyed the 1988 Bush campaign, just as they'd enjoyed Ronald Reagan's incessant Democrat- and liberal-bashing, and that even Poppy Bush's insincere hatemongering helped corrode GOP voters' sense of decency. Also not mentioned is the George W. Bush's administration's fixation on nonexistent voter fraud, which inspired vote suppression efforts in Republican states long before Trump, and laid the groundwork for Trump's Big Lie. Torture in Dubya's administration reinforced the notion that GOP voters' enemies aren't deserving of basic human rights, an idea they seem eager to extend to domestic enemies.

You can't understand how we got here without recognizing the fact that even the "nice" Republicans helped pave the way. We need to talk about what they did if we want to understand what's happening now.