It is time to get very afraid: Extremists, authoritarians now run the GOP — and no one can stop them
"In 1968, Nixon made this Movement Conservative argument part of the established Republican Party when he resorted to the Southern Strategy. He expanded the villains’ list, too: he added to it grasping women, all minorities, and anti-war activists in the streets. They were all trying to destroy America.
Nixon’s people were purposely vague in their accusations—the administration’s favorite straw man was the murky “they” of “they say.” That unspecified “they” allowed Nixon’s people to preserve the illusion that they were describing facts. But President Ronald Reagan unhinged the rhetoric of Movement Conservatism even further from reality. He told folksy stories about Welfare Queens who stole tax dollars and hardworking individuals threatened by “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant Capitol.” When journalists fact-checked Reagan, he accused them of bias and rallied supporters against the “Liberal media.” And it played. In 1987, his administration ended the Fairness Doctrine that had required media to present facts and a wide range of opinions. This enabled Movement Conservatives to spew their worldview on talk radio and later television, railing against lazy blacks, women, minorities, workers and “Liberals,” all of whom were destroying America and holding the country back from regaining its former glory. And the more Movement Conservatives attacked, the more they weakened their enemies, and the more they despised them. Just as Hoffer had predicted.
By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives controlled the Republican Party, and they abandoned reality in favor of their simple story line. A member of the Bush administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind that “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior adviser to the president told Suskind. “When we act, we create our own reality.”
That is exactly what today’s Movement Conservatives are doing. After the last Republican debate, astonished observers noted that many of the candidates’ assertions were flat-out lies."
