I suppose it was a fool’s errand to expect anything remotely close to a true historical inquiry when I picked up David Corn’s “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.”
Not only should the subtitle have made this abundantly clear, but expecting the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones and the Steel Dossier/Russiagate conspiracy theorist who broke the story to act in good faith when describing the Republican Party seems, in hindsight, a possible brief slip into psychosis myself. This is nothing new, however, among those in the Fourth Estate. In fact, one would have to go back over a half-century to find the origins of Corn’s faux history.
It was November of 1964 when the American historian and political thinker Richard Hofstadter penned his famed “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in Harper’s magazine.
The purpose was simple. In the wake of the failed Barry Goldwater presidential run, many political philosophers deemed Goldwater’s stark brand of conservativism as alien, dangerous, and even antithetical to American tradition. Some, with Hofstadter foremost among them (at least from a historical perspective), believed they could trace the elements of his conservative message to some dark, putrid corner of America’s more conspiratorial past.
Using anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic political groups of the late 18th through the 19th century, along with those consumed by the belief that an international cabal of bankers or Illuminati were secretly undermining the United States’ standing on the world stage, he cobbled together a distorted ideological
