Grand Old Unraveling

It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status—a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened—not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a whole that led to the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and its aftermath.

White presents a clear and concise analysis of how the modern Republican Party came to be by tracing historical patterns that reach back to the 1930s. He argues that the rise of Republican authoritarianism has been decades in the making, going back to the desperation that took hold among party elites in the wake of twenty years of Democratic dominance between 1932 and 1952. The fear of losing that overtook the party during the Roosevelt period eventually led to an escalation of intrigue that included the rise of the John Birch Society in the 1950s and QAnon today. White traces the development of this culture of conspiracy theories within the GOP and explains how the emphasis on winning at any cost created a cult of personality and a willingness to seize power by any means necessary.