Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

But over the last generation, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” says the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.” The right’s ideological center of gravity careened way to the right of Rove and all Bushes, finally knocking them and their ilk aside. What had been its fantastical fringe became the GOP center. In retrospect, the sudden change in the gun lobby in the late 1970s, from more or less flexible to absolutely hysterical, was a harbinger of the transformation of the entire right a generation later. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.