Opinion

As George Washington prepared to leave the presidency, he issued a famous Farewell Address warning Americans about the dangers of partisanship. Washington — who famously refused to join a political party during his two terms — exhorted that if Americans cared more about whether their party "wins" than maintaining democratic structures, "a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community" could manipulate the masses through a demagogic leader "to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

In cults of personality like Bolsonaro's there are "social-psychological associations that give adherents a sense of vicarious power through a heightened sense of destiny and purpose."

Donald Trump would not be powerful if he wasn't enabled by the larger Republican Party. But a combination of cowardice, greed and unchecked ambition has led the GOP establishment to capitulate to a maniac who lies as easily as he breathes as well as to a rising authoritarian movement that justifies itself through bigotry and conspiracy theories. In his new book, "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind," journalist Robert Draper carefully details how Trump and his fever swamp-dwelling lieutenants successfully remade the Republican Party over in their own image. In this deeply reported book, the New York Times Magazine contributor traces how the quisling leadership of the GOP, plus a voting base drunk on decades of right wing propaganda, brought us to where we are today — at the brink of democratic collapse.

Salon spoke with Draper about his new book and how Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is the true face of the 21st-century Republican Party. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The J6 committee stopped short Thursday of saying whether it would send a criminal referral to the Justice Department of Donald Trump’s attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government. (A decision on that is expected by the end of the year, however.)

This sparked yet another round of fear and loathing about the impotence of our justice system. What does “no one is above the law” mean when the Congress won’t tell the Justice Department that Trump is a spectacular traitor who committed spectacular crimes?

In the seventh episode, she's fighting with her former friend/current stepdaughter Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy), and eventually slices open Rhaenyra's arm with a knife. The ostensible source of Alicent's outrage is that Rhaenyra's son took our her son's eye in an otherwise childish brawl. But the rant exposes her deeper motive: plain old envy. Alicent and Rhaenyra were friends growing up, but turned on each other when their lives took very different paths. Alicent was married off to King Viserys (Paddy Considine), Rhaenyra's father. She must spend the rest of her days in a loveless marriage with a man who physically repulses her, while bearing one child after another without much break. Rhaenyra, meanwhile, is the heir to the throne and indulged by her father. She gets to have sex with cute guys (and her uncle, because this is the "Game of Thrones" franchise), fly around on a dragon, and abscond to another castle when she gets sick of being around her miserable stepfamily.

I write often about the psychology of conservatism for a liberal audience, drawing on my background as a native Texan from a GOP-voting family. But I'm also a feminist writer. This combination means that, by far, the most common question I get from readers is, "How can women be conservative/vote Republican?" As the interlocutors note, women who vote Republican are voting against their own basic rights to reproductive choice and equal pay. After the election of Donald Trump, who famously bragged on tape about how he sexually assaults women, the question got even louder. How can any woman support a party so sexist?

When looking back through history to figure out how we ended up in this hellscape that will inevitably be known as the "Trump era," pundits often look to predecessors like Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, Richard Nixon in the '70s or even Ronald Reagan in the '80s. The 1990s, however, are often overlooked, even though that's when Donald Trump's notoriety as a tabloid fixture really came into focus. That decade is often remembered fondly these days, as a time of relative innocence, a country preoccupied with how to figure out email and what to do about a president getting a blow job in the Oval Office.

In her new book "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s," historian Nicole Hemmer wants us to take another look at the '90s. It was, she writes, "actually an era of right wing radicalization." And not just on the fringes, as with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Led by figures like House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich and race-baiting gadfly Pat Buchanan, it was a time when the GOP stopped being merely a conservative party and forged its new path — a competitive race to the bottom in which the trophy goes to the most repulsive political troll. (Right now, it's Trump, but there are contenders, including Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis.) That was when the idea of winning elections in order to govern wound down for Republicans and was replaced with scorched-earth politics, in which destroying the opposition is all that matters.

When the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned abortion protections in Roe v Wade, the majority wrote that it’s up to the states to decide whether to allow abortions, restrict them or to ban them altogether. In other words, the six justices were saying that the U.S. Constitution gives no more protections to people who can get pregnant than it does to a zygote, the cell that’s formed when a human sperm fuses with a human egg.

The 76-page opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, delves deeply into what he sees as the flaws in the Roe decision and subsequent rulings upholding its central tenet: that at least some right to abortion is inviolable. It also talks a lot about what the abortion laws were around the time the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 — and it gives other examples stretching all the way back to the 1200s. And it criticizes Roe for ignoring “the legitimacy of the States’ interest in protecting fetal life.”

We are three weeks out from the midterm elections and by all accounts many races are within the margin of error. It's pretty clear that the "red tsunami" everyone was expecting has not materialized. Republicans are still favored to win (at least in the House) but it's looking more and more as if it will be a very narrow victory if they do — and there's a decent chance they won't.

So, of course, Democrats are going on television arguing that everyone is doing it wrong. It's just how they roll. The latest disagreements come from those who think candidates should focus on the old saw, "It's the economy, stupid," because inflation has people so spooked. Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared on "Meet the Press" over the weekend and gave his familiar spiel about income inequality and big corporations, suggesting that some Trump voters would be open to that argument. He begged Democrats to focus more intently on the economy and attack the Republican threats to Social Security and Medicare.

In Michigan, the GOP nominee for a critical congressional seat is on record blasting women being in the workplace and having the right to vote.

John Gibbs, who won his 3rd District primary thanks to an endorsement from former President Donald Trump and is facing Democrat Hillary Scholten on Nov. 8, got exactly zero backlash from his party when his retrograde views as the leader of an anti-feminist “think tank” made the news last month.

It's the "unvaccinated and conspiracy-theory minded with anger against authority issues" guy who deliberately exposes his family to COVID. It's the defiantly maskless Republican attending a 2020 Trump rally (who dies of the virus shortly after). It's the "Proud Boy to rank-and-file supporters" gathering at an anti-vaccine "Defeat the Mandates" protest. We've spent nearly three years now, witnessing and often suffering from the behaviors of conservatives who refused to abide by COVID guidelines — or even acknowledge the crisis. And the question that keeps coming up around family dinner tables and in heated exchanges at big box stores is — Do these people just not care about anybody else?

This article first appeared in Salon.