Don't look now, but the paranoids are out to "get" democracy

Way back in 1964, when Barry Goldwater's candidacy first brought the right-wing fringe out from under the rocks, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." It summed up the same irrational, morbidly suspicious, and luridly imaginative tendency that spawned the Know-Nothing Party of a previous era, the Joe McCarthy inquisition during the 1950s, and the conspiracy-based Trump phenomenon of the present day.

Practitioners of the paranoid style seemed to seize control of the Republican Party back in Goldwater's day. Of course, Goldwater won the 1964 Republican nomination largely by default. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller played Hamlet and couldn't decide whether to run or not for long enough to freeze the Republican center and prevent a more centrist alternative to Goldwater from emerging until it was too late. The Republican center itself remained strong and vital. And Goldwater personally, despite his eccentric political views, was a fundamentally far more decent human being than is Donald Trump; doubtless that in itself kept the paranoia from doing greater damage than it did.

In any event, Goldwater was buried in the Johnson landslide of 1964, and the GOP came to its senses. Whatever his failings, Richard Nixon, the 1968 nominee, was firmly rooted in reality and was able to rally the American people to his cause not once but twice. Were it not for Watergate, he would doubtless be remembered as one of the more successful presidents of the Twentieth Century.

The lunatic right next came to prominence with the candidacy of perhaps the best president of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan was not immune to gaffes and misstatements of fact such as abound today in TrumpWorld. But again, he was a personally decent man who, while he might say things that were incorrect and on occasion even absurd, was amenable to logic and would never have deliberately lied or knowingly slandered an opponent. His successor, George H.W. Bush, was a man of the center-right and one of the best-qualified presidents in our history, if also one of the unluckiest ones.

With the advent of Donald Trump, who lacks Goldwater and Reagan's personal decency and is far more ignorant than either of even the most basic political reality aspects, things are different. Neither in Goldwater's day nor in Reagan's would the Republican Party have been party to an attempt, based on no evidence whatsoever and finally nothing but sheer paranoia, to overturn a presidential election and substitute its will for that of the American people. But here we are. Only today, retiring Congressman Paul Mitchell of Michigan- ordinarily a staunch Trump supporter- formally resigned from the Republican Party in response to the party's overwhelming support of President Trump's attempt to steal an election he lost at the polls.

Joe McCarthy is probably the closest the paranoid style has brought us in the past to where we are now. It's hard to see how the GOP comes back from seeking to undermine the Constitution and our American system by trying to overtly steal a presidential election. The president's attorneys can't even answer in the affirmative when judges ask whether they are alleging fraud because they have no evidence of fraud and know that they would be placing themselves in personal legal jeopardy if they did allege it! And Mr. Trump's own attorney general admits that the Justice Department has been unable to come up with fraud evidence on a scale even capable of turning a victory for Trump into a defeat.

Mr. Trump is not happy with Barr. He will not commit himself to bring Barr back if somehow his attempt to subvert the election succeeds. There is even speculation that he might fire Barr, just as he did election security chief Christopher Krebs when Krebs said that the recent election, contrary to the president's claims, was the most secure in history.

Essentially, the aftermath of this election is probably the last nail in the Republican Party's coffin. The paranoia isn't going away. But our system can't survive without a center-right alternative to a Democratic Party whose youth and probably whose future tilts far left.

The GOP has crazed itself out of a role in American political life other than that of a comic sideshow.

ADDENDUM: Telling the truth is not a good career move in this administration. Sure enough, the White House has announced that Atty. Gen Barr is "leaving" his job before Christmas.