The Roots of Republican Extremism

Three new books attempt to trace the GOP's break with reality.

- Kim Phillips-Fein

In 1992, Pat Buchanan made a campaign stop at the San Diego-Tijuana border. As a few white-power activists who had tagged along milled in the background, he called for the United States to build a wall-a 200-mile-long physical boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. At the time, Buchanan was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency, the first of two consecutive efforts that were rebuffed by party voters and leaders alike. Buchanan and his politics seemed to be on the verge of being drummed out of the GOP altogether. (When he made one last try for the White House, in 2000, he ran on the Reform Party ticket.) From the start of the 1990s, his hostility toward free trade and NATO, his extremist proposals on immigration, and his jeremiads against cultural decline marked him as an outlier. Communism was over, the stock market was rising, Silicon Valley was just taking off, and few were interested in Buchanan's grim vision of a looming “illegal invasion."

Three decades later, Buchanan's ideas may still seem fringe, but they are no longer marginal. His call for a barrier at the border has become a staple of Republican platforms, as have his denunciations of cultural decadence, his skepticism about free trade, and his warnings about the dangers of the "global elite" and of immigrant incursions. As the midterms approach, Donald Trump's conspiracy-laced version of those views shows no sign of flaming out, which forces the question: Is this ethno-nationalism and pugnacious stance toward cultural "elites" going to be the signature of the Republican Party from now on? And if so, what happened? Not all that long ago, the GOP was the party of Big Business, free markets, "traditional" family values, and anti-communism. Now it has become the party of election denial and the Wall.