Can Republicans exile their most toxic supporters?
By Matthew Dallek
JANUARY 29, 2021
... Can the deranged fringe be contained and our politics restored to something like normal? If social media platforms keep Trump out, Senate Republicans convict the former president, GOP leaders rally voters to defeat Trumpian candidates in the 2022 primaries, and Trump acolytes in places like Arizona and Georgia lose statewide races, the party could diminish his legacy and weaken his followers, relegating them to the periphery ...
... Just as QAnon followers see a deep-state conspiracy to destroy Trump, some John Birch Society members viewed liberals as communist agents and dupes. The armed Minutemen of the 1960s echo in the gun-toting pro-Trump extremists in Charlottesville and Lansing, Mich. Talk radio kingpins such as Rush Limbaugh share a heritage with right-wing media stars Dan Smoot and Clarence Manion. And the Proud Boys share a sensibility with the white supremacists who formed Citizens’ Councils in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision desegregating schools ...
An estimated 20 percent of those arrested for their part in the Capitol riot are former or active-duty military members. The military in the 1960s was aggressive about policing far-right extremists whom it considered subversive. In 1961, for instance, the Defense Department reassigned and admonished Gen. Edwin Walker for seeking to teach his soldiers that Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, were communist agents. Walker resigned from the service, and when a reporter asked him a tough question after a congressional hearing where he was testifying, Walker gave him a black eye. At the same hearing, a Capitol Police officer kicked out American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell (who had praised Walker as a “great American”). Walker then went back to Texas and came in last in a six-person Democratic gubernatorial primary. When his former aide, Maj. Arch E. Roberts, was caught giving a conspiracy-crazed speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Army suspended him, too ...
... Anything that works to define anti-government extremists as toxic threats to our country is helpful. This work held off the far right for a time. And any period, short or long, that this fringe spends in the wilderness is a boon to American democracy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/29/gop-john-birch-society-trump/?arc404=true
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