But it was Newt Gingrich, an unscrupulous politician willing to embrace otherization as a core political strategy, who really set the stage for Trump and today's politics of cruelty. Newt came up with a word list he encouraged Republicans to memorize and use to describe their Democratic opponents, including labels like corrupt, insensitive, intolerant, failure, pathetic, radical, sick, they/them, and traitor.
Republican members of Congress and GOP candidates memorized Newt's list and took classes learning how to best characterize their opponents, given that the only real policy positions the Party had by then were tax cuts for the rich (6 of Newt's 10 Contract With America points) and deregulation of big business (the other four).
Trump, with Newt's help and encouragement, took this "otherizing" to a whole new level, starting in 2008 by characterizing President Barack Obama as a communist Muslim from Kenya who wasn't a "real American" but a full-fledged other. He doubled down in the 2015/16 Republican primary, this time otherizing people from south of the border.
The rightwing billionaires' network first jumped into the act spending millions to rent busses, stage events, and fund PR agencies across the country to promote their anti-Obama "Tea Party" throughout his presidency, just like today they're backing "grass roots" anti-mask and anti-racial-history attacks on teachers and school boards.
This time it got a lot more juice than during McCarthy's or Gingrich's eras because of social media today, with its algorithms that prioritize and push out to unsuspecting victims articles that enrage people (it's called "emotional engagement").
Those relentless algorithms have put the entire process of tearing apart the fabric of American society on steroids, amplifying the voices of hate and otherizing their political opponents much the same way talk radio hosts did in Rwanda in 1994.
While Democrats struggle to understand their radicalized brethren, McCarthy's, Gingrich's and Trump's otherizing strategy has completely taken over the GOP. They're otherizing teachers and school board members, election volunteers, anti-fascists, Black people who think their lives should matter too, and women who must deal with the consequences of an unintended and unwanted pregnancy.
And, of course, they're otherizing Democrats across the board, right on up to promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories about Tucker Carlson's "Great Replacement Theory" and "Jews will not replace us," doing it all for political power.
And when they get that power, they use it to further isolate the "others" (passing laws making it difficult for them to vote and gerrymandering them into political obscurity), while rewarding the billionaires who funded their Tea Party and School Board Revolts with massive tax cuts and corporate deregulation.
This is, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, the exact same and totally predictable path to power used by every single demagogue, fascist and oligarch through history. In the modern era it's brought strongmen like Viktor Orba'n to power in Hungary, while in my father's generation it was the launching pad for Mussolini, Franco and Hitler.
Once otherizing as a political strategy gains a solid foothold among enough people to get and hold power, it inevitably leads in only one direction: single party rule supported by a violent police state that kills, imprisons or effectively marginalizes all political opposition. Just ask Alexei Navalny.
Joe McCarthy's path down this road was interrupted by a brave lawyer shaming him while on live TV in front of the American public. Gingrich's path was interrupted by his own moral and political corruption. And Trump's was interrupted by the populace rising up and rejecting him by over seven million votes in the landslide election of 2020.
But Newt's still at it, pushing his otherization identity politics. Coincidentally, I got an email from him while writing the first draft of this rant yesterday afternoon; in it he identified Democrats and the media as "anti-American" and a "cancer" while tipping his hat to Trump's white supremacist rhetoric:
"With all the anti-American propaganda coming from the Left and their friends in the mainstream media, this Country is hardly recognizable. One thing has become clear: "Wokeism" is a cancer to American society as we know it.
"President Trump fought day and night to preserve our AMERICAN identity and now it is YOUR turn to join him."
Meanwhile, rightwing billionaires and big corporations are pushing even harder to put and keep Republicans in office, pouring millions into otherizing teachers and school boards in next week's Virginia gubernatorial election, using the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision as their shield.
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