From Thom Hartmann’s substack blog.
In Wednesday’s Daily Take here on Hartmann Report, I mentioned Russell Kirk and the origins of today’s hard right GOP. A few people replied with, “Who’s that?” and similar questions; others were incredulous that Republicans actually believed the middle class created by FDR’s New Deal was a bad thing. So, here’s the backstory to what I mentioned.
I was thirteen years old in 1964 when my dad, a Republican activist, gave me a copy of John Stormer’s book “None Dare Call It Treason.” The Goldwater campaign had sent it to him, and its claim that the State Department was filled with communists intent on handing America over to the USSR had his friends buzzing.
Ironically, Stormer’s book and the movement it ignited within the GOP is largely responsible for that party today standing on the precipice of fully endorsing fascism as an alternative to democracy in the US.
And it was started by morbidly rich men (it was all men back then) who wanted to use the threat of a “communist menace” to gut the union movement to increase their own corporate profits and CEO pay.