An amazing read in the L.A. Times this morning about the genealogy of modern conservatism. It’s not about Goldwater; it’s about McCarthy.

In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn’t run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn’t likely to be expunged any time soon.
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McCarthyism is usually considered a virulent form of Red-baiting and character assassination. But it is much more than that. As historian Richard Hofstadter described it in his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” McCarthyism is a way to build support by playing on the anxieties of Americans, actively convincing them of danger and conspiracy even where these don’t exist.

So for McCarthy, it was ‘Commies!’ For Nixon, it was ‘Hippies!’ Or perhaps ‘Hippie commies!’ And at various times the scapegoat group has been blacks (Willie Horton and others), gays (destroying the family), women (uppity), and of course liberals liberals liberals. Demonisation has turned out to be a very successful electoral strategy, which is why the GOP is having such a tough time reeling in its McCarthyish habits.

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That’s why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama’s relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

Read the rest.