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OPINION
How The Party Of Lincoln Became The Party of Loonies
It’s partly Democrats’ fault that Republicans have turned to nutcases like Marjorie Taylor Greene
Why does the Republican Party attract so many Americans who have suffered from its policies, such as its refusal to raise the minimum wage? How did the GOP recast itself as the party of working-class voters, who for generations stood with Democrats?
A torrent of books on questions like these has poured forth since the rise of Donald Trump, and it remains undiminished by Joe Biden’s election. Last month brought Robert Draper’s Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind, which focuses on new GOP extremists like the conspiracy theorists Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
At the headwaters of the surge of books stands the journalist Thomas Frank’s bracing and witty What’s The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Macmillan, 2004), a New York Times bestseller that inspired a documentary with the same title.
Frank refracts the upheavals in the Republican Party through the changes in his native state, a former seedbed of progressivism that in recent decades has turned conservative.
