Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism

by John Kenneth White

It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status—a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened—not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a whole that led to the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and its aftermath.

White presents a clear and concise analysis of how the modern Republican Party came to be by tracing historical patterns that reach back to the 1930s. He argues that the rise of Republican authoritarianism has been decades in the making, going back to the desperation that took hold among party elites in the wake of twenty years of Democratic dominance between 1932 and 1952. The fear of losing that overtook the party during the Roosevelt period eventually led to an escalation of intrigue that included the rise of the John Birch Society in the 1950s and QAnon today. White traces the development of this culture of conspiracy theories within the GOP and explains how the emphasis on winning at any cost created a cult of personality and a willingness to seize power by any means necessary.

Genres: Politics, Audiobook

263 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2024

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dry. Preaches to the choir. People who should read it won't.

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is tough to read. First, it is poorly organized. Points made about the Roosevelt administration are made in the immediately following chapter again. Second, the overall argument is ultimately not convincing. The author tries to argue that the rise of Trump is part of a 100 year process of the Republican party losing faith in democracy, and giving in to extremism. Yet the evidence is unconvincing. Yes, there were Republicans who were incensed and enraged by FDR, and his four presidential victories, and even more by Truman's remarkable 1948 triumph. Yes, they said things about dictatorship, and they despaired of democracy. But Republicans began winning the presidency quite regularly after Eisenhower. Their faith in democracy was quite strong for decades. Nor is the decline in faith in democracy in the 1930s remotely similar to Trump's frontal assault on democracy.
There are virtues to this book. Despite the organization, the author writes well and the prose moves. The history is mostly correct, and carefully researched. However, if you know your 20th century American political history, you are unlikely to learn much, and certainly his interpretations, with the exception of the one noted above that is wrong, are pretty standard.

there are also a few howling errors. First, he labels Jason Miller as the top legal counsel on the Trump 2020 campaign. Jason Miller isn't even a lawyer. He's communications. He gets the first name of the author of the Flight 93 essay wrong--it's not Richard, it's Michael Anton. And he makes much of the huge boost in specific state vote totals or margins that Eisenhower got compared to Hoover...the population growth in the US during the intervening years makes this far less impressive than the author makes it. Percentages would be more impressive.

Finally, while the author tries to link John Birch Society extremism to Trump, the truth is that Trump is far less consistent than the ideologues of the Birch Society.

[Victoria Pena · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece that beats with truth and conscience. John White doesn’t just write about politics, he writes about the human heart behind democracy, the courage to question, and the hope that refuses to die. Every page left me thinking, feeling, and believing again.