Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
America’s Republican Party has completely transformed itself to fit the mold of former President Donald Trump—in the process becoming something more like an autocratic cult, according to historian and cultural critic Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who joined this week’s episode of The New Abnormal.
Nowhere was this more apparent than when it nuked its policy platform for the 2020 election in favor of blanket support for Trump—a moment that paved the way for last week’s shitshow of a GOP debate.
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“The part of the cycle we were talking about before is that the GOP has nowhere to go but becoming more extreme—that’s why you have fanatics, like [Vivek] Ramaswamy up there reviving old conspiracy theories, and they also have to hide from the public,” Ben-Ghiat said.
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“They’re getting into the bunker stage—that’s what we call it when dictators get into their bunker stage—so they can’t have transparency,” she added. “We already saw episodes during the pandemic of GOP legislators running away from their constituents. So all of that will increase and that’s going to cause a reaction.”
Then, the hosts of the podcast Blowback join the program to talk about their most recent season, which centers around U.S. involvement in Afghanistan over the past 50 years. America’s early involvement over there was sold as rare bright spot in American foreign policy, they said, specifically our assistance in fighting Soviet incursions— what Blowback summarizes as: “Afghanistan was Russia’s Vietnam.”
“Hollywood had a field day with the Soviet-Afghan war in the ’80s and sort of flipped the script on all these gloomy Vietnam movies America had to answer for,” Brendan James, one of the creators of Blowback, said. “Now it could be the Soviets’ turn.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to more accurately describe the discussion about American’s early involvement in Afghanistan.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
