Simultaneously, in the late 1970s, television preachers like Jerry Falwell taught their flocks that since “homosexuals couldn’t reproduce,” they set in motion a massive conspiracy to recruit children (in order to ritually murder them, according to another prominent televangelist, James Robison, whose right-hand man was a young Mike Huckabee). From the other side of his mouth, Falwell would take to big-city newspaper op-ed pages to explain decorously, in the language of good-old-fashioned American pluralism, that all his flock were interested in was practicing their faith without government interference, just like everyone else.
This habit of speaking to two audiences at once was mirrored at the level of Republican presidential politics. Ronald Reagan appeared beside Falwell at a rally of preachers at the height of his 1980 presidential campaign to proclaim, “I know that you can’t endorse me … I want you to know that I endorse you and what you’re doing.” Reagan’s endorsement occurred even as, backstage, a leading Christian Reconstructionist—an extremist movement that sought to make the Old Testament the foundation of American criminal law and considered the public school system a conspiracy to spread paganism as the national religion—complained that their guru, Dr. R.J. Rushdoony, had not been included in the event’s program. A Reagan campaign official reassured him: “If it weren’t for his books, none of us would be here.”
Such was the complex dance that has always been at the heart of Republican politics in the conservative era. The extremist vanguard shops fantastical horror stories about liberal elites in the hopes that one might break into the mainstream, such as the “Clinton Chronicles” VHS tape distributed by Jerry Falwell in the early 1990s. The stories included the Clintons covering up the murder of Vince Foster, murdering witnesses to their drug smuggling operation, and participating in a crooked land deal at a development called “Whitewater.” (The New York Times bit hard on the latter claim, setting in motion a chain of events that led to President Clinton’s impeachment over lying in a deposition about a sexual affair.)
Later, an incumbent Republican president ran for reelection on a platform of wartime national unity and policies to spread the beneficence of American capitalism more broadly—while at the same time his backroom operatives got divisive anti–gay marriage initiatives in swing states to flush scared reactionaries to the polls, and the Republican National Committee distributed fliers in rural areas accusing Democrats of a literal conspiracy to outlaw the Bible.
This is why Trumpism is not a reversion to an older, more gothic form of conservatism but an apotheosis decades in the making. Trump may have been our country’s first post-truth president. But the post-truth environment of conspiracy we are living in today has been a long time coming. We owe it in part to the truth-optional habits on the right that Robert Welch and the Birch Society exemplified—and in part to the same Republican elites who were complicit every step of the way.