Announcing My New Book, American Psychosis...and Asking for Your Help

By David Corn  July 19, 2022

I need your help...and I have a special offer.

Over the past year, I have read through hundreds of books, scoured many more newspaper and magazine articles, and reviewed government records, campaign memos, and personal correspondence in assorted archives across the country to investigate how the Republican Party went bonkers. This has led to a book appropriately titled American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy. It chronicles the 70-year relationship between the GOP and far-right fanaticism and recounts the party’s long-running effort to exploit and encourage extremism, bigotry, paranoia, and tribalism. The book examines and explains the party’s critical partnerships with extremists—from McCarthyism to the Birchers to the Southern strategy to the New Right to the religious right to Palinism (as in Sarah Palin) to the Tea Party to Donald Trump. It didn’t start with Trump. His alliance with kooks, racists, conspiracists, and other extremists is not an aberration; for decades the Party of Lincoln has relied on, egged on, and embraced the forces of hate, conspiracism, and racial bias to win elections. Republicans and many others do not acknowledge this shameful and ugly history. As far as I can tell, no other book connects these dots and tells this story of the GOP’s dark side.

Here’s what Jane Mayer, the New Yorker correspondent and author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, said after reading the book:

David Corn's American Psychosis is essential reading for anyone hoping to restore political sanity in America. It argues convincingly that the toxic brew of bigotry, conspiracy theories, and lies that define Trumpism started long before Trump. Corn chronicles the Republican Party's decades-long slide into the gutter and weaves this investigative history into a compelling narrative that is equal parts horrifying and entertaining. Corn has managed to make brilliant sense of American senselessness.

Thanks, Jane.

As some of you might know, a few nights ago I announced the book’s forthcoming publication on MSNBC, and I began tweeting about it for the first time.

The book comes out on September 13, and I hope it will be a success. Now here’s where you come in.

I’m sure you’ve seen authors pleading for people to preorder their book before its release date. Writing a book will turn even the most self-effacing progressive into a capitalist mad-dog salesperson. After devoting a year, or many years, to the project, you desperately want all that hard work to have meaning. As in people buying and reading it. Some authors refer to books as their children. That’s a bit of a stretch. But a book is an extension and a reflection of its author. To write a book is to put yourself in a position to be judged—by readers, reviewers, and the market. We authors crave approval, thus the desire to race down a crowded street, grab strangers by the arm, and beg them to buy your book. Or something like that.

These days, because of the increasing importance of preorders, that impulse kicks in before the book is released. Booksellers (and their algorithms) use these preorders to determine how they will handle individual books. Will they order large numbers from a publisher and display big stacks of the book in the front of a store or heavily promote it on its website? Or will they request a small number of books and toss them on a shelf far from the gaze of browsing customers? Online retailers—ok, Amazon—can show you the book when you’re shopping for something else, or leave it up to you to search for it. All of this makes a great difference in sales. The more books any one of these places order, the more it is committed to championing the book.

That’s why publishers, and authors, obsess over preorders. It’s all about creating velocity for a book. That also means that early buyers have more clout. Because preorders usually are a small percentage of a book’s total sales, preorder purchasers have more influence and the potential to help launch a book into success. You literally can be a trendsetter.

My editor at Twelve (an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, which is part of Hachette Book Group) explained a few other benefits of preorders. A reader will receive the book lickety-split, often on the publication date. And Twelve will provide early buyers sneak peeks at content and “other giveaways.” (Details to come.) An early purchaser will help determine how a book is perceived, particularly a book with political content, which in turn can impact the overall political culture since media commentators and pundits often look to book sales as a political indicator. If conservative books dominate the bestsellers’ list—right now I see several Fox-related authors on the list—that is taken as a sign of right-wing energy and enthusiasm. The success of books that challenge the right can help shape the larger political cultural battle—and be a blow for truth and freedom.

All this explanation is a prelude for me asking you to consider preordering American Psychosis. To make it easier, I’ve arranged with Twelve to offer Our Land readers a special deal via Porchlight Books. If you preorder now—click HERE—you can get a signed copy of American Psychosis for 35 percent off.

One reason that I enjoyed writing American Psychosis—reviewing American history (going back even to the Salem witch trials) and exploring the saga of the GOP and the role of paranoia, conspiracy theories, hatred, and extremism in politics since the birth of the republic—was that I learned a lot. I never knew that the Ku Klux Klan was a key participant in the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1924. Nor did I realize that the fellow who gave Pat Robertson the idea to create the Christian Coalition was an antisemitic political defender of a white supremacist. Regular readers of this newsletter and my pieces in Mother Jones can see how all this research has informed my coverage of the current political mess that has been caused by Republicans and the forces of extremism.

I wrote American Psychosis so that I could better understand the current crisis and what brought us here. The past few years have sharply illuminated the worst elements within the Republican Party. And this moment offers the opportunity to show that what’s been occurring in the Trump era is not a fundamental shift for the GOP. Trump was the first president to summon white supremacists, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, and other far-right fanatics to form a mob that attacked the US Capitol. But he was continuing his party’s tradition of cynically and crassly exploiting extremism to win political power. He didn’t invent this tactic. He just made it more obvious.

Now is the time to fully expose this core component of the Republican Party. With a stronger grasp of the past, we will have an improved shot at addressing the profound challenges the nation faces.

In the weeks ahead, I will be relentlessly flogging the book. Apologies in advance if that bugs anyone. (See the above paragraph about authorial desperation.) But as with movies and much else these days, a book must quickly charge out of the chute. And you get only one chance to do that. Please bear with me and, better yet, help me with a discounted preorder of a signed copy of American Psychosis. I look forward to hearing what you think of it.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

Breitbart Gets It Right

Breitbart News, the right-wing site that has spread disinformation and amplified Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, thought it was big news that I made an obvious comment about the conservative war on women’s freedom. It ran a story with this headline: “David Corn: GOP’s ‘War on Sex’ Is About Controlling Women.” I’m not sure what the news value was here. But the Breitbarters posted a video clip from MSNBC’s The ReidOut, in which host Joy Reid, fellow guest Elie Mystal, and I discussed the tragic case of the 10-year-old Ohio girl who was raped and forced to travel to Indiana to obtain an abortion. The article quoted me: 

Corn said, “What we’re seeing with the Republican Party is as crazy as we thought it was, it’s getting even crazier after January 6th, and they used to talk about abortion bans, right, but with exceptions. Now they don’t want exceptions, and now they even want to deny what happens as a consequence of these bans. I mean, this is about theocracy, theology. It’s about controlling women. It’s a war on women. It’s a war on sex.”

He added, “I think that this is how they see it. In a war, there are casualties, and a casualty may be a 10-year-old girl who has to be forced to give birth. They are not relenting here. They are not saying, oh, we need to rethink that these incidents really happened. They want to deny these incidents because they take away part of the moral foundation for these laws that they enthusiastically support, so they can’t allow them to be such cased, and they — they do want, in a Soviet way, [to] photoshop them out of the picture, out of the debate. It’s just a sign of how far extreme they have gone over a long journey of 70 years now or so.”

And that was it. The deep thinkers at Breitbart offered no commentary or further analysis. My statement that abortion bans without any exceptions could be considered right-wing measures for controlling women apparently was sufficiently shocking to stand on its own as newsworthy. I think that point was rather obvious and hardly headline material. But I do appreciate Breitbart spreading the word. Hope they suggest that people preorder my book.

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and The Player. I love movies about Hollywood. Get Shorty, The Stunt Man, Barton Fink, and many others. And I adore movies that go meta and create a loop like a Möbius strip. Say, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, the latter being a twofer, given it is about screenwriting. Thus, I was interested in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Nicolas Cage plays “Nicolas Cage,” a dimming and hyper-self-absorbed Hollywood star whose artistic yearnings conflict with his up-and-down status as a box office hero. Ersatz-Cage is bummed out after failing to land a big role that could be his—don’t you dare say it—comeback. And his agent (a deliciously smooth Neil Patrick Harris) lands him an unusual gig: $1 million to attend the birthday party of a wealthy Spanish businessman named Javi Gutierrez, who’s an extreme Cage fanboy. Facing a slight artistic and moral dilemma—and on the outs (of course) with his teen daughter—“Cage” accepts. He’s flown to Javi’s villa in Majorca; the two men bond in goofy buddy-movie fashion. But then CIA officers inform “Cage” that his new bestie is an arms dealer responsible for a high-profile political kidnapping. Hijinks ensue, as “Cage” is recruited by the spooks to save the day.

The movie explores and falls prey to the various clichés of action films. The yielding to base Hollywood instincts is the point. But what exactly is The Unbearable Weight? Another Nicolas Cage action blockbuster? Or is it just pretending to be? Cage, who starred in Adaptation, is no stranger to meta-movies about the film business. Directed by Tom Gormican, the film is laced with plenty of inside-industry references and numerous pokes at Cage and “Cage.” Cage does a fine “Cage,” and Javi is played with flair by Pedro Pascal, who was outstanding in Narcos and quite good in The Mandalorian, the Star Wars spinoff. Mandalorian warriors can never take off their helmets, so we rarely got to see Pascal’s expressive face through the entire series. No such problem in Unbearable Weight. Even though the movie does show off the wit of its creators, ultimately the satire fizzles and loses out to formula. Perhaps that was the message, but at the end I felt another Cage—““Cage””?—was needed to rescue the movie from itself. 

Watching The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent prompted me to think about Robert Altman’s 1992 classic The Player, one of the best Hollywood swings at Hollywood. And there it was, sitting in the back-of-the-store bin at HBO Max, when the other night a friend of mine—a real-life movie producer!—and I were looking for a film to view. Neither one of us had seen The Player in decades, so we hit play. The film begins with one of the great tracking shots in movie history: eight minutes on a Hollywood lot, as various execs and writers engage in trope-ish, self-referential film-biz chatter, including talk about great tracking shots. Altman tells the story of Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), a sharky studio exec who may be about to be supplanted by a more sharky studio exec. Mill, whose talent is dealing with the underclass of Hollywood, also known as the writers, semi-inadvertently kills a writer and strives to keep this dastardly deed covered up as he handles internecine studio intrigue. Altman, a Hollywood outsider who made great movies for Hollywood (Nashville, M*A*S*H, and many others), sprinkles dozens of cameo appearances throughout the film: Burt Reynolds, Lily Tomlin, David Carradine, Harry Belafonte, and other celebs play themselves, often slipping in industry in-jokes. 

In The Player, Altman masterfully toys with and subverts Hollywood conventions, cynically bowing to Hollywood rules in such a clever manner that there’s no mistaking his disdain or his skill at biting the hand that feeds him. My producer buddy and I agreed the film holds up well. There are a few slow moments that could use a snip, and it fails the Bechdel test. But, as my pal attests, its satirical dissection of Hollywood is as sharp and relevant today as three decades ago when Altman was bucking the system. Altman’s wonderful takedown of Hollywood endings is perhaps the best in the cinematic universe. The Player remains a classic. I give Cage and Gormican credit for their Altmanian endeavor. But as Griffin Mill might say—while requesting a bottle of the hippest designer water—their script needed one more rewrite.

Here's that brilliant opening shot from The Player: 

The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, Simon Winchester. Simon Winchester is one of my favorite historians. He combines profound erudition with elegant writing, as he probes the intriguing pivot points of human development. He’s best known for The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, his 1998 bestselling account of the creation of the OED. That work focused on one of the dictionary’s most prolific contributors, a retired US Army surgeon who was imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Readers learned as much about the exhaustive efforts to codify the English language as they did about the treatment of the mentally ill in the 19th century. I much enjoyed Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883. It had explosions, adventure, and political intrigue, and the book explained how the catastrophic eruption of one of the Earth’s most dangerous volcanoes—which emitted dust that stayed in the atmosphere and affected temperatures for years—caused people to understand for the first time the interconnectedness of the global environment. What happened in Krakatoa didn’t stay in Krakatoa. This was a powerful lesson we’re still struggling to learn today.

When I stumbled across a copy of Winchester’s The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, which was published in 2009, I grabbed it. The immediate subject is this fellow Smith, a self-taught surveyor, excavator, coal mining expert, and canal digger, who in the late 18th century discovered that the rocks beneath our feet were formed by different layers that each contained its own unique set of fossils. Smith identified the various strata, and his work challenged the predominant view of the day: The Earth was created by God’s mighty hand in six days about 6,000 years previously. As Winchester so eloquently puts it, thanks to Smith, “[f]or the first time the earth had a provable history, a written record that paid no heed or obeisance to religious teaching and dogma, that declared its independence from the kind of faith that there is no more than the blind acceptance of absurdity. A science—an elemental, basic science that would in due course allow mankind to exploit the almost limitless treasures of the underworld—had at last broken free from the age-old constraints of doctrine and canonical instruction.”

Smith would devote over a dozen years to creating the first geological map of England illustrating which geologic formations undergirded each region. (The book jacket for The Map That Changed the World in nifty fashion can be unfolded to display a replica of the map.) Through it all, he would withstand financial setbacks, family troubles, and the snobbery of London’s scientific establishment, which would not accept him as one of its own. In the end, Smith won the recognition he deserved for creating the new science of geology—but not until after some of his work was plagiarized and he was forced to sell his magnificent fossil collection to stay afloat. Winchester has a knack for locating and animating oddball characters who, through their passionate pursuit of knowledge, alter the course of human history. Smith did not set out to revolutionize humankind’s conception of the world. But that’s what can happen through the obsessive search for truth.

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

July 16, 2022: Does Steve Bannon buy his own BS?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Catherine Glenn Foster, Lauren Boebert, and Dave Yost); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 12, 2022: It’s about sex; Iran-contra flashback: the day reality died; a dangerous state Supreme Court decision; and more.

July 9, 2022: Why did the Atlantic enable Mitt Romney’s dangerous both-sidesism?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Marjorie Taylor Greene, again); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 2, 2022: Mark Meadows: one helluva liar; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Ali Alexander); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

June 28, 2022: The lessons from the right’s 50-year-long crusade to limit the freedom of women; the end of Ozark; and more.

June 25, 2022: Hooray for the Trump Republicans who saved the nation—or not?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Clarence Thomas); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

June 21, 2022: Is Trump’s GOP getting even crazier?; George Carlin and the American Dream; Alexei Navalny’s nightmare; and more.

June 18, 2022: Is Elon Musk more dangerous than Peter Thiel?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Lauren Boebert, again); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

June 14, 2022: From Watergate to Trump: Does the system really work?; a thrilling performance by Paul McCartney; how The Staircase apprehends its viewers; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.