Perseus Academic: Republican Gomorrah by Max Blumenthal

Award-winning journalist and documentary videographer Max Blumenthal has been behind some of the most sensational (and funniest) exposés of Republican excesses. Whether it was his revelation of Sarah Palin’s involvement with a Kenyan pastor who boasted of epic battles with witches, his shocking reports on rapture-ready fanatic Pastor John Hagee’s ties to Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, or his exposé of the eccentric theocratic multimillionaire behind California’s Prop 8 anti-gay-marriage initiative, Blumenthal has become one of the most important and most constantly cited journalists on how a fringe movement became the Republican Party mainstream.

Republican Gomorrah—Blumenthal's remarkable, muckraking debut—is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal, and crime from the heart of the movement that runs the Republican Party. Blumenthal describes with no-holds-barred detail the people and the beliefs that establishment Republicans—like John McCain—have to kowtow to if they have any hope of running for president, and how moderates have been systematically purged from party ranks. He shows why the unqualified Sarah Palin was the party’s only logical choice and how her most fanatical supporters will be setting the strategy for the Republican assault on the Obama administration. Blumenthal warns that the Christian right will quietly exploit the widespread financial misery caused by the economic meltdown while mainstream media pundits churn out faddish and unfounded tales of the movement’s death.

More than just an exposé, Republican Gomorrah reveals that many of the movement’s leading figures are united by more than political campaigns; they are bound together by a shared sensibility rooted in private trauma. Their lives have been stained by crisis and scandal—depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, addiction to drugs and pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. For the most zealous foot soldiers of the right, the crusade to cleanse the land of sin was in fact a quest to purify their souls.

Inspired by the work of psychologist Erich Fromm, who analyzed how the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, transforming the character of the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.

Max Blumenthal is one of the most constantly cited young liberal journalists in America and is regularly featured on the Rachel Maddow Show, Democracy Now!, and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. His articles and video documentaries have appeared in The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English, and many other publications. He is a correspondent for The Daily Beast, a research fellow for Media Matters for America, and a Journalism Writing Fellow for The Nation Institute. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.