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This includes the implosion of conservative media, many of whose leading voices turned from gatekeepers to cheerleaders and from thought leaders to sycophantic propagandists.
Somewhere along the line much of the echo chamber turned on the very principles that had once animated it, replacing ideas of freedom, limited government, and constitutionalism with a crude populist nativism that fed into the Right’s media zeitgeist.
Such is our worship of success and power that we assume that an election triumph wipes away a multitude of sins; instead, it magnifies them.
By aligning themselves with Trump they will score significant victories, including the appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices, tougher policies on immigration, and the rollback of the administrative state. But they will constantly have to ask themselves, What is the butcher’s bill for this Trumpian bargain? How much will they overlook? How many other principles will they be required to abandon?
The election marked not only a rejection of the Reagan legacy, but also the abandonment of respect for gradualism, civility, expertise, intelligence, and prudence—the values that once were taken for granted among conservatives.
How did a movement that was defined by its belief in individual liberty, respect for the constitution, free markets, personal responsibility, traditional values, and civility find itself embracing a stew of nativism, populism, and nationalism?
Trump, we were told, “tapped into something.” Yes he did; something disturbing that we had ignored and perhaps nurtured—a shift from an emphasis on freedom to authoritarianism and from American “exceptionalism” to nativism.
“Most traditional conservatives reliably serve large corporate interests, and can be counted on to ignore the basic interests of middle- and working-class voters,” author Joel Kotkin writes.
while the rhetoric of conservatives was often libertarian, their agenda often focused on the use of government power to satisfy the needs of the donor and lobbyist class. In recent years, nearly every major spending bill has been a master class in the art of crony capitalism.
The tone and the language of the Right was also shifting, as columnist Peter Wehner noted, with many conservatives confusing “cruelty, vulgarity, and bluster with strength and straight talk.”
Not content with winning historic victories on gay marriage, some progressives indulged their penchant for labeling opponents as bigots and their religious faith as hatred and discrimination. The goal was not tolerance, but what seemed like a determination to drive dissenters out of polite society and expel them from the public square.
But as we learned in 2016, we had succeeded in convincing our audiences to ignore and discount any information whatsoever from the mainstream media. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the Right’s immunity to false information.
They deligitimized themselves.
The false information was spread by automated “chatbots” powered by software programs that flooded Twitter with anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages.20 “The use of automated accounts was deliberate and strategic throughout the election,” the researchers concluded.
Funny how I remember Obamas team being praised for its social media mastery when he won.
Perhaps even more cringe worthy has been the rise of a new class of pro-Trump “intellectuals” who attempt to impose some coherence and substance on Trumpism. Often they strained to attribute to Trump an ideological lucidity that seems little more than a projection of their own wishful thinking.
Rush. 😁
The New York Times’s James Poniewozik notes that politics today” is attitudinal, not ideological. The reason to be for someone is who is against them. What matters more than policy is your side’s winning, and what matters more than your side’s winning is the other side’s losing.”
As schools dumbed down their curricula and indulged a series of ill-fated educational fads, the results were increasingly horrible.
AMONG THE MANY IRONIES of the conservative implosion was how the Right became what it had once mocked. In 2008, conservatives ridiculed the Left for its adulation of Barack Obama, only to succumb to their own cult of personality eight years later.
—24 percent thought Antonin Scalia was murdered; just 42 percent thought he died naturally; another 34 percent are unsure.
As recently as 2008, the nightly news programs on the three major networks devoted a grand total of less than four hours of airtime over an entire year to reporting on actual issues (as opposed to candidate speeches or political horse race coverage). By 2016, the Tyndall Report, which monitors networks’ newscasts, estimated issue coverage for the year had fallen to just thirty-six minutes.
The problem here is obvious: An ignorant electorate is not likely to hold ignorant politicians to account. If voters don’t know what they don’t know, they will also be unlikely to recognize or care very much about what politicians don’t know. So ignorance begets ignorance and the tolerance of it in high places. As it happens, there is actually a term for this: the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
This was not simply an artifact of the Right’s Alt Reality bubble; it was also a reflection of a broader populist anti-intellectualism that rejected expertise and authority alike. Within the Alt Reality silos there was a nagging insistence that everyone’s opinions and facts were as good as anyone else’s and that claims to the contrary were signs of “elitism.” This rejection of reason and evidence was essentially a rejection of Enlightenment values as well as the conservative tradition.
“The American Founders could have a conversation among themselves,” National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote, “because they had in the main all consumed the same library of Greek and Roman classics (in the original or in translation), British and Continental literature ranging from fiction to political economy, legal literature, and the like.” This did not lead to uniformity of opinion. “What it ensured was literate and enlightened argument,” noted Williamson. “From the man of many books to the man of one book, we devolved very quickly to the man of one sentence, the paragraph being too
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“Trump is something that could not happen in a nation that could read,” he wrote. “But we are not a nation that reads, or a nation that shares a living tradition of serious contemporary literature, fiction or nonfiction.”9
Her attitude toward reading was, unfortunately, shared by the forty-fifth president of the United States, who has admitted that he has not read any biographies of former presidents. He has no time to read books, he told the Washington Post. “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.”
Throughout the campaign there were strained attempts to compare Trump to Ronald Reagan. But although the media often portrayed the Gipper as an amiable dunce, the discovery of the papers that were published in the book Reagan, In His Own Hand forced historians to revise their views of the fortieth president. Reagan wrote out many of his radio commentaries and newspaper articles, as well as many of his own speeches. He wrote poetry, short stories, and letters.14 Trump, in his own hand, writes 140-character tweets.
The fusionists noted that the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had not embraced either the “libertarian” vision of the Jeffersonians nor the “authoritarian” politics of Alexander Hamilton, but had steered a middle course as laid out by James Madison, who helped craft a system of checks and balances.
“What is conservatism?” Lee Edwards summarized the rough consensus that emerged: They accept “an objective moral order” of “immutable standards by which human conduct should be judged.” Whether they emphasize human rights and freedoms or duties and responsibilities, they unanimously value “the human person” as the center of political and social thought. They oppose liberal attempts to use the State “to enforce ideological patterns on human beings.” They reject the centralized power and direction necessary to the “planning” of society. They join in defense of the Constitution “as originally
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The Conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.
although he was loathed by the left, Nixon often governed as a liberal Republican, creating bureaucracies like the Environmental Protection Agency and imposing wage and price controls. Anticommunist conservatives felt betrayed when he opened the door to China;
On the eve of Obama’s election, Frum wrote that Republican conservatism was “tired and confused”: Once the party of limited government, now it is the one that enacted the largest new social programme since the 1960s: the prescription drug benefit. Once the party of law and order, it now offers amnesty in all but name to illegal immigrants.
some conservatives decided to “mimic the confrontational street theater of the far left they had spent decades despising. Civility was the first calculated casualty.”
At rallies, signs comparing Obama to Hitler began popping up, while literature appeared skewering “Obama’s Nazi health plan.”
Leftist plants
On the floor of the State Assembly a Democratic state representative turned to a female Republican colleague and shouted, “You are F---ing dead!” None of his fellow Democrats condemned his conduct.
“In a very short span of time,” Lewis noted, “the conservative movement [had] dramatically shifted in a populist direction, and that means embracing positions on trade, taxes, and entitlements that were thought of as rather left-wing just a few years ago.”
In 2008, PolitiFact rated Barack Obama’s statement “If you like your health care, you can keep it” as “True.” The next year it downgraded the problem to “Half True,” and finally in 2013 labeled the statement the “Lie of the Year.”†
Haidt also cites the work of fellow social psychologist, Tom Gilovich who studies “the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs.” If we want to believe something, Gilovich says, we ask, “Can I believe it?” and we need only a single piece of evidence, no matter its provenance, so that “we can stop thinking” because we “now have permission to believe” what we wanted to believe. The flip side is that when we are confronted with uncomfortable or unwanted information that we do not want to believe, we ask “Must I believe?” and look for a reason to reject the argument or fact. Again, only a single
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“Your reputation is amazing, I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones in a December 2015 appearance.7
On the Monday after the election, Donald Trump called Jones to thank him for his support in the campaign. The newly elected president promised Jones he would return to his show, a pledge that the Washington Post called “an extraordinary gesture for an incoming president whose schedule is packed with calls from world leaders and the enormous task of overseeing the transition.”
Robertson was later subjected to harsh criticism for citing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic bit of fake history to make his case.
Unfortunately, this seemed to change in the last campaign, which became a coming-out party for the denizens of the fever swamp. Even this would rate as hardly more than an asterisk, except for the way that the Trump campaign—and its media allies, including Breitbart, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh—normalized, promoted, and brought Alt Right ideas into the 2016 campaign. Steve Bannon, who became CEO of Trump’s campaign and later counselor to the new president, has bragged that under his leadership Breitbart had become, in his own words, a “platform for the alt-right.”1
In fact, as one conservative commentator noted, “Racism is not a fringe element of the Alt-Right; it’s the movement’s central premise.”
As an early target of the epithet, I was naturally curious to discover what a “cuckservative” was. “Cuck,” a derivative of “cuckold,” is a noun used by white supremacists to refer to whites who invite destruction of the white race by tolerating other races, which they view as weak whites inviting other races to rape their wives, steal their homes/schools/society, etc.6
Erick Erickson was blunt in his description. The phrase “cuckservative,” he wrote, “is a racist slur.” It is used by racists in support of a racialist agenda. The people who use it are not opposed to illegal immigration, but are opposed to immigration in general. They are opposed to evangelical Christians who support interracial adoption. They are opposed to anyone who does not think in terms of the white race.7
While the movement is not monolithic (there are many factions and variations) the Alt Right is not only explicitly white nationalist, it is also often explicitly anti-Semitic and comfortable with questioning and even mocking the Holocaust.
The day of Limbaugh’s broadcast, one leading white supremacist wrote: “Sam Francis was right: We need to stop pretending we are ‘true conservatives’ or that we have anything in common with these bow-tied, low-T clowns. We don’t support the ‘conservative agenda’ as articulated by the National Review. We are populists and nationalists, which means we are ‘tethered’ to the well-being of our own people and protecting and advancing their interests, not some abstract ideology.”15
In March 2016, Jewish writer Bethany Mandel wrote that “the surest way to see anti-Semitism flood your mentions column is to tweet something negative about Donald Trump.”
A conservative movement that embraces the Alt Right—or its candidate—will have forfeited both its intellectual integrity and its political future. No tent can possibly be that big and still remain standing.
On an intellectual level, the Alt Right challenges the conservative belief that America is a nation founded on an idea or a vision of natural and God-given rights. They prefer to see it as defined by its ethnic and racial identities. This goes to the core of their break with the conservative tradition. “We question America’s founding myth,” Spencer, the white nationalist leader, explained. “If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it’s not just the notion of ‘all men are created equal’ that I would object to. It’s also this notion that states come into being as entities for people to
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After a video surfaced in which Milo expressed support for sex between grown men and children as young as thirteen, CPAC rescinded the invitation.
In this binary world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles.
