How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

I cannot pretend that I was not part of this story, and not merely for my attempts to construct a firewall of sorts against the march of Trumpism. For a quarter of a century I was part of this conservative movement, both as an observer and as a full participant. Like a number of other conservatives, including talk show hosts, I have to step back and ask uncomfortable questions. There’s no point in mincing words: for me 2016 was a brutal, disorienting, disillusioning slog. There came a moment when I realized that conservatives had created an alternative reality bubble and that I had perhaps helped shape it. 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.

In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More asks Richard Rich, “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales, Richard?” A more modern version might read, “but for tax cuts, Paul?”

Conservatives once recognized that politics was a means, not an end, because they believed that we live in communities sustained by moral capital, recognizing as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes, that moral communities are “fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy.”4