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the culture and mind-set of a Republican party and a conservative movement that enabled him, capitulated to him, and embraced him,
conservative movement that enabled him, capitulated to him, and embraced him,
revealed the tectonic shifts that had already broken conservatism apart.
the betrayal of conservative principles by so many of the trusted leaders, spokesmen, and champions of the Right.
conservative media, many of whose leading voices turned from gatekeepers to cheerleaders and from thought leaders to sycophantic propagandists.
somehow a movement based on ideas had devolved into a new tribalism that valued neither principle nor truth;
The gleeful rejection of established norms of civility, tradition, and basic decency played well in an era of reality television, but was the antithesis of what conservatism had once represented.
for me 2016 was a brutal, disorienting, disillusioning slog.
There came a moment when I realized that conservatives had created an alternative reality bubble
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 nat...
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How did the elites miss the signs of division that turned to schism that became a veritable civil war?
Did we play with fire, only to see it spread out of control? Did we really “make” Donald Trump? Or is he a merely a cartoonish bizzaro version of conservative values?
the 2016 victory makes the need for a reassessment even more urgent. After Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats need to perform an autopsy; Republicans need an exorcism.
The problems of the Right
are now a national problem with potentially sweeping consequences.
regard Donald Trump’s victory as a catastrophe for the movement.
Trumpian bargain?
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.
strictly genteel;
the distinctive element of 2016 was the open ridicule and contempt for notions of civility, or even basic decency, as values that...
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They have an acute sense of the hypocrisy of a society that touts virtue but lavishes fame, wealth, and power on people who flout them.
Pre-Trump, former education secretary William Bennett had argued eloquently that: “It is our character that supports the promise of our future—far more than particular government programs or policies.” Bennett, the author of the Book of Virtues and one of the most prominent virtucrats of the Right, emphasized the importance of the president as a role model. “The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.”1 But during the recent presidential campaign, Bennett reversed himself,
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“Our country can survive the occasional infelicities and improprieties of Donald Trump,” Bennett wrote. “But it cannot survive losing the Supreme Court to liberals and allowing them to wreck our sacred republic. It would reshape the country for decades.”
willing to inject toxic sludge into the culture in order to win a political victory.
now, for many conservatives, a willingness to ignore, rationalize, or defend lies has become a test of tribal loyalty.
Trump’s acolytes in politics and social media have modelled their behavior on his, combining the worst traits of the schoolyard bully, the thin-skinned nastiness that mimics confidence; the strut and sneer that substitutes for actual strength.
it create an alternative-reality silo that indulged every manner of crackpot, wing-nut conspiracy theory?
“cuckservatives”?
Was it the day the Drudge Report began linking to the fevered conspiracy rantings of a guy named Alex Jones? Was it when the GOP thought it might be a good idea to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office? Was it the rise of the Tea Party or when Rush Limbaugh called a young female law student a “slut,” and his career began to implode?
they made fiscal promises they couldn’t keep?
“Conservatives who for 8 years sowed the dragon’s teeth of partisan politics are horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon”?
Consider that in recent years “conservative” had come to mean “radical change agent,”
ordered liberty.
something disturbing that we had ignored and perhaps nurtured—a shift from an emphasis on freedom to authoritarianism and from American “exceptionalism” to nativism.
Where Reagan had famously called on Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” Donald Trump was proposing to build one—a big, beautiful wall to shut people out from Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”
the conference revealed an “ideology conforming to an individual rather than the other way around.… Anyone searching for a brand of conservatism independent of the new president would have walked away sorely disappointed.”
conservatives had long ago replaced rational policy discussions with the politics of lowest-common-denominator angry populism.
movement once driven by ideas found itself dominated by Kardashian-like talking point reciters, intellectually dishonest shills, cynical careerists, and Alt Right bullies.
Conservative “leaders” did not merely regurgitate “talking points” but became addicted to word salads of conservative clichés—“establishment,” “globalist,” “elites”—that became substitutes for actual thought.
this environment, conformity was demanded—on language, attitudes, and even tactics. Since even the mildest of dissent was punished by withering fire on air and through social media—“RINO!”—it was not surprising that original, fresh thinking was discouraged.
even before the rise of Donald Trump, there were signs of deep dysfunction in the conservative ranks, raising questions about its ability to govern.
their message was often contradictory and incoherent.
Even as the Republican base became more Southern, evangelical, and working class, the party’s actual policies tended to focus on the entrepreneurial and business class.
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.
conservatives confusing “cruelty, vulgarity, and bluster with strength and straight talk.”
Such quixotic, self-defeating strategies were often justified on the grounds that they “made liberal heads explode,” or as Palin put it so memorably, “it’s really funny to me to see the splodey heads keep ’sploding.…”
conservatives embraced and defended figures like Christine (“I am not a witch”) O’Donnell and lost winnable Senate races with candidates who said bizarre things about rape (Todd Akin) or were just too weird for the electorate (Sharron Angle).
far from being “indivisible,”
As recently as 1997, 164 of the House of Representatives’ 435 seats were considered “swing districts.” Today, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report, only about 72 seats are considered competitive.
In 1976, when Jimmy Carter narrowly edged Gerald Ford, only about one in four Americans lived in a landslide county. That proportion has grown steadily as the nation’s political polarization accelerated. By 2004 that had risen to 48.3 percent; by 2012, a majority of Americans (50.6 percent) lived in a landslide county. In 2016, the portion of Americans living in deeply blue or deeply red counties surged to 60.4 percent. In rural America, more than three fourths of voters lived in counties that voted overwhelmingly red.
