How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

Our politics becomes less about compromise than confrontation and less about persuasion than about tests of tribal loyalty.

Conor Friedersdorf wrote in the Atlantic, “Hugely popular intellectual leaders abandoned the most basic norms of decency, as when Mark Levin screamed at a caller that her husband should shoot himself; stoked racial tensions, as when Rush Limbaugh avowed that in President Obama’s America folks think white kids deserve to get beat up by black kids on busses; and indulged paranoid conspiracy theories, as when Roger Ailes aired month-after-month of Glenn Beck’s chalk-board monologues.”9

Activists who had clamored to “burn it all down” suddenly pivoted to demand party loyalty and virtual lockstep support of policies, even when they conflicted with fundamental principles or contradicted what the dear leader had previously said.

Hatred of the media substituted for a coherent governing agenda.

principles like constitutionalism, entitlement reform, and even the belief that character mattered turned out to be pie-crust thin, leaving the movement vulnerable to cult of personality politics.

Their about-face reflected the degree to which conservativism has come to be dominated by careerists and opportunists for whom the professed beliefs in small government, fiscal restraint, and constitutionalism were merely means to an end (ratings, cash, clicks, power), and thus easily discarded.

For years, conservatives have felt that the Left has been at ramming speed, often ignoring the niceties of congressional action, public opinion, or tolerance of religious differences. There was the passage of Obamacare with the barest of partisan majorities, rammed through on Christmas Eve and a massive stimulus package that threatened to explode the national debt. That was followed (in the eyes of conservatives) by assaults on free speech and religious liberty; the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, John Doe probes into conservative activists in Wisconsin, complete with predawn paramilitary raids; threats to bankrupt the coal industry; and the ongoing vilification of conservative activists and donors.11* On university campuses, activists began enforcing their demands for ideological conformity, complete with lists of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and “safe spaces.”

Decades of scarcely concealed contempt, including the almost reflexive dismissal of conservatives as ignorant racists, had sowed seeds of deep antipathy among conservatives, many of whom felt both disrespected and under attack.

All of this often was distorted and exaggerated by the...