How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

It will be painful not just because it will recount the dissolution of the conservative coalition, but also the betrayal of conservative principles by so many of the trusted leaders, spokesmen, and champions of the Right.

Most painful of all has been the recognition that some of the Left’s critiques, while often unfair and overdrawn, were also often far more on target than many of us ever wished to admit.

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.

After Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats need to perform an autopsy; Republicans need an exorcism.

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. Problems that were exposed during the rough-and-tumble of the campaign are unlikely to disappear when the tribe assumes all of the trappings and perks of power. History seems rich with examples: Success does not necessarily imply virtue or even sanity. One can lose one’s mind and still achieve the imperial purple. Kings can be both mad and bad, and the courtiers are usually loath to point out the obvious.

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.

In the 1990s, as Bill Clinton’s scandals unfolded, conservatives insisted that character mattered and worried deeply and often loudly about the toxic effects of our politics on the culture. What message, they asked, were we sending our children? So, what is the message now?

And the folks who had been the culture’s chief defenders of character and virtue seem to be okay with that. 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.”

On the surface the rise of Trump seemed to rend the fabric of the movement, but it merely exposed a preexisting condition: a failure of imagination, principle, political courage, and ultimately of ideas.

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.

The reality is that a genuinely “conservative” party would never have nominated a Donald Trump; a right-wing nationalist party or one without fixed principles would have no problem doing so.

In 2016, the portion of Americans living in deeply blue or deeply red counties surged to 60.4 percent.

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.

The hard fact is that only a political party that had cultivated an indifference and insensitivity to racial issues could have nominated Donald Trump and embraced him so easily.

After the election, a study by University of Oxford researchers found that “nearly a quarter of web content shared by Twitter users in Michigan during the 10 days before the presidential election was false.”

In many ways the new anti-anti-Trumpism mirrors Trump himself, because at its core there are no fixed values, no respect for constitutional government or ideas of personal character, only a free-floating nihilism cloaked in insult, mockery, and bombast.

Ultimately the idea of backing Wallace fizzled out, when some of the calmer heads realized that would have meant an alliance with an unsavory coterie of crackpots, including anti-Semities and Holocaust deniers. But the flirtation with Wallace served to expose a soft underbelly of conservativism.

Why not? Why didn’t the Right embrace Wallace? Why didn’t it reject the establishment Right of the time?

One possibility may be that the lack of a raucous Right media during the 1980s actually gave Reagan the space for maneuver and ideological flexibility that his successors would not enjoy. Imagine, for example, the reaction of the current Right media to Reagan’s amnesty for illegal immigrants or his decision to raise taxes later in his administration.

After the number of illegal immigrants surged again, many GOP leaders including Bush, along with Senator John McCain and Marco Rubio and much of the business community began to push for another shot at immigration reform. For a time, comprehensive reform seemed possible, as polls consistently suggested widespread support among Republican voters for some sort of a path to citizenship.

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. Once the party that ran against Washington’s special interests, it is now run by lobbyists. Once the party of sound management, it is now tarred by the managerial disasters of the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina.3

Perhaps inevitably, the new conservative media focused far more on Clinton’s foibles than on explaining conservative ideas, even those laid out so hopefully in the “Contract with America.” That would also set a pattern for the new media that would have notable consequences two decades later.

Others on the Right flirted with ideas like nullification, an idea that has enjoyed pretty much complete obscurity since the Civil War. (The idea, repeatedly rejected by the courts, is that states can nullify federal laws they deem unconstitutional.)

So what had changed? And why were the gatekeepers of conservative purity willing to overlook Trump’s many and sundry ideological foibles (i.e., he opposed both free trade and entitlement reform) but unwilling to cut Ryan slack for his deviations from conservative orthodoxy?

Only 21 percent of Republicans said they wanted cuts in spending for Medicare, 15 percent wanted to decrease spending on education, and just 17 percent favored cuts in Social Security. The Pew Poll also found that Tea Party supporters made up only 37 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, but had an outsized impact on Republican politics because they tended to be more engaged in the political process and more likely to vote in primaries.

In such a world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth, a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society.

The answer is deceptively simple—they believed fake news because they wanted to and because it was easy. We might assume that people naturally want to seek out information that is true, but this turns out to be a basic misunderstanding of the human psyche, which feels more comfortable with familiar information, or stories that confirm their biases.

In other words, many voters use information not to discover what is true, but rather to reinforce their relationship to their group or tribe. They use reason to confirm or justify the outcome they want.

But rereading it in the age of Trump reminds us that the Right has harbored some darker impulses for decades.

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans, Robertson implied that America had brought the tragedy on itself. “We have insulted God at the highest level of our government. Then, we say, ‘Why does this happen?’ It is happening because God Almighty is lifting His protection from us.”26 Jerry Falwell Sr., the founder of the Moral Majority, echoed his remarks in an appearance on Robertson’s television show, The 700 Club, suggesting that gays, abortion-rights supporters, and liberal civil-rights activists shared the blame for the horrific attacks:

Most conservatives did not, of course, take Robertson’s ideas seriously. For the most part, his bizarre notions were met with eye rolls, but seldom with censure. Conservative thought leaders looked the other way. As a result, for years elements of the conservative coalition marinated in a toxic stew of conspiracy theories. Not surprisingly, that had consequences.

By failing to push back against the birther conspiracy theories, conservatives had faced a moral and intellectual test with significant implications for the future. It was a test they failed.

On the day his campaign ended, Cruz accused Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch and Ailes of making “a decision to get behind Donald Trump and turning Fox News ‘into the Donald Trump network 24/7.’”

In her memoir, which was published shortly after the election, Megyn Kelly strongly suggested that Roger Ailes was actively colluding with the Trump campaign.

As reporter and author Gabriel Sherman noted, the network that “played an undeniable role in reshaping American politics over the last 20 years,” had its own culture where the sexual harassment of women “was encouraged and protected.”

Limbaugh became Trump’s primary enabler. What followed were months of painful and tortured rationalizations as he defended Trump’s gaffes and tried to explain why he—the voice of conservatism for a generation—was now willing to abandon one conservative principle after another.

The incident was an opportunity for conservatives to draw a line, but mostly they refused. It was similar to the tests they would repeatedly fail over the next four years.

George Will noted that the lack of reaction “was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”

As he had repeatedly said over the last two decades, Limbaugh didn’t measure his success by whether or not his side won elections, what mattered was his “business metrics.” It was a remarkably candid acknowledgment.

Writer John Avlon anticipated Limbaugh’s dilemma when he noted that many hosts “become prisoners of their own shtick,” because if they softened or wavered, “they will be called traitors by the tribe they have cultivated.”

Every issue, every conspiracy, every applause line has been ripped from their websites, radio shows, and television programs. It’s why he became America’s most prominent birther. It’s why he floated rumors that Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK, and that Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster. It’s why he talks the way he does about Mexicans and Muslims and women and African Americans. It’s why he’s been able to get away with knowing little to nothing about policy or government or world affairs—because Trump, like any good talking head, only speaks ,in chyrons and clauses and some-people-are-sayings.

Arguing from economic principles is not always easy. Arguing facts and logics is not as popular as arguing from feelings and emotions.

The vast majority of airtime was not taken up by issues or explanations of conservative approaches to markets or need to balance liberty with order. Why bother with such stuff, when there were personalities to be mocked, conspiracy theories to be shared, and left-wing moonbats to be ridiculed?

The “ad hominem” argument—literally “to the person”—is rightly regarded as a logical fallacy because it substitutes personal attacks for discussing the argument someone is making. But on many talk shows, including Limbaugh’s, nearly every argument was ad hominem. Instead of offering statistics and building a case, it was simply easier to ridicule House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, or shrug off a negative report because it came from the “lamestream media.”

This was, of course, a rather fundamental challenge not merely to conservative principles, but to simple, basic norms of decency.

“You’re comparing American citizens, Muslims, to rabid dogs,” Sykes responds.

The reality was that the Right had become comfortable with racially charged rhetoric. At one time, racist language was a ticket to exile, but that had changed in the new media environment.

The Alt Right also frequently embraces the idea of “white genocide,” which sees immigration and civil rights as part of plot to decrease the white population.

Not surprisingly, the term “cuckservative” was also popular in social media postings that dwell on the perfidy of Israel and Jewish conspiracies. But that did not seem to bother some prominent conservatives.

Of the 2.6 million total tweets, ADL focused its analysis on tweets directed at 50,000 journalists in the United States. A total of 19,253 anti-Semitic tweets were directed at those journalists, but the total number of anti-Semitic tweets directed at journalists overall could be much higher for a variety of factors noted in the report also shows that more than two-thirds (68 percent) of the anti-Semitic tweets directed at those journalists were sent by 1,600 Twitter accounts (out of 313 million existing Twitter accounts). These aggressors are disproportionately likely to self-identify as Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, or part of the “alt-right,” a loosely connected group of extremists, some of whom are white supremacists. The words that appear most frequently in the 1,600 Twitter attackers’ bios are “Trump,” “nationalist,” “conservative,” and “white.”