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April 5 - April 9, 2022
Writing this in May 2021, it’s clear that my dark conclusion about the party was wrong. I was overly optimistic. As honestly as I had tried to confront the reality of the party that I had helped win so many elections, I never would have thought that the events of the post–2020 election were possible. Had you asked me on November 2, 2020, if Republican senators and members of Congress would accept a Biden victory if he won by over eight million popular votes and north of three hundred Electoral College votes, I would have said of course they would. They wouldn’t like it, but they would not
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I was wrong. I could not conceive of the Republican Party becoming the greatest internal threat to democracy since the Civil War. But that is the reality of this moment. That is the challenge we face if the American experiment is to survive this decade.
I spent decades making ads about tax policy, health care, foreign policy. None of that is now important. In retrospect those campaign issues seem almost quaint. Certainly, they were naive.
What a fool I was. All of these immutable truths turned out to be mere marketing slogans. None of it meant anything. I was the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were really smart and just crushing the market. What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.
It is a strange, melancholy feeling to turn sixty-five and realize that what you have spent a good portion of your life working for and toward was not only meritless but also destructive.
There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
I’ve worked in five presidential races. Four out of five we won the nomination. Two out of five we won it all.
What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.
This is one of those insidious half-truths that conceal a deeper, more important truth. Yes, pretty much all voters do care about jobs. But to say a white college-educated male or female cared about jobs in the same way as an African American is delusional. It was akin to saying that everyone would like not to get shot and that this truth means the same to a white suburban high school student in Des Moines as it does to a black teenager in Chicago’s K-Town. It was a truth asserted with such disregard for specifics that it became a building block of a larger falsehood. Feed generations of
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There is a small kernel of truth in it—the woman used four, not eighty names, and the total fraud was $8,000—but when four becomes eighty and $8,000 total becomes $150,000 a year, Reagan is just lying.
The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear.
So what’s the difference between Clinton’s making a racial appeal in 1992 and Bush’s doing the same in 1988 with the Willie Horton attack? The answer is simple and one African American voters seem to understand with great clarity: The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial.
telling. The RNC endorsed Roy Moore but ignores moderate governors. What else do you need to know?
I think it is telling that the Republican focus on the need to broaden the party has been driven by an instinct for survival and no real sense of a larger purpose.
For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by “situational ethics,” but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic. It wasn’t the morality of inclusion driving the call to expand the party; it was the political necessity. With Trump’s victory in 2016, the party seemed to breathe a sigh of relief that no longer did it need to pretend that it must reach out more to nonwhite voters.
How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.
The Christian right would like the world to believe it was the political arm of Jesus Christ, come to life to save a sinful America. In practice it operates more like a Christian-related super PAC for a white America. The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity. It was where the commercialization of Christianity meets the politicization of Christianity.
To understand how white evangelicals could embrace Donald Trump, consider him the ultimate white megachurch preacher.
Compare photographs of Jimmy Swaggart and Donald Trump, and they look like brothers from some strange union of Mardi Gras floats: huge heads, strange colors, balloon bodies, mouths disconnected from brains. The very strangeness of the figures makes them harder to judge by the standards of normal human behavior. Their entire artifice is to appear abnormal and thus escape judgment. These men are “different” and should be judged differently.
Whoever got one-on-one with Trump would win because he was an open sewer of immorality and Republicans were the “Character Counts” party. Those of us who voiced this opinion were allowing ourselves to think that the Republican Party we wanted to exist actually did.
I once tried to raise the obvious contradictions of Helms’s homophobia and Arthur’s own sexual orientation, he actually burst out laughing. “Kid,” he said, “all we do is elect them. After that they’re on their own.”
Now whenever I hear the loonies on the right asserting that God wanted Trump to win, I always wonder why it didn’t occur to them that if God really was involved, he probably could have won the popular vote for Trump. And done it without the Russians’ helping.
I was never burdened by the notion that I was working for a political party that was fundamentally hypocritical on the deficit and economy and one that would proceed to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having an affair with a former House intern himself.
But still the Republican Party continues to push tax cuts the same way the Roman Catholic Church uses incense for High Mass, as a comforting symbolism for believers that reminds them of their identity.
Being against “out-of-control federal spending,” a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. It just makes the members of the Republican Church feel closer to their political God.
The most likely scenario is that the deficit will continue to pile up until there is a financial crisis that forces the country to feel debt pain. Then the odds are that it will give renewed energy to a tax plan that greatly increases taxes on the wealthy.
The essential texts would include F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. These are serious works by serious minds who have dedicated much of their intellectual life to examining the relationship between individuals and government, the true meaning of freedom, and what system of government affords individuals the greatest opportunity to maximize their potential.
But what is often forgotten is that the National Review began as basically a well-educated-racist publication. In an infamous editorial published in 1957, Buckley fiercely defended segregation: The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics
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The National Review, as the unofficial intellectual beating heart of the American conservative movement, was committed to the principle that a “white” culture was superior to all others.
Opinion. In 1965 at the Cambridge Union, Buckley debated James Baldwin on the topic “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.” It was an extraordinary exchange and one of the few moments when Buckley faced an opponent more eloquent in word and elegant and appearance. James Baldwin slaughtered William Buckley; at the conclusion of the debate, 544 supported the Baldwin argument and 164 the Buckley side.
By 2004, Buckley would say, “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.”
In Magnet’s view, the 1960s were a time when America lost its way and became disconnected from the moorings of culture and faith that had…made America great. What I realized I was reading was an articulate, erudite evocation of the world as seen by Donald Trump. The period of some of the most dramatic and uplifting social change in America, a time when millions of Americans were granted the right to vote after pitched battles were fought in the streets, that was not the civil rights era we should celebrate but the time in which America lost its way. White families own more than 90 percent of
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Once you convince yourself that racism has been defeated and that the real problems in America are the crisis of the family structure, it’s a short walk to the impeached Alabama judge and defeated Senate candidate Roy Moore’s passionate claim that blacks were better off during slavery.
Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days.
As it was in Mao’s China with the Red Guard, it is a political crime in today’s Republican Party to appear well educated. So we find Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeting a rant about “unelected progressive elites in our govt.”16 The senator went to Stanford, taught at St. Paul’s School in London (founded in 1509), and graduated from Yale Law School. Senator Ted Cruz denounces “coastal elites who attack the NRA.”17 Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, was a Supreme Court clerk, worked in the Bush administration, and is a former assistant
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So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennett decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump?
When a Williams College and Harvard Law grad like Bill Bennett considers a man who found the nuclear triad a puzzling mystery in a primary debate qualified to be president, the idiotocracy is in full ascendant.
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, published in 2018, is the most extensive comparison of the Democratic and Republican Parties’ relationship to the media and a concept of verifiable truth.
In this restrained and scholarly presentation is a screaming headline that, yes, Republicans have gone crazy and here’s proof. The authors—Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts—remind readers of the critical role played by modern institutions that serve as gatekeepers for an accepted truth.
What few people grasp—because they are outside the system and have normal lives to lead—is just how huge the machinery of deception is that the Republicans have erected and how long it has been in the making.
God and Man at Yale became a New York Times best seller, and Buckley followed it up with a defense of Joseph McCarthy written with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning.18 Like his defense of segregation in the National Review, the McCarthy book is a reminder for those who today, in the age of Trump, like to cast William Buckley as the lost soul of true conservatism: that for all his well-crafted sentences and love of language, Buckley was often a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.
The brand of conservatism that has emerged from those early beginnings at Human Events requires the absence of professional standards. The entire purpose of this ever-increasing brand of conservative journalism—and it does great violence to the profession to call most of it by that term—is to confirm not just your opinion but also your feelings.
All through 2016, I had conversations with what passed for leadership in the Republican Party on the need to stand up to Trump. Most of their responses went like this: “Trump is a disaster and a disgrace. But we have to let him lose on his own.
My dad was in the FBI when Hoover ordered the roundup of Asian Americans. He hated it and quit, joined the navy, and spent the next three years fighting in the South Pacific. Like so many, he didn’t talk a lot about the war. But when it came to leaving the FBI, he told me once, “You can always say no.”
Special interest groups are like terrorists: they test for weakness and exploit fear.
The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong.
No single political figure better illustrates the predicate for Donald Trump than Newt Gingrich. Both men are deeply damaged psychological cripples from dysfunctional families.
The Princeton political science professor Nolan McCarty has written extensively on polarization
The combination of high ideological stakes and intense competition for party control of the national government has all but eliminated the incentives for significant bipartisan cooperation on important national problems. Consequently, polarization has reduced congressional capacity to govern.10
Is one party more to blame than the other? Professor McCarty is clear on Republicans’ greater role in the negativity of polarization: The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in polarization. Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.11