It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

by Stuart Stevens

Then the odds are that it will give renewed energy to a tax plan that greatly increases taxes on the wealthy. This would be a fittingly ironic fate facing the so-called fiscal conservatives of the Republican Party. By pretending to care about an issue without the courage or will to act, they will have set in motion a scenario that is among their worst nightmares: an activated left with the moral authority to soak the rich with taxes.

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”43

CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES

We’ve got to stop being the stupid party. —Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, 20131

Science was a Democrat thing. —Landon “Tucker” Davis, an Interior Department official, according to notes by the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General2

a body of intellectual work makes the case for a center-right party in America. 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.

The American species (to the extent that there really is such a thing) is, of course, populist rather than conservative—and for a very forceful reason: America happens to be the only society in creation built by conscious human intent…and

and developed, by Europeans tired of Europe’s ancient commitments, and determined,…each in his own way, on a “new beginning.”3

Today in the Trump era, many conservatives who believe Trump has denigrated all political discourse and destroyed any meaning of conservatism—which, of course, he has—look back longingly at the National Review as being everything that Trump World is not: clever, erudite, committed to principle.

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 evidencing the cultural superior...

National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct….It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by vi...

was committed to the principle that a “white” culture was superior to all others. William Schlamm went on to edit the John Birch Society magazine, American 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.”

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.

It is the essence of the “color blind” assertion that is perversely racist but reassuring to white people. It has the benefits of sounding antiracist—we are all people, or, as it were, “all lives matter”—but is in practice deeply racist because it ignores the reality of the impact of race in every element of American society. James Baldwin took his audience through a journey of what it meant to be black in America:

It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you….I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing….The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors….Why is my freedom, my citizenship, in question now?

Buckley’s response was to deny the existence of race as a societal force:

being black in America is actually an advantage because government and society treat blacks with a differential preference:

By 2004, Buckley would say, “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.”7

that many in these demographics view government as a positive and necessary tool in bettering their lives. The avowed hatred of government that is such a Republican bedrock principle is offensive and alienating to much of the country.

(It is also a practice of the white middle class to be completely blind to the vast help they get from the government in all aspects of their lives.)

But how does a black person hear these same words, knowing that it took thirty thousand federal troops to force the University of Mississippi to accept one African American?

The entire conceit of compassionate conservatism was an acknowledgment that conservatism had failed to provide an alternative to the conservative critique that liberals believed any problem could be solved through more money and more government.

Therefore, eliminate government, and people in tough circumstances will suddenly be better off. Both the public and many Republican mayors said that’s naive. Merely the absence of bad action is not going to be sufficient.”11

Phrases like “the soft bigotry of low expectations” to describe a failed education system that processed children more than educated them, or “reading is the first civil right,” or celebrating those involved in private efforts to help those in need as “the armies of compassion.”

the most strident voices against Trump were those I’d worked with in the Bush campaigns: Michael Gerson, now a Washington Post columnist; Nicolle Wallace, who has her own show on MSNBC; Steve Schmidt, who ran rapid response for the 2004 Bush campaign; Matthew Dowd, who coordinated polling in the 2000 campaign and was a 2004 strategist turned ABC regular; and Mark McKinnon, who, along with Karl Rove, brought me into the Bush world and now has a show, The Circus, on Showtime.

The embrace of Trump by the Republican Party is a repudiation of everything we claimed to believe.

Jeb Bush lost for many reasons, but the basic one is that he was running to win a race in a party that no longer existed. He was like a guy who showed up with a tennis racket at a bowling alley.

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.

This is neocon thinking. 100% is a formal fallacy of taking a true conditional statement (e.g., "If the lamp were broken, then the room would be dark,") and invalidly inferring its converse ("The room is dark, so the lamp is broken,") even though the converse may not be true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Affirming-the-Consequent

White families own more than 90 percent of the wealth in America not because of institutionalized racism and the legacy of slavery but rather because of their “culture.” In Magnet’s world,

What other conclusion can be drawn from the proliferation of the black middle class in the last quarter century? Though doors still remain to be unlocked, as a general principle opportunity is open for whoever wishes to seek it.12

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs, and an endless stream of professional nuts and cranks who roam the internet selling conspiracies, bitterness, grievance, and anger, in search of an argument.

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing.

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.

if he believed what he wrote about Bill Clinton that “a president whose character manifests itself in patterns of reckless personal conduct…cannot be a good president,” how can Bennett support a man who brags about assaulting women and directs his own son to write checks to reimburse his lawyer Michael Cohen for hush payments to a porn star?23

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?

Trump refuses to accept the terms of his own victory and incessantly conjures machinations against him, including coups d’état from within his own administration.

The acceptance of the conspiracy theories is just one station in the slaughterhouse of truth that is the Trump presidency.

In truth, Puerto Rico is part of the United States and has received less than $14 billion.

Republicans are allowing Trump to equate conservatism with conspiracy,

“What would it take to get white Republicans in Alabama to support a Democrat? What if the Republican was a child molester?” By Election Day, nine women had come forward with allegations against Moore. No credible defense was offered by Moore or his supporters other than a blanket denial.

Large elements of the Republican Party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth. 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.

No fact emerges more clearly from our analysis of how four million political stories were linked, tweeted, and shared over a three-year period than that there is no symmetry in the architecture and dynamics of communications within the right-wing media ecosystem and outside of it.7

Does a society live in a shared reality? In a civil society like the United States, that shared reality, that truth, is the core energy that drives the functioning of society. Without agreement that red lights tell motorists to stop, there is no traffic control.

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.

For decades a certain percentage of those who called themselves conservatives had been cultivating a country within a country, a sort of virtual secession from the United States of America.

Beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s, activists working in media emerged as leaders of the conservative movement. Not only did they start an array of media enterprises—publishing houses, radio programs, magazines, book clubs, television shows—they built the movement.

They coordinated rallies, founded organizations, ran political campaigns, and mobilized voters.

While they disagreed profoundly on tactics and strategy, they shared a belief that political change stemmed not just from ideas but from the proper expression and diffusion of those ideas through ideological media sources. Unlike fellow conservatives who worked for mainstream periodicals and broadcasters, these media activists believed independence was vital to their work—that they needed to develop their own publishing houses, their own radio programs, their own magazines if they were going to truly change American politics.11

To promote a world viewpoint distinct from that shared by the majority, it was critical to assert that everyone else simply didn’t have the correct information on which to base decisions.