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For my father, Jay G. Sykes, curmudgeon, contrarian, and mentor
[Back] of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas—not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word.
—“PUBLISHER’S STATEMENT,” IN THE FIRST ISSUE OF NATIONAL REVIEW (NOVEMBER 1955)
Conservatism must, however, be wiped clean of the parasitic cant that defaces it, and repels so many of those who approach it inquiringly. Up against the faith of a conservative, the great surrealistic ideologies reduce to dust.
—WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, UP FROM LIBERALISM (1959)
I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not a reader. I don’t like to read long books. I like to read news. So I couldn’t tell you that there was a book that I read that changed my life. More so, I love to read news and I love to read commentary and I love to watch TV. I love to watch news. I’m a watcher and I’m a writer. A reader in the sense that I like to read news but I have a very short attention span, so sitting down with a book is very difficult for me.
—TOMI LAHREN (2016)
I told them, you know, it’s really funny to me to see the splodey heads keep ’sploding over this movement.
—SARAH PALIN (2016)
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS NOT A book about Donald Trump, even though he will play a central role. It is about the culture and mind-set of a Republican party and a conservative movement that enabled him, capitulated to him, and embraced him, probably much to his own surprise. His nomination and election profoundly changed the face of conservativism, but also revealed the tectonic shifts that had already broken conservatism apart.
It is also a painful book for me to write.
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. This includes the implosion of conservative media, many of whose leading voices turned from gatekeepers to cheerleaders and from thought leaders to sycophantic propagandists. 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.
But somehow a movement based on ideas had devolved into a new tribalism that valued neither principle nor truth; a Brave New Age that replaced Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. with Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos. Moral reasoning was supplanted by polls; ideas were elbowed aside by charlatans and media clowns; while ratings spikes were proof that one was not “out of touch.” 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.
Unfortunately, the election results will surely fill the worst elements on the Right with passionate intensity.
I cannot pretend that I was not part of this story, and not merely for my attempts to construct a firewall of sorts against the march of Trumpism. For a quarter of a century I was part of this conservative movement, both as an observer and as a full participant. Like a number of other conservatives, including talk show hosts, I have to step back and ask uncomfortable questions. 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.
Sometimes movements or organizations can only be understood from the inside, because only an insider can provide a sense of perspective and motivation or translate the language and the nuance, separating dog whistles from core principles.
But there are also times when it takes an outsider to recognize the essential lunacy of a political cause or strategy; the guy in the room who will raise his hand and say, “This is foolish.” The power of groupthink to coalesce around awful ideas in closed meetings is well understood, but the process is magnified in a political movement that creates its own silos. Participants often simply do not understand how silly they look from the outside. As someone who had a front row seat for years, but now finds himself exiled from what the conservative movement has become, I hope to straddle those perspectives and be able to look at what has happened as both an insider and an outsider.
Inevitably, this book will also ask whether many of the Left’s critiques of conservative rhetoric—charges we have rejected for decades—might not have had a grain of truth. Did we—did I—contribute to this prairie fire of bigotry and xenophobia that seemed to grip so many on the Right? 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?
In other words, did Trump represent continuity or discontinuity? Was he a logical development in conservativism, or a radical, ominous break with that tradition? Or was it a combination of both?
First a confession: When I set out to write this book, I was prepared to argue that Trump’s victory was a black swan event, a hostile takeover of the conservative movement. But that position no longer seems tenable; the roots for the populist/nationalist putsch run too deep.
Another obvious question is whether the sweeping successes of Republicans in 2016 essentially refute my argument that the Right has indeed lost its mind or render this book irrelevant. Actually, I would argue that 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.
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 problems of the Right are no longer a crisis of a political faction or a theoretical conundrum to be hashed over by its pundits. They are now a national problem with potentially sweeping consequences.
Of course, the Left also has its moonbats, its cranks, its hermetically sealed bubbles and alter
native realities. They can easily be found on university campuses and the newsrooms of elite media organizations, whose lip service to “diversity” seldom extends to diversity of ideas. Buckley once said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” Evidence is abundant that progressives have experienced their own crackup, but I will leave that book for someone else; this book focuses on what just happened to the Right.
It is not a contradiction to say that conservatism urgently needs to adjust to modern realities and also to regard Donald Trump’s victory as a catastrophe for the movement. One of the abiding ironies of the campaign was the way that many of the enforcers of ideological purity, who had made such innovation and creative policymaking politically impossible, were the first to embrace Trumpism.
The dilemma now for many conservatives will be painful: By aligning themselves with Trump they will score significant victories, including the appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices, tougher policies on immigration, and the rollback of the administrative state. But they will constantly have to ask themselves, What is the butcher’s bill for this Trumpian bargain? How much will they overlook? How many other principles will they be required to abandon?
In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More asks Richard Rich, “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales, Richard?” A more modern version might read, “but for tax cuts, Paul?”
Unfortunately, the effects of Trumpism cannot be measured solely in terms of policy, but also in the way it has coarsened the culture as a whole. 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. This isn’t to say that conservatism was ever strictly genteel; that is obviously not the case, especially in recent years. But the distinctive element of 2016 was the open ridicule and contempt for notions of civility, or even basic decency, as values that needed to be protected and advanced.
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?
Consider the problems of raising children in an era in which our most famous role model is Donald Trump, a new symbol of power, success, celebrity, and masculinity. As parents, we struggle to teach our children empathy and compassion. We hope to teach them character, humility, impulse control, kindness, and good sportsmanship. We want them to learn how to win and lose graciously, treat others with respect, avoiding name-calling, and tell the truth even if it’s inconvenient. But young people only need to flip the channel to see what success looks like in America today. Whatever we tell them, young people have a keen sense of what traits and behaviors are rewarded and celebrated. 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. Especially for young men still searching for a model of what it means to be a man, Trump’s behavior will carry significant weight. And why not? He may be a bully, a fabulist, a serial insulter and abuser of women, but our alpha-male president is a billionaire, who has been elevated to the most powerful job in the world.
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.” 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, saying that conservatives who objected to Trump “suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”2 In August 2016, Bennett wrote an essay making the case for overlooking questions of character in choosing a president. “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.”3
Like Bennett, most conservatives have been willing to make the trade-off: they were willing to inject toxic sludge into the culture in order to win a political victory. Needless to say, this is a dramatic reversal for the Right. Conservatives once recognized that politics was a means, not an end, because they believed that we live in communities sustained by moral capital, recognizing as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes, that moral communities are “fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy.”4 But now, for many conservatives, a willingness to ignore, rationalize, or defend lies has become a test of tribal loyalty. At the same time, 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. Vindictive smash mouth attacks have replaced civil engagement. For many of us, this has a familiar feel; it is as if we’ve all been sent back to the sixth-grade playground.
This book is not a comprehensive chronicle of conservatism. There are inevitable gaps, and critics will note that I have glossed over many of the movement’s historic foibles and failures. What I have tried to do is capture some of the developments that led to the Trumpian Revolution and their implications for the conservative mind.
To a certain extent the title of this book is also misleading, because not everyone on the Right lost their minds. There have been consistent, principled voices from the conservative old guard, including George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Peter Wehner, Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, Noah Rothman, David French, David Frum, Rich Lowry, Bret Stephens, Jennifer Rubin, and Stephen Hayes. Despite heavy pressure, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary magazines all stayed true to the faith. But despite its electoral successes, the conservative movement is broken and the conservative media deeply compromised. 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.
Finally, I suspect this book will disappoint some readers who hope to read a full-throated rejection of conservative values. But I hope I have made it clear that I am still a conservative—albeit a contrarian one, who believes that the events of the last several years do not invalidate conservative principles, but rather make them political orphans.
PART I
HOW THE RIGHT LOST ITS MIND
CHAPTER 1
DID WE CREATE THIS MONSTER?
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—W. B. YEATS
SO HOW DID THIS happen?
How did the right wander off into the fever swamps of the Alt Right? How did it manage to go from Friedrich Hayek to Sean Hannity, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump? How did it create an alternative-reality silo that indulged every manner of crackpot, wing-nut conspiracy theory? How did a movement that was defined by its belief in individual liberty, respect for the constitution, free markets, personal responsibility, traditional values, and civility find itself embracing a stew of nativism, populism, and nationalism? How did the thought leaders of the movement find themselves tossed aside as “cuckservatives”?
When exactly did conservatives start to lose their minds?
Was it the day the Drudge Report began linking to the fevered conspiracy rantings of a guy named Alex Jones? W
as 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? Was it when they outsourced their thought leadership to the perpetually outraged? Or when Ann Coulter began her rants about Mexican rapists? Did the Right’s intellectual implosion begin when conservatives began to get their information from their Facebook news feeds? When conservatives replaced Bill Buckley with late-night Twitter rants? When they made fiscal promises they couldn’t keep?
Was Stephen King right when he wrote: “Conservatives who for 8 years sowed the dragon’s teeth of partisan politics are horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon”?1 Or did it start long before that?
From the outside, political movements can look monolithic, even coherent—especially when there is a dearth of actual conversation with the people who comprise it. For years, progressives have indulged in hostile generalizations about the Right, a pastime made easier by the fact that they seldom read conservative books or magazines or listened with much attention to what conservatives were saying.
So the Right may have looked formidable, but the reality is that it was a mess—a contentious collection of disparate, often contradictory ideas and querulous and warring factions of libertarians, chamber of commerce types, traditionalists, and social conservatives. For years there have been deep fissures in a movement that calls itself conservative but supports an economic system that was designed to be creatively destructive, that supports traditional values but also a limited government. There are inherent tensions in a party that claims to be the party of “freedom” but also of national security and law and order. Consider that in recent years “conservative” had come to mean “radical change agent,” and you see the difficulties. Those were very real tensions, but not necessarily contradictions.
How the Right Lost Its Mind Page 1
