How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  Arguing from economic principles is not always easy. Arguing facts and logics is not as popular as arguing from feelings and emotions. Traditional morality is a far less easy sell than the culture of “whatever.” In education, “most people” may not choose higher standards or rigorous accountability measures over gold stars and happy faces. It is harder to explain why free markets create wealth than it is to pander to workers who have been displaced by global competition. It is an uphill fight to persuade workers that the minimum wage is not in their interest. Those arguments, of course, could be won, and Ronald Reagan and others showed that they could be embraced by electoral majorities. But the case was made by conservatives who understood the odds against them.

  Increasingly, however, as they competed in the new media ecosystem, the talkers eschewed wonkery for the more sensational narratives.* 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.” Arguments via the 140-word characters of Twitter fit easily into this media ecosystem, as did Trump himself.

  THE DEFENDER-IN-CHIEF

  Even before he dumped Scott Walker, Limbaugh played a key role in maintaining Trump’s viability as a candidate. Trump’s mockery of former POW John McCain (“I like the ones who weren’t captured”) could have been a campaign-ending gaffe for other politicians. But Limbaugh provided support at a critical moment.

  “The American people haven’t seen something like this in a long time,” he told his audience in July 2015. “They have not seen an embattled public figure stand up for himself, double down and tell everybody to go to hell.”21 Despite the fact that Trump, who had never served in the military, had questioned McCain’s status a war hero, Limbaugh opened his show by declaring: “Trump can survive this, Trump is surviving this.” He called Trump’s refusal to apologize “a great, great teachable moment here, this whole thing with Trump and McCain.”

  Months later, he defended Trump’s claim that he had seen videos of “thousands and thousands of” people in Jersey City “cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” Actually no such video exists and officials on the ground have consistently denied the story. But again, Limbaugh set the pattern of providing air cover by defending what Stephen Colbert would call the “truthiness” of the statement.

  And, so here comes Trump saying that he saw Muslims cheer on 9/11, he adds tens of thousands there. The bottom line is that a lot of Americans are well aware that Muslims were cheering. Maybe not in New Jersey in great numbers, but around the world they were because we saw the video. On 9/11 and in the aftermath, we saw video on the news, unquote of Muslims all over the world, in certain places, cheering. So, regardless of the specific details, the American people and a lot of Trump supporters know, I mean it was militant Islamists who conducted 9/11, it’s militant Islamists that make up ISIS. [Emphasis added.]22

  This was vintage Limbaugh, rationalizing Trump’s statements while conceding they were false, mixing in criticism of the news media and suggesting that the erroneous statement somehow revealed a more important truth. Limbaugh’s defense also ignored the vital distinction between celebrations that might have taken place among Islamist sympathizers in the Middle East—and those that did not take place here in the United States among American Muslims.

  As the campaign wore on, Limbaugh also did yeoman service by explaining away some of Trump’s more flagrant inconsistencies. When it appeared that Trump was about to flip-flop on the signature issue of his campaign—his pledge to deport illegal immigrants—Limbaugh rationalized the broken promise by saying that he had never taken Trump seriously on the issue anyway, even when he was publicly praising it.23 This became awkward when a caller to Limbaugh’s show expressed concern over the flip-flop.

  LIMBAUGH: Yeah? Well, I guess the difference is—or not the difference. I guess the thing is … This is gonna enrage you. You know, I could choose a path here to try to mollify you, but—

  CALLER: (chuckles)

  LIMBAUGH: I never took him seriously on this. [Emphasis added.]

  CALLER: But thirty million—or fifteen or ten million … Excuse me. Ten million people did.

  LIMBAUGH: Yeah, and they still don’t care! My point is they still don’t care! They’re gonna stick with him no matter what. [Emphasis added.]

  Limbaugh was also quick to jettison conservative ideas like “small government” when Trump endorsed a federal maternity leave plan. “Do you think the argument over big versus small government’s still going on, or do you think it’s over?” Limbaugh wondered. “And if you think it’s over, who won?” He proceeded to offer a convoluted rationalization for the new mandate, insisting that “I am the last person on earth who wants any expansion of the government,” but blaming the “mess” in child care on the government and the Left. Limbaugh, then, essentially gave up the game, conceding that since the voters wanted more government spending, why not give it to them, regardless of what small-government conservatives had said in the past?

  Other than an intellectual exercise, you can’t say, “Oh, what could have been! Oh, how bad! Oh, I told you!” I know there’s a whole bunch of I told you so’s out there, but I think politically.… You wait. I think just for people that are not ideological—which is a hell of a lot of people in this country. I think they’re gonna respond so positively to this, and it’s gonna disappoint a lot of people. “Oh, my God, do people not even understand the whole concept of Big Government destroying the country?” They don’t, folks. They don’t look at it the way you and I do in that regard.24

  Conservative blogger Allahpundit observed that Limbaugh appeared to have “thrown in the towel on what should be the entire point of his show, trying to convince people smaller government is better.”25 The irony of his pivot to Trump did not go unnoticed. Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson noted that for decades “Limbaugh set the tone of popular conservatism by arguing for ideological purity,” but that he has now enabled the rise of “a candidate who talks more of personal rule than of limited government. A candidate who praises a single-payer health system, proposes higher taxes on the wealthy, opposes entitlement reform and advocates the systematic destruction of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.” Gerson credited Limbaugh with giving Trump “the ideological hall pass of a lifetime.”26

  WHAT IF…?

  This raises an interesting question: What would have happened if conservative talk radio had not rallied around Trump?

  During the campaign, I was able to watch the process from a unique perspective, as Wisconsin became a laboratory of sorts for the role of talk radio. It turned out that when Trump lacked the air cover provided by friendly radio hosts, he fared poorly. In April 2016, Trump lost the GOP primary in Wisconsin by double digits to Ted Cruz. The vote was more anti-Trump than pro-Cruz, since the Texas senator was not a natural fit for the Badger State. (Wisconsin Republicans would have been more comfortable backing either Walker or Marco Rubio, but they had already exited the race.) Conservative voters made the strategic decision that Cruz was the only candidate with a chance to stop Trump.

  The day in late March when Trump called in to my radio show, I had posted an article giving him fair warning: “Donald Trump is about to find out that Wisconsin is different. And one of the reasons is conservative talk radio.”27 Along with five other conservative talk show hosts in the state, I had been cri
tical of Trump for months, and it had taken its toll on the front-runner’s popularity. Polls showed that in the vote-rich WOW counties around Milwaukee—Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington—Trump was viewed positively by only 25 percent of GOP voters; 64 percent said they disapproved of the Manhattan billionaire.* In other words, when Trump was subjected to a sustained critique, conservative voters responded. But in 2016, Wisconsin’s media culture was the exception to the trend in the Right media’s ecosystem.

  Wisconsin was also an outlier for a number of other reasons, including its Midwestern sensibilities and a culture that valued certain norms of civility (although the concept of “Wisconsin nice” may have been overplayed). Conservative voters there had been exposed to substantive, reform-minded conservatives like Paul Ryan for years, and had been battle-tested by recent political fights, including the high-profile attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker.

  A few weeks before the primary, I tried to explain what made Wisconsin different. “There’s kind of a fundamental decency about Wisconsinites that you can’t downplay,” I told the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel. “We’ve never had a huge division between the Tea Party and the establishment. We’ve got think tanks and radio talk shows that have been through the fire and are really intellectually driven. And you don’t get that elsewhere. I was driving here listening to Sean Hannity, and after 15 seconds, I could feel myself getting dumber.”28

  In contrast to Trump, Ryan’s approach reflected the distinctive sort of conservatism that had flourished in Wisconsin: principled, pragmatic, reformist, but not afraid of taking on tough, controversial issues. While the GOP in Washington, DC, had been frustrated and blocked, the record in Wisconsin was markedly different. Not only did conservatives dominate all three branches of government in Wisconsin, they used that dominance to enact an impressive array of reforms and initiatives, from Act 10, Right to Work, and prevailing wage reform to tax cuts, tort reform, and the expansion of school choice. (Voters also noticed that Trump had lied about the success of the conservative reforms there.) In other words, conservatives in Wisconsin took ideas seriously, at least during the primary season.*

  Perhaps most important, though, was what Trump’s defeat in Wisconsin suggested about what might have happened if talk radio elsewhere had pushed back against the reality show star. That, of course, didn’t happen. So, rather than being a firewall, Wisconsin proved to be merely a speed bump on Trump’s road to the nomination.

  IT’S NOT ABOUT CONSERVATISM ANYMORE

  Limbaugh, meanwhile, continued to adapt himself to the new era. Less than four months into Trump’s presidency the one-time conservative guru told his audience that with Trump in the White House, conservative principles were no longer the point.

  How many times a day did I tell people that Donald Trump is not even ideological? Multiple times a day. How many times have I told you, do not expect Trump to be a conservative; he isn’t one.… I never once talked about conservatism ’cause that isn’t what this is about, and I told you back in the campaign that it was not about conservatism. Because that’s not who Trump is.

  Conservativism had lost in the primary, Limbaugh declared, and his focus on conservative values had been replaced with antiliberalism. That was one of the reasons, he said, that he had changed “the name of my think tank from the Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies to the Institute for Advanced Anti-Leftist Studies.” Beneath his bellicose tone, Limbaugh’s statement was a declaration of surrender.29

  CHAPTER 12

  THE BIGOTS AMONG US

  FOR MUCH OF 2016, Paul Nehlen was the great hope of Breitbart World. A political unknown, Nehlen was the pro-Trump primary challenger to House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had angered Trump supporters with his reluctance to back the GOP nominee and for being willing to criticize Trump’s more outrageous statements. Nehlen was backed by pro-Trump luminaries Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and, at one point, Trump singled out Nehlen for praise before eventually backing Ryan.

  Under CEO Steve Bannon, Breitbart and its satellites had not hesitated to use their clout to attack other conservatives who have been insufficiently enthusiastic about embracing Trumpism. Specifically, Bannon declared it was his mission to destroy Speaker Paul Ryan and, even after the public detente between Trump and Ryan, the website relentlessly attacked the conservative Speaker. During Nehlen’s campaign, Breitbart kept up a drumbeat of attacks—usually linked on the Drudge Report—on Ryan’s choice of a school for his children (it was Catholic), to the fence around his family home (for security). On the day of the election, Nehlen gave an interview to Bannon himself on Breitbart News Daily and called Ryan a “soulless, globalist snake,” and bragged that he had “smoked him out of the snake hole.”1

  Readers of Breitbart were repeatedly assured that Nehlen was gaining traction, the site reporting in July that Ryan had “fallen to 43 percent in a new primary poll.”2 Ryan got 84 percent of the primary vote, a result that undoubtedly came as surprise to those who relied on Breitbart’s reporting.

  But Nehlen’s abortive effort to dump Ryan led to one of the more troubling—and revealing—moments of the campaign for me.

  Throughout the campaign Nehlen had attempted to out-Trump Trump by enthusiastically backing the GOP nominee’s various proposals to ban Muslims from the country and crack down on those who were already here. But in late July, he took it to a new level, suggesting during a Chicago-area radio interview that we should consider deporting all Muslims from the country.3 The radio host asked Nehlen how he would go about vetting refugees or Muslim immigrants. “Then how do you implement, how do you implement the test that you want to implement?” he asked.

  PAUL NEHLEN: Well, then, the question is, why do we have Muslims in the country? How can you possibly vet somebody who lies?

  DAN CROFT: Well, that said, are you suggesting that we deport all of the Muslims in this country?

  PAUL NEHLEN: I’m suggesting that we have a discussion about it. That’s for sure. I am absolutely suggesting we figure out how do we, we, here’s what we should be doing. We should be monitoring every mosque. We should be monitoring all social media.

  The host challenged Nehlen on his proposal:

  DAN CROFT: But what you’re talking about is people that are Americans that are here, and whether or not we should deport all of them. Do … you see any Constitutional problems with the vetting, the kind that Newt Gingrich wanted to do and apparently you do as well. Much less deporting Americans who have done nothing wrong.

  NEHLEN: Well, if somebody supports Sharia that is doing something wrong. It is.

  This was, of course, a rather fundamental challenge not merely to conservative principles, but to simple, basic norms of decency. It was also, I thought, a clear test of where we stood as a movement. So that Friday morning, I opened up the phone lines to get my listeners’ reactions to the suggestion that we round up and expel Muslims—including American citizens—from the country because of their religion. One of the first callers was Audrey from Oshkosh, who thought it was a great idea. A writer for Politico magazine, who was sitting in the studio with me that day, recounted both the call and my reaction.4

  “Yeah! Let me make a comparison, and I don’t mean this in a bad way,” Audrey says. “They’re talking about phasing out breeding of pit bulls. Well, not all pit bulls are bad.” “You’re comparing American citizens, Muslims, to rabid dogs,” Sykes responds.

  “No, I’m saying, they’re talking about phasing out the breed because so many are bad. No one wants to phase out poodles! I mean, there’s no Lutherans doing this! We never know when one of these people are going to be radicalized.” “One of these people,” says Sykes. Sykes ends the call. He’s silent, broadcasting dead air. He looks upset, like he’s stopped breathing. He goes to a commercial break. “OK, that doesn’t happen very often,” he says off air. “I’m not usually absolutely speechless.” He says his listeners never talked like this until recently. “Were these people that we actually thought were our allies?” h
e asks.

  This was shocking stuff and I was shocked. But the exchange also forced me to ask several hard questions.

  He wonders: Did “the faux outrage machine” of Breitbart.com and other right-wing outlets foment the noxious opinions that Trump has stoked so effectively on the trail? “When I would deny that there was a significant racist component in some of the politics on our side, it was because the people I hung out with were certainly not,” Sykes says. “When suddenly, this rock is turned over, there is this—‘Oh shit, did I not see that?’

  “I kind of had that reaction this morning, with that woman: Did we ignore this? There’s got to be some serious introspection, because of the things that we either didn’t see, or that we ignored, or that we enabled.”5

  Let me stipulate here that critics on the Left will accuse me of naïveté or worse. For years they had warned about the latent racism on the Right, accusing conservatives of engaging in “dog whistles” and coded language to conceal their bias. And indeed, as the base of the GOP shifted to the South after the 1960s, the party became more white and disconnected from minority populations. But in recent years, conservatives had also engaged in concerted efforts to reach out to minority communities, most notably efforts by Ryan along with neighborhood activist Robert Woodson to explore innovative ways to combat poverty.

  But it was hard to miss the growing undertow of anti-Muslim sentiment on the Right, and Trump had clearly tapped into it, as he did regarding other anxieties that seemed to target members of minority groups and foreigners—Brown people were going to take your jobs, your country, and perhaps your women from you.

  THE CURIOUS CASE OF ANN COULTER

  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. Now the most extreme language leads not to excommunication, but to celebrity—speaking invitations, cable hits, clicks, bestselling books, and a new level of influence in GOP politics. No one illustrated this phenomenon more clearly than Ann Coulter.