How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  Do you think that they got their thirty pieces of Silver?8

  Another talk show host, Mark Belling, struck a similar note. Belling, who is based in Milwaukee and occasionally fills in for Rush Limbaugh, was also originally a fierce Trump critic, calling him a blowhard, buffoon, clown, fraud, and, a liberal before reluctantly saying that he would vote for him because he was preferable to Clinton.9*

  But, after the election, Belling lashed out at “egghead anti-Trumpers,” arguing that “the first few months of Trump’s presidency will require the full support of all committed conservatives.” Belling went on to suggest that conservative nonprofit groups “clean house” of Trump skeptics if they betrayed the “Trump Revolution.” If conservative think tanks “allow themselves to be co-opted by spoilsport brats who hop in bed with the enemy,” Belling insisted “they are not only no longer needed in this state but will be counter-productive.”

  Belling insisted that while he was “not suggesting a purge,” he was “clearly implying that treason against the new conservative cause is possible.” [Emphasis added.]10 If “fellow travelers in the ‘I Hate Trump Club’ use Wisconsin organizations to fight against their own groups’ very mission, it is imperative that the organizations’ boards clean house.”

  BULLYING CONGRESS

  The demand for retaliation and purges also has implications for elected officials. In December 2016, a month after the election, Politico reported that many GOP lawmakers were “loath to say anything remotely critical, fearful they might set off the president-elect or his horde of enforcers.” Reporter Rachael Bade described the mood among many conservative legislators: “They’re terrified of arousing the ire of their tempestuous new leader—or being labeled a turncoat by his army of followers.” When one Texas congressman named Bill Flores made some anodyne comments suggesting that the GOP Congress could work well with the new president even though some of his proposals were “not going to line up very well with our conservative policies,” the blowback was explosive and revealing. “Little did Flores realize the hell that would soon rain down from Trump’s throng of enforcers,” Bade wrote.11

  Breitbart piled on first, suggesting that Flores’s remarks were evidence that the House GOP wanted to “isolate and block President Donald Trump’s populist campaign promises.” Sean Hannity joined in, featuring the Breitbart story on his radio show. Another conservative site headlined: “BREAKING: Rep. Bill Flores Has CRAFTED a PLAN to BLOCK Trump’s Immigration Reform.”12 The Twitter hordes, Bade reported, responded on cue: “@RepBillFlores get in @realDonaldTrump way & we will burn your career down until you are reduced to selling life insurance,” tweeted one person. “@RepBillFlores you can go hang yourself!!” another wrote.

  Examples had to be made and the attack on Flores was a warning shot for other wavering conservatives.*

  THE CULTURE OF INTIMIDATION

  Even before Trump had locked up the GOP nomination, the pattern was set. Writing in the Federalist, Robert Tracinski described the emerging style:

  When they’re not literally pushing people around, they dabble in blackmail and threats of retaliation: Trump’s staff and surrogates smear the reputations of female reporters and campaign staff, he threatens to dig up damaging information on donors to rival campaigns, and Trump threatens to crack down on an insufficiently fawning press.13

  Breitbart and its former CEO Bannon have openly relished the image of street fighters who take no quarter. “If a guy comes after our audience—starts calling working-class people vulgarians and brownshirts and Nazis and post-literate—we’re going to leave a mark,” he explained. “We’re not shy about it at all. We’ve got some lads that like to mix it up.”14

  Indeed, Trump and his lawyers have a long and colorful track record of attempting to intimidate journalists. When the Daily Beast was preparing a story about Trump, one of his lawyers, Michael Cohen, threatened the writer with legal action, telling him: “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”15

  Of course, Breitbart is not omnipotent. The site failed spectacularly in its attempt to beat Speaker Paul Ryan in the August 2016 GOP primary. (Breitbart reporter Julia Hahn, who authored some of the most personal attacks on Ryan, was given a job in Trump’s White House.) But other, less powerful Republicans might fear risking a similar attack, knowing that the Trumpists can call out the flying monkeys and trolls of the new media against them.

  THE FLYING MONKEYS

  All of this had become familiar to Trump’s early media critics, including me. On March 28, shortly before the Wisconsin primary, Trump called in to my radio show for what was later described as a contentious interview. The tone was civil throughout, but I challenged Trump on his behavior toward women (in particular, his comments about rival Ted Cruz’s wife) and his credentials as a conservative. Even before the show was over, I had an email in my in-box from a Breitbart reporter, noting that I had “hammered [Trump] multiple times on his treatment of women,” and then linking to a story on a left-wing news site about my previous marriage. “Would you like to give a comment as to the allegation in this story (link above)?” The threat was hardly subtle.*

  I also got a taste of the scope of the online troll armies when I began doing cable news appearances. One night in particular stood out. In early May 2016, after Trump had wrapped up the GOP nomination, I appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show on Fox News and explained why I was not getting on the Trump train. My comments were blunt and obviously provocative to the legions of Trump supporters in the audience.* (I found it interesting that Fox News posted online the interview that preceded me and the one that followed, but not what I had to say that night. Nonetheless, it was posted by other websites.)16

  After the show, as usual, I checked my Twitter feed. I had become accustomed to what I came to call my “Hour of Hate,” as my social media time lines were clogged by angry, obscene, and occasionally threatening messages. But the reaction that night eclipsed anything I had seen before, with well over a thousand responses. Because Megyn Kelly’s Twitter address was included in many of the messages, I got a glimpse of the sort of reaction she must have been getting throughout the campaign. I’ve been at this long enough that I didn’t think I could be shocked, but seeing the language directed at Kelly, who had clashed with Trump repeatedly, was genuinely shocking. Who were these people, and what was the point?

  The point, obviously, was to browbeat critics into silence or acquiescence. One by one, other radio talk show hosts either modified or abandoned altogether their opposition and skepticism. Considering what they were seeing online, this was not surprising.

  Talk show host Erick Erickson launched a new website called The Resurgent, but later had to admit that “the sponsorship model died with opposing Trump.” He explained that anyone who showed up as a sponsor of the site “saw an alt-right army go on the attack.”18

  It could get very ugly. In an article headlined, “How Breitbart Unleashes Hate Mobs to Threaten, Dox, and Troll Trump Critics,” the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove recounted what happened to one of Trump’s most outspoken and colorful critics, Rick Wilson. After a cable news appearance in which Wilson jibed that Breitbart was Trump’s “Pravda” and referred to Trump’s “low-information supporters,” Bannon went on his radio show to “essentially declare war on the Rubio backer.”

  “It was a planned deployment,” Wilson told Lloyd Grove. “After I criticized Breitbart and criticized Trump, they decided they were going to weaponize themselves and go after me.” What followed was chilling, even by the standards of an increasingly uncivil political campaign. The Daily Beast reported that it had obtained emails that Bannon and another Breitbart staffer “worked to obtain a comprehensive list of Wilson’s political clients (with the intention of making them feel uncomfortable about hiring him, Wilson believes).” Worse was to come.

  Someone pulled Wilson’s credit report, and online trolls, some of whom were �
�apparently active on an online forum associated with white supremacists” began posting “photoshopped sexual images of his college-age daughter, claimed she’d had a child with an African American, threatened gang-rape, and claimed Wilson’s teenage son was a pimp.”

  There may be even darker (if that’s possible) forms of intimidation directed against critics. During the campaign, several high-profile GOP Trump opponents were targeted in an elaborate “catfishing” scheme in which a con man posing as various fictitious characters online sought details of their efforts to oppose the GOP nominee. Over a period of months a convicted scam artist named Steve Wessel used multiple fake identities and offered salacious gossip, gifts, and free trips, “all in an apparent effort to glean more about the operatives and their intentions regarding Trump,” reported Politico.*†

  Occasionally, the attacks against critics would backfire. In April 2016, nationally syndicated talk show host Mark Levin lashed out at anti-Trump Republicans (including me) in the clearest possible language:

  These people are not conservatives. They’re not constitutionalists. They’re frauds. They’re fakes. They’re not brave. They’re asinine. They’re buffoons.…

  Two days later, he reversed himself. Even in the annals of classic political flip-flops, Levin’s 180-degree pirouette was impressive.20 Levin announced that he was disgusted by the Trump campaign’s “bully dirty tricks Nixonian tactics,” after Trump adviser Roger Stone apparently targeted Levin himself by implying that he had somehow been bought off by the “establishment.”21 Levin explained:

  As a result of what the Trump supporters have attempted here, particularly Roger Stone, I am not voting for Donald Trump. Period.…

  So I want to congratulate Roger Stone. And if anybody has a problem with Donald Trump, you can talk to Roger Stone. These bully dirty tricks Nixonian tactics, they’re only going to backfire. So count me as never Trump.

  Some point you’ve got to stand up to it … I do not like bullies and I never have.22

  Levin, eventually, reversed himself again, saying that he would vote for Trump after all. But his temporary apostasy was telling, nevertheless. Levin had been prepared to back Trump despite the fact that Trump had routinely smeared his opponents.

  But those were other people. He spread vile gossip about women. But those were other people. He mocked the disabled, and lied with impunity. But until Trump’s thugs turned their sights on him, Mark Levin saw none of this as disqualifying the man from the Oval Office. In that respect, he was like so many other conservatives who decided that what was happening to their movement was somebody else’s problem.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE CONTRARIAN CONSERVATIVE

  It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales, Richard?

  —A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

  BEING A CONTRARIAN CONSERVATIVE comes rather naturally to me (maybe it runs in the family DNA), and I suppose this takes me full circle. Back in the 1970s, I became a “recovering Liberal,” when I looked around me and decided I know longer wanted to be a part of what that movement had become. My decision came slowly, but it was ultimately liberating to break free from the cant of tribal politics and its tendentious talking points.

  Part of that was my affinity for Groucho Marx’s sentiment that “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” But I was also sure that I didn’t want to be part of that club. So this circumstance feels familiar. If the conservative movement is defined by the nativist, authoritarian, post-truth culture of Trump-Bannon-Drudge-Hannity-Palin, then I’m out.

  So what does that mean?

  As difficult as it may be, conservatives need to stand athwart history once again—this time recognizing that Trumpism poses an existential threat to the conservative vision of ordered liberty.

  This will be a complicated undertaking, given the pressures of political tribalism and the reality that conservatives will actually applaud much of the Trump agenda. At times, they will be impelled to mount the barricades against the overreach of the Left and will align themselves with Trump on issues like the judiciary.

  But despite the clamorous demands that conservatives now fall into line with the new regime, precisely the opposite is needed. Rather than conformity, conservatism needs dissidents who are willing to push back—in other words, contrarian conservatives, who recognize that conservatism now finds itself reduced to a remnant in the wilderness. But the wilderness is a good place for any movement to rethink its first principles, rediscover its forgotten values, and ask: Who are we, really?

  Contrarian conservatives will answer as follows: We’re conservatives who believe in things like liberty, free markets, limited government, personal responsibility, constitutionalism, growth and opportunity, the defense of American ideas and institutions at home and abroad, modesty, prudence, aspiration, and inclusion. We are conservatives in the great tradition that stretches back to Burke, Tocqueville, Buckley, and Reagan. But that means that we are not part of what the conservative movement or the GOP has become.

  What does it mean to be a contrarian? It does not mean mindless opposition. When the Trump administration or congressional Republicans are right, we should support them; when possible, we’ll nudge them to do the right thing. But we will have no problem adopting a spirit of contradiction when they go wrong or lose their way. Contrarians have no obligation to defend the indefensible or reverse their positions based on the leader’s whims or tweets. They can step out of the alternative reality silos and look at things as they actually are, rather than relying on what Trump aide Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts.” These independent conservatives can affirm that Trump won the election fairly and freely, but they can also recognize the gravity and implications of Russia’s interference in the campaign. They can support tougher border controls and still be appalled by the cruelty and incompetence of his immigration bans. Independent conservatives can applaud Trump’s support for Israel and still be thoroughly appalled by his slavish adulation of Vladimir Putin and his flirtations with proto-fascists like France’s Marine Le Pen. Most important of all, they will take the long view, recognizing that electoral victories do not change eternal verities or the essential correctness of traditionally conservative insights into human nature and society.

  Opposition in the face of power is not a sign of weakness, but rather an indication of the ongoing intellectual vigor of the conservative idea. We should draw inspiration from Frederick Douglass, who observed, “One and God make a majority.” Undoubtedly, this will be lonely work and we may lose a lot of friends; but it should also be familiar to conservatives who have a long history of being out of step with the spirit of the age. William F. Buckley Jr. sharpened the definitions of the new conservativism by contrasting it with the “modern” Republicanism of the Eisenhower years. Later, conservative spokesmen were full-throated and active in their opposition to Nixonism. It is not a coincidence that there is no such thing today as a “Nixon conservative.”

  MODESTY VERSUS BINARY

  Although it may sound heretical, conservatives need to step back from the cycle of win-at-all-costs politics in which we are told that each election is the Apocalypse. That cycle contributes to the sense of desperation in our politics today, the conviction that defeat means disaster because our foes are so malign, so vicious, so destructive, that they must be stopped at any price.

  This may, in fact, be a teachable moment for conservatives in exile: We simply should not care about politics as much as we do, because it should not be as important as it has become. The question of who serves in political office should not be as consuming as it has become, but is a consequence of the concentration of power and expectations. There is a lesson here for both sides of the political spectrum. Our politics have become too toxic and scary, in large part because our government is too large and consequential.

  The English political theorist Michael Oakeshott said that the role of government is “not to inflame passion and give it ne
w objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation.”1 But our politics has morphed into a rough beast that inflames passions and crushes voices of moderation. Inevitably, the word “moderation,” will be misunderstood as a sort of political squishiness. Rather, it should be understood in the sense that Edmund Burke used it—as a call to modesty in our politics. Peter Wehner notes that political modesty entails a sense of “prudence, the humility to recognize limits (including our own), the willingness to balance competing principles, and an aversion to fanaticism. Moderation accepts the complexity of life in this world and distrusts utopian visions and simple solutions.”2

  A politics of modesty does not, Wehner argues, “see the world in Manichaean terms that divide it into forces of good (or light) and agents of evil (or darkness).” This does not mean quiescence or surrender. Conservatives can believe that “bold and at times even radical steps” may be necessary to “advance moral ends.” But a sense of modesty, Wehner wrote, “takes into account what is needed at any given moment; it allows circumstances to determine action in the way that weather patterns dictate which route a ship will follow.” By embracing the politics of perpetual outrage and ideological purity, conservatives have lost sight of that tradition and the very real dangers of immodest authoritarianism.

  CONSERVATISM IS NOT POPULISM

  The rejection of populism runs deep in the conservative tradition, which has long recognized the threat that it poses both to limited government and to individual freedom. Writing nearly two centuries ago, Tocqueville warned that the greatest threat to American democracy was the tyranny of the majority. Long before public opinion polls or social media could define majority opinion or enforce conformity, Tocqueville warned of the potentially suffocating effects of believing vox populi, vox dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God.”) “No monarch is so absolute as to combine all the powers of society in his own hands and to conquer all opposition, as a majority is able to do,” Tocqueville noted, “which has the right both of making and of executing the laws.” He recognized the potential problem of demanding that we all be “in touch” with majority sentiment. “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America,” Tocqueville wrote.