Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  Centrist Republicans are targeted by conservative groups like the Club for Growth, which run right-wing candidates in closed primaries who win and then often promptly lose the general election to Democrats. In 2006 and 2008, such self-inflicted losses included Representatives Heather Wilson and Wayne Gilchrest. “They don’t make any bones about losing elections so long as they purify the party,” said Senator Arlen Specter, who abandoned the GOP ship after twenty-four years in the face of a tough primary challenge from Club for Growth President Pat Toomey. “I don’t understand it. . . . There ought to be an outcry.”2

  The latest example came in a 2009 special election for an upstate New York congressional seat that had been held by Republicans since 1872. It was won by a Democrat because the Wingnuts split the right. New York State Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman challenged local Republican elected official Dede Scozzafava, drawing national support from Sarah Palin and conservative pundits who characterized the GOP nominee as a “radical leftist” because she was pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. Brian Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage, made his intentions clear: “The Republican Party cannot take someone as liberal as Dede Scozzafava and thrust her out on the voters and expect the voters just to accept it.”

  “You can have a very, very intense movement of 20 percent. You can’t govern,” Newt Gingrich cautioned a week before the election, explaining his support for the party nominee. “To govern, you got to get 50 percent plus one.”3 And for that bit of pragmatic math, the leader of the 1994 Republican revolution was dubbed “King of the RINOS” by the Wingnut netroots.4

  Soon after this election debacle, a ten-point party-purity petition was advanced by members of the Republican National Committee, proposing that any candidate who broke with conservatives on three or more of these issues—in any votes, public statements or on a questionnaire—would be denied party funds or the party endorsement.5

  There is a struggle going on between the 50 staters and the 51 percenters—those who want a broad, diverse and national Republican Party against those who are content to only play to the base in pursuit of narrow victories. Right now, the 51 percenters seem to be winning. The hunt for heretics has helped make congressional Republicans extinct in an entire region. In 1997, the Club for Growth’s Stephen Moore published an article in the American Spectator titled “Is the Northeast Necessary?” in which he suggested Republicans should “[write] off this dying region once and for all.”6 Twelve years later, Moore had gotten his wish. There isn’t a single Republican representative left in all of New England. This is what success looks like in the all-or-nothing world of the RINO hunters.

  There is a special fury inside the conservative movement directed at Republicans who don’t walk in lock-step with both social and fiscal conservatives. The goal of the RINO hunters is spelled out on the Web site of conservative activist Bob MacGuffie at Right Principles: “The RINO is a destructive animal that tramples on many people’s hard work. It has no useful objective in an American sense because it feeds on destruction of our individual liberties and freedoms. It is a parasite that needs to be driven into political extinction!”7

  Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are dubbed RINOs (because they were “progressive plutocrats”), and the site goes on to offer a RINO hit list, including Senators John McCain, Richard Lugar, Lindsey Graham, Kit Bond, Lamar Alexander, Mel Martinez, Judd Gregg, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Among the Representatives mentioned are Mark Kirk, Jeff Flake, Mike Castle, Mary Bono Mack, David Reichert, John McHugh, Chris Smith and John Sullivan.

  John McCain—a pro-life, fiscal conservative war hero—has been a target of RINO hunters over the years because of his political independence and willingness to criticize both conservative and liberal excesses. After the election, when McCain’s daughter Meghan began advocating on The Daily Beast and television that the party should modernize itself on issues like gay rights, she became a target of Wingnut familial suspicions. When Arlen Specter defected, Rush Limbaugh invited the GOP’s recent nominee to do the same: “Take McCain and his daughter with you.”

  We’ve seen the hunt for heretics before.

  During the southern conservative “massive resistance” to desegregation, moderate critics were derided as traitors, double-crossers, sugar-coated integrationists and cowards.8

  During the anticommunist heyday of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society, a new umbrella term was introduced, “ComSymp”—for “communist sympathizer”—that allowed any skeptic to be stigmatized without the difficulty of actually proving they were communist. At the time, Republican Senator Milton R. Young of North Dakota reflected on the Birchers’ obsession with what would become known as RINO hunting: “Strangely enough, most of the criticism is leveled not against liberal public officials but against more middle of the road, and even conservative Republicans.”9

  And while Nixon VP Spiro Agnew invented the use of the word “squish” to refer to radical liberals in the late ’60s and early ’70s, by the Reagan revolution it was used by conservatives to denigrate centrist members of their own party, notably Reagan chief of staff (and future secretary of state) James Baker and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush.10

  But the hyper-partisan hunt for heretics really got mainstreamed during the administration of the second Bush. At the outset, conservative activist Grover Norquist gleefully told Pat Robertson’s 700 Club that “there isn’t an ‘us and them’ with this administration. They is us. We is them.”11

  Poisonous partisanship got a new name in the later part of the Bush administration when the actions of Monica Goodling came to light. Goodling was the thirty-four-year-old Justice Department White House liaison—known as “she who must be obeyed” by her staff—who illegally imposed partisan social conservative litmus tests on prospective Justice Department civil service employees.

  An investigation found that Goodling—a graduate of Messiah College and Pat Robertson’s Regent Law School—asked about abortion in thirty-four interviews and gay marriage on at least twenty-one different occasions. 12 She recommended Internet searches be applied to job applicants to gain insight into their political beliefs, and just before Christmas 2006, Goodling e-mailed political appointee John Nowacki urging him to “hire one more good American”—a phrase he later testified applied exclusively to conservatives.

  Even the pioneering secretary of state and Bush loyalist Condoleezza Rice was considered suspect by second-tier administration conservatives because of her position on social issues. When one applicant expressed admiration for Condoleezza Rice, Goodling frowned and said, “But she is pro-choice.”13

  Over the course of the Bush administration, but especially during the 2008 election, the excommunications and defections continued. Individuals who were once considered among the brightest young minds of the Reagan and Thatcher era have been caught up in this dragnet—Peggy Noonan, David Frum, David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan—each declaring their independence to differing degrees and receiving a hailstorm of right-wing criticism in return. Some might argue—as Reagan once did about the Democrats—that they didn’t leave the party, the party had left them. But this was not the time or place for debating differences of opinion.

  The son of William F. Buckley, Jr., waded into the crossfire by endorsing Barack Obama for president after the Palin nomination. Chris Buckley chose The Daily Beast as the location of the announcement instead of the National Review, founded by his father, because “I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 e-mails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground.”14 He got his 12,000 angry e-mails any way.

  Buckley—who describes his politics as that of “a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al., I’m libertarian”—found himself no longer welcome in the pages of the magazine
his father founded.

  When David Frum—another National Review alum and a former George W. speechwriter—engaged in a public debate with Rush Limbaugh over the future direction of the GOP, he was barraged with angry e-mails from dittoheads. “Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don’t agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There’s the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: We want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don’t care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That’s not the language of politics. It’s the language of a cult.”15

  The cult-like impulse to hunt for heretics has only escalated. The founder of the acclaimed blog LittleGreen Footballs.com, Charles Johnson, got his first big boost railing against Islamist radicalism after the attacks of 9/11. But in the Bush administration’s second term, he started to criticize excesses from the far right as well—taking aim at creationism and the increased influence of the religious right.

  “I’ve been pretty much labeled as a heretic now by all the people who used to be what I would consider friends and allies,” Johnson told me. “I’m getting more hate mail nowadays than I got even at the height of my popularity as an anti-Jihadist, which was very surprising to me, because I used to get some pretty nasty hate mail from radical Islamists. But the stuff I’m getting right now from right-wingers is an order of magnitude worse.”16

  When it comes to seeing an order of magnitude worse up close, you’re not going to outdo what you’re about to see from the inbox of nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker.

  In late September of 2008, Parker had the temerity to criticize Sarah Palin in the pages of National Review, concluding after a month of watching that the Alaskan VP nominee was “out of her league.” “No one hates saying that more than I do,” she wrote: “Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.”17

  Within a week she’d gotten 11,000 e-mails. By week three the total passed 20,000. She estimates that about 70 percent were negative, with the general theme being that she was a traitor.

  “I didn’t realize that I worked for the GOP,” says Kath leen, “or that my job as a ‘conservative’ columnist meant I had to defend all things Republican.”18

  Here are some choice cuts from her e-mail bag at the time:• “You’re not one of us, you’re one of THEM, the liberal lovers, the flag burners, country haters, the ones who want to kill god and put Stalin in his place and see this nation destroyed by a sea of brown people and gays. Do you secretly date black men, Parker? You make me sick you sickening sick witch!!!”

  • “So the republican party is supposed to surrender their traditional values in order to expand the base. Have you always been a dumb, trashy cunt or did sucking Obama’s schlong fill your head with such bull-shit that you can’t even think straight.”

  • “You’re a fucking, shit-faced whore and you are the reason for the decline of the republican party. Yes. You and every pansy shit-headed fucking liberal republican who caters to the leftist agenda.”

  • “You like getting cucumbers up your ass, whore? Huh? Stop writing your stupid articles. Conservative Christians don’t like you and your ilk, we don’t need you or your fucking ideas. We will do fine without republicans, democrats, or anyone else who tries to disregard our values.”

  • “Kathleen Parker is a lesbian, anti-christian whore and anti-American terrorist who must be eradicated. She is an Adolph [sic] Hitler of this century.”

  There is something breathtakingly stupid about seeing such bile written down instead of just hearing it screamed. For some unhinged hyper-partisans, a hint of dissent provokes unreasonable rage. When thoughtful criticism is responded to with an avalanche of hate, its absurdity is the only saving grace.

  You don’t want to indulge in close readings of deranged right-wing dispatches like a high school class reading Hamlet, but in those five e-mails you get the whole gamut of paranoid associations—Hitler, Stalin, people who “want to kill God,” “Us versus Them,” and fear of the nation being “destroyed by a sea of brown people and gays”—a two-fer of racism and homophobia. What’s especially weird is the abrupt segues between high-minded conservative arguments and then the slide into the psychotic sewer.

  Hunting for heretics pretends to be a principled fight for ideological purity, but behind that mask is an uglier impulse, an attempt to intimidate and insist on conformity. Imperiousness and inflexibility in politics is a sign of insecurity. It’s a reminder of what the Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel once wrote: “Ideology offers human beings the illusion of dignity and morals while making it easier to part with them.”

  Burning Down the Big Tent

  “I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks,”19 reflected William F. Buckley, Jr. His friend Ronald Reagan won the White House for conservatives by preaching a “big tent” philosophy—noting as far back as 1967, “The Republican Party, both in [California] and nationally, is a broad party. There is room in our tent for many views; indeed, the divergence of views is one of our strengths”20—and reminding activists that an 80 percent friend is not a 20 percent enemy. 21 These axioms echoed Reagan’s genial personality, but they were also shrewd politics. In 1984, the tent was big enough to hold 59 percent of the electorate and carry forty-nine states.

  But now Wingnuts are trying to burn the big tent down. They have forgotten that the essence of evangelism is winning converts. Reagan’s oft-quoted Eleventh Commandment—“Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican”—is dismissed if the Republican is not considered adequately conservative. Even the term “big tent” itself is regarded as code for liberal subversion.

  The tone has come from the top as well as from the grassroots activists. When former Vice President Dick Cheney was asked whether the party should follow the lead of Rush Limbaugh or Colin Powell, he chose the professional polarizer instead of the centrist former secretary of state. “Well, if I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh,” he said with gravelly dismissiveness while sticking in the shiv. “My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.”22

  Here’s the irony of today’s ideological purists: Conservatives’ greatest patron saints, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, would never have met the “You’re either with us or against us” litmus tests of today’s right wing. Not even close.

  Goldwater was a small-government libertarian who believed in getting government out of both the board room and the bedroom. On the issue of abortion, Goldwater was frustrated that “a lot of so-called conservatives think I’ve turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to a pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some dogooders or the religious right.”23 It wasn’t a newfound view—his wife co-founded Arizona Planned Parenthood in the 1930s.

  On gay rights, Goldwater took a live-and-let-live attitude at odds with the social conservative playbook, saying: “The rights that we have under the Constitution cover anything we want to do, as long as it’s not harmful. I can’t see any way in the world that being a gay can cause damage to somebody else.”24 Of gays in the military, he famously said, “You don’t have to be straight in order to shoot straight.”25

  Goldwater was also wary of the growing influence of the religious right on the Republican Party, taking to the floor of the Senate in 1981 to decry “the religious factions that . . . are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. . . . I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a mor
al person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ . . . I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’”26

  Goldwater’s libertarian instincts would color him a liberal in the eyes of current social conservative power brokers. This paradox, in turn, raises questions about the role and influence of libertarians in the party that so many consider their natural home, especially by contrast to the big-spending Democrats. Nick Gillespie, the editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason, has stated that the split is too obvious to ignore. “The Republicans used to talk about cutting taxes, cutting spending, and cutting regulation,” Gillespie told me in the lead-up to the 2006 elections after half a decade of conservative control of Washington. “Now, they only talk about cutting taxes and regulating people’s personal lives.”27

  Even the sainted Reagan would come under fire from most in the current Republican Party if his policies were judged absent the hagiography. As governor of California, he signed the nation’s most liberal abortion bill into law (an action he later said he regretted). In the 1970s, he opposed California’s Proposition 6, the conservative bill backed by Anita Bryant, which would have made it legal to fire gays and lesbians from teaching positions in public schools. He raised taxes by a billion dollars to close a budget gap and presided over an increase in the number of state employees by 50,000.28 Any of these actions could get him disqualified as an untrustworthy conservative or even a dangerous liberal, if he tried to step out on the road to the White House today.