How The Right Lost Its Mind

Charles J. Sykes,  “How The Right Lost Its Mind,”  St. Martin’s Press, 2017, pp. 232 pp.

Gradualism, expertise, and prudence—the values that once were taken for granted among conservatives—were replaced by polls and rating spikes, as the right allowed liberal overreach in the Obama era to blind them to the crackpots and bigots in their midst. .Some have argued that the election was a binary choice; Hillary Clinton had to be defeated by any means. The author shares many of these concerns about Clinton but maintains that the price of supporting Trump was ruinous. 

Trump tapped into something disturbing —a shift from freedom to authoritarianism, from American “exceptionalism” to nativism and xenophobia. From his hard line on immigration and rebuttal of free trade to his strange fascination with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump represented a dramatic repudiation of the values that had once defined the conservatives.

This book gets my “Education Label”: I found it essential to my understanding of the current political climate in the United States.  It explains how the right wandered (or is it plunged?) into the swamps of the Alt-Right.  How conservatives went from Frederick Hayek to Sean Hannity, from William F. Buckley to Rush Limbaugh, from Reagan to Trump, creating alternate-reality silos that indulge every crackpot, wing-nut conspiracy theory.  All this in this book by a conservative Wisconsin talk show host of twenty-three years that just couldn’t take it anymore.  It is not particularly about why Trump was elected, rather it is how nastiness has taken over the Right. (To read why Trump was elected, follow this WSJ link).

My Notes:

Pg. xvf: After Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats need to perform an autopsy; Republicans need an exorcism…  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 Regan legacy, but also the abandonment of respect for gradualism, civility, expertise, intelligence, and prudence—the values that once were taken for granted among conservatives.  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. 

Pg. 4:  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?  How about putting Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office?  Or the rise of the Tea Party or outsourcing their thought leadership to the perpetually outraged?  Did the Right’s intellectual implosion begin when conservatives began to get their information from their Facebook news feeds?

Pg. 7:  In the years before embracing Trump, the party flirted with the eccentric candidacies of Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Herman Cain, making each of them temporary presidential front-runners at one point or another. 

Pg. 8:  A “landslide county” is defined as a county where the elected carry the county by 20 percentage points or more.  In 1976 only about one in four Americans lived in a landslide county.  By 2016 a majority of Americans (60.4 percent) lived in a landslide county.  In rural America, more than three-fourths of voters lived in counties that voted overwhelming red.  Any common ground between the two sides has nearly disappeared.  Inevitably, that has meant that the worst tendencies of both the right and left have been magnified as we interact less and less with those with whom we may disagree.  Our politics becomes less about compromise than confrontation and less about persuasion than about tests of tribal loyalty. 

Pg. 10:  Conservativism has come to be dominated by careerists and opportunists for whom the professed beliefs in small government, fiscal restraint, and constitutionalism were merely means to an end (ratings, cash, click, power), and thus easily discarded.  George Will told the author that conservative belief in limited government, the rule of law, working against the new effort to destigmatize dependency on government is pretty thin nowadays.  The number of conservatives genuinely wanting a smaller government, genuinely worrying about the separation of powers, and the grotesquely swollen presidency we have under both parties is a smaller band of brothers and sisters than previously thought.

Pg. 11:  No account of what happened to conservatives would be complete without a discussion of what conservatives thought they were reacting against.  For years, conservatives have felt that the Left has been at ramming speed, often ignoring the niceties of congressional action, public opinion, or tolerance of religious differences.  There was the passage of Obamacare with the barest of partisan majorities, rammed through on Christmas Eve and a massive stimulus package that threatened to explode the national debt.  That was followed (in the eyes of conservatives) by assaults on free speech and religious liberty; the IRS targeting the Tea Party groups, John Doe probes into conservative activists in Wisconsin, complete with predawn paramilitary raids; threats to bankrupt the coal industry; and the ongoing vilification of conservative activists and donors.  On university campuses, activists began enforcing their demands for ideological conformity, complete with lists of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and ‘safe spaces.’

Pg. 17:  Trump has proven that a candidate can be immune to the narratives, criticism, and fact-checking of the mainstream media.  This was, after all, a campaign in which a presidential candidate trafficked in ‘scoops’ from the National Enquirer and openly suggested that the father of his rival, Senator Ted Cruz, may have been involved in the assassination of JFK. And got away with it.  Trump and his allies in the Right media quickly absorbed, disarmed, and turned the term ‘fake news’ against its critics, draining it of any meaning.

Pg. 26:  The mainstream media is complicit in dumbing down the electorate.  As recently as 2008 the nightly news programs on the three major networks devoted a grand total of fewer than four hours of airtime over an entire year to reporting on actual issues (as opposed to candidate speeches or political horse race coverage).  By 2016, the Tyndall Report, which monitors networks newscasts, estimated issue coverage for the year had fallen to just thirty-six minutes.

Pg. 52:  Although a hard line on dealing with illegal immigrants was to become a litmus test for conservatives in 2016, there was never a real consensus on the issue.  In 1986, Reagan had signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which was effectively a massive amnesty of illegals who had entered the country before January 1, 1982.  Later, Bush, McCain, and Rubio and much of the business community began to push for another shot at immigration reform but the Right protested this ‘amnesty’ program.

Pg. 56:  Many of the Tea Party’s sources of discontent began while Bush was in office: Medicare Part D, immigration reform, No Child Left Behind, government spending, and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP); but the Tea Party did not burst into prominence until after Obama’s election.  That immediately fed suspicion that the uprising was less about policy than about the identity of the new president.

Pg. 72:  It is hard to overstate the importance of The Heritage Foundation in the rise of conservatism.  In 1981 they handed the Reagan administration a 1,100-page briefing book which was ‘a blueprint for grabbing the government by its frayed New Deal lapels and shaking out 48 years of liberal policy.’  Later, Heritage claimed that nearly two-thirds of the document’s two thousand recommendations were adopted or attempted by the Reagan administration.  Among the ideas and embraced by Reagan included across-the-board tax cuts, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and urban ‘enterprise zones.’  But with the rise of the Tea Party, in 2010 Heritage took a fateful turn from policy wonkery to more overt political activism.  In 2012 South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint became Heritage’s new president and a tectonic shift in Heritage’s culture occurred.  DeMint escalated the pressure on the GOP for both ideological purity and tactical aggressiveness. 

Pg. 78:  Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, and Matt Drudge are at the center of the new media ecosystem which is essentially about getting the audience outraged.  Outrage clicks on links.  Outrage tunes in.  Outrage buys books.  It is not about conservative policy and ideas, or good governance, or increasing our liberty, or social conservative values, or even about the Constitution.

Pg. 82:  Americans have segregated themselves into intellectual ghettoes, each with their own realities and narratives. ‘What’s big news in one world is ignored in another.  Conspiracy theories sprout, anger abounds and the truth becomes ever more elusive.  The new media ecosystem rewards the loudest, most reckless voices, so the echo chamber gets louder and angrier and increasingly shrill.

Pg. 87:  In the Alt Reality silos, the feedback loop was effectively closed, creating a hermetically sealed ideological cul-de-sac.  BuzzFeed’s study found that right-wing pages ‘almost never used mainstream news sources, instead pointing to other highly partisan sources of information.’  Also, a Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch ‘news’ on Facebook, driving users deeper into their ideological corners, with other like-minded users.  An article in the Economist noted that on Facebook ‘algorithms are designed to populate their news feeds with content similar to material they previously liked.’  In Britain that means that during the battle over Brexit, users who supported the exit from the European Union mostly saw pro-Brexit articles; those who wanted to stay in the EU were offered pro-EU material.

Pg. 116:  Even after the excommunication of the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the 1960s, a virulent paranoid strain remained alive, including in the newly resurgent religious Right.  For instance, Pat Robertson trafficked in conspiracy theories, sharing with his audience warnings about schemes by the Illuminati, Freemasons, and Jewish bankers to impose a Satanic ‘New World Order.’

Pg. 120:  Donald Trump launched his successful presidential bid by seizing upon the issue of Obama’s birth certificate.  Trump would eventually disavow birtherism in the final months of the 2016 campaign while attempting to blame its origins (falsely) on Hillary Clinton.  But for five years, Trump had questioned Obama's birthplace.

Pg. 128:  A 2014 Pew Poll measured the extraordinary influence of Fox News among conservatives.  Nearly half of consistently conservative voters—47 percent—named Fox News as their main source for news about politics and government.  Among those voters, 88 percent said they trusted Fox as a source.  While media bubbles also exist on the left, no single source of information comes close to the clout that Fox had with the right.  The dumping of Megyn Kelly and George Will were widely interpreted as a signal that Fox will become even more overtly pro-Trump in the future than it was during the campaign.  Even after the later fall of Bill O-Reilly, that dynamic is unlikely to change.

Pg. 133:  Along with Fox News, Breitbart, and Drudge, Limbaugh was the loudest and most influential voice setting the table for a voter insurrection.  Repeatedly, he warned his listeners about the dire and imminent threat posed to the nation’s liberties by the ‘elites’ of both parties.

Pg. 142:  Most, if not all, Trump's applause lines have been taken from alt-Right websites, radio shows, and television programs.  It is why he became America’s most prominent birther.  It’s why he floated rumors that Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK, and that Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster.  It’s why he talks the way he does about Mexicans and Muslims and women and African Americans.  It’s why he’s been able to get away with knowing little to nothing about policy or government or world affairs. Like any good talking-head, he speaks in clauses and some-people-are-sayings.

Pg. 144:  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.’

Pg. 148:  During the Wisconsin primary Trump did not have the supporting media coverage he had in other states.  Trump lost the Wisconsin GOP primary by double digits to Ted Cruz.  The vote was more anti-Trump than pro-Cruz.  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.  However, most of those conservatives would later come to see the election as a ‘binary choice,’ and decide to support Trump over Hillary Clinton in November.

Pg. 176:  The Alt Right challenges the conservative belief that America is a nation founded on an idea of natural and God-given rights.  They prefer to see it as defined by its ethnic and racial identities.  The Alt Right is skeptical of the idea of American exceptionalism.  For them, it is a white, European enclave in which Jews, immigrants, and other minorities are trespassing.  It is a rejection of Reagan’s ‘shining city on a hill.’

Pg. 180:  For many conservatives steeped in the Right’s alternative reality media ecosystem, politics has come down to a starkly binary choice.  In this binary world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles.  If everything—the Supreme Court, the fate of Western civilization, the Constitution, the survival of the planet—depends on tribal victory, then nothing else really matters. 

Pg. 192:  A poll released in October 2016 found that fully 76 percent of white evangelicals had decided that a candidate’s morals were no longer that important.  (As recently as 2011, only 30 percent had held this position).  Exit polls indicated that white-evangelicals backed Trump by a staggering margin of 80 to 16 percent, eclipsing Bush’s 2004 margin of 78 to 21 percent. 

Pg. 202:  The binary choice facing voters in November 2016 does not explain the willingness of evangelical leaders to back Trump during the primaries, choosing him over such other obvious alternatives as Cruz, Rubio, Santorum, Jindal, or even Mike Huckabee.

Pg. 210:  Trump is able to call upon a passionately loyal alternative media—which includes talk radio, much of Fox News, websites like Breitbart, the Drudge Report, and dozens of Scam PACs—to attack his enemies and provide air cover in adversity.  Now we can truly see what a state-controlled media that Russ Limbaugh has complained about for years really looks like.

Pg. 222:  To oppose this Alt-Right, we need contrarian 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.  Reclaim the conservative tradition that goes back to Burke, Tocqueville, Buckley, and Reagan.

Pg. 224:  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.  By embracing the politics of perpetual outrage and ideological purity conservatives have lost sight of the very real dangers of immodest authoritarianism.

Pg. 228:  Trump has planted a demographic bomb in the GOP.  The appeasement of Trump may have alienated Hispanics, Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, African Americans, and women for a generation.  Failure to restore the GOP’s ability to appeal to those groups will consign the party to political oblivion.