Okay, that’s a bit harsh, even though, let’s face it, a lot of Republicans are crumbs. A week or two ago, I ran a piece, “John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican”, in the course of which I quoted fairly extensively from two often interesting “I’m outta here” books by (more or less) former Republicans Charles Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, and Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies). Both books are at times consciously and at times unconsciously revealing about the Republican mindset.
Sykes, a former conservative (or so he thought) radio commentator in Wisconsin, is the son of a once-standard University of Wisconsin liberal, his father driven from the party in the wake of the Vietnam War by the New Left, devotees of anyone who wielded a Kalashnikov, an attitude not calculated to sit well with a fifties-style Jewish liberal. Sykes, who, as I pointed out in my earlier article, admired Paul Ryan extravagantly, strikes me as a Republican “moderate” who was kidding himself about what made the post-George H. W. Bush Republican Party run.
Sykes (and Wilson, a party professional for decades) saw the Republican Party as first of all the party of fiscal responsibility. That was why we had to rein in entitlements. That was what the Republican Party was all about. This was, in fact, nonsense.
Both Sykes and Wilson—not to mention many other Republicans—have forgotten that it was George Bush who created our deficit “crisis”, to the extent that it exists, by cutting taxes for no reason but to cut them, and massively increasing spending on virtually every aspect of government during the “War on Terror”, a war that we did not need to wage and which has brought disaster in its wake for the past 17 years.1
The Republican Party lost its purpose after the end of the Cold War. It lost its conscience after the election of Bill Clinton. Clinton, and the Democratic Party in general, had to be destroyed because they had to be destroyed. They had to be! They were evil! The racial resentment that had helped fuel the Republican Party ever since the explosion of violent black street crime in the late sixties now became the real raison d’être for the Republican Party—racism and a misogynistic anti-feminism.
Newt Gingrich ushered in the new Republican Party, spouting fantasies of a vague sort of “New Age” capitalism when he wasn’t fueling sexist or racist hysteria with his demagoguery, though his first and last goal was always to wreck the presidency of Bill Clinton.
In 2000 the Republican “establishment”—largely, the Wall Street financiers big-state governors, along with foot soldiers like Wilson and Sykes—drew back in horror from the spectacle of Clinton’s grotesque and scandalous impeachment and forced through the nomination of George Bush, who squeezed into office with only a little extra-constitutional assistance from the Supreme Court.
Bush, who came, after all, from one of the most diverse states in the Union, governed for eight whole months as a moderate. His White House staff was surely the most diverse in Republican history. But, bizarrely, tragically, 9/11 filled Bush with an unexpected and unextinguishable hubris—he had been put here on earth to kick ass in the name of democracy.2
Bush’s presidency, which wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives and climaxed in the worst financial calamity since the Great Depression, shredded the reputation of the “Establishment”, but nothing rose to take its place—nothing but the anarchical venom of the “Tea Party”. For eight long years, Paul Ryan allowed people like Sykes and Wilson and George Will and the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza to pretend that there was something still respectable about the Republican Party. But there wasn’t. Paulie was simply a whited sepulchre in a bespoke suit.
When the “good people” in a party build their self-image on lies, you know the party is in trouble. Neither Sykes nor Wilson say anything about George Bush’s Middle East disasters, the result of the endless Republican obsession with finding a new enemy to justify ever more bloated defense budgets. Virtually no one in the Republican Party had the nerve to ask “What went wrong?” because the answers would have torn the party apart.
Both Sykes nor Wilson seem convinced that everything in the Republican Party was fine until 2016, when suddenly everyone went crazy. They never noticed the xenophobia that appeared as early as 1996, when the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform bill aggressively restricted benefits to legal immigrants (one of the major reasons why Clinton was reluctant to sign it), which prevented passage of immigration reform during both the Bush and Obama presidencies, and which, in 2012, led Republican presidential candidates to vie with one another as to who could speak of immigrants most contemptuously.
They never noticed the endless efforts of the Republican Party at the state level to reduce the number of black voters, efforts that won the repeated support of the Republican-dominated Supreme Court. They (somehow) never noticed the blatant racism that swelled in “their” party against Obama for eight long years, never noticed the decades-long garbage fires of Limbaugh and Drudge and Breitbart and Coulter and a dozen others who got rich on hate, never noticed in 2012 when candidate Mitt Romney sought the blessings of birther Donald Trump, a presage of things to come.
Wilson, as a “professional”, writes in a cynical, seen it all, wise-guy persona for most of his book, yet comes apart at the seams when it comes to discussing Obama, almost as if he can’t stand to admit that the guy beat his party twice for the presidency, actually beat them fair and square.
Yes, in 2008 the press lost their damn collective minds. The first Obama campaign benefited from a tidal wave of largely uncritical adulation. The superlatives flowed in a ridiculous, flowery stream of praise that bordered at times on the creepy. …
They spoke and wrote about Obama in terms so glowing and so toadying that it was easy to caricature the journalist class of 2008 as a group of fangirls squeeing and fainting at his every utterance. That nearly mindless rah-rah remained a constant element in Obama’s coverage until he walked out of the Oval Office.
Yes, that was how Rush Limbaugh, and the Drudge Report, and Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal covered Obama. Nor does Wilson notice what an easy act George Bush was to follow, how much better the Obama-Biden ticket looked compared to McCain-Palin—how much better Obama-Biden was than McCain-Palin, not to mention the fact that Obama came in for very sharp and sustained criticism once it became clear that he wasn’t going to solve the economic crisis in six months and was in fact ridiculed for years by DC insider types like Bob Woodward as a metrosexual sissy who couldn’t close the deal like LBJ or WJC. Nor does Wilson notice how Republicans unceasingly sought to undermine first the president and then, with the election of the Tea Party House in 2010, the entire American economy in order to destroy Obama. Not since the pre-Civil War era have we seen such a “burn it down” will to destruction in Washington.
Both Sykes and Wilson profess to be amazed at how “their” party turned on its values in 2016 and how so many “good” men and women were transformed into Trump toadies overnight. They should have seen it coming long before. And they should have left it long before as well.
John Boehner, another “moderate” Republican, in a long, plaintive, post-retirement interview, “seething over what happened to his party”, is particularly plaintive in his complaint about the damn-fool Democratic Party for nominating such half-assed, fat-assed granny in a pant suit as Hillary Clinton to run against Frankenstein’s monster. And I can see his point, because I am heartily anti Hillary. Yet it was Boehner, and Sykes, and Wilson, and hundreds of other “name” Republicans who sat on their fat asses and let Hillary wage war on the ogre all alone. “Hey, we’re smart! We’ll let Hillary slay the monster, and then we’ll explain to the hicks why we’re the ones who should be in charge! And then once she’s in office we’ll beat the shit out of her and the hicks will love us and we’ll be back in the driver’s seat! It’s a goddamn win-win!”
Yes, you let Hillary do your dirty work. But when she failed, it isn’t her fault. It’s your fault. Trump is your baby, born and nursed by your cowardice, your unwillingness to reform or forsake a party whose manifest faults you should have confronted long before.
- Supposed “wonk’s wonk” Ryan never proposed raising taxes to cut the deficit, which, you know, actually worked when Bill Clinton did it. He never (naturally) proposing cutting defense spending, which continues its cancerous growth, despite the fact that, as I keep saying, we have no enemy. ↩︎
- At military briefings, Bush would always ask in conclusion, “Are we kicking ass?” The answer he required was not “Oh, yes sir!” It was “Oh, yes sir! We are definitely kicking ass!” ↩︎
