A couple of years back, when, it seems, I was feeling particularly down in the mouth, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, a couple of actual Republicans have written books asking themselves the same question, viz. Matthew Continetti (The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism) and Tim Miller (Why We Did It).
Matt, a long-time (relatively) opinionist around town for such lustily interventionist publications as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, attempts a century-long overview of American conservative thought and practice and does a fairly decent job at it—well, when he isn’t lying his damn ass off—while Fellow Millennial Tim is a recovering political operator whose prose has the sting and reek of political cordite.
I originally planned to discuss both Tim and Matt in the same post, but Matt’s tome unfortunately provoked such an outburst of liberal logorrhea on my part that the whole thing started to become absurdly unbalanced. As a result, I’m discussing Why We Did It in this post, reserving the logorrhea unleashed by The Right in a separate post, “The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 2.”
Why We Did It is, for the most part, an engaging memoir/confession/cri de cœur, which starts off as follows:
America never would have gotten into this mess if it weren’t for me and my friends.
We were the “normal” Republicans. The pragmatic and practical. The “adults in the room” you hear so much about. Back in the early 2010s you might have found us networking with reporters at a bipartisan Bobby Van’s happy hour. Or making you wait one more second for our attention while we typed out an urgent missive on our BlackBerry device. Or appearing as the token right-winger on some onanistic Beltway panel.
Like virtually everyone who goes into politics full time—I guess—Tim was an early political junkie. In his engaging post in the Bulwark, Goodbye to All That, he recalls getting goosebumps as a teenager listening to Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential candidate, asserting his party’s devotion to openness:
If there's anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you, tonight this hall belongs to the Party of Lincoln. And the exits which are clearly marked are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.
This had a special ring to Miller, a young, closeted gay man (in a Catholic high school, no less), who would bear the burden for what would become an explicitly anti-gay party during the George W. Bush years. He finally resolved to out himself in 2007 after watching 62-year-old then Idaho Senator Larry Craig “explain” to Matt Lauer his arrest for indecent behavior in a Minneapolis airport men’s room. But even after doing so he continued to work for Republicans, because there are two kinds of political junkies—the policy junkies and the adrenaline junkies.
Miller, and the people he describes in this book, whether he likes them or detests them, are the latter. They often enter politics because they “fall in love” with a given candidate—they may have great story, like John McCain, for example, or glamor, like JFK, or sheer personal power—no one who ever met LBJ or Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton could deny that they had encountered a true force of nature—but whatever it is, it sets them off from lesser mortals, someone for whom you would gladly run over your grandmother. I mean, when you think about it, it could be a lot of fun!
Lawyers call this “zealous advocacy”, which basically means that you get to be a total, lying prick because you’re doing it for someone else! (And, hopefully, being paid a shitload of cash.) Contrary to Tim’s rather naïve belief, this sort of political operative is not exactly a recent phenomenon. In ancient Greece, “respectable” politicians would hire what were called “sycophants” to handle the sort of dirty jobs they wouldn’t want to touch themselves. Today, “sycophant” means an abject flatterer—Tim is, I guess, familiar with the type—but in ancient Greece it meant “fig shower”, “fig” being a very long-running obscene gesture in Mediterranean circles. A sycophant’s job was to push to the front of the crowd when a rival candidate was speaking and give him the fig.
Nor is this sort of behavior new in Washington, DC or confined to conservatives. Back in the early 1980s I knew a young woman who came to DC fresh out of college to work for Common Cause, then easily the most celebrated do-gooder outfit in town. She left after a few years, unable to stand working with people who spent all their time stabbing each other in the back.
Tim, obviously, was made of sterner stuff. He eventually developed a particularly ingenious brand of sycophancy, operating a consulting firm that would link up with establishment Republican types who naturally wanted to trash their opponents, but didn’t want to get their hands dirty—and, in particular, didn’t want to be seen getting their hands dirty. That’s where Tim would come in. Tim had connections with the “real” right-wing folks, folks who liked getting their hands dirty, and with Tim as the go-between, one hand would wash another without all the dirt. But when Trump came along, Tim had the seriously painful experience, shared by only a handful of others on the right, of exclaiming to a close friend “Can you believe this guy Trump?” only to have them respond “I know! Isn’t he amazing! Though Tim doesn’t say so, it must have been like being in the closet all over again, being afraid to mention your favorite pop group because all your cool friends think they’re a bunch of homos.
Tim’s disgust at the emergence of Trump was so visceral—and he was so outspoken about it—that in May of 2016 he was featured in the Washington Post’s take on The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most, coming in at 9, right behind David Brooks. (Extremely fun fact: Number 1 was none other than South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, now Number 1 sycophant/suckophant in chief.)1
But while Tim didn’t follow 95% of his erstwhile colleagues into self-inflicted damnation in the service of El Donaldo, he didn’t give up on the sycophancy. He just found a new master. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong one, secretly working for what was then Facebook, hoping/helping to defuse the furious blowback from the revelations that America’s chatroom had allowed/enabled Russian “rat fucking” (to use a term from the Watergate era) of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Tim’s outfit, Definers Public Affairs, was first fingered and then fucked in the course of a massive New York Times take on Facebook, Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis, and then had the dubious pleasure of being featured exclusively the next day in Facebook Cuts Ties With Washington Firm That Sought to Discredit Social Network’s Critics.
As described in the Times, Tim’s particular crime was informing the right people that some of the groups attacking Facebook received funding from George Soros, or at least Soros-backed organizations, thus picturing Tim as trying to smear the opposition to Facebook as being a Jewish plot, with or without space lasers. Well, on the one hand, it was true that some of these organizations were “Soros backed”, but on the other hand, so what? Only an anti-Semite would care, and being given two big-time beatdowns on consecutive days in the New York Times for attempting to stimulate an “anti-Semites for Zuckerberg” movement, while a bit far-fetched, was guaranteed to put Definers Public Affairs out of business, and it did, causing Tim to realize that he needed to explore a new career path, though how that was to be done was a little tricky, seeing as his old right-wing “pals” hated him for refusing to join them in the Trumpian stye they now called “home”, while his new-found pals on the left hated him both for the “crime” of working with Facebook, for many liberals a bête noire almost as loathed as Putin, and for all the right-wing fast ones he’d pulled back in the good old days, gleefully recited to the Times as payback by the guys who knew him when.
I began to stare at my own work through a different light. Not the PR kingpin and badass dark artist engaging in shrewd subterfuge. But the putz who was being used by some of the forces that contributed to the latest wave of white nationalism in America and the election of a truly evil man. I was favor-trading with people who were causing real-world harm so I could get a pat on the head from some client who wanted self-serving scuttlebutt fed to the rubes. To what end? Shouldn’t I be doing something more productive and virtuous with my skills?
One way, of course, is to write a book—how the Hell did I end up like this? And all my “friends” as well? Tim provides a sort of taxonomy of DC sell-out, with categories like “Messiahs and Junior Messiahs”, “Demonizers”, “LOL Nothing Matters Republicans”, and, well, quite a few more, but, really, what it comes down to, in the eyes of someone who handed out leaflets for Adlai Stevenson, is that there is no more Republican Party: there is only the Trump Party, because the Republican masses are loyal to nothing other than Donald Trump, something that has been proved over and over again. If the Republican Party was once your life, well, today the Donald Trump Party is your life. If you don’t like that, well, get a new life. And if, unlike Tim, you weren’t singled out in Esquire back in 2011 for your “surprisingly hip” emails, and by Politico in 2016 for your elegant tweets, the road may prove rockier than your aging knees can bear.2
Not surprisingly, a lot of what Tim has to say about his erstwhile playmates is pretty harsh, and some of it can sound more like payback than analysis, but the two long portraits that conclude the book, the first of Alyssa Farah, a seriously long-time, seriously right-wing policy buff, whose dad, Joe Farah, founded the frenziedly right-wing WorldNetDaily, and the second, the equally right-wing Caroline Wren, are quite touching.
All her life, Farah followed pretty conscientiously in her father’s footsteps, working for Mark Meadows when he headed up the “Freedom Caucus” in the House of Representatives—to me, the worst pack of mouth-breathing knuckle-walkers ever to shamble their way into Congress, but to Alyssa, it was sheer heaven!
I can only guess that what Alyssa found “refreshing” (my word) about the Freedom Caucus was their lack of inhibition and calculation. At last, guys who won’t compromise! Ever! Barack Obama wants us to fund the U. S. government? Well, fuck him! He’s not in charge, we are! So what if it destroys the U. S. economy? It will make Obama look bad, won’t it? Enough said!
While Alyssa luved the Freedom Caucus’ covert nihilism—the destruction of the U. S. economy in the name of balanced budgets—she gagged on the overt nihilism of Donald Trump, whose forever stated sole goal and purpose was the glorification of Donald Trump. She didn’t seem to know it, but what she was really gagging on was his habit of saying—nay, screaming—the quiet part out loud, all the fucking time, that the total destruction of all norms was not a means to an end, but the end in itself.
Alyssa hated Trump so much she even wanted Hillary to win—so she told Tim—though with no help from Alyssa, of course. And, of course, she ended up working as Trump’s press secretary. Hey, stuff happens! Especially in DC! How can you be a team member when you won’t take a hit for the team? Running a country isn’t for sissies, after all. They’re all in the other party! And you sure don’t want to be one of them!
But Alyssa did gag, completely, when it became clear that Trump wasn’t going to let a little thing like losing an election keep him from staying another four years in the White House. She “even” bailed before Jan. 6, which is kind of impressive. And, even more impressive, she stayed bailed, unlike all those other sunshine stalwarts, like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, and, yes, Lindsey Graham, who jumped all over Trump when they thought he was dead, only to crouch and cower in terror when he rose again, buoyed upwards once more by the surging, never satisfied nihilism of the masses.
Even more stunning, Tim notes, is that this is what it took to drive Alyssa from Trump’s service, she who knew, far better than all but perhaps several hundred DC insiders in the White House, the Cabinet, and Capitol Hill, just how awful Trump was, how ignorant, how vicious, how petty, how thoroughly unprincipled, and how they all kept making excuses, like Alyssa, like Bill Barr, like Mitch McConnell, and all the rest, all afraid of their own shadows, all afraid of jeopardizing their careers and alienating their friends, and all trying very hard to believe that it wasn’t all as bad as it seemed, that someday soon we’d all be back to normal, with a conservative Supreme Court as a bonus! And all because they had kept the faith, and hadn’t taken the easy way out! Because winners never quit, and quitters never win!
Tim can’t help honoring Alyssa very late blooming yet apparently permanent conversion to principle, which makes his last portrait, of Caroline Wren, so wrenching. Caroline was not simply a “colleague”—from the way Tim writes, he’s had many a “colleague” he couldn’t stand—but a friend. “We browned out at a club in Miami and in some dive bar in Columbia and at the 9:30 Club and in her basement and well . . . lots of places.”3
Caroline, as it turns out, was one of the organizers of January 6, remained unrepentant afterwards, and even proclaimed herself “besties” with Alex Jones, perhaps the only man in America who can give Donald Trump a run for sheer shitheadedness. Tim desperately struggles to figure out where she’s coming from, consuming quantities of vodka “with a splash of pomegranate White Claw on the rocks”—which apparently is what up-scale MAGAgarians drink when they don’t want to get fat—in pursuit of, you know, the Truth.4
The Truth seems to be that, even more than Tim, Caroline likes living in the bubble of zealous advocacy. Why go outside? It’s too confusing out there. Just think of the lefties as negative energy. Who needs that? It just brings you down. Focus on the job, and the job will see you through. Who needs those damn lefties with their damn Priuses anyway? It makes you want to drive a steamroller. It really does!
Matthew Continetti, in his book, The Right, says that, among Republicans after the defeat of George I in 1992, “hatred of the Clintons became a substitute for policy,” and this was true for everyone in the Republican Party, from Rush Limbaugh to William Kristol. Why think when you can hate? It’s so much easier!
Newt Gingrich established this as the Republicans’ official, long-running political strategy. Don’t attack Democrats on policy, attack them on character! They’re sleazy, dirty, and corrupt, and unpatriotic to boot! You never have to think and it never gets old! Rush and Newt and a horde of others introduced the Republicans to the joys of irresponsibility, and, once formed, it’s a very hard habit to break. It’s true that George Jr. started off trying to be “compassionate”, but he soon discovered that killing people is a lot more fun. “I have to control my bloodlust,” George admitted, regretfully.5
Trump, clearly, has no such worries. And that’s why the Republicans love him so much.
Afterwords
We do live in unfortunate times, about which I ruminated extensively in a post titled CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.. I noted then the impact of the civil rights and sexual revolutions on American politics—it is no “accident”, for example, that evangelicals and Catholics, the backbone of today’s Republican Party, are the two groups that deny women leadership positions in their churches. These are, as well, the two groups most threatened—or at least most likely to perceive themselves as threatened—by affirmative action—because they are, generally, lower down on the economic scale. Throw in a wildly misguided interventionist foreign policy that has led to one self-inflicted disaster to another for over 30 years, constant economic turmoil for 15 years, capped off by the worst plague in a century—well, what’s next, a trillion-ton meteor?6
1. According to Tim, pre-Trump Lindsey was a wonderful guy.
2. Tim is young enough to know that “Portugal. The Man” is not a misprint. And he was into them years before the crowd!
3. I’m guessing that Tim is using “browned out” to mean “drinking until your later memories of the event are vague and confused”—sort of a back formation from “brownout” (for drinkers, this means “not as bad as a blackout”)—rather than the definition offered by the Urban Dictionary, which is a lot worse.
4. Caroline’s wedding is coming up, and wine has too many calories. I’m a little dubious of this, but it seems that Caroline would know.
5. This is a true story.
6. The “Chicxulub Impactor” that offed the dinosaurs weighed in at two trillion tons, says the Washington Post. (The Post calls it a “meteor” but some people think it might have been a comet.)
