How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  Blaming the backlash solely on racism is a tempting, but lazy reflexive retreat to a rhetorical safe zone for the Left. Crying wolf had serious consequences for both sides, because over time our audiences shrugged off the charges, responding to accusations of racism with an eye roll and “Not this again.” By the time the real thing came along, the Left had used up its rhetorical ammunition, and the Right had become numb to the realities of the bigots around them.

  A MORAL FAILURE

  But this does not let conservatives off the hook.

  For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers, and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled tales of Hillary Clinton’s murder victims. We treated them like your obnoxious uncle at Thanksgiving. Rather than confront them, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our friends, whose quirks could be indulged or at least ignored. They could rant and pound the table, we thought, but they were merely postcards from the fringe, right? The hope was that the center would always hold, things would not fall apart, and principled conservatives would rise to the occasion. Except they didn’t. That proved to be a moral failure that lies at the heart of the conservative movement, even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph.

  It is impossible to say how many conservatives actually harbor racial resentments, but what is undeniable is that a great number of American conservatives have proven themselves willing to tolerate and even accept racism and racial resentment. When Speaker Paul Ryan denounced “textbook racism,” after Trump lashed out at the Mexican American judge in his Trump University lawsuit, he was hit with an avalanche of opprobrium from many of his fellow conservatives who believed that winning the election was more important than distinguishing conservatism from racial animus.

  The hard fact is that only a political party that had cultivated an indifference and insensitivity to racial issues could have nominated Donald Trump and embraced him so easily.

  Blogger Ben Howe has lamented all the signs we ignored, the times we looked away or simply rolled our eyes when one of our “allies” suggested that Obama was from Kenya or that liberals wanted to impose Sharia law on the country. “People would say outlandish things and I would find myself nodding my head and awkwardly walking away, not calling them out for their silliness,” Howe wrote, because there were more important issues at stake. So, he said, he lied to himself about who they were.

  I chose peace over principle. I chose to go along with those I disagreed with on core matters because I believed we were jointly fighting for other things that were more important. I ignored my gut and my moral compass.

  The result is that, almost to a man, every single person I cringed at or thought twice about, is now a supporter and cheerleader of Donald Trump.17

  THE ALT REALITY RIGHT

  I was, of course, well aware that the Right had created an echo chamber. But as authors Kathleen Jamieson and Joseph Cappella noted in 2008, the conservative media were generally united around Reagan conservativism.18 I was part of that and flattered myself that we were helping the audience become savvier, more sophisticated analysts of current affairs and well-informed consumers of news. For years, the relationship among on-air, online, and print conservatives was symbiotic and apparently seamless. On my show I frequently shared with my audience the latest column by Charles Krauthammer or set up topics by reading a Wall Street Journal editorial on air. Other talk shows did likewise, providing a broad forum for conservative authors, editors, and columnists. As long as this nexus held, conservative ideas could be exposed to a much wider audience than Buckley or his generation ever could have imagined.

  But as the volume rose and competition for the outrage market intensified, this morphed into an alternative reality bubble that effectively isolated many conservatives from inconvenient information. “The American Right,” Matthew Sheffield writes, “has become willfully disengaged from its fellow citizens thanks to a wonderful virtual-reality machine in which conservatives, both elite and grassroots, can believe anything they wish, no matter how at odds it is with reality.”19 The explosive growth of the Right’s new media infrastructure was fueled by well-heeled conservative donors, dramatically changing the shape of the media and political landscape. A study by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) of more than 1.25 million online stories published between April 1, 2015, and Election Day documented the impact of a “right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart” that had “developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.” In a remarkably short period of time, the CJR study found, Breitbart had become “the center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem,…” All of this was a long time coming. For years, conservatives criticized the bias and double standards of the mainstream media and much of that criticism was richly deserved; conservatives may exaggerate media bias, but they do not merely imagine it. The double standards—something treated as a misdemeanor for a liberal was a felony for a conservative—made for daily fodder. Over the years, I used my own radio show to call out the many failures of the liberal media. What the media has learned (one hopes) is that if you ignore or insult your audience long enough, they will find other sources of information and entertainment. Credibility squandered through bias is not easily restored.

  But as we learned in 2016, we had succeeded in convincing our audiences to ignore and discount any information whatsoever from the mainstream media. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the Right’s immunity to false information.

  So it should not have come as a surprise when “fake news” became a significant factor in the campaign. After the election, a study by University of Oxford researchers found that “nearly a quarter of web content shared by Twitter users in Michigan during the 10 days before the presidential election was false.” They concluded that “not only did such junk news ‘outperform’ real news, but the proportion of professional news content being shared hit its lowest point the day before the election.” The false information was spread by automated “chatbots” powered by software programs that flooded Twitter with anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages.20 “The use of automated accounts was deliberate and strategic throughout the election,” the researchers concluded.21 The problem was neither small, nor isolated. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird found that there were dozens of “conspiracy-propagating websites,” such as “beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com.” Starbird was able to catalog eighty-one separate sites, “linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots.”22

  The proliferation of hoaxes—and the number of gullible voters who believed them—should have inspired some serious introspection among conservatives, but that now seems highly unlikely.

  In the wake of the election, the newly weaponized conservative media genuinely believe that they have changed the paradigm of media coverage. In the new Right media culture, negative information simply no longer penetrates; gaffes and scandals can be snuffed out, ignored, or spun; counternarratives can be launched. 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.

  Indeed, in a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new postfactual political culture, 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. Now any news deemed to be biased, annoying, or negative can be labeled “fake news.” It was surely a sign of things to come when Trump used his first press conference after the election to refus
e to answer a question from a reporter because he was from a “fake news” media outlet (CNN).

  Perhaps even more cringe worthy has been the rise of a new class of pro-Trump “intellectuals” who attempt to impose some coherence and substance on Trumpism. Often they strained to attribute to Trump an ideological lucidity that seems little more than a projection of their own wishful thinking. Even so, Trump’s defenders were often less pro-Trump than anti-anti-Trump, aiming their polemics against the Left and conservatives who have been slow to shift their allegiances. What may have begun as a policy or a tactic in opposition, has long since become a reflex. The New York Times’s James Poniewozik notes that politics today” is attitudinal, not ideological. The reason to be for someone is who is against them. What matters more than policy is your side’s winning, and what matters more than your side’s winning is the other side’s losing.”23 But, as I wrote earlier this year, there is an obvious price to be paid for essentially becoming a party devoted to trolling.24 As the Right doubles down on anti-anti-Trumpism it will find itself goaded into defending and rationalizing ever more outrageous conduct, just as long as it annoys the Left.

  In many ways the new anti-anti-Trumpism mirrors Trump himself, because at its core there are no fixed values, no respect for constitutional government or ideas of personal character, only a free-floating nihilism cloaked in insult, mockery, and bombast. Needless to say, this is not a form of conservatism that Edmund Burke, or even Barry Goldwater, would have recognized.

  CHAPTER 2

  CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING LIBERAL

  THROUGHOUT THE 2016 CAMPAIGN, I struggled to understand why I had such a different perspective from many of my one-time allies. Why didn’t they recognize what I was seeing? What secret knowledge was I missing? I have to confess that this gap in perceptions grew wider with every passing month, and I had a hard time accounting for it. Perhaps it had something to do with my own background.

  For years, I described myself not as a conservative, but as a “recovering liberal.”

  My father, Jay, was a longtime liberal activist, who was president of the Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union and ran antiwar insurgent Eugene McCarthy’s Wisconsin primary campaign in 1968. As an eighth grader I helped open the campaign headquarters and was a page to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year. I went on to become an active member of the Young Democrats, serving for a time on the state executive board while I was in high school.

  So I did not come by my conservativism either by birth or by upbringing.

  Over the next few years both my father and I drifted away from liberalism, largely because we both felt that it had moved away from us. My father was at various times of his life a lawyer, a newspaper reporter, an editorial writer, and professor of journalism. In all of those roles, he was a curmudgeon and a contrarian. I grew up arguing history and politics around the dinner table, often to the horror of the women in our family. Our worst jibe was to accuse the other of “being predictable.” But in the 1960s, we were liberals, because the moral issues of the times seemed so clear to us—the fight for civil rights and opposition to a bloody and costly war.

  My father was a World War II veteran who opposed the Vietnam War because he regarded it as reckless and ill-advised, but he was also a deeply patriotic man, who understood what we were asking of the men and women in the military. He admired Eugene McCarthy’s courage in standing up for principle and challenging his own party’s incumbent president. I think that McCarthy, who wrote poetry and made no effort to tone down his wit or hide his erudition, was my father’s ideal politician and I shared his attitude. As a junior high school student he let me travel around the state with the Minnesota senator and his national press entourage, an experience that turned me into a political junkie, a condition from which I haven’t yet recovered.

  But as the antiwar protests became more strident after Nixon’s election, my father became increasingly troubled by the tone of the movement. Opposition to a misguided war was morphing into a virulent anti-Americanism. My father, who had served in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, was especially disgusted by the vicious treatment of returning Vietnam veterans; the first time I saw him truly angry was when he heard one activist celebrating a Viet Cong victory in a battle that cost more than a hundred American lives.

  His disillusionment came to a head in 1970, when students went on strike after the invasion of Cambodia and sought to shut down the university where he taught. Originally launched to protest President Nixon’s decision to temporarily expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia, as my father later recalled, “The strike was quickly transformed into a crusade against an authoritarian and insensitive faculty; against irrelevant curricula, racism, sexism, oppression, capitalism; against American imperialism oppressing the revolutionary peoples of the Third World; and against all the assorted global inequities that the university has none of the means or the obligation to fix.” He described the scene on his campus:

  Bands of ragged students, heavily infiltrated by off-campus civilians and a few faculty partisans, roamed across the campus, through corridors, and into classrooms, chanting “on strike, shut it down.” Outfitted with simulated Che Guevara berets, Fidel Castro jackets, and arm bands, many appeared to be acting out roles in a grade-B adventure melodrama of a Balkan revolution. The guerilla brigades were later joined by truant high school students from nearby suburbs, attracted less by the cause than as a relief from boredom entered classrooms, demanding that the classes disband.1

  After the shooting of four students at Kent State University, the strike intensified. Several university buildings were padlocked by the strikers who then stormed the university library demanding that it be shut down, threatening to scatter hundreds of thousands of book cataloging cards on the floor, which my father regarded as “a new version of book burning.” When strikers tried to shut down the student newspaper, my father, who was faculty adviser, ordered the occupiers to leave the office, he recalled, “upon which a seventeen-year-old Fidelista called me a ‘fascist pig.’” The paper was surrendered an hour later when it was discovered that “no one among the new barbarians had the expertise to operate a typewriter.”

  For my father the climax of the strike came when he tried to drive through a blockade around the campus. A student protester jumped on the hood of his car. “My response, not out of principle but personal anger, was to keep my car rolling forward, shouting at the student to get off my car.” The protest was no longer “an abstraction but a violent presence on my car. A potentially dangerous impasse was averted when one of the blockade leaders, remembering me from my affiliation with the McCarthy campaign two years before, told his colleagues to let me pass. ‘He’s all right,’ he said mistakenly. I still had some little credits which I quickly dissipated that week.”

  Memories of the sixties have been romanticized, but left-wing politics came to be dominated by humorless and strident ideologues, who did little to hide their contempt for the older generation, bourgeois values, and for American culture in general.

  During the decade that followed, the excesses of the Left drove millions of former Democrats—families who had voted for Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy—to the right. The Left had seemingly lost its mind and the country seemed to be politically realigning, as were we.

  A protest against the stultifying conformity of the 1950s now demanded its own conformism to moral and cultural relativism in which every sort of deviancy and crime could be excused. On civil rights, the Left had shifted from an emphasis on judging one another “by the content of their character,” to a demand for racial quotas, which for my father evoked memories of the quotas that limited the number of Jewish students that he faced while trying to get into college in the 1930s.

  This was not the liberalism my father had signed up for. Later, he regretted not defecting from the Left sooner, but he noted, “The habit of years blocks out reason, making ideological transformation difficult, like a heart that continues
to beat after the brain dies.”

  I was undergoing my own shift. I left the Young Democrats and, after college, embarked on a career in journalism. As a newspaper reporter, I watched as the good intentions of the Great Society often failed to match the results, creating as many problems as they solved. Covering urban issues, I watched the multiplication of programs that had increasingly abstruse acronyms but seemed to exist for no other purpose than to satisfy a voter bloc and provide employment to various hacks and mediocrities. They did not discernibly improve any lives or fix any problems. As it turned out, bureaucracies made poor substitutes for families and neighborhoods and were often insensitive to the unintended consequences they left in their wake.

  My particular interest was education reform, especially in the central city, which I came to regard as the civil rights issue of our time. But it was obvious that the greatest impediment to change was an entrenched status quo that clung to its perks, privileges, and powers. As schools dumbed down their curricula and indulged a series of ill-fated educational fads, the results were increasingly horrible. But it was also obvious that the Democratic Party had become a wholly owned subsidiary of the teachers’ unions. Here I found that asking awkward questions often led to charges that I was flirting with the dark forces of the Right but, after a while, I simply stopped caring whether I was becoming a heretic. Even though I would lose a lot of friends (and, naturally, be accused of “selling out”), I found that breaking free of the tribal loyalties and ideological straitjackets was quite liberating. I suppose that was a result of my contrarian upbringing.