How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  That did not mean that I became a conservative right away, however. At the time, conservatism still seemed an exotic and not terribly attractive alternative that often came in repellent packages (this was the era of Nixon, after all). But I became open to alternatives. Conservatism was appealing not only because it was contrarian, but because, at the time, it just seemed smarter.

  I was charmed and amused by William F. Buckley’s critiques and increasingly open to Milton Friedman’s case for free markets. In the late 1970s, George Will and Ludwig von Mises made more sense to me than the pieties and obligatory cant of the Carter era. Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, who had similarly moved to the right, reminded me of my father as he struggled with a liberalism from which he felt increasingly alienated. But most important for me was that conservative ideas simply made more sense; they took the world as it was rather than seeing it through the lens of wishful thinking and ideology.

  By the late 1980s, my shift from left to right was complete. I wrote several books about universities, political correctness, and the culture of victimization; edited a public policy magazine; and in the early 1990s became a talk radio host. Those were heady times for the new medium. Conservativism suddenly found an audience, and the movement itself seemed alive with ideas. In Wisconsin I helped advance the careers of conservatives like Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Reince Priebus, and Ron Johnson. In 2010, conservatives won big majorities in the legislature and I openly supported many of their reforms, including reforms of collective bargaining and expansions of school choice. In short, I was under the impression that conservatives actually believed in concepts such as free trade, balanced budgets, and character, and had respect for constitutional rights.

  And then along came this campaign.

  Donald Trump suddenly surged in the polls, and a conservative media that had once formed a solid phalanx around Reagan conservativism now began a vertiginous pivot toward the erratic populist.

  INTO THE WILDERNESS

  When I wrote in August 2015 that Trump was a cartoon version of every leftist/media negative stereotype of the reactionary, nativist, misogynist right, I thought that I was well within the mainstream of conservative thought.2 In January 2016, former presidential speech writer Peter Wehner recalled that the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democratic senator from New York, had remarked in 1980, “Of a sudden, the G.O.P. has become a party of ideas.” But Wehner wrote that a GOP headed by Donald Trump would “become the party of anti-reason.”3

  Like Peter Wehner I thought the issue was clear for conservatives. Even after Wisconsin failed to be a firewall of rationality, I hoped principled conservatives would draw the necessary lines, and many did. But the months that followed were like a slow-rolling version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which one friend and associate after another was taken, or rather chose to change their minds.

  In my social media feeds I found myself called a “cuckservative”—a favorite gibe of white nationalists. The soundtrack of my year (or at least the second half) were callers and emailers and social media users telling me they would never listen to me again, calling me a sellout, a traitor, a Judas for failing to get on board the Trump Train. Under the withering fire of social media trolls, one GOP politician and commentator after another fell into line. The GOP became the party of Trump.

  For the second time in my life, I found myself in the political wilderness, with more questions than answers.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE ATTACK ON THE CONSERVATIVE MIND

  AMONG THE MANY IRONIES of the conservative implosion was how the Right became what it had once mocked. In 2008, conservatives ridiculed the Left for its adulation of Barack Obama, only to succumb to their own cult of personality eight years later. For years, they scoffed at what Rush Limbaugh called the “low information voters,” only to find out that the conservative base was (as one pundit put it) itself decidedly postliterate.

  Polls suggested that as many as seven in ten Republicans doubted Obama’s birth in the United States. A majority thought he was a secret Muslim. A Public Policy Poll of Republican voters in May 2016 found that:

  —65 percent thought President Obama is a Muslim; only 13 percent thought he’s a Christian

  —59 percent thought President Obama was not born in the United States; only 23 percent thought that he was

  —27 percent thought vaccines cause autism; 45 percent didn’t think they do; another 29 percent were not sure

  —24 percent thought Antonin Scalia was murdered; just 42 percent thought he died naturally; another 34 percent are unsure.1

  This is not to say that the Right had a monopoly on voter ignorance. Surveys have found that only about one third of Americans can even name the three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judiciary). As Ilya Somin, a professor at the George Mason University School of Law, has observed, the problem is not that such knowledge is absolutely essential, it is that “anyone who follows politics even moderately closely is likely to know them. The fact that most people do not know is a strong indication of their ignorance about politics and public policy generally.” And, indeed, the ignorance runs quite deep:

  Despite years of public controversy over the budget, surveys consistently show that most of the public have very little understanding of how the federal government spends its money. They greatly underestimate the percentage of federal funds allocated to massive entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security—which are among the largest federal expenditures—and vastly overestimate the proportion that goes to foreign aid (only about 1 percent of the total).2

  As its coverage of the last campaign demonstrated, 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 less 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.

  “Journalists were confronted with the spectacle of an issues-free campaign,” analyst Andrew Tyndall told columnist Nicholas Kristof. “They had to decide how to react: with complicity, since such tactics were easy to shoehorn into the ratings—pleasing entertainment structure of a reality TV show, or with defiance, by delving into what was at stake.”3 The media chose entertainment, and the result was a campaign that was seldom about substance or ideas.

  The problem here is obvious: An ignorant electorate is not likely to hold ignorant politicians to account. If voters don’t know what they don’t know, they will also be unlikely to recognize or care very much about what politicians don’t know. So ignorance begets ignorance and the tolerance of it in high places.

  As it happens, there is actually a term for this: the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Professor David Dunning, for whom the concept is partly named, coauthored a study entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” which argued that “people tend to hold overly favorable reviews of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains.”4 This occurs “because people who were unskilled in the domain suffer a dual burden: not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” During the campaign, Dunning extrapolated the concept to the presidential contest, explaining in Politico why so many voters seemed untroubled by Trump’s ignorance or gaffes. Many voters, “especially those facing significant distress in their life, might like some of what they hear from Trump,” wrote Dunning, “but they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes. They fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps.” The problem, he noted, was not simply that voters were ignorant, “it is that they are often misinformed—their heads filled with false data, facts and theories that can lead to misguided conclusions held with tenacious
confidence and extreme partisanship.…”5

  THE RISE OF THE ILLITERATI

  This was not simply an artifact of the Right’s Alt Reality bubble; it was also a reflection of a broader populist anti-intellectualism that rejected expertise and authority alike. Within the Alt Reality silos there was a nagging insistence that everyone’s opinions and facts were as good as anyone else’s and that claims to the contrary were signs of “elitism.” This rejection of reason and evidence was essentially a rejection of Enlightenment values as well as the conservative tradition. But ignorance and anger proved to be a dangerous combination.

  “What we missed was that nobody cared about solutions,” recalled Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had worked on her father Mike Huckabee’s campaign before signing on with Trump. “They just wanted to burn it all down. They didn’t care about building it back up. They wanted to burn it to the ground and then figure out what to do with the ashes afterwards.… You may have the best policy in the world to get every single American the best job they’ve ever had. Nobody cared.”6

  Even before 2016, some critics accused the GOP of self-consciously dumbing itself down. In Too Dumb to Fail, Matt Lewis charged that conservatism had become “more personal and less principled—more flippant and less thoughtful. It became mean. It became lazy.” As conservatives cultivated their everyman anti-intellectualism, Lewis said, many “deliberately shun erudition, academic excellence, experience, sagaciousness, and expertise in politics.”7 It had become the party of Sarah Palin … and Donald Trump.

  There was also a time—before the Age of Twitter—when statesmen actually read books. “The American Founders could have a conversation among themselves,” National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote, “because they had in the main all consumed the same library of Greek and Roman classics (in the original or in translation), British and Continental literature ranging from fiction to political economy, legal literature, and the like.” This did not lead to uniformity of opinion. “What it ensured was literate and enlightened argument,” noted Williamson. “From the man of many books to the man of one book, we devolved very quickly to the man of one sentence, the paragraph being too demanding and unwieldy a form.”8

  Williamson saw Trump’s election as a sign of our “postliterate politics.” Williamson’s thesis was that Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is only possible in a society that doesn’t read or think much. “Trump is something that could not happen in a nation that could read,” he wrote. “But we are not a nation that reads, or a nation that shares a living tradition of serious contemporary literature, fiction or nonfiction.”9

  Television personality Tomi Lahren seemed to embody the unapologetic anti-intellectualism of the new generation of conservative media “thought leaders.” She has 3.6 million likes on Facebook and 406,000 followers on Twitter, and some of the YouTube clips from her show, which was streamed on Blaze.com, have gotten more than 2 million hits. (Lahren and The Blaze parted ways in early 2017.) She is known for suggesting that Hillary and Bill Clinton could have been behind the deaths of half a dozen political opponents—and government officials linked to them—who died under questionable circumstances over the years.10

  When the slim, blonde, twenty-four-year-old Lahren was profiled by the New York Times, she was described as “young, vocal and the right’s rising media star.”11 But in an interview on The Jamie Weinstein Show podcast, she admitted that she was no Edmund Burke:

  I don’t like to read long books. I like to read news. So I couldn’t tell you that there was a book that I read that changed my life. More so, I love to read … but I have a very short attention span, so sitting down with a book is very difficult for me.12

  Her attitude toward reading was, unfortunately, shared by the forty-fifth president of the United States, who has admitted that he has not read any biographies of former presidents. He has no time to read books, he told the Washington Post. “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.”13*

  Throughout the campaign there were strained attempts to compare Trump to Ronald Reagan. But although the media often portrayed the Gipper as an amiable dunce, the discovery of the papers that were published in the book Reagan, In His Own Hand forced historians to revise their views of the fortieth president. Reagan wrote out many of his radio commentaries and newspaper articles, as well as many of his own speeches. He wrote poetry, short stories, and letters.14 Trump, in his own hand, writes 140-character tweets.

  TRAGEDY OF THE CONSERVATIVE MIND

  The story of the conservative movement in the past sixty years has been the long development of a coherent, principled, often witty and sharp-tongued intellectual worldview that provided devastating critiques of liberal pieties.

  At one time, the Left had a monopoly not merely of the media and academia, but also of the world of policy think tanks. Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950 that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in this country. Trilling declared that “it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” He conceded that there was an impulse to conservatism, but “the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”15 Clinton Rossiter made the same point in Conservatism in America: We were a “progressive country with a liberal tradition,” and the ideas of the Right were more or less “irrelevant.”16 This continues to be the attitude of much of academia.

  But the playing field was changed by the development of an intellectual infrastructure—including The Heritage Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute—that has redefined what was possible for conservatism. It became possible to challenge the Left on policy grounds, win the war of ideas, and win elections. No longer content to stand athwart history and yell, “Stop,” conservatives were able to propose reform agendas based on free market, nonstatist principles. There would not have been Reagan, a GOP revolution, or a Tea Party without them.

  As a recovering liberal, I remember reading their stuff and realizing that their arguments were stronger and their ideas were better. They made free markets understandable, made the case for constitutional government, and inspired a generation to defend a culture of life and personal freedom. They were voices of reason and common sense.

  Throughout 2015–2016, the struggle in the GOP was often characterized as a contest between “outsiders” and the “establishment” or the “elites.” But this was lazy punditry, and missed a larger (and more troubling) development.

  There was, of course, justifiable disillusionment with the Washington, DC, insider/elite who have been co-opted by the beltway culture, but there was something else going on as well: an assault on intellectual traditions of conservative civility. This went beyond candidate Trump’s serial insults of conservatives—Charles Krauthammer was a dummy/loser/clown; George Will was “dopey”; Bill Kristol had “lost all respect”; Rich Lowry was the “worst”; and so on.

  Trump’s targets were unusual because they were not politicians or officeholders. But all of them were heirs to the conservative intellectual tradition and a culture that had once placed a value on thoughtfulness, experience, intelligence, and a coherent philosophy of man and his relationship to the state. What we were seeing was, in effect, a repudiation of the conservative mind.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CONSERVATIVE IDEA

  CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN IN exile before.

  In 1964, conservatives had been annihilated in Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. That campaign had introduced the country to some rising political stars, such as Ronald Reagan, but the consensus was that a chastened GOP would have to shake off the stink of the Right and move to the center. For many Republicans, reeling from the prior year’s defeat, the future was embodied by young, charismatic liberal Manhattan
congressman John Lindsay, who was running as a Republican for New York City mayor.

  In a pivotal moment for the movement, William F. Buckley Jr. decided to stand athwart the GOP’s retreat from conservatism. The founder of the nation’s premier conservative magazine, Buckley decided to run for mayor of New York in 1965 on the Conservative Party ticket, his colleague Neal Freeman later wrote, as “a right-wing insurgent marching against the citadel of self-satisfied liberalism … the denizens of the citadel were not amused.”1

  In 1965, there were few platforms for conservative ideas: no talk radio, cable shows, blogs, or social media. The most important platform was the syndicated newspaper column, and by Freeman’s count there were only three that could be described as conservative: David Lawrence, “the grand old man” of U.S. News & World Report, “who was by that stage of his career more old than grand.” There was also James Jackson Kilpatrick, whose appeal was somewhat limited by his nostalgia for Southern conservatism. And then there was Buckley.

  Buckley had been a “conservative long before conservatism was cool,” Freeman wrote, so he was regarded by much of the Left and the media as a “creature of the Hard Right lagoon.” But he was also one of the most provocative and lively polemicists in American politics. As a magazine editor, Freeman wrote, “he had been poking Liberal shibboleths through the bars of a cage.” By running for New York mayor, “he was poking those shibboleths from inside the cage.”2

  Buckley’s 1965 campaign, chronicled in his book The Unmaking of a Mayor, was quixotic with a distinctly New York and Buckleyite twist. When asked if he thought he had any chance of winning, he answered simply, “No.” Asked what he would do if he did, in fact, win the election, he quipped that he would “demand a recount.”