How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  PROPHETS IGNORED

  In their 2005 essay, Douthat and Salam pinpointed a central but overlooked political reality: the GOP had become “an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working-class vote,” but that voter base was not particularly conservative in any orthodox sense. Writing a full decade before Trump’s ascendency, they noted that white working-class voters were “quite okay with raising the minimum wage, and raising taxes on the wealthy; they were upset about globalization, and skeptical if not hostile both to free trade and to open borders immigration.” And yet, they argued, the GOP was offering them very little, content to take their votes for granted. “Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy,” wrote Douthat and Salam, “the party isn’t just out of touch with the country as a whole, it’s out of touch with its own base.”

  They offered up a series of proposals to give “coherence and sustainability” to conservativism, while addressing the economic realities of the middle class and matching government policies to the lip service given to family values. The GOP, they noted, seemed stuck in a time warp: “Like aging hippies who never quite got over Woodstock, many of those young Reaganites, now safely ensconced in the GOP establishment, view across-the-board tax cuts as a permanent ticket to political power.” But, they argued, it was time for more aggressive pro-family policies that would “keep taxes lowest for those entering the workforce and preparing to have children.”

  Later labeled “reformicons,” the two insisted that this would not mean eschewing a belief in small, limited government, “but it would mean recognizing that these objectives—individual initiative, social mobility, economic freedom—seem to be slipping away from many less-well-off Americans, and that serving the interests of these voters means talking about economic insecurity as well as about self-reliance.” Taking aim at some of the wishful thinking of the Bush years, Douthat and Salam wrote that a new reformist conservatism “would mean recognizing that you can’t have an ‘ownership society’ in a nation where too many Americans owe far more than they own. It would mean matching the culture war rhetoric of family values with an economic policy that places the two-parent family—the institution best capable of providing cultural stability and economic security—at the heart of the GOP agenda.”4

  While some of their ideas would later be embraced by thoughtful policymakers and candidates, most notably Marco Rubio, the suggestion that conservatives pay more attention to the problems of their own voter base were largely ignored. The Right preferred redder meat, which they got from the Tea Party.

  RISE OF THE TEA PARTY

  While many of its discontents can be traced to the Bush years—unhappiness over Medicare Part D, immigration reform, No Child Left Behind, government spending, and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Tea Party did not burst into prominence until after Barack Obama’s election. That immediately fed suspicion that the uprising was less about policy than about the identity of the new president, but the Tea Party defied easy categorizations.

  What was striking about the early rallies was the number of people who attended that had not previously been active in politics. They were also extraordinarily diverse. Journalist John Avlon described the range of attendees at a typical rally: “libertarians, traditionalists, free-marketers, middle class tax protesters, the more patriotic than thou crowd, conservative shock jocks, frat boys, suit and tie Buckley-ites, and more than a couple of requisite residents of Crazytown.”5 But the rallies were also striking for their normality. Despite the caricatures and repeated attempts by the Left to portray them as dangerous or bigoted, Tea Party rallies were generally orderly events whose attendees developed a well-deserved reputation for neatness.

  But it was also hard to determine who and what was meant by the “Tea Party.” Was it a genuine grassroots movement? A fringe movement increasingly composed of wing nuts? Or was it a series of Scam PACs set up by an emerging class of ideologically driven political grafters? Over time it was all of those things; the Tea Party was a chimerical construct that changed its focus and agenda depending on its leadership and location.

  It also became the face of the conservative movement, firing up a base that had been defeated and demoralized in 2006 and again in 2008. As Avlon noted, the movement marked an aggressive shift in tactics, as some conservatives decided to “mimic the confrontational street theater of the far left they had spent decades despising. Civility was the first calculated casualty.”6 At rallies, signs comparing Obama to Hitler began popping up, while literature appeared skewering “Obama’s Nazi health plan.” Legitimate concerns over rationing of health care morphed into overheated rhetoric about “death panels.” Few on the Right pushed back against the excesses.

  “In this environment,” Avlon noted, “there are no enemies on the right and no such thing as too extreme—the more outrageous the statement, the more it will be applauded.”7 Even after Congressman Joe Wilson was censured for yelling “You lie!” at Obama during a speech on health care, he was hailed as a truth-telling hero.

  Avlon later described Glenn Beck’s September 2012 march on Washington as a protest “that celebrated the deepest domestic political divisions we’ve seen since 9/11, with unhinged accusation of traitors and despots in the White House and talk of resistance and revolution.”8 He took note of many of the signs at the event:

  “Obama Lied, Granny Died”

  “Muslim Marxist”

  “Don’t Make the U.S. a Third World Country—Go Back to Kenya”

  “Mugabe-Pelosi in ’12”

  “Barack Obama Supports Abortion, Sodomy, Socialism, and the New World Order!”

  “If you are a liberal or Progressive Democrat or Republican you are a Communist. Impeach Obama!”

  Such rhetoric became increasingly common, and was often echoed by conservative media celebrities. In August 2010, Ted Nugent denounced Obama’s “Islamic, Muslim, Marxist, communist and socialist agenda.” Did he think Obama was a secret Muslim? Nugent responded: “You’re damn right I do. He says he’s a Christian so he can continue his jihad of America-destroying policies.”9

  “YOU’RE F---ING DEAD!”

  The rhetorical excesses were not, however, confined to the Tea Party. While the Right has indulged in vituperative language to describe its opponents, it was supposedly tolerant progressives who routinely called supporters of the Tea Party “teabaggers,” a sniggering reference to a sexual act. While the right engaged in over-the-top rhetoric over Obamacare’s “death panels,” some Democrats warned that conservatives like Paul Ryan, who had suggested fixes to Medicaid, wanted to push Granny off the cliff.

  When conservatives staged a peaceful lakefront rally in downtown Milwaukee in 2009, Mike Tate, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, responded by attacking the attendees in inflammatory language, comparing them with the Know Nothings and the KKK. They were not only bigoted and dumb, the chairman of the state party declared, they “frankly don’t believe in this country.” Who were these citizens (and voters)? “They don’t want to see more people have access to quality affordable health care; they don’t want clean air and water. They fundamentally don’t understand how the American economy and capitalism work.”10 Later, Wisconsin’s Democratic Party spokesman tweeted out ‘It’s Medicare’s 45th Birthday, celebrate by punching a Republican.” (He was later removed for comparing Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, which was one of his milder rhetorical forays.) This was frankly unhinged stuff and contributed over the next few years to a series of catastrophic defeats of Democrats at the polls.

  During the fight over Act 10, Walker’s legislation to drastically restrict the collective bargaining powers of public unions, the extremism of the Left’s reactions turned the tide in Walker’s favor. Early on in the fight, polls showed that voters did not support the GOP governor’s antiunion measures, but the excesses of the protesters—including demonstrators dressed as zombies
disrupting a ceremony to honor special Olympians—alienated the general public.

  During one of the protests in Madison in 2011 a video captured one demonstrator repeatedly shouting the F-word at a fourteen-year-old girl who was speaking at a pro-Walker rally.11 On the floor of the State Assembly a Democratic state representative turned to a female Republican colleague and shouted, “You are F---ing dead!” None of his fellow Democrats condemned his conduct.12 A “progressive talk-show host” mocked the state’s female lieutenant governor for having colon cancer and suggested she had only gotten elected because she had performed oral sex on talk show hosts.13*

  Death threats and obscene letters became commonplace, and the language of Walker’s critics was especially toxic. In his book Unintimidated, Walker recounted a death threat that had been addressed to his wife, Tonette:

  Has Wisconsin ever had a governor assassinated? Scott’s heading that way. Or maybe one of your sons getting killed would hurt him more. I want him to feel the pain. I already follow them when they went to school in Wauwatosa, so it won’t be too hard to find them in Mad. Town. Big change from that house by [—] Ave. to what you got now. Just let him know that it’s not right to [expletive removed] over all those people. Or maybe I could find one of the Tarantinos [Tonette’s parents] back here.14

  Over the next three years, Walker was reelected twice.

  So, conservatives were understandably skeptical of demands that they be held to Marquess of Queensbury standards of civility. Even so, the rhetoric became increasingly toxic and much of it was aimed at the country’s first African American president.

  Conservative firebrand Michael Savage hardly felt the need to resort to dog whistles or coded language when he declared that “the rage has reached a boil.” His radio rant contained an implicit threat:

  If they keep pushing us around and if we keep having these schmucks running for office catering to the multicultural people who are destroying the culture of this country, the white male—the one without connections, the one without money—has nothing to lose.… He is still the majority.… You’re gonna find out that if you keep pushing this country around, there is an ugly side to the white male that has been suppressed for probably thirty years right now but it really has never gone away.15

  “This the tragedy of the Tea Party,” critic John Avlon charged. “What began as fiscal-conservative protests against the generational theft of deficits and debt became infected by a serious strain of Obama Derangement Syndrome.… Constructive civic conversation became almost impossible across that divide.” But he also warned that Republicans were “playing a dangerous game.” In the short term, they benefited from stoking the fires of anti-Obama outrage, he warned, “but they have tapped into something they can’t control.”16

  What happened to the Tea Party? David Frum had his own autopsy: “A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing, but all too interested in merchandising.” And, he noted, the GOP was being overrun by impulses “that were once sublimated by the party elites, but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers.”17

  RETURN OF THE CRACKPOTS

  Indeed, the Tea Party seemed to open the door for the return of the sort of crackpots that Buckley had worked so hard to expel from the conservative movement. In contrast to the 1960s, there were now far more outlets for the voluble defense of crackpotism and denunciations of their critics. Talk radio too often succumbed to the temptation to defend candidates who were in the process of immolating themselves.*

  Others on the Right flirted with ideas like nullification, an idea that has enjoyed pretty much complete obscurity since the Civil War. (The idea, repeatedly rejected by the courts, is that states can nullify federal laws they deem unconstitutional.) It was, of course, one thing to oppose the implementation of Obamacare state exchanges and quite another thing to begin channeling your inner John C. Calhoun and embrace the rhetoric of the 1830s. As if this were not bad enough, there was also some buzz about states actually seceding from the United States, despite the fact that we fought a war over that, which ended badly for the advocates.

  At the time, my sense was that the vast majority of principled conservatives shared my dismay over the parade of bizarre effusions that have sunk so many opportunities, but that many either were reluctant to speak out or were cowed by the fear that they would be flamed by the defenders. For example, after I pointed out on Facebook the unwisdom of talking about secession, one commenter flamed back:

  You call yourself a conservative, Charlie Sykes? It’s “conservatives” like yourself who have allowed this country to grow to the extreme sizes that it is and allowed government to run amok. We are just trying to clean up your mess.

  Your brand of conservatism is the crackpotism and extremism.

  Apparently “genuine conservatism” now meant embracing the Confederacy. That hardly seemed like a winning message.18

  Inevitably many of the excesses were blamed on the Tea Party. But the failures of candidates like Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle need to be juxtaposed with the successes of candidates like Florida’s Marco Rubio, Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte, Utah’s Mike Lee, Texas’s Ted Cruz, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. Not everything that came out of the Tea Party was nutty.

  But this was another one of the paradoxes of the Tea Party and its impact on the conservative movement. Had the GOP simply lurched to the right, the most conservative candidates—the ones who hewed most closely to the models of ideological purity—would have moved into dominant positions in the party. But instead the presidential candidates most closely aligned with the Tea Party—namely, Cruz, Rubio, and Walker—were spurned, as Republican voters instead chose a man who had spent most of his career rejecting their values. That suggests a deeper problem within the populist insurgency.

  DUMPING PRIVATE RYAN

  So, too, was the speed with which the right turned on Paul Ryan.

  Whatever you might think of his policies, Paul Ryan is inarguably the most formidable intellectual leader the Republican Party has had in decades. For years, he was known for his dogged advocacy of budget and entitlement reform in the face of opposition from his party’s establishment. His rise from conservative backbencher to Speaker could have been seen as one of great success stories of the conservative movement. “I spent more time, I’d say, in the backbench, than I have in leadership,” Ryan told me during a conversation on my last radio show. “The party really tried to isolate me a number of years ago and tried to explain to our members, ‘do not touch what Ryan is talking about, don’t deal with these fiscal issues, these entitlements, it’s political suicide.’ And I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold,” he explained. “What happened, really, was the 2010 election, I think. The 2010 election brought all these, sort of Tea Party conservative Republicans into office.”19

  And yet by 2016, many conservatives who had lauded him just a few years earlier turned against him. As Matt Lewis noted, Ryan went “from wingnut to RINO (Republican in Name Only)” in a remarkably short period of time.20

  Back in 2010, Sarah Palin had lavished praise on the young congressman, saying, “I’m very impressed with Paul Ryan.” Appearing on Fox News, Palin gave the young congressman her blessing.

  CHRIS WALLACE: Congressman from Wisconsin.

  PALIN: Yes. He’s good. Man, he is sharp, he is smart, articulate, and he is passionate about these common-sense solutions that America has got to adopt to get us on the right road.21

  When Mitt Romney named Ryan as his running mate, Laura Ingraham praised him as a “fine pick” and Ann Coulter called him a “perfect” choice. But by 2016, Palin was declaring Ryan’s political
career over and endorsed his pro-Trump primary challenger; Ingraham began calling him “Boehner 2.0,” and Coulter and her allies took turns anathematizing Ryan for his political sins.

  To be sure, Ryan’s record was not without blemish: he had supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and voted for No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D. But that was true when Palin praised him and the Right’s punditocracy celebrated his vice presidential nomination. So what had changed? And why were the gatekeepers of conservative purity willing to overlook Trump’s many and sundry ideological foibles (i.e., he opposed both free trade and entitlement reform) but unwilling to cut Ryan slack for his deviations from conservative orthodoxy?

  The answer is that Ryan had not changed, but the Right had. “In a very short span of time,” Lewis noted, “the conservative movement [had] dramatically shifted in a populist direction, and that means embracing positions on trade, taxes, and entitlements that were thought of as rather left-wing just a few years ago.”22 The new litmus test was immigration, and heresy was not tolerated. (Coulter famously declared that she didn’t care if Trump “performed abortions in the White House” as long as he took a hard line on illegal immigration.)23

  Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump and Ryan were a study in contrasts, with the young Speaker arguing that the election should be about ideas rather than personalities. As Trump was lashing out at the international cabals he said were conspiring against him, Ryan was laying out a detailed and coherent conservative agenda. And yet, as Election Day neared, it was clear that the conservative electorate had turned against Ryan, whose approval rating among Republicans dropped precipitously.24 A Bloomberg poll in October 2016 asked Republicans which leader better represents their view of what the Republican Party should stand for: 51 percent of likely voters picked Trump, while 33 percent picked Ryan (15 percent weren’t sure).25