How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  CHAPTER 6

  THE PERPETUAL OUTRAGE MACHINE

  Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

  —ERIC HOFFER

  BY 2016, THE TEA PARTY was effectively defunct, displaced by new passions. But its demise had not been pretty. The Tea Party movement, noted attorney Paul H. Jossey, had not died a natural death. “It was murdered,” he wrote, “and it was an inside job.” While acknowledging that a number of factors may have contributed to the movement’s collapse—including the targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS—Jossey placed the blame on opportunists who saw a chance to cash in on the angers and anxiety of conservatives. “In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.”1

  Despite raising tens of millions of dollars, the Tea Party PACs spent only a tiny fraction of the money on the actual support of conservative candidates. Even so, the onslaught of fund-raising emails was relentless and the number of groups playing on conservative frustration and angst multiplied. There were groups called the “Tea Party Patriots,” the “Tea Party Leadership Fund,” “Tea Party Express,” as well as groups pumping out emails urging donors to “Boot Boehner,” “Stop Hillary PAC,” “Draft Newt,” “Fire Paul Ryan,” and “Demand NBC Fire Al Sharpton.” Grassroots donors who responded found themselves inundated with more appeals, whose volume was routinely set at apocalypse—“Act now … your freedom is at stake … send a message before it is too late.” As it turned out, the politics of outrage was immensely lucrative. Wrote Jossey:

  What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds.

  The transformation of the Tea Party was already evident in 2014, when the Washington Post noted that Tea Party PACs had been furiously raising money ahead of the midterm elections, but “have put just a tiny fraction of their money directly into boosting the candidates they’ve endorsed.”2 The six major Tea Party PACs had raised $37.5 million, but less than $7 million went to helping candidates. Nearly half the money ($18 million) was sucked up by fund-raising and direct mail costs primarily benefiting consultants and firms based in Washington, DC. “Meanwhile,” the Post reported, “Tea Party leaders and their family members have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees, while their groups have doled out large sums for airfare, a retirement plan and even interior decorating.” Some of the best-known Tea Party groups, including the Tea Party Patriots and the Tea Party Express spent less than 5 percent of the money they raised on “election-related activity” during the 2014 campaign.

  The numbers reflected the transformation of what had once been a grassroots movement. “The lavish spending,” wrote Post reporter Hadas Gold, “underscores how the protest movement has gone professional, with national groups transforming themselves into multimillion-dollar organizations run by activists collecting six-figure salaries.”*

  A Politico analysis of thirty-three Tea Party PACs came to a similar conclusion, calculating that they spent only about 7 percent of their cash “on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals.”3

  Some conservative activists sounded the alarm. Talk show host Erick Erickson noted that the fund-raisers “have the pulse of the crowd, and they recognize that they can make a profit off the angst of the conservative base voters who are looking for outsiders.” They had become a “blight” on the movement, he wrote, draining cash for idealistic donors who would eventually “get burned out and stop giving money, including to the legitimate causes.”4

  Because they knew what would motivate the activists, Politico noted, the Scam PACs focused many of their appeals “on politicians who are military veterans, Tea Party activists, African-Americans—or all three.” For some reason, some of the sketchiest PACs claimed they were raising money for “African-American conservatives, including former Rep. Allen West, 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain, fringe 2016 hopeful Ben Carson and two-time unsuccessful House candidate Deborah Honeycutt of Georgia,” Politico reported. One group, the “Black Republican PAC” spent less than 1 percent of the cash it raised actually backing any candidates.

  Amid all of this, one Tea Party entrepreneur stood out from the others: an attorney named Dan Backer, who had a hand in at least forty separate organizations that were raising money from conservative activists. As Media Trackers later pointed out, a look at just five of Backer’s groups—Tea Party Forward, Tea Party Leadership Fund, Great America PAC, Conservative Action Fund, and Stop Hillary PAC—“reveals an astonishing amount of money going to vendors and very little going to actual political efforts.”5*

  Politico noted that Backer, who served as a lawyer, treasurer, and strategist for many of the PACs, spent the vast majority of the cash he raised on “overhead,” including payments to his own law firm.

  In 2014, Backer’s PACs—a roster including Draft Newt (created to coax the former House speaker into the Virginia Senate race), the Tea Party Leadership Fund (which urged Sarah Palin to run for Senate), Stop Hillary (to oppose the former secretary of state’s expected presidential campaign), and Stop Pelosi (which the Federal Election Commission called out for using the House Democratic leader’s name)—spent more than 87 percent of the $8 million they raised on operating expenses, including $419,000 to Backer’s own law firm, DB Capitol Strategies. By contrast, the amount the PACs spent on donations and ads was about $955,000—or less than 12 percent of their total fundraising haul.7

  Backer defended the overhead for the groups by insisting that direct mail and phone campaigns are costly. “Email is not as free as people want to pretend like it is. It’s really expensive,” he told Politico. “And there’s a lot of money that goes into making these things legal so—I hate to say it—you pay for lawyers.”8

  In 2016, Backer would serve as the treasurer for the long-shot (and ultimately doomed) campaign of Paul Nehlen, who was challenging Speaker Paul Ryan in the campaign. (For more on Nehlen, see chapter 12.)

  TURNING UP THE VOLUME

  All of this was almost certainly legal, but it had dire political consequences for conservatives. The most obvious damage was the amount of money siphoned away from legitimate conservative causes and candidacies. Conservative blogger John Hawkins calculated that the Tea Party PACs had diverted at least $50 million in contributions that might have done some good had they gone elsewhere. “How many conservative candidates lost in 2014 because of a lack of funds?” he asked. “How many of them came up short in primaries, lost winnable seats. Or desperately tried to fight off better funded challengers?”9

  But the most damaging fallout may have been the way the PACs escalated the rhetoric of outrage, roiling the already unsettled waters of political anger and alienation on the Right. With their incessant and increasingly shrill appeals and warnings, the PACs pushed the GOP into tactical fights it couldn’t win, while fueling a deepening disillusionment with conservatism itself. “They stoked controversies beyond all reason,” wrote National Review’s David French, “fed the worst sort of conspiracy theories, and led rank and file conservatives to believe that their elected representatives were doing literally nothing to oppose the Obama administration.”10

  This
notion that the GOP had capitulated to Obama was an alternative reality at stark variance with the way Democrats and mainstream conservatives saw it. Far from rolling over to Obama, Democrats accused the GOP of waging an unprecedented campaign of obstruction. And more thoughtful conservatives, including National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke, argued that the notion that the GOP has simply caved to Obama was “flat-out wrong. Disastrously wrong. Apocalyptically wrong.”

  Despite the failures to repeal Obamacare or roll back the Obama legacy while he was still in office, Cooke noted that if the GOP had not resisted Obama, “the United States would look dramatically different than it does today.” Instead of a public-private hybrid, Obamacare might have been single payer and “at the very least, the law would have included a “public option.”11

  Without the GOP manning the barricades, we’d have seen a carbon tax or cap-and-trade—or both. Without the GOP manning the barricades, we’d have got union card check, and possibly an amendment to Taft-Hartley that removed from the states their power to pass “right to work” exemptions. Without the GOP standing in the way, we’d now have an “assault weapons” ban, magazine limits, background checks on all private sales, and a de facto national gun registry. And without the GOP standing in the way in the House, we’d have got the very amnesty that the Trump people so fear.…

  Cooke goes on to say that:

  A similar truth obtains at the state level. Had the GOP not taken over the vast majority of the country’s local offices since 2010, we’d have seen significantly less progress on right to work, the protection of life, school choice, and the right to keep and bear arms; we’d have seen a whole host of new sanctuary cities; we’d have had considerably fewer attorneys general rising up against Obama’s executive overreach; and, perhaps most importantly, we’d have seen Obamacare entrenched almost everywhere as state after state chose to expand Medicaid.12

  The congressional GOP also pointed to its efforts to hold down domestic spending, and its success in extending the vast majority of the Bush-era income tax cuts. And yet, the disappointment on the Right was palpable, as the loudest voices in the newly weaponized Right made demands that the GOP could not fulfill because they were politically and fiscally impossible to enact.

  Conservative wins were real, but they were often buried under the detritus of special-interest favors, and “go along to get along” compromises, including a series of incomprehensible budget votes—the omnibus, followed by the horrifically named “cromnibus”*—that could be portrayed as packages of horrors, because they largely were. Not for nothing did even representatives who voted for the monstrosities call them “crap sandwiches.” But they were too frequently on the menu.

  All the while the outrage machine became more heated, with charges that conservatives had not merely been disappointed, but that they had been betrayed by a traitorous “establishment.” The lack of a coherent alternative seemed beside the point, and conservative politicians found themselves vilified over tactical issues.

  In his thoughtful study, Why the Right Went Wrong, E. J. Dionne argued that the history of contemporary conservatism was a story of “disappointment and betrayal,” because conservative politicians “have made promises to their supporters that they could not keep,” which led to disillusionment and “the sense their leaders had failed them,” which created “a cycle of radicalization.”13

  The Tea Party accelerated that process, but it was the shift in focus of the venerable Heritage Foundation that really put the cycle on steroids.

  HERITAGE GOES ACTIVIST

  It’s hard to overstate the importance of The Heritage Foundation in the rise of conservatism. One of the oldest of the conservative think tanks that would spring up to give intellectual heft to the Right, Heritage had handed the incoming Reagan administration in 1981 a blueprint for governing, an 1,100-page briefing book called the Mandate for Leadership. One news account described the document as “a blueprint for grabbing the government by its frayed New Deal lapels and shaking out 48 years of liberal policy.” The foundation later claimed that nearly two thirds of the document’s two thousand recommendations “were adopted or attempted by the Reagan administration.”14 Among the ideas advanced by the think tank and embraced by Reagan included across-the-board tax cuts, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and urban “enterprise zones.”

  William F. Buckley Jr. hailed Heritage’s contribution, stating, “The foundation had a great hour when Ronald Reagan was elected president and found waiting for him three volumes of Heritage material designed to help him chart the nation’s course in the right direction.”15 It was not an exaggeration when the foundation claimed that “Heritage was President Reagan’s favorite think tank, and Reagan was the embodiment of the ideas and principles Heritage holds dear.”*

  But with the rise of the Tea Party, Heritage took a fateful turn from policy wonkery to more overt political activism. There had been growing concern, one insider later told me, that there was too much focus at Heritage on “white papers,” and not enough on action. That was about to change, dramatically. Throughout the course of this book, I’ve tried to identify certain pivotal moments for conservatives (e.g., the selection of Sarah Palin, the Drudge Report’s decision to link to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh’s attack on a female law student). But near the top of that list has to be the decision in 2010 to create Heritage Action as a political arm of the foundation and then in 2012 to name South Carolina senator Jim DeMint as Heritage’s new president.

  DeMint’s appointment reflected a tectonic shift in Heritage’s culture. The foundation’s chairman described DeMint’s appointment as “turbocharging our already powerful engine.”16 But the shift in focus was immediate as DeMint escalated the pressure on the GOP for both ideological purity and tactical aggressiveness. In a remarkably short time, the activist Heritage Action had effectively eclipsed the venerable foundation. “As Heritage Action flourishes, Heritage Foundation has become less of a force on Capitol Hill,” Time magazine later reported, “its role for three decades as an omnipresent voice in hearing rooms and Senate hideaways crafting legislation for Republicans now firmly in the rearview mirror.”17

  As a senator, DeMint had not been shy about attacking other Republicans whom he deemed to be insufficiently aggressive. He created in the Senate the Conservative Fund, a PAC that backed conservatives in primaries, often against candidates backed by the GOP leadership. His track record was decidedly mixed. He had backed successful primary bids by Marco Rubio in Florida, Ted Cruz in Texas, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and Mike Lee in Utah. But he had also thrown his support behind such political dumpster fires as Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Joe Miller in Alaska, and Ken Buck in Colorado.*

  As the new Heritage CEO, DeMint immediately cranked up opposition to any budget deal with President Obama that did not include a full and complete repeal of Obamacare, even if that meant a government shutdown. Heritage Action amped up the pressure on GOP representatives by rating their votes, ranking them, and disseminating targeted attacks on recalcitrant members. The group launched a nine-city bus tour that featured both Ted Cruz and his father Rafael. At one rally in Tampa, Heritage Action’s CEO Mike Needham declared: “Politicians don’t lead, politicians follow. They need to be forced by you all to do the right thing. They won’t do the right thing by themselves.”18 Heritage backed up the rhetoric by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking Republicans who were balking at a government shutdown. Perhaps more important, Heritage and other conservative groups had forged close links with the nation’s most prominent talkers, fortified by a strong cash nexus. As Politico reported in 2014, conservative groups “spent nearly $22 million to broker and pay for sponsorships with the most influential hosts,” including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin.19 (Politico estimated that The Heritage Foundation had paid more than $9.5 million for its five-year sponsorship of Limbaugh’s show.)


  The problem, of course, was that Heritage was demanding something that was impossible. Ultimately it came down to numbers, and the political math was stark: to repeal Obamacare, the GOP would need sixty votes in a Senate that was still controlled by Democrats. Even if, by some miracle, they would get the requisite votes, a presidential veto was certain, meaning that conservatives would have to muster two thirds of both the House and the Senate to override. No rational observer believed that was remotely possible.

  As early as July 2013, it was obvious that Heritage Action’s shutdown plan had no real exit strategy. “There is no plan B, there is no ‘what if,’” one Republican lawmaker told Roll Call.20 But Heritage Action and other Tea Party groups continued to hammer their fellow Republicans, and their message was amplified by the megaphones of the Right media, who continued to raise expectations that were doomed to be disappointed. (Amid internal debates over the politicization of Heritage, in early 2017 the foundation’s board fired DeMint. But this came six months after the election.)

  I was tangentially involved in one particularly heated controversy over the shutdown. As the shutdown loomed, Senator Ted Cruz became the leading advocate and a Tea Party hero for his mini filibuster against Obamacare. But Cruz was unable to explain how a shutdown could actually be successful, given the lack of votes either for passing a repeal of Obamacare or for overriding a veto. During the controversy Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, one of the Senate’s most outspoken fiscal conservatives, came on my radio show and called Cruz’s strategy to defund Obamacare “intellectually dishonest.” That comment brought down the wrath of the Right media onto Johnson’s head.