Charlie Sykes has a cover story in Newsweek called, “How the Right Lost its Mind and Embraced Donald Trump.” It’s nothing we haven’t seen, heard or read before from the Johnny-come-latelys of the so-called “conservative” movement (viz., fans of the GOP) who are only just now coming to realize that their beloved party and its base of supporters have lost their collective sh**, and that maybe — just maybe — they themselves had a hand in it.
Sykes, of course, attempts to be magnanimous at the start:
For a quarter of a century, I was a major part of the conservative movement. But like many on the right, in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory I had to ask some uncomfortable questions. The 2016 presidential campaign was a brutal, disillusioning slog, and there came a moment when I realized that conservatives had created an alternate reality bubble—one that I had helped shape.
That’s very nice, of course. But if there’s one thing I’ve noticed about these supposedly contrite Doctors Frankenstein confronting the reality of the monster they’ve created, is that they cannot get through an essay or an article, or in some cases even a paragraph, without taking gratuitous potshots at liberals, the left, Democrats, Obama, the Clintons, the media, and whoever else they’ve been lying about for all these years. They simply cannot help themselves. If anyone can find me a mea culpa by a “conservative” writer or pundit who has taken responsibility for marinating the brains of gullible millions in toxic bullsh** without taking potshots at or blaming the foregoing targets, there might be a handsome reward in it for you.
Sykes’ piece is no different. In the very next paragraph after admitting that he “helped shape” the right-wing paracosm, he says that
...the right allowed liberal overreach in the Obama era to blind them to the crackpots and bigots in their midst.
Ahh! I see. All this is the fault of “liberal overreach,” not blind adherence to a political philosophy grounded primarily in selfishness and cruelty; and just “in the Obama era,” not in the Rush Limbaugh era or the Newt Gingrich era or the Fox News era. If it weren’t for all that “liberal overreach in the Obama era,” “the right” would never have “allowed” itself to be “blind[ed] to the crackpots and bigots in their midst.”
How does that work, exactly? How does “liberal overreach” “blind” you to the existence of “crackpots and bigots”? Take me down that slippery slope, Charlie. I’d really like to see that process unfold in real time.
You know what? Never mind. On to the next apologia:
Some have argued that the election was a binary choice, that Hillary Clinton had to be defeated by any means. I share many of their concerns about Clinton, but the price was ruinous.
Yes. You “share many of their concerns”. Of course you do. You “helped shape” those “concerns”, remember?
Of course, Sykes wouldn’t be a conservative if he didn’t engage in a little self-congratulation, so hold your nose:
We called ourselves conservative, but supported the creative destruction of capitalism; we championed limited government, but also traditional values. We were the party of freedom, but also national security, law and order.
Phew. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get back to blaming liberals for the excesses of the right:
Despite the caricatures and repeated attempts by the left to portray them as dangerous or bigoted, Tea Party rallies were generally orderly events—and extraordinarily diverse.
See, Sykes could have made the latter point without the first half of that sentence. There was absolutely no reason to mention these purported “attempts” except to blame-shift, and take another gratuitous potshot at the [imaginary] “left.”
Oh, and that “extraordinarily diverse” thing? To support this claim, Sykes quotes John Avlon’s Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama:
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.
Uh-huh. So, a rally that includes white Christian libertarians, white Christian conservative traditionalists, white Christian conservative free-marketers, white Christian conservative middle-class tax protesters, the white Christian conservative more-patriotic-than-thou crowd, white Christian conservative shock jocks, white Christian conservative frat boys, white Christian conservative suit-and-tie Buckley-ites and more than a couple of requisite white Christian conservative residents of Crazytown — that’s Sykes’ idea of “extraordinarily diverse.”
Next paragraph:
At rallies, signs comparing Obama to Hitler began popping up (as they had on the left with George W. Bush), while literature appeared skewering “Obama’s Nazi health plan.”
He cannot help himself. Next sentence:
Legitimate concerns over rationing health care morphed into overheated rhetoric about “death panels.
Right. “Legitimate concerns.” About “rationing health care.” Seriously.
Not everyone on the right bought into birtherism.
Oh, certainly not. But everyone on the left “attempt[ed] to portray [the Tea Party] as dangerous or bigoted,” right? Only conservatives get the “Not everyone” treatment, right?
Sorry about the snark. We’re about halfway through the piece. You might think it gets better from here, but believe me, it gets worse. Moving on:
In private, conservatives who knew better justified their return to the dark fringes on the grounds that it fired up the base and antagonized liberals. … The result was a compulsion to defend anyone attacked by the left, no matter how reckless, extreme or bizarre.
Not clear what “reckless, extreme or bizarre” modifies here, whether it’s the hypothetical person “attacked by the left,” or “the left” itself and/or its “attack” on that person, or the “compulsion to defend” that person. I’ll give Sykes the benefit of the doubt that he’s describing the defenders of Christine O’Donnell and Todd Akin as “reckless, extreme or bizarre.” Yet he still uses the verb “attacked” instead of “criticized” or “scrutinized” or even “ridiculed,” in order to rhetorically maintain the aggressor-vs.-victim dynamic that he wants.
And lest we forget which Side is really to blame for all this:
Decades of liberal contempt, including the almost reflexive dismissal of conservatives as ignorant racists, had created deep antipathy on the right. And during the Obama years in particular, many conservatives felt attacked.
Oh, pray tell, why might that be? (Again, sorry for the snark.) Sykes follows this up immediately with a weighty passage reeking with the fumes of reconstituted BS from the annals of Republican fan fiction:
First there was the massive stimulus package, which threatened to balloon the national debt. Then the Democratic Congress rammed through Obamacare with the barest of partisan majorities. These moves came at a time when conservatives felt their free speech and religious liberty were under assault, when the Internal Revenue Service was targeting Tea Party groups, and on university campuses activists began enforcing their demands for ideological conformity, complete with lists of microaggressions, trigger warnings and safe spaces. Later, Democrats began dismantling the filibuster, while Obama, frustrated by gridlock in Congress, started issuing a dizzying array of executive orders on issues ranging from immigration to clean power.
Followed immediately by this supremely unironic, wholly unself-aware, pithy offhand observation:
The right distorted and exaggerated all of these issues.
Gee, ya think? Kind of like you just did, in the previous paragraph?
Am I over-doing the snark? And am I stretching the bounds of fair use at this point?
But Democrats seemed to act as if their success were preordained, not merely by history but by demographics ... Not content with winning historic victories on gay marriage, some progressives called their opponents bigots, deriding their religious faith as hatred and discrimination. The goal was not tolerance but to drive out dissent.
Sigh. He really can’t help himself, can he?
Or so it seemed to many conservatives…
Yes, because people like you made that sh** up, like what you wrote just above, and told them that.
...especially evangelicals, who came to feel ... they were being dismissed by a country they no longer recognized.
Again, because that’s what people like you told them to feel. Not because anything like that was actually happening.
That’s always been the formula for conservative/Republican fan fiction: 2% fact + 0% context + 98% wishful thinking. As I keep saying, Sykes simply cannot help himself.
It goes on for a bit longer. Sprinkled in are even more excuses for conservative excess:
Conservatives may exaggerate media bias, but they do not imagine it.
And more self-congratulation:
I was proud to be part of the conservative media ... I genuinely believed we were helping people become savvier, more sophisticated analysts of current affairs.
Then the rest of the piece is largely focused on the right, and on Trump. However, Sykes makes sure to congratulate himself some more, this time for being an “ideological orphan” again, having left the liberal movement in the 1970s because he “hated the left’s smugness, its stridency and dogma” and now leaving the right’s “nativist, authoritarian, post-truth culture” behind. I’ve always maintained that proclaiming oneself to be ideologically neutral and equally contemptuous of Both Sides® is a rather grotesque form of self-praise (especially when one is obviously carrying water for one and not the other). That goes for both political color-war teams.
Don’t get me wrong; by no means does Sykes’ piece go easy on the right, the GOP, the conservative media, or himself. He tries to qualify the talking points quoted above as “exaggerations” or as something conservatives merely “felt” or “believed,” but largely fails because he still recites passages from the annals of Republican fan fiction as if they were actual history and bear any resemblance to objective, observable, verifiable reality. The fact that “ex”-conservatives (or “ex”-Republicans) like Sykes cannot resist repeating Republican fan fiction and taking gratuitous potshots at those they have always despised, loathed, caricatured and denigrated, minimizing and brushing aside their own rhetorical excesses as a mere reaction to the [largely imaginary] excesses of “the left,” at least in my mind, precludes pieces like this from being taken seriously.
Sorry, Charlie. I appreciate the effort, but I won’t be impressed until you, and others like you, can pen a truly genuine, meaningful, trenchant criticism, analysis and evaluation of what the “conservative” “movement” has become, and leave the left out of it. If you really want to understand where, when, how and why you and your movement went wrong, start by acknowledging the fact that you’re the ones who made us out to be traitors and heretics instead of just political opponents, and by the year 2000 you couldn’t justify yourselves or your own existence without making sh** up about the left. Judging from this article, you still can’t.
Saturday, Sep 23, 2017 · 2:10:10 PM +00:00 · GrafZeppelin127
I was reminded this morning that a couple of weeks ago Bret Stephens, another conservative Johnny-come-lately like Sykes, appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and told Bill essentially the same thing:
STEPHENS: The question isn’t how Trump won. The question is, How did Hillary lose? And I don’t think liberals ask themselves that question nearly hard enough. You could say Trump won because there are all these deplorables, but…
MAHER: What do you think the liberals’ biggest flaw is?
STEPHENS: I think it’s … wow, you could go down the list, but … I was last on the show January 2015. … You had a segment about Joni Ernst … [which] practically explains the 2016 election in that segment. Joni Ernst, it turns out, was so poor growing up … she would put bread bags on her feet as a child, because she had one pair of shoes … you mocked her for it. And it was funny … to the people in your studio audience. Ask yourself, if you’re in Iowa, or maybe outside of Madison, Wisconsin, of in the middle of Pennsylvania…
MAHER: Oh, for f***’s sake. ... Are you telling me that bread bags on the feet is off-limits for a comedian?
STEPHENS: Making fun of the poverty in which someone like Joni Ernst grew up…
MAHER: See? Now you sound like a liberal! This is what I get on the liberals’ case for! … This is snowflake-ism! You can’t take a joke about bread bags on your feet?
STEPHENS: You asked me why, what it is about liberals that people don’t like? And I would say, the answer is condescension. Cultural condescension.
MAHER: Yes.
Laying aside Bill’s all-too-common enabling, he does have a point vis-à-vis that “snowflake hypocrisy” (to coin a term) coming from Stephens, as it did from Sykes. I wrote about this once before, that Republican voters are mean, irrational, reactionary, and extremely delicate, driven to absurd heights of political madness by perceived liberal “demands” that they behave and treat others decently. The irony of this ubiquitous notion that conservatives went berserk and destroyed the country because liberals were mean to them is entirely lost on just about everyone.
Can any sane person seriously believe that a self-evidently vulgar, immature, ignorant, demented racist gangster won the Presidency of the United States because Bill Maher made a joke about a Republican Senate candidate’s claim to have worn bread-bag booties as a child?
And as much as I hate to keep repeating myself, we never saw, heard or read anything like this…
The Republicans lost this election because conservatives in middle America just stopped listening to well-educated coastal liberals, the people who live in our cities and our centers of art, culture, commerce and technology. If they want to win future elections, conservatives need to back off of the anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant and anti-government rhetoric, stop demanding that liberals respect their gun rights and religious beliefs, and start listening to the other side.
...in 2006, 2008 or 2012. This particular shoe is never, ever on the other foot.
