In the midst of the disaster that is the Donald Trump presidency, one encouraging thing is that some conservatives have been speaking out against the insanity. Republicans such as Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Ana Navarro, and Steve Schmidt, to name a few, have made their voices heard in opposition to Trump. Now add former Reagan adviser and Bush official Bruce Bartlett to the list.
Bartlett goes beyond bashing Trump. Trump, he says, is a symptom of a Republican Party that has sacrificed principle for power and has gone intellectually and morally bankrupt. He traces this back to the 1990s and Newt Gingrich, who realized the effectiveness of dumbing down political campaigns to reach the lowest common denominator. Gingrich led the effort of training Republicans in sound bite politics, which they found could help them grab and hold onto power more easily than actual policy analysis and debate.
Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 after nationalizing the election into broad themes and catchphrases. Newt Gingrich, the marshal of these efforts, even released a list of words Republican candidates should use to glorify themselves (common sense, prosperity, empower) and hammer their opponents (liberal, pathetic, traitors); soon, every Republican in Congress spoke the same language, using words carefully run through focus groups by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Budgets for House committees were cut, bleeding away policy experts, and GOP committee chairs were selected based on loyalty to the party and how much money they could raise. Gone were the days when members were incentivized to speak with nuance, or hone a policy expertise (especially as committee chairs could now serve for only six years). In power, Republicans decided they didn’t need any more research or analysis; they had their agenda, and just needed to get it enacted.
This has been the Republican model ever since. Policy expertise has no place in a party where all that matters is winning and where winning can be accomplished by sending out simple-minded slogans and sound bites through the propaganda machine of Fox News and talk radio. Of course, there’s a price to pay for punishing critical thinking and rewarding ignorance. Among other problems, we get a corrupt, authoritarian, bumbling buffoon in the White House leading America off a cliff.
Bartlett points out parallels with the Republican train wreck of the Goldwater era that forced the party to re-evaluate its priorities and led to an era where conservatives had a moral and intellectual center. He sees some rays of hope that a similar transformation may be in the offing today:
Conservatives are starting to accept that Trump is not the leader they had hoped for and is more of a liability for their agenda than an asset. They are also starting to recognize that their intellectual infrastructure is badly damaged, in need of repair, and that the GOP and intellectual conservatism are not interchangeable. The Heritage Foundation recently fired its president, former Senator Jim DeMint, in part because he had allowed its research capabilities to deteriorate. The journal National Affairs aspires to be the serious, conservative policy-oriented journal that The Public Interest was. And some leaders, like Bill Kristol, have courageously stood up against the GOP’s pervasive Trumpism (“I look forward to the day when American conservatism regains its moral health and political sanity, and the David Horowitz center is back on the fringe, where I’m afraid it belongs,” Kristol recently told the Washington Post).
Bartlett believes that what’s needed to save the Republican Party is a crushing election defeat on the order of the 1964 rebuke of Goldwater. He believes conditions are ripe for such a loss in 2018.
I couldn’t agree with him more. Let’s hope and pray that we can make his wish come true in 2018.
Read the whole article here.