I recently read Mark Sumner’s Many Republicans dream of a post-Trump GOP and it got me thinking about those in the GOP who (off the record, of course) are dreaming wistfully that Trump might go down in flames this time and their party’s insane fever might finally break. Many of them are the ex-pats, of course – those who were critical of Trump from the beginning and have since been banished to the wasteland – but many others would be those who made a calculation to kneel before Orange Julius regardless of their past principles, hoping it would gain the party a few yards without costing too much in the end.
Unfortunately for them, it’s not their party anymore. Honestly, it hasn’t been for some time – and while Trump is current face of their problem, he’s not the reason they’re doomed.
“You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.” ― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
When Trump began his rise in the GOP back in 2016, George Will was one of the chorus of sage establishment Republicans who spoke against him, saying his childish coarseness would do more damage to the country than Nixon’s crimes ever did. There were a lot of those kinds of predictions in those days – before Red State purged all its Trump critics, before Fox read the writing on the political wall and started sanewashing him to thumb the electoral scale as best they could.
But I remember way back in the late 90’s, when George Will had written about the sad case of two college freshmen who abandoned their newborn to die in a dumpster in Newark, Delaware. The teens, both from affluent families, had hidden the pregnancy, delivering the child themselves in a hotel room in Newark and disposing of it shortly afterward. Straining to tie the case into the then-raging debate about late-term abortion, Will mused that the two could have simply taken a quick trip across state lines and gotten a “partial-birth abortion” instead.
Except, of course, they couldn’t have. Because elective third trimester abortions – even in the impossibly rare cases where one might be desired – were never a thing. And George Will absolutely knew that – at least, if he didn’t, then he should have spent his career sticking to writing about baseball.
It was a lie, a lie meant to feed a base that, little by little, had been selectively bred to live on a diet of fear and outrage. It was geared toward a base that was being conditioned to dismiss facts that didn’t fit their feelings or expectations, to view “mainstream media” as untrustworthy. And while he’ll never see or acknowledge it, lies like that one, or the many others from his long career, make a joke of his late-day high-horsery about Trump.
“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.” – Jim Morrison
Like most ills of the modern era, the problem starts with Ronald Reagan. When his FCC repealed the long-standing Fairness Doctrine (and he later vetoed a Congressional attempt to restore it in law), it allowed the creation of ideological echo chambers on the nation’s airwaves.
It happened just in time to save the career of Rush Limbaugh, a then-foundering radio personality who’d had short runs at multiple radio stations, usually ending with a firing. With no requirement to allow someone to call him out on his many distortions, omissions, and outright lies, he immediately began crafting a conservative talk radio format that would be imitated by a wave of lesser right-wingers.
TV would later follow suit, with the largest and most visible example being the creation of Fox News in 1996. The increasing audience built by these TV and radio outlets constantly enforcing an increasingly distorted and delusional worldview created a demand for conservative print media, books (even if many of them needed some game-rigging to boast “best seller” status), music, and (usually direct-to-video) films.
And this was not an organic movement. It was very much directed by a political and donor class that saw this captive base as the means to long-term, if not permanent, power. Think tanks and corporate media pushed that base more and more into an increasingly isolated bubble, either believing that a more concentrated form of ideology would spread more effectively, or if nothing else such a base would be a more reliable voting block.
When they were challenged, they simply ramped up their efforts – first for Clinton’s presidency, then for Obama’s. It was worse with Obama – Clinton had been practically a centrist, or at least knew how to sound like one convincingly, but Obama represented a potential tidal shift in American politics. His campaign’s watchword was “Change” after all, and he shined a light on a lot of dark corners of American life that had been easily ignored before that.
So the manipulation became uglier and more naked. The powers that be turned a blind eye to ugly elements at their party’s fringes, then became increasingly comfortable with mainstreaming them. And by the end, they’d created a base that listened to only what they wanted to hear – regardless of facts, evidence, and even their own direct experience.
“An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction.” – Simon Bolivar
And let’s spare a thought about that base. These are a people who’ve been genuinely brainwashed to sacrifice themselves for the ideological talking points that don’t do a damned thing for them.
These are red-state farmers who are watching their multi-generational family farms languish due to global warming – who openly admit in interviews that they’ve watched the changes happen over the last few decades. Yet they still can’t shake off their programming. Like any cult member, they refuse to connect the last dot that would tell them they’ve been lied to.
These are the people of Appalachia and the Rust Belt who love to brand themselves the Forgotten People – utterly ignoring the fact that there have been people fighting for them the entire time. At the both the state and federal levels, people have been fighting to improve their water and air, provide them healthcare, revitalize their dying towns with new industries – they’ve just been consistently blocked, vetoed, or outvoted by the people those people keep electing.
It’s a tragedy. It’s human sacrifice on an unimaginably broad scale. I hope we can reach them in time – I cheered the 50-state strategy for just that reason, and I hope we bring it back. They need us to try – and perhaps there’s hope, because perhaps the sick pipers that have been leading them will finally start to go silent, because things aren’t working out the way they planned.
“We create monsters and then we can’t control them.” – Joel Cohen
Donald Trump’s earliest political aspirations (so far as we know) go back to when he asked Lee Atwater if he could be considered as a possible running mate for George H. W. Bush in 1988. Suffice it to say, that offer was not taken seriously.
After an abortive attempt at capturing the nomination for Ross Perot’s Reform Party in 2000, he went dormant until 2012. That’s when he first made grumblings about vying for the Republican nomination, but that attempt went nowhere – the base hadn’t quite finished baking yet.
But by 2016, they were ready, and so was he. He steamrolled the wide field of contenders – humiliating some of them along the way for good measure – and ended up in the White House.
And from almost the first day, he began killing the GOP. Not in a way Fox would report, of course, but killing it all the same.
Republican electoral fortunes have been in a downward spiral ever since Trump’s first inauguration. Established politicians, appointees, and pundits have been shamed and cast out for daring not to show complete, blind loyalty. Mismanagement has become a signature governing style, with disastrous results any place he or his various mini-me’s have held power.
And no matter how the doners and party elites ask, Trump won’t improve. He can’t. He doesn’t know how to get better at management (which would require both study and listening to other people – two things he’s not built for), he refuses to adopt any kind of filter, and he’s psychologically incapable of putting his own grievances and ego below party or national concerns.
“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
Which brings us back to George Will. And the Cheney’s. And Adam Kinzinger. And all the Never Trumpers who openly hope he loses, and all the grovelers doing so in secret. They all still labor under a delusion – that Trump is some alien thing that happened to their party, an asteroid that fell from the stars and hit the GOP.
He isn’t. Donald Trump is the snowball finally reaching the bottom of the hill. George Will can tsk tsk about Trump all he wants, but the truth is that Donald Trump is his life’s work. His, and all the other pundits and politicians, and pretty much everyone with an R by their name – including all the ones who got hero points for standing up to Trump initially. They all told and reinforced the lies that made the base that made Trump. And if that base replaces him with anyone, it will be someone even worse.
Like a bad sci-fi trope, their own creation has them by the throat. Except the golem isn’t Trump – it’s their base. They bred it to be this, to want what Trump is, and to hate anyone or anything that stood in his way. It took decades to make them this way - they’re not going to change in a single election cycle. Maybe not ever — at least, not in a way that favors the old GOP establishment.
To call for a post-Trump GOP is to call for a post-base GOP, if such a thing can be imagined. What would that look like – Mike Johnson and the Cheney’s in an empty ballroom?
Good luck with that.
