The New York Times (8/1/16) illustrating a story about how the Republican Party was formerly only pretending to be the “stupid party.” (image: Damon Winter/NYT)
The curious rise of Donald Trump has led to public soul-searching from establishment Republicans, whose loud and repeated condemnations nevertheless read more as brand management than cris de coeur. In doing so, they suffer from a severe case of dewy-eyed nostalgia over how reasonable and competent the pre-Trump GOP actually was.
In a New York Times op-ed Monday, “How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump” (8/1/16), neoconservative commentator-turned-liberal-favorite Max Boot complained that Trump has taken the GOP’s heretofore-insincere shtick of anti-intellectualism seriously and is thereby running the party into the ground. Boot insisted that previous shows of “stupidity” had all been a ruse:
Here’s the thing, though: The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now.
So, for decades Republicans were strategically pretending to be doofuses—Boot claims, for instance, that Dwight Eisenhower sometimes “resorted to gobbledygook in public…in order to preserve his political room to maneuver”—but have now been taken over by a real one. Ignoring for the moment the raw cynicism of this admission (consistent with the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism Leo Strauss’s theory of “the noble lie”), it’s important to note that “stupidity” in this context is simply a matter of marketing, not substance. Boot is right that Trump’s ignorance of the most basic facts is, on its own, disturbing, but what did the “thoughtful” GOP of the past get us?
Lamenting the lost reign of “Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will,” Boot offers, as exemplar of a remaining link to the party’s proud history in “the realm of ideas,” House Speaker “Paul Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party.” Never mind that the plan impresses by zeroing out government agencies wholesale while taking food from the mouths of the poor; or that Ryan mindlessly votes in favor of every war, and has spent every moment in Congress making life harder for the poor, people of color, LGBT and women. In Boot’s world, pandering to voters’ ignorance in order to make life harder for the most vulnerable is A-OK, but a politician actually being ignorant calls for outraged denunciation.
And what does it mean to be “stupid,” anyway? Boot, who presumably considers himself part of the right-wing intelligentsia, was a staunch advocate of the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of over a million people and directly resulted in ISIS. He defended the war as late as 2013. He called for war against both Iran and Syria in 2011. In October 2001, he made “the case for American empire.” If this is the deliberative thoughtfulness Trump is deviating from, then it’s simply a different kind of stupid, not an absence of it.
Fellow #NeverTrump brigadier David Brooks likewise rewrote history in last week’s column, “The Dark Knight” (New York Times, 7/22/16):
Finally, a law-and-order campaign calls upon the authoritarian personality traits that Donald Trump undoubtedly possesses. The GOP used to be a party that aspired to a biblical ethic of private charity, graciousness, humility and faithfulness.
This is perhaps the ethic David Brooks wanted his party to aspire to, but certainly not at all what it achieved. “Graciousness” is not a word that comes to mind in describing a party that has worked for decades, long before the arrival of Trump, to cut resources for the poor and people of color. “Humility” is not a word one would use to describe eight years of invasions, bombing and “with us or against us” chest-pounding.
As for “faithfulness,” it should be noted that of the three Republican congressmen who led impeachment charges against Bill Clinton in the late ‘90s, one was a serial child molester and the other two were such prolific adulterers they had to resign. There’s also David Vitter and Larry Craig, John Ensign and Edward Schrock, and many more. Our rosey-glassed pundits keep confusing marketing with objective reality, conflating their West Wing–like fantasies with history (as with Boot, who’d have us remember Ronald Reagan as one who “spent decades honing his views on public policy” while masquerading as a “dumb thespian”—rather than as the president who joked over a live microphone that he was launching a nuclear attack on Russia).
One of the more risible examples of this revisionism was from Foreign Policy editor and quintessential Serious Person David Rothkopf (7/27/16), who hand-wrung over the decline of the once “competent” Republican party on the one issue they’ve been most objectively incompetent at, foreign policy:
Put a Fork in the Tradition of GOP Foreign Policy Competence
On its face, this headline should elicit a chuckle. But Rothkopf’s evidence for this competence turns out to be polls saying Americans trust the GOP more on national security and unnamed random others:
I hear constantly from international leaders worldwide that the Republicans are the proven, trusted custodians of US foreign policy. Two weeks ago in Shanghai, I spoke to Chinese experts who said that they were hoping for a Trump victory because “Republicans are more experienced and sensible” and because they feared more human-rights critiques from Hillary Clinton.
In addition to sourcing standards that wouldn’t pass middle-school muster—“international leaders” and “Chinese experts” think it, therefore it must be true—there’s very little in Rothkopf’s piece that shows actual GOP foreign policy “competence” beyond, again, the meta-issue of perception or PR.
In his “to be sure” paragraph, Rothkopf dismisses the Iran/Contra affair (the US arming death squads in Nicaragua) and the 2003 Iraq invasion (that killed a million people) as “missteps.” The core defining foreign policy initiative of the past 30 years, the Iraq War, is a mere footnote, a slip up—a deviation from an otherwise competent Republican party, evidence for which can be found in “polls” and Rothkopf’s Davos drinking buddies.
The fact that Trump is shockingly ignorant and crude–which he objectively is–doesn’t make the pre-Trump GOP smart or reasonable or virtuous. It simply makes them better at marketing themselves as such.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
From the beginning up to right this minute, if Donald Trump does win the election there is absolutely no one to blame but ‘THE MEDIA”. Never, ever asking the right questions or contradicting his answers or insane comments They all wanted a big show and not content for a whole year and only now ask the question, “How’d Trump do it”. The media is no longer “news”, it’s entertainment and in such a time of dire importance, this just should not be allowed.
Bravo, Donna! The electronic media depend entirely on advertisements, so the more outrageous their lies, the more their viewers, and the more they get paid. Yet the media in general, including the print media, have refused to report or comment on the fact that these relatively new “news” outlets are responsible for the rise of Donald Trump.
I am encouraged to see that some of those who comment on FAIR understand what has happened to the American Fourth Estate, but I am bewildered that the print media, and in particular The New York Times, have nothing to say about it.
Brilliant at marketing
Beastly at product
Contra the above (”… of the three Republican congressmen who led impeachment charges against Bill Clinton in the late ‘90s, one was a serial child molester and the other two were such prolific adulterers they had to resign.”), I don’t think Gingrich’s resignation was related to his adulterous adventures, and the linked article agrees.
Anyway, he only did it because of his one true love … for America! To wit: “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
I like Adam’s style, direct, slightly polemic but making a good case. Thanks!
It seems to be a common human theme that sometime in the past there was an Edenic state where all things were “right” followed by a fall from grace. In Adam’s article we have conservatives bemoaning the current GOP in contrast to how wonderful it once was. But what about liberals? I’ve read so many articles and so many comments here and elsewhere written by liberals bemoaning, for example, Citizens United: Democracy prevailed (the Edenic state) until Citizens United (the fall from grace). Or back in the 1960s the earning power of the average worker was greater (Edenic state) than it is now (the fall from grace)! Yes, these are things to bemoan, but there is no fall from grace. The point is, there never was an Edenic state. And if you think that, golly, fi only we can get the right judges on the Supreme Court and the right people elected to Congress, and, gee, if only all those good deregulation, environmentally friendly, pro education laws were actually enforced we would have a return to grace–well I would think again. You can not patch a system that is fundamentally flawed.
” “I’ve read so many articles and so many comments here and elsewhere written by liberals bemoaning, – JB says:” ”
Or perhaps you’ve a lot of article written by Neo-conservative republicans who tell you “this is what the liberals are saying”, rather than actually reading any articles written by real liberals. I am sorry but the ‘I am not a liberal, but I play one in the media’ isn’t the same thing, and false equivalency is false equivalency.
Funny that for two of your examples the false equivalency charges you toss out coincides exactly with the republican talking points, That “more money is freedom of speech’ and ‘less money for the working class is freedom of decision’. Your comparative hyperbole is the very thing your accusing the other side of doing.
You can’t claim ‘both side do it’ when in fact they don’t. Because you don’t understand the situation, this doesn’t make the rest of us complacent in doing the same thing as you; i.e. believing that all was perfect until ‘xyz’ happened and that the other side ‘does it also’. We know it wasn’t perfect, we know there was faults. We called them on it. Unlike the Republicans who seem to be busy gazing into a reflecting pool for their candidates and seeing only ‘pure beauty’.
I wish some media interlocutor would ask serious person David Brooks when the last golden era of the GOP was. It may well have been Lincoln’s. Maybe he would say it was the administration of Calvin Coolidge, who kept his mouth shut while busting strikers. Or Reagan, sacking air controllers who had the temerity to speak up for themselves. Or Bush II, for Medicare Part D that guaranteed drug profiteers would make out like bandits. Sure they espouse “private charity,” but “graciousness, humility and faithfulness?” Who was he talking about? Nancy Reagan?