I finished reading Stuart Stevens’ book, It Was All A Lie. There’s so much to talk about with this book, I’ll have to do more than one blog post. This is Part I: The Making of the Modern GOP. Screenshots are from the Kindle version.
Spoiler: We already knew a lot of this. For example ⤵️
The difference now is that it is coming from a GOP insider, someone who saw it firsthand.
Stevens takes full responsibility. He doesn’t blame GOP voters or even Trump. He blames GOP operators like himself and the GOP elected leadership for making Trump possible:
Stevens uses terms differently than I do, so as a preliminary matter, I need to define terms—or my regular readers will get the wrong idea about what Stevens is saying.
Stevens uses the word “conservative” to refer to the entire GOP, even the parts he calls “paranoid.”
Using Hofstader’s terminology (and others) I call the far right wing of the spectrum reactionaries, or the politically paranoid. See this article on reactionist politics.
Reactionaries (far right wing paranoids) reject democratic institutions. True conservatives are “center right” and fully embrace democratic values. For more, see this blog post, particularly this Jonathan Haidt lecture.
Because the GOP has become a full-on white nationalist / reactionary party, true conservatives have no party. But the GOP falsely claims to stand for conservative values. (This is part of what Stevens means when he says it was all a lie.)
For Stevens, the GOP set out on the road to Trump in 1964 when it rejected Civil Rights:
In contrast, the Democratic Party embraced Civil Rights. After 1964, Black support for the GOP plummeted to 7 percent and has never recovered. The GOP couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t appeal to Blacks 🙄. Even when they cloaked their anti-civil rights position in terms like originalism and states’ rights, Blacks weren’t fooled. So the GOP gave up trying to appeal to blacks, and reached out to “disaffected” whites.
Steven quotes the 1971 Nixon “research” memo that developed the “Southern Strategy” for luring the white Southerners into the GOP without alienating non-racist whites.
One of the authors of the Nixon memo was Pat Buchanan, who, in 1957, defended segregation. Just so you know who we’re dealing with. (For a fuller recounting of how the Party of Lincoln became the party of white segregationalists, see this post.)
The Nixon White House also studied and consciously emulated the political tactics of segregationalists George Wallace, who insisted that he wasn’t a racist.
At the same time, the GOP talked about conservative “values” to attract what Haidt calls real conservatives. Thus, to achieve electoral majorities, the party that called itself conservative invited in the KKK. But they couldn’t openly embrace the KKK, so they found ways to quietly signal their support for racists.
For example, Reagan’s “welfare queens.”
Aside: While in law school, I took a course in feminist jurisprudence and wrote a paper on Reagan’s “welfare queens.” I never thought I’d see someone like Stuart Stevens writing about this episode in GOP history so honestly.
Stevens also talks about the GOP invocation of “family values”:
Aside: I distinctly remember wanting to throw something when Pat Robertson used this dig at people who didn’t conform to gender expectations.
Stevens discusses GOP hypocrisy during the Clinton era, when Gingrich was secretly having an affair with an intern while impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about an affair with an intern. The GOP even attacked Clinton when he did what they said they wanted (balanced the budget):
Stevens fully admits that the hypocrisy never troubled him. It was all about winning, which of course means the GOP cared only about power.)
This brings us to the title. What was all a lie? Stevens answers that as well:
Stevens also admits that he helped contribute to the rise of the right-wing media lie machine:
Stevens explains why religious evangelicals embrace Trump: white evangelicals have been primed for decades for just such a figure by comparing Trump and TV evangelical Jimmy Swaggart.
(You can see how bluntly Stevens writes⤵️)
Having evolved into paranoid reactionary white nationalist party, the GOP faces two crises.
Its demographics are shrinking and aging.
Trump exposed the GOP for what it really is and how it used lies to disguise its goals.
Before I wrap up Part I, I have a quibble with Stevens: He says the Democratic Party “drifts leftward” but offers no data. (Location 2594)
Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson include this chart with citations in their recent book, Let Them Eat Tweets, which I reviewed here.
To be fair, elsewhere Stevens makes clear that there is no equivalency between the GOP and Democratic Party.
(Let Them Eat Tweets describes much of the same things that Stevens discusses in It Was All A Lie.)
For those terrified because now Trump is trying to destroy the post office, I’ll quote another Never Trumper, Mike Madrid, who knows what the GOP really is:
Next up: It Was All A Lie, Part II (unless Trump creates an emergency so enormous that I am forced to put down my book).
