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.
Spoiler: We already knew a lot of this. For example ⤵️
The power a small group of right-wing zealots has over the Republican Party will continue until one of two events occurs: either a critical mass of Republican politicians stands together and stands up to their power, or the party changes such that it is not a white party but a party that looks more like America. As a point of reference, at some point in the future the sun will collapse as a red star and consume the earth. I’d call it a toss-up as to which of these three events is likely to happen first.
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:
I come to this not out of bitterness but out of sadness. It’s not that I failed. I was paid to win races for Republicans, and while I didn’t win every race, I had the best win-loss record of anyone in my business. So yes, blame me. Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane.
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.”
Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing.
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:
Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party. That year 93 percent of blacks voted for Lyndon Johnson, and the die was cast that has led the Republican Party to evolve into the predominantly white party it is today. 6 As the percentage of the white electorate steadily declined, the Republican Party faced an existential choice. Was it possible to change such that it could attract more nonwhite voters, or would it go down the road of using every means possible to fight the demographic trend of declining white voters by making it more difficult for nonwhite voters, particularly black voters, to participate in the election?
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.
So the Nixon White House laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies, and legal challenges. It was this road that the Republican Party took to the Trump White House. There is nothing new about Donald Trump. He hasn’t invented a new politics or executed a brilliant and novel strategy. Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan played the same race-based politics of resentment. It is precisely Trump’s predictability and, alas, inevitability that is so depressing.
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.”
Chicago Tribune and Jet magazine. As much as many of us—yes, I include myself in this group—would like to, even need to, separate Reagan from Trump, the welfare-queen theme weaponized race and deceit in exactly the same ways employed by Donald Trump. There is a small kernel of truth in it—the woman used four, not eighty names, and the total fraud was $8,000—but when four becomes eighty and $8,000 total becomes $150,000 a year, Reagan is just lying. The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear.
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”:
“Family values” was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, “family values” was useful in attacking and defining Democrats. It was just another weapon to help portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream. It was an “otherness” tool, as in those who didn’t loudly proclaim their strict adherence to its code were “other” than normal. Like not being white is “other.” Like not being Christian is “other.” Like not being heterosexual is “other.” The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.” The Republican use of “family values” was the weaponization of two key elements of its power structure: racial prejudice and a politically conservative Christianity, from Catholics to evangelicals.
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):
As Steve Clemons wrote in The Atlantic, when it comes to reducing the debt, “the big winner is Harry Truman, followed by Bill Clinton. Eisenhower is next, followed by Johnson and Nixon, Kennedy, and finally Jimmy Carter. All of these presidents reduced debt as a percent of GDP.” 8 The great modern-era success story is Bill Clinton. In his January 1998 State of the Union address, Clinton was accurately able to claim, When I took office, the deficit for 1998 was projected to be $357 billion and heading higher. This year, our deficit is projected to be $10 billion and heading lower. For three decades, six Presidents have come before you to warn of the damage deficits pose to our nation. Tonight I come before you to announce that the federal deficit, once so incomprehensibly large that it had 11 zeros, will be, simply, zero. I will submit to Congress for 1999 the first balanced budget in 30 years. 9 What is most remarkable—and telling—about the Clinton success on the deficit is the furious degree that he was opposed by Republicans. Not one Republican voted for his 1993 budget package that combined tax increases and spending cuts. In 1994, I and just about every other Republican political consultant made ads attacking the Clinton tax increases and predicting economic disaster unless repealed. The Republican predictions of economic calamity following the Clinton administration were dire.
Stevens fully admits that the hypocrisy never troubled him. It was all about winning, which of course means the GOP cared only about power.)
I was never burdened by the notion that I was working for a political party that was fundamentally hypocritical on the deficit and economy and one that would proceed to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having an affair with a former House intern himself. The point of politics, as far as I could see, was to win, and when you were winning, what could possibly be wrong? Stevens, Stuart. 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⤵️)
The long list of high-profile evangelical figures who scammed the public and lived their lives exactly opposite of what they preached reveals the essential truth of the Moral Majority and the like efforts it spawned. In The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe, an evangelical who grew up in the movement, describes the long list of disgraced preachers as “figures who were cartoonish, dramatic, deceitful, wealthy, white, smarmy, judgmental, callous, and, above all, hypocritical. Charlatans.” 6 This is about as perfect a description of Donald Trump as one can find. Stevens, Stuart. It Was All a Lie (p. 35). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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: There is no time to be immobilized by fear. You dig deep and march forward. Fear is their tactic. Face it down. They’re far weaker than you think
Stevens has an entire chapter called “What are they Afraid Of”
GOP insider Stuart Stevens, who spent his career helping get Republicans elected—and who knows these people well—wrote an entire chapter on “What Are They Afraid Of?” (All screenshots are from the Kindle version.)
Notice the word “pretend”:
The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice. The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise. This means the party demands dishonesty as a trait of membership—unless you are a rare sociopath who defends pathological lying. They do exist. The vast majority of Republican elected officials know Donald Trump is unfit to be president and pretend otherwise.
Never once does Stevens mention fear of blackmail. He says GOP officials are moral cowards who long ago traded their principles for power, and who are surrounded by other cowards so they feel right at home.
Parties and elected officials don’t suddenly wake up one day and decide to betray avowed principles. It’s a gradual process of surrendering little bits of your soul and values while convincing yourself it is for a greater good. Rationalization is like a lot of things in life: the more you do it, the easier it becomes. The story of Faust is not just that Mephistopheles takes your soul; he also doesn’t deliver on what he promised. Cowardice, like courage, is contagious, and to be surrounded by cowards is to feel comforted in the knowledge that not only are there others like you but there is probably someone worse.
Stevens offers a different explanation for Lindsay Graham’s about face:
The Lindsey Grahams of the world have not changed. We are only now seeing who they always were, freed from any need to pretend.
In fact, Stevens uses the word “pretend” often. Here are a few examples:
The truth is that Trump brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible.
Trump just removes the necessity of pretending. “Family values” was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, “family values” was useful in attacking and defining Democrats. They like what he stands for. From Stevens: They like being the voice of white America.” They are moral cowards without principles—and Trump freed them from the need to pretend.
As I’ve said before the “blackmail” theory gives them too much credit. People are projecting their own decency. They can see no other reason for Lindsay Graham’s about-face, so they think it must be blackmail.
