Pretensions Republicans had to being a party fueled by patriotism and serious ideas began dissipating with the trickle-down nonsense and “starve the beast” strategy sold by President Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor and pitchman. Reagan budget director David Stockman later admitted it was all a con.
Richard Nixon’s impeachment over Watergate had been an embarrassment for the party. The greater scandal of the Nixon years — his 1968 back-channel effort to “monkey wrench” the Paris Peace talks for political advantage — would not be exposed for years. President Lyndon Johnson hid what he knew at the time but felt Nixon was guilty of treason and had “blood on his hands”. Reagan lied about tax cuts and sold weapons to a terrorist nation to fund a secret war in defiance of Congress. And got away with it.
It was a few short decades from there to Republicans committing war crimes and lying the country into war in Iraq; to nominating a know-nothing pinup for vice president; to electing a white-nationalist, narcissist man-child as Republican savior. The former pro-wrestling impresario would rub elbows with autocrats. The career con man would preen daily as half a million Americans died in a pandemic he denied while pimping a miracle cure. He would instigate an insurrection by cosplaying “patriots” bent on overturning an election and installing him as dictator.
It’s all kayfabe
Whether Never Trumpers’ come-to-Jesus moment about their party’s state is itself serious, time will tell. For now, conservative pundits such as Charlie Sykes are done. Substance is gone out of the conservative movement. Save for a feral instinct for survival and the will to power, all that is left is putting on a flashy show for the donors. Post-Trump Republican politics is all kayfabe.
Sykes writes at Politico:
There is no legislative agenda here, only a new form of highly theatrical posturing that has replaced what was left of substantive conservatism in the GOP. Under Trump, the Republican Party literally decided that it did not need to have a platform; and even after Trump’s departure, it doesn’t think it needs an actual agenda, or indeed fixed principles of any kind.
The current GOP is less interested in the messy business of governing than it is in performative indignation and the memes that play well in social media and on cable television. Memes, it shouldn’t need to be said, are not ideas and don’t require a consistent set of principles. The result is a kind of free-floating nihilism, as the GOP chases narratives that stir outrage, generate clicks, shake loose grassroots contributions, and play well on Newsmax and Fox.
Principles? Those are the guys in law firms that make the most money.
Increasingly, however, there are voices on the right calling for the abandonment of values like restraint, moderation, or concerns for procedural niceties like the peaceful transfer of power. And this is where the performance veers from absurdist comedy to something much darker. Having abandoned both principles and traditional conservative sensibilities, some of the right seem ready to abandon the very idea of America. In a recent edition of the Claremont Institute’s journal, The American Mind, one right-wing writer argued that anyone who voted against Trump in the last election is not a real American. “I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants,” he wrote. He meant Americans who “may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans.”
Go back and reread the first three paragraphs above. Don’t bother asking nihilists what they mean by Americans.