A career GOP operative steps into it
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair
Miles Bruner has left the Republican Party after more than a decade in the pay of the campaign industrial complex. That system exists on both sides of our political duopoly.
Bruner, a minor cog in the Republican fundraising team, is particularly tardy in taking his leave. He exits far behind the Never Trumpers, behind former GOP consultant Tim Miller, author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell,” and behind former right-wing journalist Tina Nguyen, author of “The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (and How I Got Out).” Bruner nonetheless charts his path to the exit this morning for The Bulwark. If the link works for you, do yourself a favor and study it.
Bruner summarizes why he’s leaving up front:
For ten years, the GOP has waged an unrelenting war on our civic institutions, the separation of powers, the foundation of the rule of law, and the very nature of truth itself. While Trump and his supporters in Congress have been the driving force behind the right’s descent into despotism, it would not have been possible without the thousands of consultants, aides, and politicos working behind the scenes to fully execute their systematic dismantling of American democratic norms.
I’ve written before about how seductive it can be (on the Democratic side too) to be paid to do what you love:
However idealistic they may have started, many — and by no means all — whose ambitions tempt them to acclimate, to learn the swamp’s rhythms, to be seduced by power’s soothing burble, slowly become the kind of politicians people love to hate.
The process of learning to compartmentalize what you do from where your paycheck comes from Upton Sinclair described rather memorably in 1934. It is a caution people have still to heed.
From his beginnings in Orange County, Bruner thought Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was a joke until it wasn’t. He stayed on. He rationalized. He was replused by the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally and Trump’s response. Yet he stayed on. He took a professional fundraising job in D.C.
Then came the Trump insurrection of January 6, 2021. But the systems guardrails held, so he stayed on.
“I was treated to conventions in exotic locales and was invited to D.C. parties,” Bruner explains. “I got promoted and received a sizable pay raise. At a superficial level and putting my ethics aside, I was living the life I had imagined having as a teenager.”
He started a family. Or he and his wife tried. Their first pregnancy in 2023 failed. That’s when the GOP’s dragging the Supreme Court to the far right and the Dobbs decision finally hit home. When it hit home. Suddenly being pro-life wasn’t as black-and-white as he’d always believed:
To a degree, I understood the selfishness of my reaction. I had been willing to work in a system and for a party that had allowed rulings like these to take hold—that had celebrated them, in fact—only to find it unbearable when I felt personally attacked. It is not to excuse my actions that I note that sometimes a personal experience is what it takes for an awakening like this to occur.
There is an empathy gap among conservatives. Many cannot or will not walk a mile in others’ shoes until forced into them. It is not like having a child murdered that makes one a lifelong gun control advocate, or having cancer shift one’s focus to cancer prevention for others. For many on the right, it is an ideology-driven blindness to others’ plights only overcome by personal experience.
And still Bruner stayed on. But he began looking for a way out. Today, finally, is the day. He’s not looking for absolution. Seeing masked, federal thugs and soldiers on our streets reminds him every day of the small part he’s played in bringing our country to this.
At every mile marker, I’ve rationalized, compartmentalized, and found every excuse to stay. I stayed past Trump’s migrants-are-‘rapists’ tirade. The January 6th insurrection wasn’t enough for me to leave. His lack of leadership during the COVID pandemic contributed to the deaths of over a million Americans, yet I still went into the office.
Wingnut welfare is seductive. The campaign industrial complex is seductive, even on the left.
Over the course of the last 20-plus years, I’ve had a couple of temporary, low-paying, part-time campaign jobs that I paused my better-paying engineering work to take on. I know idealistic young people working professionally on the Democratic side who may never lose themselves, just as Sen. Bernie Sanders never did. But some will.
As Bruner’s experience proves once again, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
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Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
No King’s One Million Rising movement
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense