Republican Riot

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Thursday, January 21, 2021

 

Donald Trump did not come out of a clear blue sky. On that much, at least, everyone — his biggest fans, his critics on the right and the left, and all of those who don’t fit into those categories — can agree.

 

Supporters on the right tell a story that emphasizes rupture. Trump’s emergence was a reaction to a generation of Republican leaders who had gradually lost touch with their own voters. The leaders had become too complacent: about the economy, about immigration, about their own defeats, and finally about their position atop the Republican Party. Progressives emphasize continuity. For them, Trump didn’t so much change the Republican Party as reveal its essential authoritarianism.

 

It’s too convenient a conclusion. Why should Trump be taken as more expressive of Republican passions than Mitt Romney or George W. Bush? Those prior leaders won a larger share of the Republican primary vote than Trump did in 2016, and a larger share of all voters than Trump did in November 2016 or November 2020.

 

But both stories have elements of truth that get tangled together — as the weeks after the national election have shown. What we just went through was a vivid break from any previous Republican response to defeat in a presidential election. President Trump said he had won, in a landslide, an election he had lost, but maintained the Democrats had stolen it from him. In support of this theory, he spread numerous claims that could be quickly shown to be false. But a lot of Republicans followed him in his folly.

 

In polls, most Republican voters agreed that he had won the election. Most House Republicans, and most Republi­can state attorneys general, backed a lawsuit to overturn the actual results. The belief that the Democrats had stolen the election motivated the rioters who breached Capitol Hill on January 6 and killed a police officer. The same day, most House Republicans voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victories in Ari­zona and Pennsylvania.

 

Much of this Republican behavior was novel. But it also drew on currents that had been present within conservatism for a long time, ones that helped carry conservatives to their alliance with Trump in the first place and are now threatening to drag us into greater danger.

 

What has gone wrong in conservatism is a matter, you might say, of overlearning certain lessons. The Re­publican Party prior to Trump had continued to extend the truths it discovered in the 1970s and 1980s past the point where they made sense. If cutting the top income-tax rate from 70 percent had worked for Ronald Reagan, both politically and economically, surely cutting it from 39 percent would work for George W. Bush as well.

 

This inertia affected the party’s mood and habits, not just its policies. Con­serva­tism always has a tendency to nostalgia, for example. It can be a useful check on the utopianism that frequently afflicts progressives. But the possibility of decline can also be exaggerated into the certainty of apocalypse, and conservatives are too prone to assuming it.

 

It was entirely defensible to worry that Obamacare, by extending government health benefits to a larger share of the population, would permanently expand the power of the state. A lot of conservatives treated it instead as a sign that the country’s basic character was about to be lost forever. If that had been the case, then the struggle would already have been lost, decades before, when Con­gress created Medicare. And political engagement would have been pointless after Obamacare was implemented. But many of the people who indulged in this point-of-no-return rhetoric — who even seemed to believe it — moved on to treat Trump’s election in 2016, and then his reelection in 2020, as the only way to prevent national suicide.

 

A portion of the Right has always had a weakness for conspiracy theories, too. William F. Buckley Jr. famously concluded that conservatives had to repudiate the John Birch Society, and its claim that President Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the Soviet Union, in order to save anti-communism from discrediting itself. Insinuations that the Clintons were involved in drug trafficking and murder attracted the interest of some conservative media outlets in the 1990s. Trump himself garnered his initial political support by insisting that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and thus was not legitimately the president.

 

None of this is much different in kind from the belief that an international left-wing conspiracy rigged U.S. voting machines to cost Trump reelection — while also, for some reason, letting House Republicans gain seats. (That increase is, to the conspiratorial frame of mind, more evidence of mischief in the presidential race.) It is arguably less crazy than the view that Bill Gates is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the Capitol Hill rioters were believers in or fellow travelers of the QAnon movement, which peddles an ever-more-rococo fantasy in which Trump is doing secret battle with pedophile rings at the highest levels of government.

 

Whether conservatives are more prone to this kind of break with reality is debatable: Hillary Clinton recently said that Trump is a Russian puppet and that he may have been talking to Vladimir Putin during the Capitol breach. But conservatism has been opening the door wider to nonsense while cutting the security budget.

 

That susceptibility is probably also related to something ineradicable from conservatism: its skepticism toward the modern university, the media, and ex­perts of all kind. Skepticism is often justified and salutary. The success of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Buckley once wrote, “required staring at the findings of conspicuous American wisemen and saying, ‘Shucks, professor, I think you’re wrong.’”

 

But medicine at too high a dose can be poison. The press is prone to groupthink, especially when it has settled on a view that puts conservatism in a bad light, and it needs corrective scrutiny. It is not intent on, or even capable of, working to ensure that ballots are miscounted in a presidential election.

 

And the distrust of “elites” can turn into a sad credulity. Elected officials who criticize the media are sometimes correct but are never speaking out of a pure interest in objectivity and accuracy. The answer to bias in the newspapers is not to believe everything in your Facebook feed. Conservatives’ refusal to believe CNN — a refusal for which CNN bears some responsibility — has ended up giving very irresponsible and rich people more power and money. Newsmax TV has spent months telling viewers that Trump might be recognized any day now as the winner of the 2020 election. Its CEO, Chris Ruddy, won’t defend that coverage even as he profits from it.

 

Perhaps you have heard the phrase “Wake up, sheeple!” It is meant to suggest that most people are a thoughtless herd who accept whatever they are told. But the people who say it, on average, probably have a more tenuous grip on reality than those they seek to enlighten.

 

The man who did the most to popularize “sheeple” was a man named Bill Cooper, a radio broadcaster, author, and all-purpose nut. His paranoia en­compassed extraterrestrials, AIDS, the Illuminati, and — once again, though he was long dead by the time Cooper was active — poor Dwight Eisenhower.

 

In 2001, Cooper became convinced a neighbor was surveilling him and pointed a gun at that neighbor’s head. Sheriff’s deputies later came out to serve a warrant, and Cooper started a firefight that ended with him dead. There is possibly a lesson there. Cooper’s work is, however, experiencing a revival now. Amazon lists one of his books as a best-seller, and QAnon adherents sometimes allude to it.