By Nick Catoggio
Friday, February 10, 2023
We all have bad luck sometimes. For someone who writes
about politics, bad luck is when news breaks that illustrates the point of your
latest column perfectly—right after that column has been
published.
What a sweet lede this would have made for yesterday’s
piece about the
end of Reaganism.
We’ll have to settle for it being a sweet lede to today’s
piece instead.
“Outrageous choice for speaker,” tweeted Ronald Reagan’s
son Michael upon
seeing the announcement. Is it? It’s outrageous that CPAC has remade itself as
a populist freak show, a major stop on the
right-wing vaudeville circuit that caters to an authoritarian
personality cult, but that’s an old story by now. And really, we should temper
our expectations of propriety from any event organized by a guy who’s being
sued for sexual assault.
Frankly, I think Kari Lake is the perfect choice for a
dinner named after Reagan.
She’s a performer by trade, as the Gipper himself
famously was. Like Reagan, she’s a tireless and passionate advocate for her
most deeply held, uh, beliefs.
And just as Reagan did in 1980 and 1984, she delivered an election result that
thrilled her strongest supporters.
She lost.
CPAC won’t tout the fact that she lost. To justify their
decision to honor her they’ve been forced to resort to argle-bargle about how
Lake “exposed widespread election fraud” when she’s
done no such thing. No doubt lip service will be paid at the event to her
claim that she received the most votes in Arizona’s gubernatorial election but
had her rightful victory cruelly stripped away by the deep state or whomever.
The uncomfortable truth, though, is that Kari Lake is
being celebrated because she lost. She’s a martyr according to
MAGA mythology and there’s
nothing populists love more than a martyr.
Last week the Washington
Post noticed the curious trend on the American right of idolizing
candidates who lost their most recent elections. Not all candidates: Mehmet Oz,
for instance, won’t be turning up on the vaudeville circuit. Populists won’t
grant martyrdom status to someone who isn’t much of a populist, and they
certainly won’t grant it to someone who conceded his own defeat.
To become a glorious loser requires a degree of
pugilistic authoritarian bravado combined with an adamant belief that your
defeat was the result of unprovable chicanery by the enemy. That’s Lake. It’s
Trump too, of course. And it’s Jair Bolsonaro, who proved recently that
American right-wing media loves a loser even
if that loser lives in another country.
Normally political movements dispense with candidates who
let them down at the polls, the Post pointed out. Yet MAGA
populists continue to cling to their vanquished idols, enough so that CPAC felt
obliged to give a plum speaking slot to someone who lost a race in a state Doug
Ducey won four years ago by 14
points.
Why are populists so drawn to defiant losers?
***
Partly it’s the nature of populism. When you purport to
represent The People against a sinister elite, it’s unthinkable that the actual
people would go to the polls and choose those elites over you.
Trump is unique because his narcissism gives every sign of
being more pathological than political, rendering him unable to believe that he
might fairly lose any sort of popularity contest. Lake, however, comes off as
someone who ended up high on her own ideological supply. She converted at some
point to the creed that Trump and Trumpism are the truest expression of the
popular will and that belief now appears unshakable. She can’t compute that an
electorate like Arizona’s would opt for a Democrat over her, let alone a bland
establishment Democrat like Katie Hobbs.
To believe Hobbs won in a state in which more Republicans
turned out than Democrats, you need to believe that a meaningful chunk of GOP
voters defied hyperpolarization and voted Democratic. Which is precisely
what happened, as it turns out: Some conservatives repelled by Lake
switched to Hobbs, just as they switched to Biden in 2020 after being repelled
by Trump. But because most Republicans have remained slavishly loyal to Trump
and his movement throughout his political odyssey, the idea of thousands of
righties crossing over to oppose a MAGA candidate is hard for devotees to
fathom.
Take
it from the lady herself.
Another reason populists cling to denialist losers is to
soothe their despair at the GOP’s ongoing underperformance at the polls. When a
party loses the popular vote in seven of eight presidential elections, its
members naturally begin to worry that it’s at an irreversible disadvantage. All
the more so if it changed its agenda during its losing streak to try to grow
its support and kept on losing anyway.
Trump was supposed to be the cure for the GOP’s electoral
malaise. The party nominated an establishmentarian who ran on zombie Reaganism
in 2008 and lost badly. It doubled down on that M.O. in 2012 and lost badly
again. Then came Trump preaching a new gospel of protectionism, avoiding
endless wars, and treating Social Security and Medicare as sacrosanct. He
won—not the popular vote but the Electoral College, which was good enough for
most Republicans. Trump had finally figured out the secret recipe to turning
out “missing”
white voters and building a muti-ethnic working-class coalition that
could compete cycle to cycle with Democrats, they believed. That recipe was
populism.
Except it wasn’t. Trump’s party lost the House in 2018,
then the Senate in 2020. Trump himself lost both the presidency and the popular
vote to a thoroughly pedestrian Democrat who barely campaigned. He supported a
variety of outspoken populists made in his own image in the 2022 midterms, Lake
the most prominent among them, and they got their collective clock cleaned. If you
had converted in 2016 to the gospel of MAGA as the path to electoral salvation,
you were faced last November with the horrifying possibility that any right-wing
agenda, establishment or populist, is doomed to be unpopular in an America
that’s less white and Christian than it was in the past. In hindsight, maybe it
wasn’t zombie Reaganism that cost the GOP the 2008 and 2012 elections. Maybe
Trump just got lucky in 2016 by facing a Democrat whom everyone hated.
That’s a bitter pill for populists to swallow, so some
refused. They gagged on it instead by choosing to believe that Trump and Lake
had been cheated. If the secret recipe developed by Trump no longer worked, it
could only be because Democrats surreptitiously slipped poison into the pot on
Election Day. The alternative, that the GOP still hasn’t found an agenda that
can make a majority after ditching Reaganism for Trumpism, is too terrible to
confront.
Combine that anxiety over losing political influence with
the right’s chronic anxiety about having lost cultural influence and you’re
left with a movement that’s stewing in alienation yet unwilling to make the
political compromises needed to persuade swing voters. With no obvious path out
of that alienation, they choose to valorize it instead. Arc Digital editor Berny
Belvedere explained it elegantly in a recent essay.
A core element of Trumpism, and of
populism more generally, is the incurable conviction that you and your movement
are condemned to exist in a kind of permanent outsidership.
…
When people who subscribe to
historically successful ideologies, ones that have been socially dominant, go
on to experience a decrease in influence, it can qualitatively feel
like an existential threat. And the regime presiding over the
shrinking of their influence can get construed by them as a tyrannical force,
as the instrument of their persecution.
So they end up catastrophizing
their situation because even a temporary “unprivileging” of their perspective
feels to them, from the inside, not as an acceptable loss but as an intolerable
form of subjugation.
They adopt a framework of
suppression when all that’s really happening is society is adjusting to more
and different voices acquiring a share of political power.
No matter how much political influence populists amass,
no matter how robust and influential their media organs are, they’re so
invested emotionally at this point in the unfairness of their own
disempowerment that they can no longer process legitimate setbacks like losing
elections. At least not when they’re being egged on by leaders like Trump and
Lake. “The victimization culture is definitely at the core of this trend,”
said Bulwark writer Tim Miller recently to the Post about
Republicans extolling electoral losers. “The base has determined that the
‘elites’ are unfairly targeting conservatives and must be treated as enemy
combatants.”
It flows quite logically from all of that how a populist
mob might have ended up outside the Capitol as Congress prepared to officially
declare their hero the loser of the 2020 election. If populists losing power is
inherently unfair, if all legal and political constraints designed to limit
their ability to hold power are on some level corrupt and illegitimate, the
only option is to break those constraints. By any means necessary.
***
What makes all of this interesting and germane to
Republican politics in 2023 is that we’re about to embark on a primary in which
populists’ infatuation with losers will be challenged directly by someone they
admire.
The title of this piece comes from a
meme popular with liberals and anti-Trump conservatives. It’s existed
since Trump’s defeat in 2020, I believe, but I’ve seen it more often since the
cranks he backed last year went belly up in race after race in November.
Republican voters who were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt about
having been cheated in his own election have new reason to wonder after the
midterms whether he really is a terrible drag on the party, just like the RINOs
always said.
But not just the RINOs. Not anymore. I
know a guy who’s going to confront primary voters with the possibility
that Trump really did lose and that, if they want to avoid
that outcome again in 2024, they should opt instead for a candidate who won
reelection by nearly 20 points in what’s supposed to be a swing state.
He might be laying the groundwork already, in fact.
No issue in the coming campaign will be as fraught for
all parties involved as election fraud. The danger to Trump is obvious: The
more Queeg-like he sounds in babbling endlessly about the grand conspiracy to
defraud him three years ago, the more likely weary Republicans are to wonder
that he’s lost the plot. Whether you believe the election was rigged or not,
Team DeSantis will tell them, we learned the hard way last fall that swing
voters do not.
Do you want to maximize your chances of winning and
wielding power or do you want to maximize your chances of losing to feed your
victimization fetish? That’s the question that’ll be posed to Republican voters
by the new guy from Florida.
But the issue is dangerous for DeSantis too. Trump has
exploited his base’s victimization fetish by making election denial the sine
qua non of right-wing authenticity. If DeSantis ducks when asked
whether he believes Trump was cheated or (gasp) alleges that Biden won fair and
square, it’ll be treated by some voters as a smoking gun proving that the
governor isn’t a populist after all.
Dig around on Twitter, in fact, and you can already find
some of Trump’s nuttiest cultists speculating that DeSantis’ own stupendous
victory last fall was … suspicious. A Republican winning in a landslide? In a
state like Florida? Such things aren’t possible—unless the nefarious
elites want them to be possible. One DeSantis fan has begun
flagging the most absurd examples:
For conspiratorial populists, the size of DeSantis’
margin in Florida will become an argument against nominating him, not
one in favor. Electability, his great advantage over Trump, will be twisted
into a perverse liability by a cult of right-wing losers that treats poor
performance at the polls by their candidates as evidence of political virtue.
If a broad swath of voters likes you, their thinking goes, then you must be
doing something wrong. Failure is the touchstone of a truly successful
populist.
We’ll know by next summer whether a majority of this degraded party still wants to win elections and make policy or whether we’re so far from Reaganism that they’d prefer to lose and revel in their dispossession. I know which way I’m betting.
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