Sunday, October 25, 2020

The Decline and Fall of the 9/11 Republicans

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, October 25, 2020

 

The nationalist–populist tendency that buoyed Donald Trump in 2016 has many precedents in American politics: the Tea Party, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, George Wallace, a political bloodline that runs back through William Jennings Bryan to Andrew Jackson and Patrick Henry. But one aspect of the Trump movement has received insufficient attention: its roots in the trauma of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

 

The 9/11 Republican was a curious creature, characteristically found not in the traditional conservative habitat but in progressive, Democrat-aligned cities and suburbs from New York to the Bay Area. The 9/11 era was marked by fear of several kinds, ranging from prudent watchfulness to clabbered paranoia. Cinnamon Stillwell spoke for the 9/11 Republicans in a 2005 San Francisco Chronicle column in which she described being a Marin County liberal pushed toward the right by her progressive friends’ “irrational hatred for their own country”:

 

As I spent months grieving the losses, others around me wrapped themselves in the comfortable shell of cynicism and acted as if nothing had changed. I soon began to recognize in them an inability to view America or its people as victims, born of years of indoctrination in which we were always presented as the bad guys. . . . America was singled out as the sole guilty party on the globe. I, on the other hand, for the first time in my life, had come to truly appreciate my country and all that it encompassed, as well as the bravery and sacrifices of those who fight to protect it.

 

Stillwell in 2005 prefigured the major themes of Trumpism: America as victim, unpatriotic elites, liberal hypocrisy, sentimental militarism, the union of conservative religious and political orthodoxies (“In my search for like-minded individuals, I also gravitated toward the religiously observant”), rightist social alienation and martyrdom (“I was spat on, called names, intimidated, threatened, attacked, cursed”), self-dramatization in martial rhetoric (“I put myself on the front lines of this ideological battle”), and Manicheanism.

 

Another part of her story will be familiar: “Suddenly, I was listening to conservative talk-show hosts on the radio.”

 

The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath had an enormous influence on the right-wing media ecosystem and contributed mightily to the rise of the entertainment wing of the conservative movement. Sean Hannity’s radio program went into national syndication on September 10, 2001, and, while Hannity already was by that time a familiar media figure, 9/11 made him a national force. Before 9/11, there really was no conservative talk-radio industry as we know it today: There was Rush Limbaugh and . . . everybody else, and everybody else amounted to not very much at the time in real cultural and political terms. Fox News, launched in 1996, lost money for years, but it thrived in the 9/11 era, surpassing CNN in total viewership for the first time in January of 2002 and then achieving the dominant position it has largely maintained during the Iraq War, during which time its profits doubled. Rupert Murdoch is a shrewd businessman, as Roger Ailes was, and Sean Hannity is near the forefront of a generation of gifted demagogues. It is likely that Fox News and talk radio would have been successful without 9/11 — Fox News already had been on an upward trajectory from its coverage of the 2000 Florida recount. But what happened, happened, and that matters because the shock of 9/11 and the peculiar voice of FNC/AM conservatism combined to shape the intellectual habits and style of a new current on the right.

 

Like Trump and his acolytes, the 9/11 Republicans were media-saturated and desirous of cathartic social confrontation. Like Trump, the 9/11 Republicans were heavily invested in symbolic illiberal displays: Their cause célèbre was blocking the construction of a mosque in Manhattan.

 

They cheered the PATRIOT Act and NSA surveillance but became skeptics of such measures when Barack Obama was elected president. (That is a familiar pattern for both political parties: libertarian in opposition, étatist in power.) Trump himself is something of a 9/11 Republican, too, enraptured by 9/11 conspiracy theories, insisting that thousands of Muslims in Jersey City, N.J., were seen cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center, a deathless urban legend. Trump also lied about going to the scene and helping to “clear the rubble,” part of his habit of making every story — especially that story — about him. You’ll remember: “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.”

 

There is always a strain of authoritarianism, paranoia, and xenophobia in American politics, and there is always a strain of nationalist populism. The events of 9/11, as communicated through the demagogic media environment that was emerging at that time, facilitated the combination of those events and the centralizing of them politically, for the time being, in the Republican Party. But Americans have short attention spans, and that may be especially true of the paranoid and the conspiracy-minded. They soured on the Iraq War, demanding to know why we weren’t using those billions spent overseas to fill potholes in Poughkeepsie. They turned on George W. Bush and the brand of Republican politics associated with his administration. Bushism has been, to some extent, a victim of its own success: The threat of an existential confrontation with the Islamic world is not quite as politically piquant as it was 15 years ago, thanks in part to the policies and tactics of the Bush administration, which continued to be implemented, to a great extent, by the Obama administration — and which have been implemented to some extent by the Trump administration, too. President Trump is desperate, though apparently not quite able, to conclude our entanglement in Afghanistan, and the U.S. continues to station thousands of troops in Iraq.

 

The locus of Oriental terror has moved from Mecca to Beijing, in keeping with the Western myth of the Asian Economic Superman who is always about to eat our Yankee lunch. For years, the dreaded Asian Economic Superman was Japan — Trump first discovered his enduring love of tariffs when Japan experienced an economic boom in the 1980s. Before Japan’s ascendency, “Made in Taiwan” was a mark of terror for nationalist populists in the 1960s. This terror was not an exclusively American phenomenon or an exclusively right-wing one: The English punk singer Joe Strummer of the Clash — on an album titled Sandinista! — sneered: “Gimme Honda, gimme Sony — so cheap, and real phony.” Hong Kong and South Korea have vied for the role of Asian Economic Superman, and India has been a candidate from time to time. It has not been very hard to adapt 9/11-era rhetoric about our “addiction to foreign oil” to Trump-era rhetoric about other imported goods. Behind the sham economics of Peter Navarro and the Liberace-as-Mussolini posturing of Trump himself, one can almost hear the whispered internal monologue: “Every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger.”

 

One of the paradoxes of American conservatism is that one of the things American conservatives seek to conserve is American liberalism, which is rooted in the Anglo–Protestant liberalism of Locke, Smith, et al. American conservatism is the political home both of American liberalism (which is distinct from progressivism and socialism) and the organic, pre-ideological conservative temperament that is rooted in prejudice, a word that here should be understood to carry no pejorative connotation. Temperamental conservatism is a prejudice in favor of the status quo and, in particular, the local status quo: one’s own people and community, their manners and habits, their traditions, their mode of family life, their economic means and economic interests, etc. This is a conservatism that is prior to political ideology as such and found on both sides of the American political divide, including at the extremes.

 

This temperamental conservatism often finds itself at odds with the classical liberalism at the heart of American conservatism. For example, it is often anti-capitalist in its orientation, seeking to use economic controls to prevent or minimize the social change associated with trade and commercial integration; it is at the moment industrialist in its orientation, seeking to preserve a partly mythical model of 20th-century factory work, but before it was industrialist it was anti-industrialist, seeking to protect agriculture and craft from the modernizing ravages of factory capitalism. (T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien are two exemplars of this school of thought.) That temperament is not naturally or reflexively aligned with freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other liberal projects, though it may seek to defend them from secularist or progressive interference.

 

Because temperamental conservatism is strongly local and communal in character, it produces different results — and a different political agenda — in different times and different places. And it acts well beyond the scope of right-leaning politics: The same Puritan spirit that sustained the temperance movement also animated, in part, such progressive programs as the eugenics championed by Margaret Sanger and others of her ilk — both were very strongly influenced by uneasiness with the social changes that accompanied high levels of immigration in the 19th century. (Prohibition and eugenics were closely associated with each other. One of the categories of human being commonly targeted for eugenic elimination was drunkards.) It is worth keeping in mind that as late as the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives and Republicans — many of them citing the need for population control — were prominent in the pro-abortion camp: Ronald Reagan as governor of California, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater. Dwight Eisenhower served as honorary chairman of Planned Parenthood’s population-control effort. Like the eugenicists of the progressive era, they worried about “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” as Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it. The Democratic Party, sensitive to its Catholic bloc, came by its current mania for abortion relatively late in the game.

 

Trump obviously is not a philosophical conservative in the vein of William F. Buckley Jr., or even in the vein of a traditionalist such as Russell Kirk. But his particular blend of celebrity, prejudice, and paranoia speaks directly to that older aboriginal conservatism, an orientation that crops up in ways that cannot always be anticipated and that sometimes can be understood only in retrospect. The fall of the Soviet Union and the booming economy of the 1990s brought the Buckley–Reagan brand of conservatism — an engaged, outward-looking conservatism of free markets and free people — to the forefront of American political life, while the trauma of 9/11 revivified the inward-looking conservatism of fear and resentment. That was intensified by the 2008–09 financial crisis and recession, the failure of the nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, the long, humiliating presidency of Barack Obama, and the Left’s vicious efforts to drive nonconformists out of American public life and into pariah-dom and, if possible, into penury. What’s been cooked up under those conditions is an admixture of genuine grievances and imagined ones, truth and fiction, responsible criticism and cynical exaggeration, patriotism and chauvinism.

 

For the moment, this witches’ brew is mostly contained in the fragile vessel of Donald Trump’s political career. If that vessel is broken in November, as seems likely, what’s inside will flow into something else, and it will fester and mutate, as it always has. At some point, without the common enemy of the Soviet empire or an Islamic caliphate to keep things together, the Republican Party and the conservative movement are going to have to reckon with the fact that both of them are houses divided — between classical liberalism and postmodern illiberalism. The natural inclination will be to try to find a new mutual threat to keep these tendencies in union if not in harmony. That effort already is under way, of course, which is why conservatives always are being warned that the republic is one election away from annihilation. (“If Trump loses, it’s over for America. The end! Finished! They’ll put us in camps! Now, let me tell you about Balance of Nature Fruit and Vegetable.”) And that may work, if imperfectly, for a while. This being the United States, there will always be another war to rally behind, but national crises do not bring the country — or the Right — together the way they once did. The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the recriminatory character of our politics rather than mitigating it.

 

The more sensible thing would be to prepare for the divorce that is coming and to try to make it as amicable as possible.

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