The New York Times (8/1/16) illustrating a story about how the Republican Party was formerly only pretending to be the “stupid party.” (image: Damon Winter/NYT)
The curious rise of Donald Trump has led to public soul-searching from establishment Republicans, whose loud and repeated condemnations nevertheless read more as brand management than cris de coeur. In doing so, they suffer from a severe case of dewy-eyed nostalgia over how reasonable and competent the pre-Trump GOP actually was.
In a New York Times op-ed Monday, “How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump” (8/1/16), neoconservative commentator-turned-liberal-favorite Max Boot complained that Trump has taken the GOP’s heretofore-insincere shtick of anti-intellectualism seriously and is thereby running the party into the ground. Boot insisted that previous shows of “stupidity” had all been a ruse:
Here’s the thing, though: The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now.
So, for decades Republicans were strategically pretending to be doofuses—Boot claims, for instance, that Dwight Eisenhower sometimes “resorted to gobbledygook in public…in order to preserve his political room to maneuver”—but have now been taken over by a real one. Ignoring for the moment the raw cynicism of this admission (consistent with the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism Leo Strauss’s theory of “the noble lie”), it’s important to note that “stupidity” in this context is simply a matter of marketing, not substance. Boot is right that Trump’s ignorance of the most basic facts is, on its own, disturbing, but what did the “thoughtful” GOP of the past get us?
Lamenting the lost reign of “Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will,” Boot offers, as exemplar of a remaining link to the party’s proud history in “the realm of ideas,” House Speaker “Paul Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party.” Never mind that the plan impresses by zeroing out government agencies wholesale while taking food from the mouths of the poor; or that Ryan mindlessly votes in favor of every war, and has spent every moment in Congress making life harder for the poor, people of color, LGBT and women. In Boot’s world, pandering to voters’ ignorance in order to make life harder for the most vulnerable is A-OK, but a politician actually being ignorant calls for outraged denunciation.
And what does it mean to be “stupid,” anyway? Boot, who presumably considers himself part of the right-wing intelligentsia, was a staunch advocate of the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of over a million people and directly resulted in ISIS. He defended the war as late as 2013. He called for war against both Iran and Syria in 2011. In October 2001, he made “the case for American empire.” If this is the deliberative thoughtfulness Trump is deviating from, then it’s simply a different kind of stupid, not an absence of it.
Fellow #NeverTrump brigadier David Brooks likewise rewrote history in last week’s column, “The Dark Knight” (New York Times, 7/22/16):
Finally, a law-and-order campaign calls upon the authoritarian personality traits that Donald Trump undoubtedly possesses. The GOP used to be a party that aspired to a biblical ethic of private charity, graciousness, humility and faithfulness.
This is perhaps the ethic David Brooks wanted his party to aspire to, but certainly not at all what it achieved. “Graciousness” is not a word that comes to mind in describing a party that has worked for decades, long before the arrival of Trump, to cut resources for the poor and people of color. “Humility” is not a word one would use to describe eight years of invasions, bombing and “with us or against us” chest-pounding.
As for “faithfulness,” it should be noted that of the three Republican congressmen who led impeachment charges against Bill Clinton in the late ‘90s, one was a serial child molester and the other two were such prolific adulterers they had to resign. There’s also David Vitter and Larry Craig, John Ensign and Edward Schrock, and many more. Our rosey-glassed pundits keep confusing marketing with objective reality, conflating their West Wing–like fantasies with history (as with Boot, who’d have us remember Ronald Reagan as one who “spent decades honing his views on public policy” while masquerading as a “dumb thespian”—rather than as the president who joked over a live microphone that he was launching a nuclear attack on Russia).
One of the more risible examples of this revisionism was from Foreign Policy editor and quintessential Serious Person David Rothkopf (7/27/16), who hand-wrung over the decline of the once “competent” Republican party on the one issue they’ve been most objectively incompetent at, foreign policy:
Put a Fork in the Tradition of GOP Foreign Policy Competence
On its face, this headline should elicit a chuckle. But Rothkopf’s evidence for this competence turns out to be polls saying Americans trust the GOP more on national security and unnamed random others:
I hear constantly from international leaders worldwide that the Republicans are the proven, trusted custodians of US foreign policy. Two weeks ago in Shanghai, I spoke to Chinese experts who said that they were hoping for a Trump victory because “Republicans are more experienced and sensible” and because they feared more human-rights critiques from Hillary Clinton.
In addition to sourcing standards that wouldn’t pass middle-school muster—“international leaders” and “Chinese experts” think it, therefore it must be true—there’s very little in Rothkopf’s piece that shows actual GOP foreign policy “competence” beyond, again, the meta-issue of perception or PR.
In his “to be sure” paragraph, Rothkopf dismisses the Iran/Contra affair (the US arming death squads in Nicaragua) and the 2003 Iraq invasion (that killed a million people) as “missteps.” The core defining foreign policy initiative of the past 30 years, the Iraq War, is a mere footnote, a slip up—a deviation from an otherwise competent Republican party, evidence for which can be found in “polls” and Rothkopf’s Davos drinking buddies.
The fact that Trump is shockingly ignorant and crude–which he objectively is–doesn’t make the pre-Trump GOP smart or reasonable or virtuous. It simply makes them better at marketing themselves as such.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.