Disclosure: I donated a small amount of money to the Trump campaign in September.
[NYTimes] MILWAUKEE — After nearly 25 years, I’m stepping down from my daily conservative talk radio show at the end of this month. I’m not leaving because of the rise of Donald J. Trump (my reasons are personal), but I have to admit that the campaign has made my decision easier. The conservative media is broken and the conservative movement deeply compromised.
Conservative media has been "broken and deeply compromised" for years. A lot of people espoused conservatism as a means of contrasting themselves as iconoclasts, while all the time embracing and advancing ideas and ideals that were anathema to conservatives. They were an act. Clowns and dancing monkeys. Trump's campaign drove most of the posers out in the open including, apparently, Sykes.
In April, after Mr. Trump decisively lost the Wisconsin Republican primary, I had hoped that we here in the Midwest would turn out to be a firewall of rationality. Our political culture was distinctly inhospitable to Mr. Trump’s divisive, pugilistic style; the conservatives who had been successful here had tended to be serious, reform-oriented and able to express their ideas in more than 140 characters. But in November, Wisconsin lined up with the rest of the Rust Belt to give the presidency to Mr. Trump.
The problem with reforms is that they do not address the basics: reduced government, eliminating and repealing unjust laws, and taxation. Reducing or eliminating government's incredible strength where it should never have been to begin with. If Mr. Sykes thought that Midwest reformers would lead the Republican party to a presidential victory, he should have been aware that reformers were in the mold of Mitt Romney, who got his ass handed to him four years before.
How on earth did that happen?
Before this year, I thought I had a relatively solid grasp on what conservatism stood for and where it was going. Over the previous decade, I helped advance the careers of conservatives like House Speaker Paul D. Ryan; Gov. Scott Walker; Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee; and Senator Ron Johnson. In 2010, conservatives won big majorities in the Wisconsin State Legislature, and I openly supported many of their reforms, including changes to collective bargaining and expansions of school choice.
What commie Daniel DeLeon once said about capitalism applies to reforms: stop washing the trash. Toss it out!
In short, I was under the impression that conservatives actually believed things about free trade, balanced budgets, character and respect for constitutional rights. Then along came this campaign.
Here Sykes wants to extol the virtues of ideas, except he fails to address the problem that expressing those ideals is like explaining to a man who has just lost his job the basics of Keyensian economics. But the man doesn't want to be schooled. He doesn't want to hear about economics. He doesn't want to hear about conservative policies. He wants his job.
On the surface, the explanations for Mr. Trump’s improbable win in Wisconsin are simple enough: He won big margins in rural, blue-collar counties and won the pivotal Green Bay area by double digits. But he underperformed Mitt Romney in the vote-rich Milwaukee suburbs and ended up getting fewer votes in victory than Mr. Romney received in his 2012 defeat. Hillary Clinton, however, got about 39,000 fewer votes in heavily Democratic Milwaukee County than President Obama did four years earlier. Democrats simply stayed home, though that is obviously not the whole story.
Damn lies and statistics.
That is what I saw, and this is what it might mean for the future of conservatism. When I wrote in August 2015 that Mr. Trump was a cartoon version of every left-wing media stereotype of the reactionary, nativist, misogynist right, I thought that I was well within the mainstream of conservative thought — only to find conservative Trump critics denounced for apostasy by a right that decided that it was comfortable with embracing Trumpism. But in Wisconsin, conservative voters seemed to reject what Mr. Trump was selling, at least until after the convention.
Sykes was so concerned about being in the tribe and being in the mainstream that he failed to see the coming flood. That happened to a lot of conservatives. They saw Trump and Trump's refusal to speak in the muted tones associated with a boring conservative campaign, so they mischaracterized what Trump was doing with the same rhetoric the left was using.
To be sure, some of my callers embraced Mr. Trump’s suggestion for a ban on Muslims entering the country and voiced support for a proposal to deport all Muslims — even citizens. One caller compared American Muslims to rabid dogs. But right to the end, relatively few of my listeners bought into the crude nativism Mr. Trump was selling at his rallies.
Self assurance. It can be a bear. What they did buy into was the argument that this was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton. You simply cannot overstate this as a factor in the final outcome. As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas, to parties, to tribes, to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.
Polarized my ass. It was congruent, and if Mr. Sykes had any sense about conservatives he would have seen that Trump sliced effortlessly through the notion that politics in America was polarizing.
In this binary tribal world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles. If everything — the Supreme Court, the fate of Western civilization, the survival of the planet — depends on tribal victory, then neither individuals nor ideas can be determinative. I watched this play out in real time, as conservatives who fully understood the threat that Mr. Trump posed succumbed to the argument about the Supreme Court. As even Mr. Ryan discovered, neutrality was not acceptable; if you were not for Mr. Trump, then you were for Mrs. Clinton.
Trump was a businessman first. He has never been in a position to pose a threat to anyone on any level except in business. And the idea stood then as it stands now. If you were, after the conventions, going against Trump, that meant that you were a Hillary supporter. I watched this played out several times where a Golden Throat of some kind did not voice support for Trump, yet denied that meant support for Hillary. There is no nuance. There only is a choice.
In this political universe, voters accept that they must tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse; the stakes are such that no qualms can get in the way of the greater cause.
For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton — that he was a secret Muslim, that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.
Sykes ignored that even with "two decades of vilification", Hillary's socialist tendencies were getting worse as time went on. This was not group think. It was blatant and visible. How can such an individual be a rational choice?
And this is where it became painful. Even among Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of betrayal.
It's like this at our local party levels as well. It's galling, but they hold the reins. Don't like it? Become involved. You can change things if you are involved. But if all you can offer is your opinion or your complaints, you won't change a thing.
When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection retribution. As the summer turned to fall, I knew that I was losing listeners and said so publicly.
Sykes had a choice. Watch the oncoming train, or get out of the way. Sykes chose to stay on the track, The train did not stop. Sux to be Sykes.
And then, there was social media. Unless you have experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics. In my timelines, I found myself called a “cuckservative,” a favorite gibe of white nationalists; and someone Photoshopped my face into a gas chamber. Under the withering fire of the trolls, one conservative commentator and Republican political leader after another fell in line.
It takes leather ballz to be famous and on Twitter.
How had we gotten here?
One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned this year, we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.
To use a football metaphor: the media referees were picking off passes intended for conservatives, and catching passes about to be picked off by conservatives. As bad as conservatives such as Sykes were, the mainstream media was an order of magnitude worse.
That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored.
"Irish democracy" will carry you only so far.
We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.
If by immunity Sykes means credibility, true. Also, you'll notice that Sykes doesn't mention any specific names, likely because for every "reckless voice on the right", the left had ten "reckless voices."
This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.
Pulueez. The "binary" notion has been exposed as a fraud. There has been only one side until 2016, and now they have a voice. Sykes and other deposed conservatives media people will have to compete now.
I’m only glad I’m not going to be a part of it anymore.
That makes two of us.
Charles J. Sykes (@SykesCharlie), a talk-show host in Wisconsin, is working on a book titled “How the Right Lost Its Mind.”
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