End of a Movement?

Heather Digby Parton blows up a myth.

[T]he conservative movement is ... under pressure. They thought their years of carefully growing and indoctrinating the right wing of the Republican Party had resulted in a common belief in a certain conservative ideology, strategic vision and commitment to a specific agenda. It turns out that a good number of the people they thought had signed on to their program just wanted someone to stick it to ethnic and racial minorities and make sure America is the biggest bad ass on the planet — authoritarian, white nationalism. If you’ve got a man who will deliver that you don’t need ideology. And he doesn’t need democracy.

The mystery is why all these smart conservatives didn’t see this coming. They unleashed this beast a long time ago with the hate radio and the media propaganda and the ruthless politics. It was only a matter of time before it turned on them.

Update (February 21):  I think the Republican nomination was decided yesterday in South Carolina. Parton explains why.

It turns out that a good many members in good standing of the conservative movement don’t care at all about conservative ideology and never have.

The chattering classes like to say “the GOP base is frustrated because conservative leaders let them down ... .” This misses the point. They did let them down but not because they didn’t fulfill the evangelical/small government/strong military agenda. They let them down because they didn’t fulfill the dogwhistle agenda, which was always about white ressentiment and authoritarian dominance. [The nominee] is the first person to come along and explicitly say what they really want and promise to give it to them.

Update (March 6):   Leonard Pitts makes it clear the joke is on them.

The popular storyline goes that voters are seeking political outsiders this year in their frustration over a government where the legislative gears are frozen and nothing gets done. What that storyline forgets is that this gridlock was by design, that GOP leaders held a meeting on the very evening of the president’s first inauguration and explicitly decided upon a policy of non-cooperation to deny him anything approaching a bipartisan triumph.

Republicans and their media accomplices buttressed that strategy with a campaign of insult and disrespect designed to delegitimize Obama. With their endless birther stupidity, their death panels idiocy, their constant budget brinksmanship and their cries of, “I want my country back!” they stoked in the public nothing less than hatred for the interloper in the White House who’d had the nerve to be elected president.

And the strategy worked, hobbling and frustrating Obama. But as a bullet doesn’t care who it hits and a fire doesn’t care who it burns, the forces of ignorance and unreason, grievance and fear the Republicans calculatedly unleashed have not only wounded the president. No, it becomes more apparent every day that those forces have gravely wounded politics itself, meaning the idea that we can — or even should — reason together, compromise, form consensus.

Update (March 12):  Neal Gabler blasts mainstream media for being "shocked, shocked" that Republicans aren't a party that exudes decency.

[T]he real story – one the popularity of [the nominee's] candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest political story of the last 50 years — is the decades-long transformation of Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of beliefs into quite possibly America’s primary institutional force of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless.

Update (March 17):  For his supporters who "want their country back" and in the words of the nominee himself, "It's payback time."

[H]is pettiness, his hurt ego, and his desire for revenge on those who [he] think[s] aren’t giving him his due is what compels his supporters to rally around him. A lot of his support comes from people who see themselves in him: People who believe they — white conservative Christians who shun city life — deserve to be at the center of American life and culture, but look out and see a world where the president is a black man from Chicago.

The modern conservative movement is filled with people who believe they are due deference from the rest of us but are getting mockery instead. The conservative media has stoked this narrative of cultural resentment for decades, too. “Liberal elite” is a common catchphrase on the right. Some might think that term is an economic one, but in reality, it’s a cultural one.

“[L]iberal elite” is a term of cultural resentment, rooted in a thwarted sense of conservative entitlement. It’s backed by this narrative that there once was a time when America was “great” because the culture was controlled by white Christians, but at some point, usually the 1960s, the undesirables — hippies, artists, people of color, secularists, feminists, gay people — started taking over. This sense that something has been stolen and needs to be taken back is the organizing narrative of conservative populism.

Update (March 20):  Sean Illing quotes two conservatives. Bret Stephens:

Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious. Not anymore. The candidacy of [the nominee] is the open sewer of American conservatism…It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years.

And Max Boot:

I’m a lifelong Republican but [the nominee's] surge proves that every bad [thing] Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true.

Update (March 29):  Charles Pierce considers how we got here.

For four decades now, ever since Ronald Reagan fed it the monkeybrains in the 1980 [election], hitching his party to the snake-oil of supply-side economics and to the sad remnants of white supremacy, often as expressed through an extremist splinter of American Protestantism, the Republican Party has been afflicted with the prion disease that now has blossomed into utter public madness. That's the story everyone [in the media] was too blind, stupid, or afraid to tell. You know who in the media really created [the nominee]? Anyone who laughed at Ronald Reagan's casual relationship with the truth and with empirical reality. Anyone who blew off Iran-Contra. ... Anyone who cast Newt Gingrich as a serious man of ideas. Anyone who cast Paul Ryan as an economic savant, that's who. Anyone who wrote admiring profiles of how shrewd Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were. Anyone who put Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck on the cover of national magazines based simply on their ratings. Anyone who put Matt Drudge on a public-affairs program. Anyone who watched the conservative movement, the only animating force the Republican party has, drive the party further and deeper into madness, they are the ones who share the blame. [The nominee] merely has taken the bark off ideas that were treated as legitimate for far too long by far too many people, most of whom don't really give a damn about the plight of the vanishing middle class except for its use as fuel for rage-based, self-destructive politics.

Update (April 29):  I'm just going to borrow this excerpt from Paul Krugman.

Both parties make promises to their bases. But while the Democratic establishment more or less tries to make good on those promises, the Republican establishment has essentially been playing bait-and-switch for decades. And voters finally rebelled against the con. [...] 

[The Republican] party has historically won elections by appealing to racial enmity and cultural anxiety, but its actual policy agenda is dedicated to serving the interests of the 1 percent, above all through tax cuts for the rich — which even Republican voters don’t support, while they truly loathe elite ideas like privatizing Social Security and Medicare. 

What [the nominee] has been doing is telling the base that it can order à la carte. He has, in effect, been telling aggrieved white men that they can feed their anger without being forced to swallow supply-side economics, too. Yes, his actual policy proposals still involve huge tax cuts for the rich, but his supporters don’t know that — and it’s possible that he doesn’t, either. Details aren’t his thing.

Update (May 6):  A lot of people call themselves conservative, but they aren't really concerned about the issues conservatives care about. Norm Ornstein explains.

When you look at populism over the longer course of both American history and other countries that have suffered economic traumas as a result of financial collapse, you’re gonna get the emergence of some leaders who exploit nativism, protectionism, and isolationism. They’re components — sometimes greater, sometimes lesser — that are baked into the process. So you’ve got a bit of that.

But if you forced me to pick one factor explaining what's happened, I would say this is a self-inflicted wound by Republican leaders.

Over many years, they've adopted strategies that have trivialized and delegitimized government. They were willing to play to a nativist element. And they tried to use, instead of stand up to, the apocalyptic visions and extremism of some cable television, talk radio, and other media outlets on the right.

And add to that, they've delegitimized President Obama, but they've failed to succeed with any of the promises they've made to their rank and file voters, or Tea Party adherents. So when I looked at that, my view was, "what makes you think, after all of these failures, that you're going to have a group of compliant people who are just going to fall in line behind an establishment figure?"

Cantor, McConnell, and others went out and really tried to fan the flames of Tea Party and populist anger, working it to their advantage in midterm contests. But what ended up happening was that they undermined their own authority.

When you basically move dramatically away from what we call the regular order, when you almost debase your own institutions — you’re gonna find an opening for somebody who’s never been a part of it and who can offer you very, very simplistic answers.

Update (July 23):  With the Republican nomination official, Heather Digby Parton says the collapse of the conservative movement is complete.

[I]t’s clear that the [the election] is not simply a matter of a charismatic con man dazzling a large number of Republicans into believing that he’s going to magically turn back the clock to a time that only existed in the imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters. It’s about the collapse of an ideological movement and a political party. The bottom has fallen out of an entire belief system. That’s where the darkness is coming from.

The last two decades have been disastrous for the conservative movement and not just because it “ran its course” or “matured.” The three pillars of conservatism, traditional values, free market economics and a strong national defense all failed and failed in rather spectacular fashion.

All that’s left of the “three-legged stool” of conservatism is the seat — racism, nativism and xenophobia. That’s what [the nominee] is running on. And it’s also failing. As you can see by the words of Ana Navarro or Ted Cruz, John Kasich or Jeb Bush or the whole staff of National Review, the party is splitting over that issue as well. The conservative movement as we’ve known it is disintegrating.

At this point there are no leaders who are untainted by hypocrisy and past mistakes, no new ideas, no “young guns.” The dark, dystopian vision we saw this week in Cleveland is all they have left. For the conservative movement it’s midnight in America.

Update (August 8):  Gary Legum doubts that Republican elites are going to make any progress reforming the party after the coming defeat this fall.

[T]he GOP’s voters have fallen for [neo-fascism], which has little use for ideology or policy. Mostly they are a seething mass of rage at undocumented immigrants, the Black Lives Matter movement, Islamic terrorists – whatever [the nominee] is telling them to be scared of at any given moment. They are unlikely to disappear after the election.

Update (August 23):  Heather Digby Parton continues to point out that the traditional conservative movement has lost its way to an "authoritarian white nationalist" voice.

Although the right-wing antecedents to [the Republican nominee] are not hard to find, nobody like him has ever come this far. The establishment is treading lightly, trying to keep a distance without angering his followers. And the movement that spent so many years creating and nurturing their ideology is very off balance. This is an insurgency they don’t control and it’s very difficult to see how they can reclaim their place in this carefully nurtured ecosystem when the man who leads it doesn’t know or care about their philosophy. And neither, it turns out, do his voters, most of whom have been voting Republican for years.

Update (September 25):  Parton writes often about how millions of GOP voters don't really care about movement conservatism and an interview with Samuel Goldman delves into that notion.

Most people just don't think very much about political philosophy. They vote one way out of habit or out of vague affinity. I think, by the way, that applies to Democrats too. I don't think there are so very many philosophical progressives out there. ... They pick the component they like and often ignore the rest or even are unaware or don't seem to perceive the tension between different elements of the package.

One of the difficulties is what you might call the [Republican nominee] bloc. I'm using this to refer to a silent majority that isn't a majority and is not particularly silent: whites, generally older, generally less educated, although of course with exemptions for all of those generalizations.

[This group] is a very, very awkward size. It seems to be somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the electorate, which is big enough that it feels like a majority but small enough that it isn't actually a majority.

That's a very uncomfortable place to be, politically, because smaller groups I think come to appreciate, not immediately but eventually, that they have to compromise and form coalitions. Larger groups can just win.

But this group doesn't seem small enough to compromise or big enough to win. That makes people very angry. I think some of that anger is reflected not just in [the nominee's] campaign but in the sort of rhetoric you see around the rallies. And everyone has seen footage of people who are just hopping mad in a way that I suspect is alien not just to the journalists who cover them but also to movement conservatives who have claimed to speak for them in the past.