By no stretch of the imagination has the Lincoln Project ever been the "foremost pro-democracy organization in the United States". And if Rick Wilson was ever a "principled Republican" for three days straight I'll eat my hat.
The foremost pro-democracy organization in the United States belongs to the Democratic Party, of which I have been a
member my entire adult life.
The Lincoln Project is an advertising company staffed by mountebanks which
cranked out slick, Trump-bashing ads that tickled the pleasure centers of way
too many credulous Liberals and made the lads and lasses at MSNBC swoon back
in the day.
...there should be one fact that stands out bold and clear to anyone who
has eyes to see: that the staggering amount of free publicity and hard
cash lavished on the Lincoln Project on the theory that their unique
insights into the Republican mind would pay big dividends for the
Democrats was a complete bust. That, outside of the tiny circle of
Never Trump Republicans who seem to exist almost entirely on teevee and
Twitter -- surprise! -- neither the tens of millions of dollars that
credulous Liberals poured into the Lincoln Project...
...nor the Liberal Political PornHub videos they cranked out budged even
a fraction of the Republican base one inch...
And yet you will remember that so many of our fair-weather Liberals allies
insisted that the Lincoln Lads basically won the 2020 election for Joe Biden
despite incontestable evidence to the contrary.
If you needed a bylined writer to tell you bitter truths, you could've heeded
the wise words
Charlie Pierce:
The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election
Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election
results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.
Or you could've read
The Hill, although it's kind of a trash publication so I can understand why you might
blow them off --
Lack of influence means it's time to dismiss the Lincoln Project
-- but the basic electoral math that they buried halfway down the column is
not in dispute.
During their time in the sun they even scammed their way into a glow-up from
60 Minutes, back when that meant something. Later, when the various scandals the Lincoln Lads were drowning in broke into the open, 60 Minutes had to, uh, revise their
assessment.
But these veteran grifters hung on like herpes because, as America's most famous capitalist philosopher, Phineas Taylor Barnum, allegedly observed, there's a sucker born every minute.
Lest you think Trump's manifold acts of corruption, extortion, treason and
unhinged racist lunacy are penetrating the MAGA groundwater, let me disabuse
you of that notion right now.
And to do that, I need us to take a little walk down memory lane.
Specifically, to 14 years ago, before Trump slouched out of the Republican id
to swallow the GOP whole. It was a time during which all your favorite
future Never Trumpers were swearing up and down that everything was fine, that
the Party of Lincoln had never shone so brightly, and anyone who
suggested otherwise was openly mocked as a crackpot.
While they were busy ignoring what was going on with the base of their own
party, this is what your 'umble crackpot scrivener was writing about
the state of the Right:
The entire Conservative enterprise is built on delusion and old dynamite,
which is why every clock much forever remain stopped at one minute after
Reagan's inauguration, every fact must be smothered under the stasis field
of Rush Limbaugh roaring, rage-drunk bluster. It is the sarcophagus of
a dead ideology where the walls are now so densely postered and palimpsested
with the detritus of Conservatism's lurid, lying history that its denizens
cannot find the exit anymore, and its floors are so sticky and pitted with
the grue of its savage, tribal, beat-in rituals that no one bothers to even
look for the door.
Which is why no deviation can be permitted, no error can be admitted
and no apologies can be allowed.
As I wrote last year, this catastrophe all began as a headlong dive into the best fucking high
the Right would ever have ...
Now the bender is over.
Outside, Reality's beating sun is stationed in the treetops, so bright and
close to the Earth that it vaporizes shadows inside of pockets and purses,
and through the sodden walls of their fragile fastness Conservatives they
can feel its slippery photons circling their ideological clubhouse, sniffing
the hinges and lintels like wolves, looking for a way in.
This time, there is no trick-or-treat scamper to safety for them in the
kindly, Tea Party gloaming: no way to scuttle off to the next wingnut spider
hole in a tri-corner hat and tights pretending they'd never even heard of
George W. Bush. No, the rotting hulk of the Party of Lincoln has become
their crypt, and inside of it there is nothing left for them but to sink
forever deeper into the shadows until they become one with the darkness.
And from deep inside their narrow house, you can hear the terrified squeals
of Conservatism's pasty, self-righteous, rigidly ignorant,
sexually-terrified wingnut child-men trying frantically to spackle up the
little holes through which modernity, complexity and reality continue to
leak...
The point of pulling this out of the archives is threefold.
First, labor-saving. Since I've been on this beat for a good long while
and since Republican bigotry and depravity are an endless cycle of repetition
and escalation, why not borrow from my younger and less emotionally exhausted self?
Second, to show why, for all their professed interest in talking with people
whose viewpoints are different than their own, no way no how does any Never
Trumper want to talk about which crew was actually right about the Right all
along, and which team of esteemed paid professionals absolutely blew
it.
Third, and of more importance, is to put the cast-iron obstinance and
denialism of the GOP base in its proper context. They didn't suddenly
get this way yesterday. They've been this way for decades and, year
after year, they've only gotten louder, stupider and more
intransigent. They can no longer metabolize reality. It's poison to
them, so, marching under Trump's banner, they make war on it, and only get
more berserk with fury the more Reality leaks into their lives.
So, while irrefutable evidence of Trump's madness and venom rage all around us
like a hurricane, and we're shouting at these idiots as loud as we can, "Can
you see it now? Can you see how bad it is now!" -- inside the
shuddering hovel of their media bubble, they're busy grabbing anything
they can to nail up over the windows to keep the storm at bay.
Two local examples.
First, there is the case of the Illinois Democratic legislator who, this last
January, proposed giving local municipalities the authority to charge people a
$5 permitting fee in unincorporated areas if they want to have an "open burn",
and the flexibility of levy stiff fines if anyone conducts an "open burn"
without a permit. Important fact: this legislation -- which, I'll remind
you, was proposed by one lone state congressperson in January and has gone
nowhere since -- would in no way affect barbequing in your back yard, or having
a cozy little marshmallow-toasting fire in a
firepit in your back yard.
State Rep. Briel: New bill is not targeting your campfire
The local MAGA meatheads went absolutely ballistic. Jackbooted this
and overreach that and the gummit telling you it's gonna slap you with a
$100,000 fine if you have a weenie roast with the kids in the yard.
And of course the fact that this legislation would do none of those things
was irrelevant to the ginned up firestorm (pun intended) that was whipped up
on the Right. Because all they fucking care about is having something
scary and Liberal to shriek about to drown out all the actual catastrophes
their Dear Leader is inflicting on this country in their name.
How bad is it?
It's worse than ballroom!
This is the pattern: a minor, local policy proposal becomes, through media
amplification, a nationwide moral panic completely detached from
reality.
And remember kids, by the commutative law of MAGA meathead media, what one
Democrat does, all Democrats are responsible for. And if all Democrats
everywhere don't stop what they're doing and unanimously denounce whatever
ginned up claptrap Fox News is troweling out today, then all Democrats
everywhere are guilty!guilty!guilty!
And when you tar the entire party with the slander-brush, don't forget to
cram as many magic conjure words into the headline as possible. For
example, this from Murdoch's New York Post checks just about every
box.
Behind today’s radical, Jew-hating Democratic Party is a monster created
by Barack Obama
Yes, they forgot to squeeze in Hillary's emails and Benghaaaazi, but I'm pretty sure that's a
headline page-limit thing and not some swine of an editor having a mild
attack of conscience and thinking,
"Nah. We dare not go that far."
Speaking of playing the hits is a desperate attempt to distract from how comprehensively Trump is
fucking them over and what utter, drooling idiots this makes all of them
look like, MAGA mouthbreakers are even dragging the already-infinitely-debunked "Clinton Kill
List" out of cold storage.
Because while their soft lizard brains are
incapable of processing facts they don't like, they all have fond memories
of the lies that made them feel smart. Of the glory days of beating up
on Hillary Clinton.
The signs went up shortly after Salem Communications acquired the station in
2004 and flipped it from Spanish-language programming to
all-conservative/all the time, talk radio.
Salem was on a buying spree at the time. Between 2000 and 2008, its
all-conservative programming footprint grew by roughly twenty net stations,
though the gross number of acquisitions was higher because Salem frequently
sold, swapped, and consolidated signals during the same period.
The result was that, at almost any time, anywhere in the contiguous 48 United
States, you could find an AM powerhouse station slandering the Left,
24/7. Depending on the time of day, you'd hear degenerate gambler and
author of the "Book of Virtues" Bill Bennett, Laura "Eva Braun-Nose"
Ingraham, Dennis "Prager U" Prager, Michael "Irrelevant Jabbering
Mustache" Medved, Michael "The Savage Weiner" Savage or Hugh "Cyborg Sent From
the Future to Destroy America" Hewitt.
That means Salem's portfolio grew by about 20 stations net between late 2000
and late 2008. However, the actual number purchased was higher because Salem
also sold, swapped, and consolidated some stations during that period.
And mind you, Salem wasn't even the most prominent dispenser of wingnut poison
across this Land of the Free. Tired of Michael Medved running his mouth
but still need your fix of Libtard hating? Spin the dial just a little and
you'll find the Premier Networks ready to fill your skull with incandescent
rage against imaginary enemies.
At the time, the Premier Networks was syndicated to around 650 stations from
coast to coast and it's main lineup was (surprise!) Rush Limbaugh, Sean
Hannity and, later, Glenn Beck.
We're your tastes a little more boutique and regional? ABC/Citadel had
you covered. They didn't own stations, but they syndicated their
conservative programs to several hundred stations and featured the likes
of Charlie Sykes, Mark Levin, Larry Elder and Mike Gallagher.
And if that wasn't enough to slake your thirst for hatin' on the Left, there
was the feisty, independent Talk Radio Network.
Against that absolute blitzkrieg of well-financed, nationwide
saturation Conservative programming (and Fox News, and all the well-funded
conservative magazines and rapidly multiplying websites) the Left had this
pea-shooter: the financially unstable, multiply bankrupted and incompetently
managed Air America. Which, at its peak, could be found on a mere 50–70
affiliate stations.
It had terrific on-air talent -- no doubt about that -- and when I lived in
Chicago I was an Air America listener, but it was a tricky business.
Frequently I had to walk my radio around my condo until I found a spot where I
could pick up the signal. It had the staticky intermittence of a
French underground pirate radio sending German troop movement intel across the
channel -- hardly a match for the million megawatt megaphone the Right had
built for itself.
Anyway, that was the state of play more than 20 years ago here in the Home of
the Brave. So the next time someone tells you the Republican base went
suddenly and inexplicably berserk with rage, racism, and grievance after
Donald Trump showed up and put the whammy on them, spit in their eye and show
them this post.
Nothing about this was sudden. It was financed, distributed, syndicated,
and broadcast -- everywhere, day after day -- for decades.
“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”-- American author and teacher Verna Hills, 1937, later adapted by teachers and parents to the melody of the traditional English folk song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush"... which itself probably originated with female inmates at England's HMP Wakefield, who exercised around a courtyard mulberry tree with their children.
Today we're making a quick stop at the Before Time to visit the early days of
the Liberal blogosphere.
In and out, nobody gets hurt, OK?
To begin, it's critical to understand that, as cutting and as harsh as our
prose might have been, all in all, the Liberal blogosphere was and is a
fundamentally optimistic enterprise. A belief that we were not
doomed. That the future could be better, and that it was worth fighting
for.
First and foremost, it was about creating community with a "You're not crazy, I
see it too" ethos. Back in the depths of the Bush regime, it felt as if
a political apocalypse had happened right in our back yard: something so
bad and so surreal that words frequently failed. And we were the ones
slowly scanning the short wave radio bands in search of other survivors.
At the time this was only possible through the blogs because, then as now, the
Beltway media was dedicated to the proposition that we were crazy, that there
was nothing to see here, so let's move along shall we.
But the hoped-for secondary effect of the blogs was a stubborn, Quixotic faith
in something fundamental about the American people.
Or at least most of the American people.
Or at least a bare majority of the American people.
Something that would be enough to beat the howling, brain-rotted Fox News
zombie horde, if...
If people were presented with the facts of the case. If they could be
shown, unequivocally, that Republican policies had fucked them over but
good. That whatever opinion they had of the Democrats, Dems were, by
every metric, vastly better for the public than the GOP.
It was towards those complacent, habitually fence-straddling Mopes in the
Middle that much of our energies were directed. And there was a moment as
the Bush regime was collapsing when we had the momentum of events
and history at our backs. The Liberal blogosphere of the Before Time felt a little like the energy Hunter Thompson describe in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was
right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle -- that
sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean
or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply
prevail.
This, but angrier.
The feeling that, just maybe, together, we could outshout the narcotizing effect
of the "Both Sides Do It" Beltway press and Sunday Shows had on the Mopes in
the Middle. If we could pry their eyes open for just a moment -- force them to see what was really happening to their country in their name...
But it was a vain hope.
Perhaps, with 1000 times the media reach and firepower that the Liberal
blogosphere had at its peak, we might have been able to pull it off. But
by then the Republican base was hopelessly addicted to its own rage and racism and the lies Fox News and Hate Radio fed them every day.
And the Mopes in the Middle vastly preferred lolling in a tepid pool of Both
Sides Do It goo to a cold shower of facts. Then as now, they don't
know. They don't wanna know. And they get very angry if you try to
make them know.
All available evidence shows that the only force that can pry them out of
their False Equivalence Goo Spa and spur them in the general direction of
productive (if fleeting) civic engagement is having the metaphorical red-hot
poker of Republican corruption and catastrophe shoved straight up their
metaphorical collective asses.
Or, to put it a little less graphically, the only time they can be moved
to action is when economic and social pain affects them personally and
profoundly. Then and only then can they be moved to lumber out of their
comforting goo bath to go stumbling into the world looking for
scapegoats.
Which, in itself, can be either good news for democracy, or bad news.
Because once they are roused to action, the Mopes in the Middle are none too
picky about who they blame for what has happened to them: they're as likely to
hold trans people, Mexicans and Democrats responsible for their reduced
circumstances as they are fascists, Republican looters and degenerates, and
evil billionaires.
And any grifter running against "the system" or "the duopoly" or "politicians
in Washington" will always have the inside track with these idiots.
We of what is left of the Liberal blogosphere will go right on writing.
Some of us also podcast now or are frequent podcast/radio guests, so we'll go
on with that as well because trying to make sense of the world and
sharing it with others is why we do what we do. And there is intrinsic
value in that. Every
"I never thought of it from that perspective" or
"Once you put it that way it started to make sense" or
"I thought I was the only one" we get from readers or listeners is
worth its weight in gold.
Of course, we'll gratefully take the gold too, but you get what I'm
saying.
However, for the time being, I think many of us have lost much of our faith in
both the utility of persuasion and in most of the American
people. It is a loss that many of us are grieving.
There’s a grief I don’t see named anywhere. It belongs specifically to people who are older, who have fought long and hard, who still care deeply — and who are now watching the possibility of a better future slip away at the exact moment their own capacity is slowing down. And not just a better future for themselves, but for the younger generations they love so dearly. Mad and sad at the same time. Carrying decades of investment in institutions and movements and people, and watching all of it under threat and being torn down.
