Irreconcilable Differences

Mr. Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark chose to ring out the old year and ring in the new by singing a few rousing choruses out of  his dog-eared "Liberals made us do racism" hymnal.  

Tucker Carlson and the Dangers of Crying Wolf

First comes an acknowledgement of that-which-can-no-longer-be-denied: the now-irrefutable fact that Republicans do not give a shit about getting caught with their Klan rags hanging out.

There are lot of explanations for what’s happening here, and most of them are not mutually exclusive, but we have to reckon with the fact that for much of the Carlson-esque right, “racism” no longer carries any stigma. They literally no longer give a shit.

Then comes the hard pivot to Sykes' favorite alibi: Smug Liberal made them do it!

I wrote about this in “How The Right Lost Its Mind”. Much of this is adapted from the book:

Sell them books baby! 

Crying wolf had serious consequences for both sides, because over time our audiences shrugged off the charges, responding to accusations of racism with an eye roll and “Not this again.”

Both sides?  Really?  And what exactly were the charges against Dems again? That Clinton was a murdered?  That Barack Obama was a Kenyan communist sleeper cell.  And Democrats are terrorist-living, Murrica-hating, commie filth.  

Was any of that true?  Or was it all the usual poisonous red meat that GOP leadership and Conservatives media always lobs to its base to keep them spun of?

And what about that Republican base?  What is the Left's critique of the GOP?  That they build a base out of pandering to bigots, gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, anti-semites and on and on and on.  That they were building a monster machine that was manufacturing armies of orcs and hobgoblins that they would one day be unable to control.

Well look around, kids.  The Republican party became exactly what the Left warned it would become, while frauds like Sykes were building careers slandering us as crackpot alarmists.  And now that is has come to pass that the Left was right about the Right all along, can Sykes summon the basic decency to own up to it?  

Aw hell no.  

Instead, he blames us for it.

By the time the real thing came along, the Left had used up its rhetorical ammunition, and the Right had become numb to the realities of the bigots around them.

Many on the Left seemed genuinely shocked that their charges of racism, sexism, and xenophobia did not seem to dent Trump’s popularity with conservatives. Only belatedly did some of them realize that this may have been, at least in part, the price they paid for crying wolf for decades. Conservatives had become accustomed to being called mean, dumb, benighted bigots.

So liberally had epithets been hurled at them, that conservatives came to recognize charges of “racism” as merely the Left’s code for “I don’t like you, shut up.”...

Gotta say, this is a helluvan alliance we've got going here. 

For Democrats -- who make up, y'know, 99.98% of this "alliance" -- it's somehow never a good time ask the most basic, obvious questions about how the Republican party came to be the toxic shitpile of bigots and imbeciles it is and who profited from helping to make it so.  

But for Never Trumpers -- who make up, y'know, .0001% of this "alliance" -- it's somehow never a bad time to go out of their way to burnish their "political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties or tribal prejudices" credentials by shitting on the Left.  By trying to hang the ugliest of their sins around our necks, and "both sidesing" --

But this does not let conservatives off the hook.

-- the rest.  

I'm not fool enough to think that recently-former Republicans like Sykes can fundamentally change.  That at this late stage in their lives they are capable of undoing all the mental and emotional corrosion that comes from steeping in the world of Conservative media for decades.  They're never going to stop bitching that the Democratic party isn't GOP lite.  Never going to stop lighting votives to  their  radically fictionalized history of Bill Buckley or St. Reagan, or reciting Thee Tragedie of Robert Bork every time the Republican Supreme Court shows its fascist ass.

Their professional lives were defined by reflexively hating us.  Mocking us.  And now, to cope with the fact that everything we warned would happen has happened, they pretend we don't exist.  They block us out so they can go right on punching the same, old Liberal straw men.  

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

But I do wonder how they maintain their fairy tales when one of their own -- someone prominent, successful, well-respected and who in all the rooms where it happened -- breaks bad.  

Or, rather, breaks good.

Consider the "Liberals made us do racism!" tall tales that Sykes repeats like a magic spell to ward off decades of inconvenient history as you read the following selections from Stuart Stevens' "It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump" (with emphasis added.)

This:

So many Republicans embraced Trump’s view that they were victims, as was he, because they had actually believed this all along. Theirs was a white birthright, and the rise of nonwhites was an unjust usurping of their rights.

And this:

The Republican decision to exploit the race issue and abandon the option of becoming a party of reform manifested itself in the 1961 speech in Atlanta by Barry Goldwater to a gathering of Southern Republicans. “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are,” he declared.

And this:

Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party.

And this:

[The Republican party] concluded that nothing positive would have much effect, so the logical and best course was to minimize the impact of black voters in various ways. This was the Nixon strategy in 1972. It was the Trump strategy in 2016. 

And this:

There is a collective blame shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously failed the principles it claimed to represent.

And this:

The reason African Americans overwhelmingly reject Republicans isn’t based on word choices or phrasing. It’s based on policy. It isn’t how Republicans are talking to black voters that results in 90 percent or more of those voters refusing to vote for Republicans. It’s what the Republicans are doing, once elected.

And this:

But anger and racism and fear of the future have always lurked beneath the surface of the Christian right, like a menacing shark disturbing a calm ocean.

And this:

The devices the Republicans used are variations on a theme going back more than 150 years. They target the socioeconomic characteristics of a people (poverty, lack of mobility, illiteracy, etc.) and then soak the new laws in “racially neutral justifications—such as administrative efficiency” or “fiscal responsibility”—to cover the discriminatory intent. Republican lawmakers then act aggrieved, shocked, and wounded that anyone would question their stated purpose for excluding millions of American citizens from the ballot box.

So much for "crying wolf".

The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial.

But what about Republican heroes like Bill Buckley?  Huh??  Huh??

Buckley was often a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.

OK, then what about St. Ronald Reagan?   Huh?  Whatabout that?

[Referring to Reagan] The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear.

Turns out the the wolf was real and growing in strength all along 

What happened to the Republican Party is that slowly over half a century the kooks and weirdos and social misfits of a conservative ideology started discovering that they could force reasonable people to support unreasonable positions through fear.

Sounds remarkably like a blog post from certain dirty, disreputable Liberal from [checks notes] 18 years ago doesn't it?

The reasons that Never Trumpers like Sykes continue to blot out the actual history of the Republican party and block any dirty, disreputable who says otherwise are clear and obvious.  But is it of interest to me how these recently-former Republicans deal with these irreconcilable histories among themselves.  

For now they can just rely on our broken and complicit media to let these irreconcilable histories coexist unchallenged.  But eventually, Stuart Stevens' brutal, true recollection of the past --

Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party.

-- will fade and the much more agreeable, Both Sideists Sykes mythology -- 

Only belatedly did some of [us dirty, disreputable Liberals] realize that this may have been, at least in part, the price they paid for crying wolf for decades.

-- will become their own Nicene Creed, complete with its own saints, sinners and heretics.

Because really, who but a few dirty, disreputable Liberals care enough about how we got to where we are to object as the problematic past is once again bulldozed down the Memory Hole.

Memory Is The Liberal Superpower