Yes, There Is a Fever. No, It’s Not the One Pundits Are Obsessed With.

Today's subjects:  Deplorables and The Fever.  That one notable moment from the 2016 presidential campaign that the meatheads still bitterly cling to like they cling their guns and their Bible.

See what I did there?

But simply remembering that moment tells us very little, which is why it is so much more important to do the thing that has made Liberals permanent media pariahs: contextualizing that moment.  Looking at the larger trajectory of events during which that moment comes and why it completely freaked out the pundits and the Very Serious Centrists and the elite Conservative influencers.

Before Biden and Before Trump and before Obama, and before podcasting, there were Liberal  bloggers.  And even all the way back then, we believed our mission to be explaining the world we were living in to people who were finding it incomprehensible.  

We were the ones who looked at the election of George W. Bush, then his re-election despite being manifestly unfit for the job, then looked at the rubble and ruin he left in his wake and tried to make sense of it all.  

How could this be us?

How could this be America?

And, as bloggers, in between "documenting the atrocities" (as we used to say), some of us would widen our lenses and try to explain what was happening on the Right, why it was only going to get worse, and why the American political media was in complete denial about it.

So, in that spirit, I'm going to be incredibly self-indulgent by reposting a couple of paragraphs from a post of mine from 16 years ago -- October of 2008 -- entitled  "Understanding the Right #1".

It was a post in which I explicitly analogized the Republican base to drug addicts.  They loved Reagan because he was their first, pure, uncut high.  They hated Bill Clinton because Bill Clinton was methadone maintenance "all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge."

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?

That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:

“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”

Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.

It is the lie the hagged-out Cokie Roberts pushes week after week after week on “This Week…”

It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.

It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests...

These observations weren't some wild flights of imagination.  This was more or less the considered opinion of most Liberal writers at the time.  That the Republican party base was a volatile mob of bigots and fools, that the GOP leadership and Conserative media kept stoking the rage and paranoia of the base to make money and hold onto power, and that the mainstream media and elite conservatives were flat-out lying about it.

It was a scary thought.  And, at the time, it was also incredibly transgressive to come out and say that most of our problems are caused by a Republican party that is very clearly losing its mind, and that, rather that tell the truth about our situation, venerable institutions like The New York Times and Meet the Press are selling their readers and viewers the incredibly toxic "Both Sides Do It" lie

This is how the “Deplorable” freakout started.   From a retrospective in the Washington Post, August 31, 2021:

Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ speech shocked voters five years ago — but some feel it was prescient

Hillary Clinton said those three words in the final months of her 2016 presidential campaign, making rhetorical and political history. There were two kinds of Donald Trump supporters, she explained: Voters who feel abandoned and desperate, who she placed in one metaphorical basket, and those she called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic” — her “basket of deplorables.”

On Sept. 9, 2016, Clinton was the opening act for Barbra Streisand at a glitzy fundraiser in New York City. A group of LGBTQ supporters were gathered at Cipriani restaurant, and the Democratic candidate had one job: to fire up her donors.

“I am all that stands between you and the apocalypse,” Clinton told the cheering crowd. She launched into all the things she found “deplorable” about Trump: He threatened marriage equality, cozied up to white supremacists, made racist and sexist remarks — all things she found “so personally offensive.”

She warned there were two months left in the race and no one should assume he wouldn’t be elected anyway. “Just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” There was laughter and applause.

The people in this basket, emboldened by Trump’s tweets, were “irredeemable,” she said. But there was another basket: Trump supporters who just felt the government had let them down and wanted change — and Democrats had to empathize to win these voters.

It spread like a prairie fire mainly because it threw pundits and Centrists and elite Conservatives a life preserver. Yay! Instead of reporting on the dire threat the Republican party had become, they could keep the Both Sides Do It lie stoked for another few weeks!  

It was all over Politico.  It was in Time magazine.  Remember Time magazine!

It was in Bustle: Transcript Of Clinton's "Deplorables" Remark

It was in PolitiFact: In Context: Hillary Clinton and the 'basket of deplorables 

It was in Vox Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables, explained   

The NPR Tone Police made a five course meal out of it.  From September 10, 2016:

Hillary Clinton's 'Basket Of Deplorables,' In Full Context Of This Ugly Campaign

Memo to candidates: Stop generalizing and psychoanalyzing your opponents' supporters. It never works out well for you.

The latest to fall into that trap is Hillary Clinton. The Democratic nominee, at a New York fundraiser Friday night with liberal donors and Barbra Streisand, said "half" of Trump supporters fit into a "basket of deplorables," while the other half are people who feel the government has let them down and need understanding and empathy.

The comments have rocketed around the Internet, infuriated conservatives and threaten to once again throw salt in the wound of the American cultural divide in a presidential election that has seen vitriol and insults, fueled by Donald Trump, that have become the norm. The remarks also remind of inflammatory remarks in recent presidential elections on both sides...[

This was David Brooks on PBS the same week:

…the irredeemable is what leapt out at me.

And the person who was at the Emanuel Baptist — AME Church in Charleston, they believe the guy who shot and killed their close friends was redeemable, but she thinks millions of Americans aren't?

And that speaks and I think it plays, because there is a brittleness there. And I don't know if there is a brittleness within. I sort of doubt it. I think she's probably a very good person within. But there has been a brittleness to her public persona that has been ungenerous and ungracious. And it plays a little to that and why people just don't want to latch on. 

And of course that was Brooks recycling his own column in the New York Times, September 13, 2016

The Avalanche of Distrust

I’m beginning to think this whole sordid campaign is being blown along by an acrid gust of distrust. The two main candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are remarkably distrustful. They have set the modern standards for withholding information — his not releasing tax and health records, her not holding regular news conferences or quickly disclosing her pneumonia diagnosis. Both have a problem with spontaneous, reciprocal communication with a hint of vulnerability.

Trump’s convention speech was the perfect embodiment of the politics of distrust. American families, he argued, are under threat from foreigners who are as violent and menacing as they are insidious. Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” riff comes from the same spiritual place. We have in our country, she jibed, millions of bigots, racists, xenophobes and haters — people who are so blackhearted that they are, as she put it, “irredeemable.”...

It was everywhere.

Then, after throwing a full-on hissy fit over it, pundits and Centrists and elite Conservatives could picnic still further on Hillary Clinton sort of walking her comment back. 

From CNN: Clinton expresses regret for saying ‘half’ of Trump supporters are ‘deplorables’

Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” Saturday for comments in which she said “half” of Donald Trump’s supporters are “deplorables,” meaning people who are racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic.

“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ – that was wrong,” Clinton said in a statement in which she also vowed to call out “bigotry” in Trump’s campaign.  

But there was also this counterpoint, from Charles Blow in The New York Times, September 12, 2016:

About the ‘Basket of Deplorables’

...

What Clinton said was impolitic, but it was not incorrect. There are things a politician cannot say. Luckily, I’m not a politician.

Donald Trump is a deplorable candidate — to put it charitably — and anyone who helps him advance his racial, religious and ethnic bigotry is part of that bigotry. Period. Anyone who elevates a sexist is part of that sexism. The same goes for xenophobia. You can’t conveniently separate yourself from the detestable part of him because you sense in him the promise of cultural or economic advantage. That hair cannot be split.

Furthermore, one doesn’t have to actively hate to contribute to a culture that allows hate to flourish.

It doesn’t matter how lovely your family, how honorable your work or service, how devout your faith — if you place ideological adherence or economic self interest above the moral imperative to condemn and denounce a demagogue, then you are deplorable.

And there is some evidence that Trump’s supporters don’t simply have a passive, tacit acceptance of an undesirable platform, but instead have an active set of beliefs that support what is deplorable in Trump...

I understand that people recoil at the notion that they are part of a pejorative basket. I understand the reflexive resistance to having your negative beliefs disrobed and your sense of self dressed down.

I understand your outrage, but I’m unmoved by it. If the basket fits.

And this from CNN, September 11, 2016.   

We turn once again to the Washington Post retrospective article from August 31, 2021:

 Trump — the same man who announced his candidacy by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” — clutched his proverbial pearls, aghast that his opponent had uttered such a shocking slander. His campaign turned that insult into an asset; supporters wore hats and shirts proudly declaring themselves deplorable. Pundits seized on the phrase, debating who does and doesn’t deserve to be called that. Five years later, many believe “deplorables” — figuratively and literally — are here to stay.

“It’s very hard to say you have a message of civility and then turn around and talk about how essentially a quarter of the country is, in your view, a basket of deplorables,” said Jonathan Allen, author of “Shattered,” a study of Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “That is a screeching conflict of her overall message, which is we have a civilized country and we need to be stronger together — that this should be a kinder, gentler, unified country.” 

But Democrats tried that, didn’t they?  Barack Obama’s administration was an eight year lab experiment in continuous and nearly superhuman efforts to reach out to Republicans. Find common ground with Republicans.  Compromise with Republicans.  And Republicans fucking hated him for it.  Back then, all of your favorite Never Trumpers were making their living relentlessly slagging Obama and counseling lockstep obstruction and sabotage. To this day, you will hear Republicans like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley blaming Obama for the divisions in the country.

And this is where the Washington Post article takes a big “On The Other Hand” turn…

Trump repeatedly mocked Clinton voters, but his fans never worried it would hurt him. In fact, they loved him for it, as well as his attacks on the media, the candidates in his own party, John McCain’s war record and the judge in one of his lawsuits. “The more offensive and insulting he could be, the happier he was with it,” Allen said.

When asked about “deplorables,” Nick Merrill, Clinton’s spokesman, said she was never afraid to denounce racism — just two weeks earlier, she gave a significant speech deconstructing the alt-right and the “quest to preserve white maleness” in America. “The deplorable comment may have been politically less than ideal, but it has been proven right again and again over the last five years.”...

Now, many of her fans believe she was prescient about “half” of Trump’s base.

“After four years of President Trump,” Jonathan Allen said. “I think that there are a lot of Democrats and some Republicans who would say that was an undercount. 

And this from the thoroughly deplorable Frank Luntz is the key to understanding the failure of the pundits, the Very Serious Centrists, and elite conservative influencers (emphasis added.)

 Luntz knew it would be an opportunity for Trump to galvanize his base. [Luntz Said]  “I thought she had committed a potentially fatal error: Insult your opponent, attack your opponent, criticize your opponent, even condemn your opponent, but never, ever, ever condemn your opponent’s supporters because you need their votes.” 

This was part of a long-standing, generalized embargo on never, ever taking a hard, critical look at the actual base of the Republican party, and that was creating a dilemma for the  pundits and the Centrists and the elite conservative influencers: Why was the base of the Party of Reagan and Romney supporting Donald Trump?  Why was it that, the worse Trump got, the more they loved him?  And so, to explain away this phenomenon which shattered the basic laws of their entire political cosmos, they concocted the Fever Theory.  

The notion that millions and millions of ordinarily noble, patriotic Republican voters had been seized by some kind of inexplicable, temporary, brain disorder.  Like being drunk.  A state that was irrational and offensive and sometimes even violent, but like a fever, it was transient.  Soon it would surely pass.  

The irony was that, an actual delusional fever really was running wild in the country, but it very much wasn't what the pundits and Centrists and elite conservatives thought it was.

And so, instead we got daily headlines like these from virtually every major political news outlet.

From Politico, Sep 17, 2015: New data show Trump fever breaking

From the Washington Post, October 25, 2017:  

CNN's Jake Tapper asked Jeff Flake a very good question Tuesday. After the senator from Arizona announced he was retiring because he couldn't win a primary in President Trump's Republican Party, Tapper asked: Why not make the case for why Trumpism is bad and let GOP voters decide?

“I think that this fever will break,” Flake said. “I don't know that it'll break by next year.” 

 

From the Chicago Sun-Times, August 15, 2023:  

'Trump fever needs to be broken,’ says rare Republican willing to take on former president

‘I want to see more people stand up to Donald Trump on that stage,’ ex-Illinois House Leader Jim Durkin said of the first GOP debate next week in Milwaukee,

From WNYC Studios radio, March 31, 2023:  Jon Meacham on How the Trump Fever Breaks

From Channel 4 British public broadcast service, November 9, 2022:  Has Trump fever finally broken?

From Roll Call magazine, November 22, 2022:  Let’s talk turkey: Trump fever could be breaking in time for a Thanksgiving feast

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 24, 2023:  Can Tim Scott break the Trump fever for the GOP?

From The Wrap, February 26, 2022:  

Bill Maher Warns Democrats Not to Humiliate Republican Voters Whose ‘Trump Fever’ Is Cooling Down -- “Real Time” host urges liberals to “show graciousness” and fight the temptation to ask, “What the f— were you thinking?”

Washington Post, August 19, 2018 by (oy vey) Ron Fournier

Nov. 6 could be independents’ day

While a viable third party is as elusive as a horned horse, there exists a rare-but-real creature in American politics that can systematically dismantle the status quo: the independent. Untethered to the two major parties, growing in sums and significance, independent candidates and officeholders are the reindeer of American politics.

If these creatures can be corralled into controlling coalitions in legislatures across the country, including the U.S. Senate, they could find a powerful leverage point to break the partisan fever...

And my personal favorite pair of headlines both from CNN

From CNN, September 15, 2015:  Donald Trump fever starting to break

Also from CNN, six years later, November 3, 2021:  Donald Trump fever may be breaking.

Pushing the reassuring fairy tale that what was wrong with the GOP base was some mysterious, exogenous condition that would burn hot and quickly for a while, but then would surely burn itself out, was one of the most aggressive and concerted propaganda campaign we have ever seen in the American political media…and no one except us Liberals recognized it as the toxic delusions that it was.

We Liberals understood that raging paranoia and racism was the baseline resting state of the Republican base, not something that one more Trump outrage was going to cause them to get over.  

And that's the most ominous irony of all.  That it wasn't the Republican base who were afflicted with a  brain-contorting fever: it was those pundits and Centrists and elite conservative influencers.  They were the deluded one.  They were the ones clinging like grim death to a gigantic lie.  They were the ones who attacked anyone who threatened to take their fairy tale away.  And tragically for our democracy, they’re also the ones who control the media and police the parameters of legitimate criticism and conversation.

It was all the same dream, a dream that they had inside their ivory tower, a dream about being savvy experts. 

And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it.

And that monster was Donald Trump.

Now let's talk for a minute about The New York Times' most recent Conservative affirmative action hire:  David French. French was one of the Conservative Evangelical freaks on staff at The National Review, and was the guy that Bill Kristol tried to get to run as an independent in 2016 because the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton was too horrible to contemplate.

As I wrote here, French came with a deeply problematic past, which he hastily "rethought" or pretended he'd never said in order to land the gig.  And so, one year ago, in January of 2023, there he was, up on the Times' Opinions masthead.

The Times explained that they'd brought him on as "[an] expert on the law, faith and politics" and praised him for his "factual and intellectual clarity" and "moral seriousness".  But mysteriously, the words "Republican" or "Conservative" are nowhere to be found in his official Times' C.V.

Anyway, last week he wrote a long column entitled Never Trumpers Never Had a Chance, which he breathlessly reported on things that you and I and every Liberal we know has known about the Republican party for decades.

So we won't bore you with that.

But then, towards the end, he wrote this.

It’s now clear to me that we never had a chance. And the reason is equally clear: We did not truly understand our own party. 

Then he compared Donald Trump with Bill Clinton so fuck you.

Then he wrote this:

I wasn’t just wrong; I was completely, embarrassingly wrong. The winds were shifting. I could sense it, but I didn’t fully understand it. Not until Trump made it all plain. 

Remember, this guy -- who now admits he never had any fucking idea what he was talking about -- is the guy the Times because of his political expertise, his "factual and intellectual clarity" and "moral seriousness".

And more and more,  what happened to David French is becoming a common, stunned epiphany among recently-former Republicans.  The party is really for-real dead, and Never Trumpers will never be welcomed back as liberators once the fever breaks, because the base is permanently and malignantly insane.  

“Deplorable” if you will..  

How does that happen?

Because the pundits and Centrists and elite Conservatives were all sharing the same fever dream.  

The dream that the Republican base was something which it very clearly was not. 

 A dream that most of them still adamantly refuse to wake up from.

Burn The Lifeboats