All the way back during the closing days of the Before Time, as the GOP was loping eagerly at speed towards the monstrous abyss into which they have now dragged us, I began documenting a rapidly spreading Republican condition, which I called Republican Detachment Disorder.
From me in January of 2016:
Now that Donald Barnum Trump, Failgunner Ted Cruz and the caravan of benighted shoutycracker GOP candidate wannabes that follow them around have removed any lingering doubt that nothing short of the Bến Tre Option --'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'-- will ever "fix" what is actually wrong with the GOP, the Republican establishment's most obedient and reliable public avatars have all suddenly come down with the same, tragic affliction: Republican Detachment Disorder.Symptoms include adopting the basic Liberal critique of the Right chapter-and-verse while forgetting to acknowledgment that "Liberals" as such even exist, and pretending that "the Republican establishment" is some mysterious directorate that you barely know which meets in a secret lair far, far away instead of a club which you have been a card-carrying member of for your entire adult life.Today's spotlight Republican Detachment Disorder sufferer: David Frum.Maybe the Republican Establishment Can’t Have It AllGiven their failure to take down Donald Trump, is it time for GOP elites to let go of some cherished inward-facing policy priorities?...Maybe it’s time for the party’s elites to let go of some of their cherished inward-facing policy priorities.Notice how RDD particularly affects the speech centers of the brain. "[T]he Republican Establishment" instead of "we". "Given their failure" instead of "Given our failure." "[T]he party's elite" instead of "Me and David Brooks and Michael Gerson and Ross Douthat and the rich fuckers we work for".Sad, really.But there is hope!With your generous support, blogs like this can continue working tirelessly towards the goal of eliminating RDD in our lifetime...
Which I simplified to this in March of 2016:
It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.
Then I spent more time than I should have documenting one prominent Republican/Conservative after another deploying the same lies in the same order. That the GOP had gone spontaneously mad. That they had nothing to do with it. That once they caught wind of it they'd righteously rebuked everyone involved, but before that moment there was nothing detectably wrong with the GOP.
Every one of these lies was and is ludicrous on its face, and yet the promulgators of these lies were invited to spout them on the largest legacy media outlets in the country, while those on the Left who had been warning for decades about the dangerous trajectory of the GOP were given the stiff arm and the stink-eye by those same legacy media outlets.
Which led me to ask why?
And the answer is pretty simple and twofold.
First, the creators of this new mythology already had deep, fraternal ties to major legacy media outlets. They all knew each other professionally and socially, so once places like MSNBC went full-time into the Republican reputation rehab business, GOP spin doctors and comms people and ad merchants who had bet wrong on the rise of Trump and fallen from grace from the party were lining up three deep to get the Nicole Wallace treatment.
And second, the gauzy, heroic bunkum these Never Trumpers were selling was much more congenial to the legacy media's self-image than the hard truths Lefty writers and podcasts were offering. In the actual history of the era that Liberals were documenting, the legacy media was deeply complicit in the rise of a monster like Trump, spending decades ostentatiously ignoring what was really going on on the Right, or, when the stench of racism and crazy leaking out of GOP containment got too knock-the-flies-off-a-shitwagon strong to ignore, they'd "Both Sides Do It" handwave any concerns.
Obviously this is a story the legacy media wants no part of.
But the fiction the Never Trumpers were selling? That the entire Republican base just suddenly went nuts one day and no one coulda seen it coming? That maybe a lot of it was actually justifiable backlash to all those terrible, imaginary excesses of the Left? That was a story the Beltway was only too happy to metabolize, to repeat endlessly, and to promote to the front of the line any recently-former Republican who was willing to help them sell it.
And over the course of the last decade you can actually track as this bullshit hardened into the foundation of Beltway-approved agreed-upon history of the era. Then, once the foundation was laid, came all of the refinements and embellishments.
So what we're going to do now is step back in time to 2016 and watch as Republican Detachment Disorder became the go-to alibi for Conservatives trying to run away from what they had helped do to their own party. Then we're going to jump back to present day for a small taste of how that fiction has evolved. For the stroll down Cursed Memory Lane, I'll mostly provide links only to Conservatives as they floated their own variation of RDD. If you want to dive deeper, have at it.
January, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Tucker Carlson, Super Class Warrior Hero Guy.
January, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Boss Limbaugh.
In his article in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan's former protege -- Young Conor Friedersdorf -- makes the following case:
Rush Limbaugh Doesn't Know He's Part of the Establishment
A portrait of a man who is unaware of his role in the system that he savages...
February, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Frank Luntz.February, 2016: David Brooks' Life When It Is Written Will Read Better Than It Lived
David Brooks -- the world's most ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual, globe-trotting lecturer on character and humility and Patient Zero of Republican Detachment Disorder -- managed to write an entire fucking column about the madness which has killed his Republican Party...
...without mentioning the word "Republican" at all.
Instead...
They want “outsiders"
They delegitimize...
They’re willing to trample...
they don’t recognize other people...
They suffer from a form of political narcissism...
they don’t accept the legitimacy of...
They don’t recognize restraints.
They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.
The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience...
The antipolitics people don’t accept...
They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations...
The antipolitics people refuse compromise...February, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ron Fournier, The Sad Clown of Centrism
March, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson
Themselves. Them. Not "me". Them. Thus begins the tsk-tsking cavil lecture of yet another Republican who stood proudly with a party that has been coasting along on the momentum of the Southern Strategy for his entire adult life. Yet another Republican who stood proudly by an Administration which resorted without hesitation to the tried-and-true Republican electoral strategy of Fox News, Hate Radio, mass-slander and demonization to win re-election in 2004...April, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Joe Scarborough
May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Peggy Noonan Finds Her Magic Cab Driver
May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Jennifer Rubin
Key Date. From NPR, May 26, 2016: Donald Trump Clinches GOP Nomination
June, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ramesh Ponnuru
By June of 2016, Suddenly There Is No "I" In "Republican" Note the time. Almost exactly decade ago, for all of these Conservative heavy-hitters and dozens of others, their political pronouns had all begun to change.
Key Date. From CNN, July 19, 2016: It’s official: Trump is Republican nominee
July, 2016: Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero
September, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: George Will
October 20, 2016: Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol -- Cannibals Fighting Over The Place Settings -- in which they traded "This wasn't my fault, this was your fault" finger-pointing.
December, 2017: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder [Bret Stephens]
December, 2017: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Charlie Sykes
They're all in on it. All of them. And 18 months to two years is officially the new, Beltway Approved Absolution Lifeboat. And all of the Republican scumbags who reaped enormous rewards for decades paving the road down which Donald Trump shambled to the White House -- who are now frantically rebranding themselves as "independent" 30 years too late once -- are scrambling on board. From Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough yesterday: "Republicans across the United States will now pay a heavy price for two years of moral indifference."
Now buckle up as we quantum leap from a decade ago to five days ago to observe how deeply rooted in the everyday political language of Never Trumpers this detachment disorder has become, and how every other political event has been warped to fit that narrative.
The occasion was The Bulwark's live thing in Los Angeles. Big crowds. Much merch. Much call-and-response. Pod Save lad(s) showed up. And during the event, Bulwark owner and publisher, Sarah Longwell, regaled the audience with her version of history...
Sam Stein: What is the Bush line? Like what actually number is the Bush line?
Sarah Longwell: Uh this is a great question... It's 32%. But that is that is the number that George W. Bush was at when he left office. Okay? And the reason again that this is important is if you think about the historical precedent when Bush left office, the Republican party never recovered from his unpopularity.
This is so ridiculous I almost don't know where to begin. In 2010, Longwell was working for conservative PR outfit in Washington D.C. and was recruited into the Log Cabin Republicans, which she eventually rose to chair. From that vantage point, surely she could not have missed the Giant Red Wave that deluged Washington in 2010 and completely reverse the GOP's political fortunes.
I mean, I don't know exactly how Ms. Longwell would measure "recovered popularity", but it seems to me that taking back the House in 2010 with a net gain of 63 seats -- the largest turnover of seats by either party since 1948 -- constitutes a pretty good metric of resurgent popularity. As does the net seven seat Republican pickup in the Senate, picking up six governorships, 680 state legislative seats, flipping control of 20 legislative chambers across the country, and having "independent" voters, who had largely voted for Democrats in 2006 and 2008, swinging overwhelmingly to the right.
And how did Sarah Longwell's party achieve this amazing feat? They did it by throwing everything they had into the largest coordinated campaign of often openly racist slander, obstruction, sabotage, and fear-mongering in modern political history, all aimed at destroying Obama before he even got started. If you're interested in the gory details, we did a whole podcast about that very subject last week:
Add to that the massive Republican "Tea Party" branding scam in which the legacy media abetted the lie that somehow the base of the party had just up and disappeared one day and had been replaced by a brand new "movement" -- heavily financed by the Kochs and promoted around the clock by Fox News. These Teabaggers had two things in common: they swore they'd never heard of George W. Bush and they despised the black guy in the White House and eagerly rallied behind every racist lie about Death Panels and "government takeovers" and birth certificates and on and on. They flooded town hall meetings, shrieking about Communists. They suddenly cared about deficits.
In congress, Republicans did everything the could to drag the Great Recession out as long as possible -- ferociously opposing the Obama plan for saving the economy, extorting concessions so that the final package was only half the size it should have been (and a third of that was tax cuts) and then voting against everything along party lines. So by 2010, with the Republican base rage-drunk on Fox News racist propaganda, and hapless "independents" terrified by the legacy media repeating Conservative lies unchallenged, the GOP was able to grab hold of real levers of power at the national and state level and use them to further hobble Obama administration initiatives.
Ms. Longwell resumes.
Longwell: He had a bad war and he had a bad economy. That sounds familiar, right? And so when you have those things, what happened is then the Republicans went into the wilderness. They lost two national elections. They struggled with their political identity only to have Trump then come in and completely revamp the party.
First, notice the pronouns? The same sleight of hand as a decade earlier. "the Republicans went...", "They lost...", "They struggled...", not "We lost..." or "We struggled..."
Second, in the Republican voter's berserk reaction to Barack Obama -- their eight-year-long racist primal scream -- it's painfully obvious that their "political identity" was right there in plain sight for anyone to see who cared to. Once a reality show douchebag and skeevy real estates slimeball named Donald Trump latched onto the biggest and most overtly racist lie of that era and ran with it (from Politico, August 4, 2010) --
41% of GOP: Obama foreign-born
On President Barack Obama’s birthday, a new CNN/Opinion Research released Wednesday shows 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country.
-- it's very clear that a plurality of the party had no "political identity" problem at all.
Now, stack that Big Stupid Lie on top of all the other Big Stupid Lies Republicans believed. For example:
From Politifact, December 18, 2009:
PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'Death panels'
Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.
"Death panels."
From KUNC Colorado, June 18, 2012:As the Supreme Court is about to rule on the constitutionality of the health care law, one-third of Americans are worrying about a part of the legislation that isn’t there.
A Kaiser Family Foundation’s tracking poll [.pdf] found in March that 36 percent of respondents erroneously believe that the law “would allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” Another 20 percent said they are not sure whether it does.
The foundation, a nonpartisan organization that provides health policy analysis, reports the “prevalence of these misconceptions is essentially the same it was at the end of 2010.”
From PolitiFact, December 17, 2010:
PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'A government takeover of health care'
In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."
"Takeovers are like coups," Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. "They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."
The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the "public option" concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.
But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn't let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.
From Pew, November 2, 2010:Majority of Republicans No Longer See Evidence of Global Warming
A 53%-majority of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, fully 70% say there is no evidence.
Add to these Big Stupid Lies all the dozens of Smaller Stupid Lies that were firehosing out of the Conservative media puke-funnel, hyped by Republican party leaders, and passed along uncritically by the legacy media, and even a low-born, nobody blogger from the middle of Middle America like me could see that this was not a party lost in "the political wilderness" in any way.
In fact, the "political identity" of the Republican party was never in question at all.
They were and are the same mob of bigots and imbeciles we Liberals have been warning about for decades. The "reprogrammable meatbags" which the GOP has spent decades and billions of dollars cultivating, and about which I've been writing about on this here blog for +21 years.
And yet back in the Before Time when it might have mattered. not a single Never Trump you can name had a problem with any of it. They were perfectly willing to ride this rage-and-racism fueled rocket as long as it took them where they wanted to go. As long as it got their guys elected. Which is why Longwell's notion that "Trump [came] in and completely revamp the party" is not just laughable, but exactly backwards: Trump didn't change the party, he revealed it. The base weren't bamboozled by Trump, the base manifested Trump as the avatar of their truest selves.
And that's the shame Never Trumpers refuse to face. That they built the Republican electoral meth lab, supplied the chemicals and created the distribution network. All Trump ever did was use their ow lab and their own chemicals to cook their own product better and purer than they did.
Back to Ms. Longwell for her solution:
Longwell: But like the one way that [the Republican party might become something that is not a criminal enterprise, that is not like an authoritarian fascist enterprise] ... the one way that it would happen is for Donald Trump to leave office with America going that fucking sucked. Like we don't want to do that again. We want to discredit Trump and everybody in his administration, right? You want Rubio and JD Vance to wear Trump like an albatross around their necks.
Well best of luck with that. I hope it works. However, since I've been to this rodeo more than once already, I feel it is my duty to mention that, prior to Trump, the previous Worst President in Modern American History was George W. Bush. After whom her "Bush line" is named. And after he left office, there was a broad consensus that, god damn, that was awful. And golly, we sure don't want to do that again!
And yet, in the blink of an eye, the Republican base had scuttled through the Bush-Off Machine and was reborn as blameless, patriotic Tea Baggers.
Conservative hacks and henchmen in the media all kept their jobs or got promotions, and many of the Bush administration's loudest cheerleaders were rewarded with positions at The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Overnight, the entire Conservative media machine became the very loud, very racist, and very profitable Voice of the Resistance.
Ann Coulter went right on making scads of cash writing garbage.
Just before Obama took office 2008, Rush Limbaugh signed a $400 million, 8-year deal.
Bush's go-to torture apologist, John Yoo, was appointed the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law.
Paul "Spitcomb" Wolfowitz was gifted the presidency of the World Bank.
Dick Cheney's mini-me spawn, Liz, was elected to the House and quickly rose to a leadership position by telling monstrous, toxic lies just like dear old dad.
And as far as I can tell, most of the rest of them ended up being re-elected to congress, as regular MSNBC contributors, or with their own shows on MSNBC.
And I see no reason why the people with the megaphones would rerun the process of mass strategic forgettery and ouchless absolution post-Trump just as they did post-George W. Because RDD is still as contagious as the flu and more persistent than herpes.
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