As surprising as Trump’s young presidency has been, it’s also the natural outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics.
Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 after nationalizing the election into broad themes and catchphrases. Newt Gingrich, the marshal of these efforts, even released a list of words Republican candidates should use to glorify themselves (common sense, prosperity, empower) and hammer their opponents (liberal, pathetic, traitors); soon, every Republican in Congress spoke the same language, using words carefully run through focus groups by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Budgets for House committees were cut, bleeding away policy experts, and GOP committee chairs were selected based on loyalty to the party and how much money they could raise.
.. Gone were the days when members were incentivized to speak with nuance, or hone a policy expertise (especially as committee chairs could now serve for only six years).
.. President George W. Bush didn’t realize he was supposed to just be a passive bill-signing machine; he kept insisting that Republicans enact his priorities, which, often, were not very conservative—No Child Left Behind Act, steel tariffs, a tax cut with few supply-side elements. His worst transgression, for me, was the budget-busting Medicare Part D legislation, which massively expanded the welfare state and the national debt, yet was enthusiastically supported by a great many House conservatives, including Congressman Paul Ryan, who had claimed to hold office for the purpose of abolishing entitlement programs.
.. In the 14 years since then, I have watched from the sidelines as Republican policy analysis and research have virtually disappeared altogether, replaced with sound bites and talking points.
.. The Heritage Foundation morphed into Heritage Action for America, ceasing to do any real research and losing all its best policy experts as it transformed from an august center whose focus was the study and development of public policy into one devoted mainly to amplifying political campaign slogans.
.. Talk radio and Fox News, where no idea too complicated for a mind with a sixth-grade education is ever heard, became the tail wagging the conservative dog.
.. Reagan, who granted amnesty to undocumentedimmigrants in 1986
.. no workable concept that adhered to the many promises Republicans had made, like coverage for pre-existing conditions and the assurance that nobody would lose their coverage.
.. their intellectual infrastructure is badly damaged, in need of repair
.. what conservative intellectuals really need for a full-blown revival is a crushing Republican defeat—Goldwater plus Watergate rolled into one. A defeat so massive there can be no doubt about the message it sends that
.. Some conservative thinkers, such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, speculate that Mitt Romney may emerge as the leader of a sane, modern, technocratic wing of an intellectually revitalized GOP
Deconstructing Frank Luntz’s Obstructionist Health Care Reform Memo
Luntz warns that “if the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost and every word in this document is useless.’”
.. Luntz establishes a straw man argument against a non-existent health plan.
.. “Humanize your approach,” but argue that health care reform “will result in delayed and potentially even denied treatment, procedures and/or medications.” “Acknowledge the crisis” but ask your constituents “would you rather… ‘pay the costs you pay today for the quality of care you currently receive,’ OR ‘Pay less for your care, but potentially have to wait weeks for tests and months for treatments you need.”
.. “This plays into more favorable Republican territory by protecting individual care while downplays the need for a comprehensive national plan,” the memo states.
.. Readers are also instructed to conflate Obama’s fairly moderate hybrid approach to reform (i.e. building on the current private/public system of delivering health care) with “denial horror stories from Canada & Co.”
.. Republicans will provide “in a word, more: ‘more access to more treatments and more doctors…with less interference from insurance companies and Washington politicians and special interests.’”
.. pretending that the Republicans actually have some kind of health care solution (the memo instructs Republicans to focus on targeting waste, fraud and abuse).
What is the long-term effect of Donald Trump?
“He is distinct only in being someone of such prominence saying such things. I think the real change was Facebook and Twitter in 2009. Trump is just a symptom.”
.. In this view, the Trump effect is not unique to the man, but is a natural, almost inevitable result of economic and social forces unleashed by swift, powerful technological change that had, even before Trump’s candidacy, made the country meaner, more confrontational and more divided.
.. Previous bursts of populism have usually burned through in less than a generation, fading away as economic expansion, war or political reform eased people’s sense of insecurity.
.. The tea party, the Occupy movement, and Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign all demonstrated a popular hunger for thoroughgoing change and a realignment of the political parties.
.. Buskirk, 47, said Trump’s blunt rhetoric and coarse language would have been startling decades ago but today only mirrors a society in which many people feel stifled by new limits on what can be said at work or school. “We’d all like a high level of public discourse,” he said, “but a 3 a.m. tweetstorm isn’t among my worries about the next generation.”
.. Trump supporters see not his coarseness or vulgarity, but a sense that an ordinary person can rise up and make a difference.”
.. and in a way, it’s even better for Trump if he loses because then his policies never have to be tested.”
.. Pop music, which often reflects the mood of the country, has been trending slower and darker, following a period of much more energetic hits around the start of the economic recovery in 2009
.. “This was the summer of unhappy popular music,” Ross said. “There’s an almost complete dearth of up-tempo, major-chord happiness. There’s no tempo right now in country, pop, R&B, anywhere.”
.. Ross said the current popularity of slow, low-energy songs is the most striking run of such music since the early 1980s — also a time of severe economic stress.
.. “There will never be a sports talk show called ‘You May Be Right,’ no TV roundtables called ‘Point Well Taken.’ ”
.. “Early on, people were horrified by his offensive statements,” Luntz said. “But as time went on, they came to enjoy it and absorb it. There’s no filter anymore. I hear Trump’s words over and over: ‘We have to keep them out.’ Trump has liberated their inner voice, and I’m shocked at what I hear now.”
.. Luntz sees no indication that the rougher rhetoric is a passing fad. “The more coarse language gets, the more coarse it stays,” he said. “We don’t go back. We don’t suddenly become civil and good to each other.”
In Luntz’s focus groups recently, the tone of disagreements has deteriorated into the kind of attacks that once would have silenced the room. “ ‘You’re an idiot’ has become relatively common,” he said. “It’s gotten to the point where I cannot stop people from yelling at each other.”
.. Luntz has seen a sharp increase in parents telling him that their children are using Trump-inspired smears at school. “It’s ‘Lyin’ Thomas’ and ‘Little David’ in fifth or sixth grade,”
.. One boy brought me his cellphone to show me Trump’s tweets. They know his insults by heart. hey’re scared.”
.. In a culture in which characters on reality-TV shows lash out at one another for sport, in a society in which bonds of trust have frayed as relationships become distanced from physical proximity, “along comes Donald Trump to give us permission to say out loud the things we’ve been saying anonymously online,”
.. “He’s closer to how a lot of people are living than Hillary Clinton. A lot of men talk exactly like Trump online; he’s just the first person to do that while running for president.”
.. “People are immersed in their own worlds now. We were already being horrible to each other on social media, so we were kind of ripe for someone to come along and further dehumanize us.”
.. Even before Trump came along, cable news had morphed from traditional reporting to “mainly people yelling at each other,” as McGrath put it.
.. “He has obliterated the idea that tone matters, . . . that there is such a thing as going too far. For the next person who tries it, it will seem less shocking because this has been accepted by the media who report it in detail (mostly without shock or complaint) and by the rest of us who grumble but keep watching.”
Why the GOP Will Never Accept President Hillary Clinton
One of the roots of this argument can be found in the famous list of words that the then-Rep. Newt Gingrich and pollster/communications strategist Frank Luntz offered Republican candidates in the run-up to the 1994 midterms. “These are powerful words,” they said, “words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party. … decay… failure (fail)… collapse(ing)… deeper… crisis…… corrupt…destructive… destroy… sick… pathetic… lie… … betray… traitors…”
.. They paint the opposition not simply as incompetent, but as malevolent. And it is an approach to politics that fits perfectly with the rise of right-wing talk radio
.. Conspiracy theories emerged suggesting that Obama, the Chicago community organizer, had managed to get his liberal, black friends at ACORN (the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to steal the national election. A year after an election that Obama had won by 10 million votes ..
.. “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” Among Republicans, only 27 percent say Obama actually won the race, with 52 percent—an outright majority—saying ACORN had stolen it, and 21 percent were undecided.
.. 43 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim
.. more than half of Republicans do not think Obama was born in the United States.
.. That may help explain why they have nominated a candidate who in 2011 repeatedly and insistently argued that he had unearthed evidence so astounding that “you wouldn’t believe” what his investigators had turned up. We still haven’t seen it.
.. wouldn’t the Republican Party use every device at its command to thwart the Democratic president’s malevolent goals? Threaten to default on the government’s debt, thus risking the collapse of the global financial system? Sure; that’s the way to force Obama to sign the repeal of Obamacare. Refuse to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee with a year left in the president’s term?
.. “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
.. Much like the most militantly revolutionary radicals of the late 1960s and early 70s, Trump’s most ardent supporters are convinced that they are battling an irredeemably corrupt system, which must be combated “by any means necessary.” If the only way they can lose (as Trump said of Pennsylvania) is to be cheated out of their victory, the normal reconciliation between victor and vanquished does not apply.