I’m not sure liberals should point fingers at Charlie Sykes and sneer, although the temptation is understandable. His situation may well be a version of theirs, reflected in a funhouse mirror; it might be one of those moments where you’re better off not asking for whom the bell tolls.
Sykes was the top-rated conservative talk show host in Wisconsin – a central figure in edging the Badger State from solid blue to purple to reddish over the last decade or so – who made national headlines with his confrontational interview with Donald Trump in March 2016, when the real estate tycoon was the unlikely Republican frontrunner after his early primary wins. Unlike most other figures in conservative media and the Republican Party who were initially horrified and amazed by the rise of Trump, Sykes never recanted. He became the object of unbridled hatred and fury from the Trumpian base; if the term “cuckservative” wasn’t invented to describe him, he remains its textbook example.
Today Sykes finds himself without a party or a movement, adrift in a one-man rowboat off the shores of a continent he no longer recognizes. He’s written a bitter, funny, irresistible account of how he got there, called “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” which brought him to New York recently for a Salon Talks interview. Sykes’ book is an insider’s chronicle of how and why the American conservative movement shed nearly all its purported core values for exciting new threads of racism, nativism and right-wing nationalism. But it’s also a personal story with a certain kinship to the religious narrative of sin, revelation and redemption: St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” with the newborn Christian church replaced by the #NeverTrump movement.
Except that as Sykes readily admits, there isn’t much of a movement – “me and Bill Kristol,” he jokes, though we could throw in a few other embittered conservative intellectual types, including P.J. O’Rourke, Charles Krauthammer, John Podhoretz and the editors of National Review. Sykes certainly doesn’t pretend that “How the Right Lost Its Mind” is likely to spread the gospel among the heathens. It’s a book by an exile, describing a country he has left behind and primarily aimed at people who have never been there. In other words, he clearly understands that his readers will mostly be Trump-hating liberals and Democrats.
Although Sykes was a radio host for years and his dominant mode is comic and upbeat, this is both a surprisingly sad and a surprisingly literary book. After we finished our on-camera conversation, he told me I had been very kind to him; if that’s true, it’s because I responded to the inherent pathos and drama of his story. Furthermore, the indictment that some readers may seek, including the acknowledgment that Sykes participated in creating the self-reinforcing right-wing media ecology that nurtured Donald Trump, is present on virtually every page of his book. From the introduction:
I cannot pretend that I was not part of this story, and not merely for my attempts to construct a firewall of sorts against the march of Trumpism. For a quarter of a century I was part of this conservative movement, both as an observer and as a full participant. Like a number of other conservatives, including talk show hosts, I have to step back and ask uncomfortable questions. There’s no point in mincing words: for me 2016 was a brutal, disorienting, disillusioning slog. There came a moment when I realized that conservatives had created an alternative reality bubble and that I had perhaps helped shape it.
There’s a slight note of defensiveness there, and perhaps of evasion: “I had perhaps helped shape it” -- and perhaps not! Who is to say, finally? (One encounters some of that in Augustine too, who keeps assuring us that even in the brothels of Damascus or whatever, his heart and spirit were reaching out to God.) When I asked Sykes why it had taken him so long to grasp that his political party and political movement were dominated by racist cranks, religious zealots and conspiracy theorists, none of whom accepted the existence or meaning of facts, he admitted it was a good question.
Sykes writes vividly about the appalling landmarks along the Republican railroad to CrazyTown – the rise of media stars like Ann Coulter and Alex Jones, the vice-presidential nomination of Sarah Palin, the racist birther fantasy peddled for so long by You Know Who – but he supported the Republican Party, its candidates and its legislative agenda throughout that entire period, without audibly objecting to any of those things at the time. As anyone in Wisconsin can tell you, Sykes was a major cheerleader for Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on public-sector unions, which successfully exploited the anxiety and uncertainty of the Great Recession to undo generations’ worth of progressive reforms in the home state of “Fighting Bob” La Follette. (Who was, by the way, a Republican.)
Charlie Sykes was, in other words, an old-school Chamber of Commerce Republican or, to put it more bluntly, a Koch brothers Republican, something he doesn’t quite cop to in this tale of conservative epiphany and apostasy written for liberals. He was aware of the racists and anti-Semites and assorted nutjobs found on the fringes of conservative politics, he told me, but assumed they were like the obnoxious drunk at the end of the bar, who is isolated and generally harmless, and liable to get kicked out when he goes too far. Sykes went along to get along in the interest of winning elections and gaining power, exactly as nearly every elected Republican not named John McCain has done under Trump.
Sykes suggests that conservatives generally ignored “the birthers, the racists, the truthers, and other conspiracy theorists” who peddled elaborate fantasies about Barack Obama’s Honolulu birth notice or Hillary Clinton’s trail of bodies, and that doing so was a “moral failure” that has undone the conservative movement at the moment of its apparent electoral triumph. Give him full credit for saying all that, but it’s too innocent by half. Ideological libertarian-conservatives like Sykes – he says he was nurtured on Ludwig von Mises, William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman – did far more than ignore the “basket of deplorables” at the base of the GOP coalition. They tolerated them, embraced them and enabled them, exploiting racial paranoia and religious animosity to gain their votes and repeatedly pandering to them with policy promises they had no intention of keeping.
Now Sykes and his ilk are dismayed to discover that no one among their own voters actually cares about limited government, fiscal restraint, the constitutional separation of powers, the ideals of personal responsibility and “family values” or any of the other crap that was supposedly central to conservative ideology. It was a marriage of convenience, and now the convenience store is closed for a torchlight parade. “That sort of conservative is pretty thin on the ground in the United States,” George Will ruefully told Sykes after the November election. “We are a smaller band of brothers and sisters than we thought.”
So Charlie Sykes displayed courage and stood up for his principles -- but he was virtually alone among conservatives in doing so, and it was pretty goddamn late in the game. Now he’s trying to reckon with his degree of responsibility for what happened to his movement, his party and his country. As I said earlier, there’s pathos in that, and also in his painful recognition that the ideology he believed in, and believed would transform history, has suddenly been swept away. He stands where we all stand, at the edge of an abyss where the normative terms of modern American politics – “conservative” and “liberal,” Democrat and Republican – have lost nearly all their former meaning.
Sykes writes that progressives and liberals never bother to understand the nuances and gradations of conservative thought, and view the entire right as a cynical or moronic monolith. That’s historically fair (and it goes the other way too). But as Sykes halfway admits, in 2017 “conservatism” is a cynical monolith that barely pretends to hold old-timey ideals about individual liberty or constraints on state power. In Sarah Palin’s immortal phrase, it’s all about getting to see the ‘splodey heads keep ‘sploding. No one has ever fulfilled that aspect of the conservative agenda better than our current president.
Shares