The Destructionists

The subtitle of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s book is: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-up of the Republican Party. Here briefly are highlights of the alarming tale, most of them surely familiar but seldom pulled together as a multiyear drama.

Act One: The arch villain is Newt Gingrich: beginning in the 1990s, he rushes on stage and makes a sort of permanent GOP campaign out of false claims, innuendo, conspiracy theories, refusal to cooperate, and obvious appeals to “white people, particularly those without college degrees, who fear the loss of their way of life in a multicultural America”; in short, the Repubicans’ “Southern Strategy” writ large. And with many followers such as Tom DeLay and Dan Burton, Gingrich then mounts an attack on the bases of democracy, on civil behavior, on truth itself, on attempts to eliminate racism (in doing so appealing to white supremacist grievance), on the foundations of our democratic institutions, on national unity and on democracy itself: for example, the sad suicide of Vince Foster, Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, is falsely implied by Republicans to have been a murder with Clinton’s involvement and this lie sets the stage for the tactic of fingering Democrats with virtually any falsehood–promoting obscene art, supporting an all-powerful national school board, abortion, “promoting homosexuality to schoolchildren” and many other such claims. In particular, the art of the wild innuendo turns on timing–wait to make the false charge until the victim hasn’t much time to refute it before facing an election or a key congressional action. Not surprisingly, Milbank points to Gingrich as the leader in changing the language of politics from the “genial cordiality” of the past to the “slashing, personal, bitter language we routinely hear from political leaders today.” Add to this the emergence of “the modern militia movement” with the encouragement of right wing media, a phenomenon Milbank traces back to the 1990s.

Act Two: Enter the George W. Bush presidency and Karl Rove. Here is a telling story:

“…After Hillary Clinton suffered a concussion in 2012 because she fainted while fighting a stomach virus and hit her head, Rove floated a conspiracy theory. ‘Thirty days in the hospital?’ he asked. ‘And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.‘

“In reality, Clinton spent four days in the hospital, and the glasses were of the sort commonly used to reduce double vision after a concussion. But ‘reality’ didn’t matter.“

This story is all-too typical.

Yet another GOP signature sentiment in the Clinton years came after Clinton defeated Dole in 1996. Margaret Tutwiler, a “Republican strategist,” warned that for Republicans to win future elections, “We’re going have to take on board the religious nuts.”

Nothing could be more salient for today.

Act Three. We are more than knowledgeable about the playing out to today of the above points enunciated by Milbank, especially this latter one. No need for further history leading to the Trump period: impeachment, falsehoods, personal attacks, security compromises, negligence, encouragement of violent militia attacks, and on and on. Milbank cites chapter and verse. I am certain The Destructionists will comprise one of the best records of these dismal affairs.

More generally, Milbank’s comprehensive book is immensely valuable in its depiction that the threat to Democracy is (a) ever there and (b) reflective of the worst tendencies in us Homo sapiens. Sometimes you wonder whether we might better be called, Natural Selectees. I did so wonder while reading Milbank. I thought about the fact that we are so much in the grip of natural selection–the conflicts and self-defeating behaviors and mutations it seems to compel–that one wonders whether there might be some undeniable “anthropological” explanations–the most fundamental ones–for the GOP crack-up (explanations that apply far beyond the GOP).

Accordingly, I play the following scenario out sometimes: Recall that in Gingrich’s time Republicans saw the handwriting on the wall: the emerging racial and ethnic diversity of Americans, urbanization, globalism and many, many other trends leading away from classic GOP times: inevitably the Republican political strategy simply must have begun in that day to paint this enlarging picture as unfavorable for them then and certainly later. But something, they reckoned, must be done. Something must be tried. We can’t just all open hardware stores. But what? Well, suppose it involves the “religious nuts” and all it implies. At first, it’s a sort of strategy in which you, imagining that you are sitting in as a GOPer, might hold your nose. But, you tell yourself and others: “It comes with the territory.” “Any voter is a friend.” “You have to pay your dues.” But suppose that as you do your duty, you find somewhat to your surprise that you are becoming a lauded, even beloved, figure. You draw crowds. You learn the crowd-control cues, most of them angry. Adoring crowds. They sincerely love you. Indeed: “They love me,” says one prominent rally-prone Republican almost every day. And, hey, you’re making money in the process! Campaign contributions, media, and so on. So: You exclaim, These are good god-fearing people. Yes, it feels good to be cheered. It feels good when people say they’d take up arms for you.

Sinclair Lewis tells this story of adventures in hypocrisy dramatically in Elmer Gantry (1927), and Lewis fittingly dedicates that searing novel to H. L. Mencken.

Fire and Fury Inside The White House

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

–Joan Didion

 

Michael Wolff has written a near miraculous book, miraculous in its appearance and in its literary quality, and he has done so none too soon. Because it is a compelling old-fashioned narrative, Fire and Fury brings home as no other account has so far, the terrible misfortune and ominous portents of Donald Trump as President. Wolff has the talent and savvy of a fine novelist, an exceptional memoirist, a profound historian, and specifically comes out of Capote’s powerful-but-difficult journalistic tradition of the True Life Novel.

Fire and Fury, an eyewitness account by a brilliant, artful, and above all insinuating spy on behalf of the Republic, rescues and awakens us from the profoundly corrupt and generally shallow daily Trumpian soaps playing on Cable TV and in print journalism–the business-enriching soundbite shows of punditry descrying (with a suspicious quenchless relish for breathless shock that overcomes dread) the psychologically inevitable multiple daily insults, imbecilities, adolescent rantings and perfect mistakes of Trump and the generally inferior people in his administration. Yes, the media and its Chatterers will miss Trump who is both an easy mark and (they’ll worry about it tomorrow) a deeply dangerous character. Do they form an unholy alliance with him? Are they averse to The End?

Wolff, with his deadly, nasty and truthful narrative, one of the great authorial coups in memory, has taken us to the point where (i) we can have no doubt of the massive trouble we are in because Wolff’s storyline makes us face the overwhelming case–he reveals that it is far more damning than previously imagined–that Trump is unfit; and (ii) we can have no doubt of the crucial, overriding imperative to bring new leadership to our imperiled Republic, something we should have commenced yesterday. With Fire and Fury, we Get It. What remains is Urgency. Together with the need (as seldom before in our polity) for pragmatic, efficient electoral strategy and success.

Fire and Fury will quickly and powerfully let you see for yourself the sheer farce and the exceptional danger.

To consider Wolff’s feat and gift to us, here are a few thoughts:

–He might well be called The Spy Who Just Strolled in from the Cold. That he could enter the White House day after day and corral key people into Confession is remarkable and delicious. (Might this be the single greatest indication of the unprecedented confusion in the Trump White House?) He understood the considerable infighting among Trump’s factions–“Jarvanka” (wonderful, eh?) versus the Bannonites versus Priebus versus Hope Hicks versus Katie Walsh versus the Mooch and, well, Wolff must have been a wonder of a Listener and possibly deserving of an honorary degree in Counseling, wouldn’t you think? And did he ever have an Ulterior Motive in his wandering (searching, really) of the corridors and his one-on-0ne talks! Certainly he seems not to have missed an iota of the rampant incompetence and naivete he experienced in all quarters.

–He undercuts the inevitable falsifying and exaggeration among his interviewees–and “factual nitpicking” by reviewers–by such narrative ploys as the following strategy about revealing the essential Trump: Early in the narrative, in the only instance of an extended quote in the book, Wolff cites verbatim the full text of Trump’s “address” early in his first year to CIA staff at Langley in the main lobby, the occasion when Trump’s backdrop was the wall bearing the anonymous signifiers of those fallen over the years in the Agency missions. It is a stunning psychological revelation, a dramatization of Disturbance, one that forms an unassailable context for any and all earlier and later aspects of Trump and seals the truth of his childish thought and judgment. It might well be the single most damning self-disclosure among the many by the President.

–Judging by what has happened to Steve Bannon since the publication of Fire and Fury and his own self-professed and often anti-Trump revelations about himself  to Wolff, the Good Listener and no friend of the Trump “Administration,” you might say that Wolff has himself been instrumental in getting Bannon out of the White House and cut off from his billionaire sponsors, the Mercers! Talk about Wolff having his cake and eating it too!

–Certainly it is arguable that Wolff has contributed mightily to bringing enough of us who are appalled by Trump to a grand awareness of the Trumpian danger and hopefully now to a confident clear- and cold-eyed resolve to make the House and the Senate able to stymie him and the McConnell’s of the world after the 2018 elections and from there to realize a new presidency in the next presidential election. I am imagining from the tone of his superb narrative that Wolff might well focus on what many strategists are now thinking. There are genuine grievances in many voters owing to institutional betrayals such as exemplified in the Recession, betrayals highlighted by the growing wealth disparity between the few and the many arising from the political triumphs of Big Money; but given these cosmic wrongs beg correction, perhaps the most pressing and practical word now is Turnout.

Fire and Fury is a powerful motivator for the broad pragmatism and the focussed campaign needed for Keeping the Republic.