Joy ReidVerified account @JoyAnnReid 50m
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The only thing I'd debate in Gerson's damning assessment of the state of conservatism is that it started with Trump.
The conservative mind has become diseased
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-conservative-mind-has-become-diseased/2017/05/25/523f0964-4159-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html?utm_term=.607a6a1e270e
Here's Gerson's blistering bottom line:
The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased. The movement has been seized by a kind of discrediting madness, in which conspiracy delusions figure prominently. Institutions and individuals that once served an important ideological role, providing a balance to media bias, are discrediting themselves in crucial ways. With the blessings of a president, they have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion. They have allowed political polarization to reach their hearts, and harden them. They have allowed polarization to dominate their minds, and empty them.
Gerson describes a conspiratorial bent that sounds a lot like the Bill Clinton era, when conservatives called the then president a murderer.
A conspiratorial approach to politics is fully consistent with other forms of dehumanization — of migrants, refugees and “the other” more generally. Men and women are reduced to types and presented as threats. They also become props in an ideological drama. They are presented as representatives of a plot involving invasion and infiltration, rather than being viewed as individuals seeking opportunity or fleeing oppression and violence. This also involves callousness, cruelty and conspiracy thinking.
At that time, Donald Trump was actually friendly with the Clintons and defending them (though he had other problems, ie women and race).
But the "paranoid style" on the right - accelerated by the shock of losing the White House to Clinton, predates him too.
You can go back to accusations that the civil rights movement was a communist plot, the McCarthy era and the red scare of 1919.
Before that, conservative conspiracists accused FDR of fomenting socialism and communism via the New Deal and Social Security.
There are conspiracy theorists on the left too, of course, but the paranoid style has found a much broader political audience on the right.
And there's a simple reason: it's conservatives (whether post-slavery Democrats or civil rights & busing era Republicans) who resist change.
And at the most basic political level the easiest way to turn discomfort with change into votes is to whip it up into paranoia and fear.
Conservatism has been divided between intellectual arguments against societal change and gutteral, showbiz arguments for decades.
Is it really surprising that the paranoid, talk radio style of arguing against change has a bigger market than the National Review version?
They're certainly saying the same things: William F. Buckley Jr was as opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as George Wallace was.
But Wallace was more entertaining. Donald Trump is just giving you George Wallace instead of Buckley. But on policy Trump = Paul Ryan.
He didn't invent the paranoid style-he just capitalized on it because at heart he is a needy showman who loves the attention his act brings.
Trump didn't even invent birtherism. He just took the "World Nut Daily" craziness and married it to The Apprentice on a national stage.
For the right, Trump isn't some interloper. He just figured out how to take your existing product and get it on the Walmart shelf.
The fact that he's vulgar and undisciplined and embarrassing may bother you, but you must admit it doesn't bother YOUR Republican base.
Neither does Sheriff Clarke's violent craziness. Nor does Greg Gianforte's violent behavior. Or Steve Scalise's white power visit...
Conservatism hasn't been hijacked, people. Trump has a base, and GOP friends, that base is yours.
One last thing: before Trump took raw conservative paranoia federal, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh (who Hannity is chasing) metastasized it.
They used the old Father Coughlin method to turn white American discomfort with change into huge, paranoia-fueled profits.
Bottom line: if conservative intellectuals want to do soul searching on how they wound up with Trump they need to go way back before 2016.
Meant *after, not before, but you know... no-edits Twitter! :-)
One last thing: you might ask, if fear works, why didn't the dire warnings about Trump, especially re Russia, work last year?
I would argue a few reasons: A) Trump was already a celebrity, so people didn't fear him, or really believe the crazier things he said...
B) many younger voters - stoked by the Russian disinfo campaign aimed at them, loathed Clinton more than they feared Trump or had apathy...
C) convert D to R voters feared the ongoing change Clinton represented not Trump-who they believed would restore a past they find comforting
... and D) warnings about Trump did work but with people who are already high propensity voters or voter suppression targets.
That said, to reiterate, while there is liberal paranoia, it isn't nearly as systematized and media organized or weaponized as on the right.
In large part because the base of the liberal party and those who ideologically lean left, don't fear the social changes taking place.
But you know what people who aren't in the conservative base do fear? The destabilizing influence of Donald Trump.
Rant /off