Sympathy for the Shameless

A new book presents the stark choice between our two electoral parties, perhaps a bit too starkly.

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If you hate Republicans, or at least their contemporary incarnation, you’ll find much to like in Brian Tyler Cohen’s new book, Shameless. A popular YouTube commentator and MSNBC contributor, Cohen advances a scathing critique of how the onetime party of Lincoln is today “controlled by a burgeoning extremist faction for whom compromise is unacceptable and chaos is the goal,” a party whose “responsibility to govern has been replaced by the need to attack, to perform, to obstruct, to provoke.”

True. All true.

In the book’s opening chapter, titled “The Road to Shamelessness,” Cohen traces the party’s rightward lurch back to Lewis F. Powell Jr., the attorney who crafted an influential 1971 memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It nudged corporate America to essentially seize control of the government, especially the judiciary, and to take aggressive action to marginalize the political left, which was then all in a tizzy about peace and social justice.

Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy

By Brian Tyler Cohen

HarperCollins, 224 pages

Release date: August 13, 2024

Such efforts reached their full flowering under former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who is said to have instructed Republicans, when talking about Democrats, to use words including “betray, bizarre, decay, destroy, devour, greed, lie, pathetic, radical, selfish, shame, sick, steal, and traitors.” No need to sugarcoat it.

Then there was the advent of Fox News, which nurtured the radical right and gave credence to the Tea Party, a force the Republican establishment could not control, setting the stage for Trump and the MAGA movement. The GOP’s pivot to extremism claimed the careers of one-time party leaders Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. The party, as Shameless tells it, has now been transformed into the unabashedly extreme, insatiably power hungry, pathologically attention-seeking, resolutely hypocritical, and purposely dysfunctional entity it is today.

True. All true. 

And yet, reading this book, there were times when I felt the oppressive weight of Cohen’s thumb on the scale. His critique of Republicans, from party leaders to the rank and file, is unsparing, and to an equal extent unenlightening. Shameless may succeed in getting you to dislike Republicans more, but it does nothing to help you understand them better. Like a lot of MSNBC commentators, Cohen thinks the only thing that needs to happen for the toxins created by Trump to be removed from the body politic is for the Democrats to completely trounce the Republicans at the polls. 

That’s a problem because, no matter what happens in the next election, we are all still going to have to live in this country with each other. The overarching goal must be to not just win elections but to get back to a place where we can have honest disagreements without defaming the other side at every opportunity. The end result of smashmouth politics is smashed mouths, not enlightened minds.

Here’s an example of Cohen’s take on Republican officials across the land: 

“No longer restrained by the threat of being exposed or chastened, they can contradict themselves, they can flip-flop, they can flaunt double standards, they can prevent the passage of legislation that they themselves demanded. 

“Post-hypocrisy, and with shame out of the equation, they’re free to do what they actually want to do, which is to consolidate power for themselves. What we perceive as a weakness is actually one of their greatest, albeit amoral, assets. They no longer need to waste time with the pretense of honesty and integrity; now they can dedicate themselves to a rabid, relentless, shameless pursuit of power.” 

I have written stuff like this and read a whole lot more of it, and my first inclination is to nod my head in approval. It squares with what I and many others think has happened to the Republican Party. And yet, after being bombarded with this perspective while reading Cohen’s book, I couldn’t help but feel there is something wrong with this generalization. While I am not now nor have I ever been a Republican, I know Republicans, even Republicans in public office, for whom this does not hold true.

While I hope with all my heart that Democrats retain the presidency and gain control of Congress, to view electoral politics through a good-guys-versus-bad-guys lens strikes me as dangerous, for it enables bad behavior on the good guys’ part. Cohen critiques Michelle Obama’s famous adage, “When they go low, we go high,” as being wholly inapplicable to the present moment. “That’s an admirable stance,” he writes, “but it assumes that both parties are on the same field, playing the same game. Unfortunately, we’re not.”

So it’s okay to go low? 

Later in the book, Cohen elaborates:

“We’re not playing the same game. There is plenty of evidence that the two parties have their eyes trained on entirely different goals. Think no further than Republican efforts to wreck the government so that they can point at it and shout that it’s broken, or the norms they have kicked to the curb. One party is seeking power and dominance by any means necessary. The other is attempting to see democracy flourish.”

I wish things were really that simple, but they aren’t. Both parties seek power and neither deserves it absolutely. The Democrats do have a much better track record when it comes to the exercise and the defense of democracy, and that’s important. But let’s be honest: Aren’t the parties both playing the same game, at least a little? Is the choice really between “wreck the government” and “make democracy flourish”? 

As a working journalist for more than four decades, I was also put off by Cohen’s persistent bashing of the press for allegedly falling under Trump’s Svengali-like spell. He blasts the media for reporting that Trump’s heinous comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” were well received by many Republicans including GOP members of Congress—one of whom, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, said he was “mad he [Trump] wasn’t even tougher than that.” Why shouldn’t the media call attention to this rot?

Yes, Trump has always been the bright shiny object that the media can’t keep their eyes off of. But the mainstream press has, with some regularity and due diligence, taken Trump to task for his constant lies. Google “The New York Times” and “Trump falsely claimed” and see what comes up. Here’s a taste:

That was just one search, and only part of what came up, but you get the point.

Cohen, writing some months before Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential race, even blames the media for having “glommed on to this narrative” that Biden was physically and mentally unprepared to serve another term. He accuses the press of “taking the Republicans’ attacks at face value and oversaturating their coverage with constant references” to this concocted concern. “The issue of Biden’s age,” he clucks, “was birthed by the GOP but raised by its willful accomplices in the media.” And ultimately agreed to by everyone.

Throughout the book, Cohen weaves in the perspective of a small group of incisive minds: Pete Buttigieg, Marc Elias, Al Franken, Mehdi Hasan, Dan Pfeiffer, Jen Psaki, Heather Cox Richardson, and Jamie Raskin (who also writes the book’s foreword). They take turns offering insights, fleshing out his analysis. I found Buttigieg and Psaki to be the most interesting, and for the same reason: Because they discuss their encounters with the talking heads on Fox News, and why these matter. 

Buttigieg, Biden’s Secretary of Transportation, says in the book that he thinks of each of the rightwing media personalities he encounters on Fox News as “a friend or relative that I might be sparring in a friendly way with over things that we both care about.” Psaki, the former White House press secretary, saw her role as educational: “It was about arming people with the right answers so that when everyone’s conservative uncle shows up at Thanksgiving dinner, one can speak with some confidence and clarity. And maybe even change some minds.”

And that’s the problem with Shameless. It is not going to change anybody’s mind. It doesn’t even try.