Jerry Rubin went from being a leader of the Yippies to a cheerleader for the Yuppies. David Horowitz, raised by communists, was an outspoken radical leftist until he became an outspoken radical conservative. Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe vs. Wade, later pledged her life to “serving the Lord and helping women save their babies” from abortion.
And Charlie Sykes has transitioned from “recovering liberal” to sickened conservative. The former conservative radio host, based in Milwaukee, has emerged as one of the harshest and most incisive critics of whatever the hell happened to give us man-child-in-chief Donald Trump.
Sykes would argue, as he does in his new book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, that he has simply remained true to his principles while others have abandoned theirs, instead lapsing into moral narcolepsy. He was a Never Trumper who never switched to never mind.
Sykes, unlike the vast majority of his colleagues in conservative talk radio, has refused to get over his revulsion and hop aboard the Trump Train.
In March 2016, just prior to the Wisconsin primary, Sykes had Trump on his hugely influential radio program. He opened the interview with a judo chop. “Here in Wisconsin, we value things like civility, decency, and actual conservative principles,” he told Trump, who doesn’t. He grilled the GOP frontrunner over his misogyny and divisiveness, likening him to “a twelve-year-old bully on the playground.”
Trump, who praised Sykes on the air and afterward called him a “low life” and “whack job,” lost the state primary to Ted Cruz, then narrowly carried Wisconsin in November. Sykes, unlike the vast majority of his colleagues in conservative talk radio, has refused to get over his revulsion and hop aboard the Trump Train. Now he finds himself at bitter odds with the conservative movement he once championed.
Sykes has written op-eds in The New York Times and appears regularly on MSNBC, castigating Trump’s daily missteps and embarrassments. How the Right Lost Its Mind, Sykes’s ninth book, is a scathing indictment of a party and ideology that has wedded its fortunes to this coarse and heinous man.
“So how did this happen?” Sykes asks at the start of Chapter 1. “How did the right wander off into the fever swamps of the Alt Right? How did it manage to go from Friedrich Hayek to Sean Hannity, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump? How did it create an alternative-reality silo that indulged every manner of crackpot, wing-nut conspiracy theory? How did a movement that was defined by its belief in individual liberty, respect for the Constitution, free markets, personal responsibility, traditional values, and civility find itself embracing a stew of nativism, populism, and nationalism?”
Good questions. And Sykes comes up with some compelling answers. He even takes some of the blame for having helped create, during his more than two decades as a radio host, an environment in which opposing views are discounted, truth is devalued, and the press reviled.
As Sykes put it in a Times op-ed, he and others who bashed the media for its alleged liberal bias “succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether—all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.”
And that left conservatism defenseless against the onslaught of crazy that Trump has helped usher in.
Oops.
Full disclosure: I have known Charlie Sykes for more than thirty years. I like the guy. I have edited his writing and he has edited mine. Four years ago, when Republicans in the legislature tried to expel my then-employer, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, from our offices at the University of Wisconsin, Sykes rose prominently to our defense. In the end, Governor Scott Walker vetoed this clumsy attack on the press.
And yet, in my mind and that of many others, Sykes has not gone far enough in calling fouls on himself. His book breezily asserts that he supported state Republicans including Walker, Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, and Ron Johnson in their agendas, “including reforms of collective bargaining and expansions of school choice.”
That’s an awfully euphemistic way to put how Walker and other Republicans, with Sykes’s unfailing support, busted the state’s public employee unions and undermined its schools. It ignores the brutal fashion in which they rammed through their agendas, causing abrasions on the state’s body politic that will take decades to heal.
Nor does Sykes really atone for the meanness he helped perpetuate and now shakes a finger at, including referring to First Lady Michelle Obama as “Mooch” or calling a black man who died in police custody a “piece of garbage.” He even aired part of a racist 2011 video called “It’s Free Swipe Yo EBT,” featuring a black woman surrounded by what the credits call her “baby’s by different daddy’s [sic].” It shows black women dancing, drinking, and downing junk food to the rap refrain, “All you have to do is fuck, and nine months later you’re getting the big bucks.”
None of these particular transgressions are mentioned in his book, although Sykes has been quoted elsewhere expressing regret. In the book’s introduction, he glibly inquires, “Did we—did I—contribute to this prairie fire of bigotry and xenophobia . . . on the right?”
Hint: Yes.
And then there is the question of Sykes’s motives for staking out a loud and clear anti-Trump position. He claimed this principled opposition cost him listeners; but, as critics on the right and left have noted, it also elevated him to a national platform and newfound fame. Sykes, writes Milwaukee journalist Bruce Murphy, is “a master at transforming himself politically . . . all to strategic and promotional advantage.”
That, Murphy allows, doesn’t mean Sykes’s “periodic transformations and confessions” are insincere. For conservatives, like everyone else, rejecting Donald Trump shows appropriate good judgment. They’d be crazy not to.
At the heart of Sykes’s book, and his worldview, is a stubborn contrarianism. He leaned right when his upbringing pushed him to the left, and he turned against his own “side” when he saw how it was being tainted by its affiliation with Trumpism.
In many ways, his book is a perfect complement to The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr.’s excellent Why the Right Went Wrong, published in 2016, before Trump’s election. Both dive deep into the party’s history and evolution, and mull the pathology that metastasized into President Trump. And both express an appreciation for what conservatism, in its best moments, stands for.
Writes Dionne, “I continue to believe that a healthy democratic order needs conservatism’s skepticism about the grand plans we progressives sometimes offer, its respect for traditional institutions, and its skepticism of those who believe that politics can remold human nature.”
There is precious little about Trump and his supporters that emerges as worthy of such appreciation. What happened?
And yet there is precious little about Trump and his supporters that emerges as worthy of such appreciation. What happened?
For Sykes, it comes down to a lack of bouncers at the Big Tent. Back in the 1960s, conservative standard-bearer William F. Buckley very deliberately purged the party of extremists including the John Birch Society, whose leader he accused of “paranoid and unpatriotic drivel.”
The prohibition on explicitly extreme elements that threatened to drag the party into irrelevance, Sykes writes, largely held until the ascension of the Tea Party, abetted by conservative talkers on radio and TV. This milking of “perpetual outrage” has continued, driven by political action committees that are mainly interested in scaring people into parting with their money. And this, in turn, had a deleterious effect on the Republican Party.
“With their incessant and increasingly shrill appeals and warnings, the PACs pushed the GOP into tactical fights it couldn’t win, while fueling a deepening disillusionment with conservatism itself,” Sykes writes. “Long before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and announced his presidential bid, the narrative had been set: The conservative ‘establishment’ had betrayed conservatives. In the echo chamber, the volume was set at Outrage.”
As people got angrier, institutions including government and the press became more despised. With the gatekeepers kneecapped, liars had free rein and truth became as malleable as putty. People who called themselves conservatives began to believe things that were demonstrably false, such as Trump’s claim that Obama had his phones tapped or that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the 9/11 attacks.
Meanwhile, news sites devoted to manufacturing lies gained prominence, as did deranged commentators like Alex Jones. In one gasp-worthy section, Sykes outlines some of the despicable lies churned out by Jones and his Infowars website, including that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City and Boston Marathon bombings, and that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary was a hoax.
Candidate Trump, as part of his wholesale embrace of rightwing lunacy, tweeted out fake crime stats from a white nationalist website, offered press credentials to a white nationalist radio show, and aligned himself with Jones. He even appeared as a guest on Jones’s show, proclaiming, “Your reputation is amazing, I will not let you down.”
What kind of person accepts this sort of behavior in a candidate for President or the presidency itself? How can a political movement that pledges allegiance to such a man survive? Does it even deserve to?
Sykes, like Dionne, would answer yes, but only if a great many more conservatives follow the lead of Trump-averse commentators including Sykes, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Jonah Goldberg. After the last election, Sykes writes, “the Democrats need to perform an autopsy; Republicans need an exorcism.”
Rescuing conservatism from Trumpism, Sykes writes, will be difficult, “given the pressures of political tribalism” and the fact that conservatives will actually like some of Trump’s agenda, such as his court picks. “But despite the clamorous demands that conservatives now fall into line with the new regime, precisely the opposite is needed,” Sykes writes. “Rather than conformity, conservatism needs dissidents who are willing to push back.”
Sykes even foresees ways that principled conservatives can find common ground with the left—for instance, in a “renewed appreciation for a reality-based politics, truth, ethics, checks and balances, civil liberties, and the constitutional limits on executive power.”
And, in an admonition to conservatives that may apply equally to progressives, Sykes warns of the danger of putting too much emphasis on winning, regardless of the cost. “There is nothing dishonorable about losing,” he writes, “but there is something shameful about abandoning your principles.”
In the end, he says, what will matter is not whether your party won a given election, but “whether you stood firm in the truth.”
That’s some mighty good advice. Thanks, Charlie.