A Touch of History: How the Heck We Got Here (Part 2)
Whence last we met; at issue was the role of talk radio in the early 1990s as a messaging medium extraordinaire for the right. As the late writer David Foster Wallace wrote in the must-read article: “Host,” talk radio is not built upon the journalistic norms and standards of fact-based investigation and accuracy. Instead, talk radio is supposed to “explain” the news:
Which all sounds great, except of course “explaining” the news really means editorializing, infusing the actual events of the day with the host's own opinions…. yet they are often delivered by the talk-radio host not as opinions but as revealed truths, truths intentionally ignored or suppressed by a “mainstream press” that's “biased” in favor of liberal interests.
The person who formed and fashioned talk radio into the behemoth it became was, of course, Rush Limbaugh, who became so immensely popular and powerful he thought of himself as the leader of the GOP.
Whether Rush led the Republican Party or not, he was massively influential and was one of three men who were instrumental in turning the GOP into the Party it is today. With his pugnacious style, Limbaugh demonstrated that by eschewing factual precision in favor of brash defiance, belligerent political commentary could be both entertaining and extremely lucrative. Rush was so popular it was inevitable that he spawned imitators that grew in number on radio shows and then made the leap to television. Without the success of talk radio in the 1980s and 90s, cable news punditry would not go on to spread the overblown vitriol even further.
The early 1990s featured two other men with outsized personalities dominating politics: Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich from Georgia, and Patrick Buchanan, first from Nixon and then from TV. These gents built different (but similarly important) features that have contributed to our current levels of toxicity. First up, Newt Gingrich introduced personal malice in our politics. This is not to say that things were butterflies and rainbows prior to Newt’s ascent to the Speaker’s rostrum, since historians point to a 30-member melee in 1858 as evidence that “men are not angels.” Regardless, there was more comity in the chamber before 1994 when Newt decided to mix things up.
Gingrich was (to put it mildly) frustrated by the 40-year Democratic majority rule in the U.S. House and as Political Scientist Steve Smith writes: “He offered an alternative: Polarization and demonization, not moderation and compromise, would hasten the end of Democratic dominance of Congress and lead to a new conservative era that Reagan initiated but failed to fully establish.” Gingrich began the Conservative Opportunity Society, helped launch the Republican Revolution in 1994 which ushered 52 new Republican House members into a brand-new majority, and almost single handedly ended a two-century norm of civility on Capitol Hill.
In his capacity as Minority Whip and the head of the group Gopac, Gingrich sent out a pamphlet instructing all GOP candidates for the House to quit using language that was benevolent and instead take up a more aggressive posture against any Democrat who ran against them. Writing: “Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast,” the pamphlet directs Republican candidates to fling contrasting invectives against their Democratic opponents like “sick, radical, traitor, and incompetent.” This took Democrats by surprise, as did their newfound position in the House minority for the first time in 40 years: the nasty name calling worked.
Which leads us to Pat Buchanan who saw the resentment stoked by Gingrich and essentially said: “Hold my beer.” In the early 1990s, Buchanan made a name for himself by stoking the culture wars and fanning the flames of xenophobia by being an early and vocal adapter of anti-immigrant rhetoric. He was an early adopter of “America First,” and coined the term “culture war” to describe the “religious war” that the GOP was fighting against reproductive rights, pornography, the “homosexual rights movement” and prayer in schools. This came as a bit of a surprise to the Republican elites who apparently did not know that Buchanan was going to say that, and who were concerned that the ferocity of the speech drove away moderates from the Party.
The late, great Molly Ivins is credited with one of the best quotes in journalism when she wrote that Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 GOP convention speech “probably sounded better in the original German.” Buchanan’s anti-Immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-Democratic Party rhetoric was deemed extraordinary for the 90s, but (as inciting things do) became ordinary with time. This was where the modern populism was first on the scene, and Buchanan attracted many of the Trump supporters well before Trump was serious about politics. Buchanan’s policies and fixed positions to the right of almost everyone made him a wingnut in the last century, but a forecaster of things to come. Since he was not palatable to the biggest slice of the Republican Party, his audacity gave him the next best thing to an actual election: A TV show and great fame. As a loud voice on The McLaughlin Group, Buchanan kept the far-right perspective in the frame.
As Carlos Lozada writes: “You needn’t pick between Buchanan and Gingrich — it’s enough to say that Buchanan gave the modern Republican Party its substance and Gingrich provided its style. (I imagine they’d both be honored by the distinctions.)” When you add in Rush Limbaugh’s extraordinary amplifier, this trifecta of wrath-mongers fundamentally changed the way the Republican Party operated. This correspondingly meant that the Democrats had to react to the new, furious style of politicking which they did with a series of thoughtful whitepapers, inspiring analysis, and discussions in stentorian, NPR-like tones. Suffice it to say, that response was underwhelming.
What the Democrats also did, however, was to follow the GOP to the right. Clinton had run as a ‘third way” Democrat, someone not too liberal, not too conservative; the Goldilocks of American politics. When the trilogy of intransigence shoved the country rightward with Republican proposals, Clinton acquiesced and under his leadership two powerfully important pieces of legislation were passed that had lasting effects on the nation, and not necessarily in a good way: the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.
Both pieces of legislation were seen as massive betrayals of the underclass and of minority communities, as NAFTA was of the working class. Once more, African Americans were left behind by the Party that had promised to support them, and blue-collar workers watched as their jobs were offshored. Seedlings of disregard were planted while many in tech became very rich, and the intense intolerance espoused by Buchanan hit a radical, antiestablishment nerve that grew larger as they heard their tune being played by a mainstream politician. In an essay about Buchanan’s 1992 convention speech, one of his advisors wrote:
The “cultural war” for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values and dirty movies but a battle over whether the nation itself can continue to exist under the onslaught of the militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism supported by the Ruling Class…
The anger and vehemence executed by the Thumping Three may have been distasteful for many in the DC establishment, those Samuel Francis called the “Ruling Class” above. But for some Americans, the vitriol shouted by Limbaugh, policy-fashioned by Gingrich, and molded into a culture war by Buchanan, was a soothing balm. They were already deeply enraged, and now they had a focus. It did not take much for the resentment to grow, spread, and infect others; all that was needed was a series of tubes.
Next time: Non-Stop Fire and Fury and Fox and Friends