A campaign operative's confession and cri de coeur

Tim Miller's Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell might not be to everyone's taste, but it sure was to mine. Miller made a career as a minor Republican campaign operative and media spinner over a couple of decades -- but knew in his gut that he couldn't stomach Donald Trump and bailed rather than work for the Orange God King. He now is a charming, queer fixture of the Never-Trump Bulwark (also not everyone's cup of tea).

Here's how Miller describes his new book:

Why We Did It is a book about the people who submitted to every whim of a comically unfit and detestable man who crapped all over them and took over the party they had given their life to. It’s about the army of consultants, politicians, and media figures who stood back and stood by as everything they ever fought for was degraded and devalued. The people who privately admitted they recognized all the risks but still climbed aboard for a ride on the SS Trump Hellship that they knew would assuredly sink. ... These people are not all barbarians or megalomaniacs. They are flawed men and women with shadow wants and desires. It’s just that in this case those desires allowed them to accept an unusual evil.

Being of the "what the hell is wrong with these people?" school myself, I wanted to know how Miller understood them. The book rewards with a history of how the Trump cult became ascendent within the Republican Party and with a taxonomy of its GOP enablers.

On the former point, Miller's answer is scary and convincing: the Republican Party has become what its most loyal constituency -- aggrieved old white men -- always wanted.

He got a glimpse while working on John McCain's campaign in Iowa in 2008. The candidate believed in honest, decent, if limited, public policies to enhance the lives all citizens. That's not what Miller encountered doing advance work:

A part of me realized that the party I had started volunteering for as an early pubescent teen was slipping away from me and the trajectory we were on was a dark one. The Republican voters I saw in Counciltucky [he didn't like Council Bluffs] weren’t looking for straight talk or paeans to national purpose. What they really wanted was to stick it in the other’s eye and be comforted by convenient lies. They just needed a leader shameless enough to give it to them.

As was likely the case for many confused Republican operatives, it was that anarcho-fascist Steve Bannon who offered insight into where the druthers of the GOP voters could be found:

“Centering the commenters” meant elevating the issues that most motivated core readers. Bannon would talk about the “hobbits” and “deplorables” who read Breitbart and how they powered the campaigns of the site’s favored anti-establishment candidates.  ... 

The result of this consistent elevation of and advocacy for fringe views was that it forced the political campaigns to respond to the things that highly engaged voters cared about. In theory, this is a good thing. In practice, it led to madness. People care about a lot of crazy shit to begin with, and when they are being goaded and inflamed by a [right-wing] propaganda machine it leads to fresh concerns that resonate emotionally, while being quite far afield from their daily lives.

Less inflammatory, more conventional Republicans didn't know what hit them when Donald Trump turned up, tickling the ids of GOP base voters.

It was the commenters, the hobbits, who had taken charge. And they were the ones dragging us along, no matter how we assured ourselves that we were in control.

Miller goes on to describe the flailing of his peer Republican campaign operatives and policy nerds when the party they thought they worked for vaporized and then was transformed after Trump's flukey 2016 election victory. He provides a taxonomy of enablers he names Messiahs and Junior Messiahs, Demonizers, LOL Nothing Matters, Republicans Tribalist Trolls, Strivers, Little Mixes, Peter Principle Disprovers, Nerd Revengers, The Inert Team Players, The Compartmentalizers, and Cartel Cashers.

The distinctions he draws between these groups are clearly of some importance to Miller, but I found these vignettes somewhat boring. These Republicans found lots of ways to be assholes, but I just don't care. Obviously, something (and it was more than a paycheck) was missing in these people. Here are some of Miller's conclusions:

• For many people in Washington, their party is more a part of their identity than their ethnicity, religion, or personal history. It’s how they see themselves and how everyone in their social network defines them. Shedding an ingrained identity that others use to define you takes courage, even if that identity is toxic and self-destructive. All of this makes the bar for removing “Republican operative” from a person’s identity pretty hard. 

• ... my friends who stuck around the GOP had a visceral loathing that I’m not sure I realized was there even when I was part of it. When we were sparring with our Democratic counterparts, some of us were kind of faking it, going along with the kayfabe. While the rest of them were employing faux outrage and gamesmanship as well, it turns out that underneath the performance was a much more deep-seated desire to see the other side punished. To watch them get owned. Their grievances were based in part in ideology, but more often it seemed like simple interpersonal annoyance and privilege. 

• They live in liberal bubbles and find their neighbors’ excesses grating. They are sick of being told what they should and shouldn’t say or do. They are embittered that the media is always being unfair to them. They are tired of diversity requirements that mean they lose out on jobs to “people of color.” They blanche at the DEI packets being handed out at their kids’ schools. ... 

•... All of that annoyance and envy bottles up until it boils over. ... They all wanted to cut the left down a peg. Put a cap on the diversifying cultural elite who were flourishing at what they perceived was their expense. Trump was the vehicle for doing it.

All that seems an inadequate excuse for selfishly overthrowing a 230-year-old evolving democracy -- but hey, I've never been a Republican.

Why did the individual named Tim Miller bounce out -- become a RINO -- and join active resistance to Trumpism? It's got to have mattered that he's gay and had already chosen to affirm his orientation while still on the GOP team.

Coming out was the best decision I ever made, by a landslide. If you happen to be reading this and are still on the fence, I’m telling you, you should do it. It improved my life in myriad ways, big and small. It widened the aperture through which I viewed the world and expanded my capacity for empathy. It saved me. ... 

... coming out still required me to unravel a mindfuck that was a quarter century in the making. The closet is omnipresent and omnipotent. It engulfs you. It makes everything you do a lie.

Before and for quite awhile after he came out, he lived inside the cognitive dissonance of  compartmentalization: diving into his gay "personal" life while he "contorted himself into defending homophobes."  He could sustain the dissonance for awhile; and then he could no longer. Coming out prepared him to bolt away from Trump.

• • •

What made this book for me was Miller's candid description of "The Game," the ethos (and sometimes flexible ethics) of the work of campaigns. Been there, seen that, participated in a small way in its pleasures and its corruptions. Some quotes from Miller:

I confessed ... that politics offered me the same kind of competitive outlet that sports fandom had.  

... The horse race mindset, taken to its logical conclusion, makes ideology subordinate to gamesmanship.  

... They were hacks through and through, adrenaline junkies who were in it for the fight. No matter which role they were in, staffers began to see themselves as tacticians in this made-for-TV blood sport rather than as functionaries in a system that is aimed to produce the best policy outcomes for their fellow citizens.  

... Whether something was the right thing to do only mattered to the extent that it was also the right thing to do politically. When the strategy, politics, and policy impacts all aligned: great. But when they didn’t, well, that was a concern for the wonks. Not our problem.

Although almost all the campaigns I've worked in pretty much every year since 1989 have been for the success of what I consider desirable ideological ends -- more fairness, more justice, more equity, less cruelty -- I know the delicious rush that is doing campaign battle. You do bizarre things that your project demands: for example, in the service of trying to end the death penalty in California, I found myself working side by side amicably with the consultant for the state's Roman Catholic bishops. He had previously steered the successful 2008 Prop. 8 campaign to ban gay marriage. We each brought something ... I've also promoted candidates about whom I had plenty of reservations -- but enough hope to make the effort palatable. 

Election work is indeed an ethically dangerous game, but also a hell of an absorbing racket.

Tim Miller provides a delicious picture of that life for a Washington DC operative. I couldn't help enjoying that story, even as I loathed his employers.