Bad faith Republican politics

Stuart Stevens was a career Republican political strategist, the capstone of whose work was serving in a leading role in George Romney's 2012 campaign against Barack Obama.  In this 2021 book, he looks back at that campaign, and his lifelong political orientation and concludes It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.

He's unsparing about this conclusion; his early campaign work in the South taught him that race was the substrate of all US politics:

[I learned] a truth as basic and immutable as the fact that water freezes below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit: race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all southern politics was played. It was really very simple: the Democratic candidate needed 90-plus percent of black votes to win. ... Since [the 1964 Civil Rights Act] no Republican candidate has broken 17 percent with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3 percent considered themselves Republicans. ... 

... the Nixon White House had laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies and legal challenges. It was the road that the Republican Party took in the Trump White House. ... Race has defined the modern Republican Party.

Since the 2024 presidential election, many pundits have attempted to muddy the question of whether the Republican Party is still the overwhelmingly racist formation that Stevens describes, but the best data we have suggests that little has changed despite whatever gestures Trump and his crew make. (Take a look at the cabinet, for example; bet you can't name his HUD appointee, the usual Black slot ...)

Beyond issues of race, Stevens has plenty to denounce in the moral foundations of his former party:

• "Family values" was never a set of morals and values that the Republican Party really desired to live by ... it was just another weapon to portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream. ...

• The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity. It was where the commercialization of Christianity meets the politicization of Christianity. ...

• The Republican Party is held aloft by a large, powerful, and ever growing industry of deceit. The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience. ...

• The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice. The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise. ...

All, I think, commonplace understandings four years on from the publication of this book and among the folks to whom I relate personally here on the Left Coast.

What I found more interesting in this book than Stevens' denunciation of Republican orthodoxies were the moments when he delves into the contradictions that can be experienced by a political consultant or advisor. This is something of which I have some 30 years experience in and around campaigns, some of which I had some influence in. In such a position, your job is to win ... not necessarily to be onboard with all the policy implications. 

For example, Stevens writes:

When [Republican Pennsylvania Congressman] Tom Ridge [on the eve of his campaign for governor] was facing a decision on how to vote on the 1994 assault weapons ban, I'd like to say I urged him to vote for the ban ... I didn't, nor did I advise him to vote against it. I never thought my role was to remind clients of deeply held beliefs. ... I cared about one thing -- winning -- and had every reason to believe it would mean we'd lose.

I get this. I can't say I ever differed from a plausible candidate I was working for on a matter of such consequence, though I'm not sure about that. But I certainly worked at least one campaign without any belief that my candidate would be a net gain to city and society if we won; I wanted the experience of working in a well-funded operation of a particular sort in order to increase my campaign skills, win or lose. That campaign work was about me, not the candidate. Such is extremely common among political operatives, however little we admit this to ourselves.

Stevens' book retained its interest to me, even though in the current Trump regime, it reads a little dated. If interested in what a good man learned that led him away from his previous political positioning, I highly recommend this one.