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Op-Ed Contributor

Charlie Sykes on Where
the Right Went Wrong

By CHARLES J. SYKESDEC.
15, 2016

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Niv Bavarsky

MILWAUKEE
— After nearly 25 years, I’m stepping down from my daily conservative talk radio
show at the end of this month. I’m not leaving because of the rise of Donald J.
Trump (my reasons are personal), but I have to admit that the campaign has made
my decision easier. The conservative media is broken and the conservative
movement deeply compromised.

In
April, after Mr. Trump decisively lost the Wisconsin Republican primary, I had
hoped that we here in the Midwest would turn out to be a firewall of
rationality. Our political culture was distinctly inhospitable to Mr. Trump’s
divisive, pugilistic style; the conservatives who had been successful here had
tended to be serious, reform-oriented and able to express their ideas in more
than 140 characters. But in November, Wisconsin lined up with the rest of the
Rust Belt to give the presidency to Mr. Trump.

How
on earth did that happen?

Before this year, I thought I had a relatively solid grasp
on what conservatism stood for and where it was going. Over the previous decade,
I helped advance the careers of conservatives like House Speaker Paul D. Ryan;
Gov. Scott Walker; Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National
Committee; and Senator Ron Johnson. In 2010, conservatives won big majorities in
the Wisconsin State Legislature, and I openly supported many of their reforms,
including changes to collective bargaining and expansions of school choice.

In short, I was under the impression that conservatives
actually believed things about free trade, balanced budgets, character and
respect for constitutional rights. Then along came this campaign.
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On the surface, the explanations
for Mr. Trump’s improbable win in Wisconsin are simple enough: He won big
margins in rural, blue-collar counties and won the pivotal Green Bay area by
double digits. But he underperformed Mitt Romney in the vote-rich Milwaukee
suburbs and ended up getting fewer votes in victory than Mr. Romney received in
his 2012 defeat. Hillary Clinton, however, got about 39,000 fewer votes in
heavily Democratic Milwaukee County than President Obama did four years earlier.
Democrats simply stayed home, though that is obviously not the whole story.

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That is what I saw, and this is
what it might mean for the future of conservatism. When I wrote in August 2015
that Mr. Trump was a cartoon version of every left-wing media stereotype of the
reactionary, nativist, misogynist right, I thought that I was well within the
mainstream of conservative thought — only to find conservative Trump critics
denounced for apostasy by a right that decided that it was comfortable with
embracing Trumpism. But in Wisconsin, conservative voters seemed to reject what
Mr. Trump was selling, at least until after the convention.

To be sure, some of my callers embraced Mr. Trump’s
suggestion for a ban on Muslims entering the country and voiced
support for a proposal to deport all Muslims — even citizens. One caller
compared American Muslims to rabid dogs. But right to the end, relatively few of
my listeners bought into the crude nativism Mr. Trump was selling at his
rallies.

What they did buy into was the argument that this
was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he
could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton. You simply cannot overstate this
as a factor in the final outcome. As our politics have become more polarized,
the essential loyalties shift from ideas, to parties, to tribes, to individuals.
Nothing else ultimately matters.

In this binary tribal world, where everything is at stake,
everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth,
or principles. If everything — the Supreme Court, the fate of Western
civilization, the survival of the planet — depends on tribal victory, then
neither individuals nor ideas can be determinative. I watched this play out in
real time, as conservatives who fully understood the threat that Mr. Trump posed
succumbed to the argument about the Supreme Court. As even Mr. Ryan discovered,
neutrality was not acceptable; if you were not for Mr. Trump, then you were for
Mrs. Clinton.

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The state of our politics also explains why none of the
revelations, outrages or gaffes seemed to dent Mr. Trump’s popularity.

In this political universe, voters accept that they must
tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other
side is always worse; the stakes are such that no qualms can get in the way of
the greater cause.

For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary
Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew
to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy
theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton — that he was a secret Muslim,
that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out
that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept
evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into
a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and
propaganda.

And this is where it became painful. Even among
Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the
demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of
betrayal.

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When it became clear that I was
going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more
than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist
sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection
retribution. As the summer turned to fall, I knew that I was losing listeners
and said so publicly.

And then, there was social media. Unless you have
experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms
that were unleashed on Trump skeptics. In my timelines, I found myself called a
“cuckservative,” a favorite gibe of white nationalists; and someone Photoshopped
my face into a gas chamber. Under the withering fire of the trolls, one
conservative commentator and Republican political leader after another fell in
line.

How had we gotten here?

One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the
bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But
as we learned this year, we had 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.

That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For
years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy
theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert
Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims.
Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the
channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed
or at least ignored.

We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while
empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.

This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure,
one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment
of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any
profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends;
the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.

I’m only glad I’m not going to be a part of it
anymore.

Charles J. Sykes (@SykesCharlie), a talk-show host in
Wisconsin, is working on a book titled “How the Right Lost Its Mind.”

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on
December 18, 2016, on Page SR3 of the New York
edition with the headline: Where the Right Went Wrong. Today's Paper|Subscribe

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