From The Corrosion of Conservatism (Max Boot, 2018) pp177-9
THE ORIGINS OF TRUMPISM
There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the GOP briefly became known as the “party of ideas” because it harvested so effectively the intellectual labor of conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and publications like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, and Commentary. Scholarly policymakers such as George P. Shultz, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, and Bill Bennett held prominent posts in the Reagan administration, a tradition that continued into the George W. Bush administration— amply stocked with the likes of Paul D. Wolfowitz, John J. Dilulio Jr., and Condoleezza Rice. This was the Republican Party that attracted me as a teenager in the 1980s and maintained my loyalty for decades to come?
In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and George F. Will. The Republicans’ populist pose has become all too real. A sign of the times is that Bill Bennett, possessor of a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and a JD from Harvard Law School, stoops to attack George Will, a Princeton PhD, for his criticism of Vice President Mike Pence by mocking his “penchant for writing columns filled with big words that most Americans never use and can’t even define? Presumably a dictionary counts as elitist foppery.
The turning point in the Republican transformation was the rise of Sarah Palin after John McCain made the mistake of selecting her as his running mate in 2008-a move that he later regretted, wishing he had selected his friend, Democratic senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, instead. Palin showed that she was a dim bulb when she was asked during the campaign which sources she relied on for the news. Caught off-guard, she could not answer and had to deflect with unconvincing generalities: “I have a vast variety of sources.” This was akin to an admission that she did not read newspapers or magazines beyond, possibly, Field & Stream or Guns & Ammo. I can’t say I was terribly surprised. As a McCain foreign policy adviser, I had briefed her and found her to be nonresponsive and uninterested in foreign policy issues. The most memorable takeaway from our meeting at a midtown Manhattan hotel was that she wore earrings in the shape of the state of Alaska.
Palin’s lack of preparation for high office could perhaps be excused as the provincialism of a small-state governor who had not asked for the national spotlight (Alaska’s population is smaller than San Francisco’s). But rather than return to her duties after the election or try to educate herself on the issues, Palin resigned as governor in 2009 and sought to cash in on her celebrity by becoming a full-time media personality. She then proceeded to litter the land with inanities that have few parallels in our history. There was no malapropism that she did not employ. She even invented a new word-“refudiate”-by conflating “repudiate” and “refute” and tried to suggest that she was a Shakespearean sage who was enlarging our vocabulary. A sample of Palin’s other bizarre statements: “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists.” “But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies.” “We can send a message and say, ‘You want to be in America, A, you’d better be here legally or you’re out of here. B, when you’re here, let’s speak American.'” “I think on a national level, your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out.” (There is no Department of Law in the White House or anywhere else.)”
Conservatives applauded this inanity, making Palin one of the biggest stars on the right-wing rubber-chicken circuit until she was eclipsed by the rise of the even more vulgar and vacuous Donald Trump. The rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.
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