Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich and the rise of Republican all-out political warfare

For context, the comments in this 40 second video from 1980 by radical Christian nationalist Paul Weyrich made clear that the Republican Party knew it was in deep trouble even back then. Most Americans were not buying what the GOP was selling.

In 1991, the New York Times published these comments about and by Lee Atwater, one of the architects of the modern Republican Party's brand of poisonous, no-compromise political warfare. The new Republican politics movement had nothing to do with governing democratically or in good faith. It had everything to do with discrediting the political opposition and winning power. Atwater was then the chairman of the national Republican Party. At the time, he was dying from a brain tumor, which he feared. His comments can reasonably be taken as deathbed confessions.

.... Lee Atwater has apologized to Michael S. Dukakis for the "naked cruelty" of a remark he made about the Democratic Presidential nominee in the 1988 campaign. 

Since being stricken last year, the 39-year-old Mr. Atwater has apologized on several occasions for many of the campaign tactics he once employed and for which he was criticized.  

Mr. Horton, who is black, raped a white woman and stabbed her husband while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison. The Bush campaign used the case to portray Mr. Dukakis, then Governor of Massachusetts, as a liberal who was soft on crime.

"In 1988," Mr. Atwater said, "fighting Dukakis, I said that I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate.' I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not." 

Reputation as 'Ugly Campaigner' 

"In part because of our successful manipulation of his campaign themes, George Bush won handily," Mr. Atwater said. He conceded that throughout his political career "a reputation as a fierce and ugly campaigner has dogged me."

"While I didn't invent negative politics," he said, "I am one of its most ardent practitioners."

"After the election, when I would run into [Democratic Party national chairman] Ron Brown, I would say hello and then pass him off to one of my aides," he said. "I actually thought that talking to him would make me appear vulnerable.

"Since my illness, Ron has been enormously kind -- he sent a baby present to Sally T.," Mr. Atwater's third child, who was born only weeks after he was stricken. "He writes and calls regularly -- and I have learned a lesson: Politics and human relationships are separate. I may disagree with Ron Brown's message, but I can love him as a man."

After Atwater, Newt Gingrich came on the scene. He made the situation more poisonous than it already was. Gingrich did not care about Atwater's regrets. He was all-in on the GOP's all-out political warfare plan. A November 2018 broadcast on NPR, 'Combative, Tribal, Angry': Newt Gingrich Set The Stage For Trump, Journalist Says, discusses Gingrich and his brand of poison politics. In the podcast below, Terry Gross interviews McKay Coppins, who wrote an article about the rise and tactics of Gingrich, The Man Who Broke Politics, for The Atlantic magazine at the about same time as the NPR broadcast. Coppins commented about Gingrich:

"He set a model for future Republican leaders," Coppins says of Gingrich. "I think that his defining legacy is he enshrined this combative, tribal, angry attitude in politics that would infect our national discourse in Washington and Congress for decades to come."

These are a couple of the comments from the interview transcript:

GROSS: I thought Newt Gingrich had kind of disappeared from the political scene. But apparently, he's very active on Fox News and very influential on Fox News.

COPPINS: Yeah. It's, I think, interesting. If you're not a regular Fox News viewer, I think a lot of people probably forgot about Newt Gingrich. He's very influential with the Republican base, the Fox News audience. He's seen as kind of this iconic figure, this truth teller. And he's also, frankly, influential within the Trump administration. He talks to the White House, he told me, 10 to 15 times a week. He's on the phone with Jared Kushner or Mike Pompeo or, you know, talking to Republican leaders in Congress. He is quite an influential figure. And I think that a lot of people forget about him, but I don't think we should for many reasons.

GROSS: What are the reasons?

COPPINS: Well, for one thing, he's influential in this current Trump administration. But also, his career is important to understand if you want to understand how we got to this point in our politics. He entered Congress in the '70s. And if you kind of trace the last 40 years of his career, you'll really come to understand how our politics has devolved into this kind of zero-sum culture war. You'll see the way that he pioneered a lot of the tactics of partisan warfare that we now take for granted as just a common fixture of our political landscape but were actually important innovations by Newt Gingrich and his allies.

And more than anything, I think that if you look at the way that he gained power in the first place, he did it very deliberately and methodically by undermining the institution of Congress itself from within by kind of blowing up the bipartisan coalitions that had existed for a long time in Washington and then using the kind of populist anger at the gridlock in Congress to then take power. And that's a strategy we've seen replicated again and again all the way up into 2016 when Trump was campaigning on draining the swamp. This is a strategy that may seem kind of commonplace now but that Newt Gingrich was one of the premier architects of.

GROSS: So your new article about Newt Gingrich is titled "The Man Who Broke Politics." And you date his really divisive style of politics to 1978. He was running for Congress as a House representative from Georgia. He was speaking to a gathering of college Republicans. He was 35 years old. And he said, one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics. And he told them that to be successful they need to, quote, "raise hell," to stop being so, quote, "nice" and to realize that politics was, quote, "a war for power." (emphasis added)

In his article in The Atlantic, Coppins wrote about a meeting at the Philadelphia Zoo with Gingrich, who was an animal lover:

“There is,” he explained soon after arriving, “a lot we can learn from the natural world.” 

.... Gingrich has spent much of the day using zoo animals to teach me about politics and human affairs. In the reptile room, I learn that the evolutionary stability of the crocodile (“Ninety million years, and they haven’t changed much”) illustrates the folly of pursuing change for its own sake: “If you’re doing something right, keep doing it.” (CAUTION: Crackpot reasoning alert! -- for example, the climate is changing, so we need to change what we do) 

Outside the lion pen, Gingrich treats me to a brief discourse on gender theory: “The male lion procreates, protects the pride, and sleeps. The females hunt, and as soon as they find something, the male knocks them over and takes the best portion. It’s the opposite of every American feminist vision of the world—but it’s a fact!” (CAUTION: Crackpot reasoning alert! -- for example, in some animal societies, females knock the males over and take the best food)

But the most important lesson comes as we wander through Monkey Junction. Gingrich tells me about one of his favorite books, Chimpanzee Politics, in which the primatologist Frans de Waal documents the complex rivalries and coalitions that govern communities of chimps. De Waal’s thesis is that human politics, in all its brutality and ugliness, is “part of an evolutionary heritage we share with our close relatives”—and Gingrich clearly agrees. (CAUTION: Crackpot reasoning alert! -- this is just plain nuts, e.g., humans invented laws to keep violence down and laws actually do that)

One can reasonably ask why such toxic politics and flawed reasoning resonated then and still resonates now with tens of millions of Americans. One commenter here, PD, postulates: 

.... in a different era or context, Gingrich's antics really would backfire. Some of this has to do with the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam New Right coalition ( Right Wing Libertarians, White Evangelicals like the Moral Majority, demoralized cold warriors after the Fall of Saigon, disillusioned southern democrats in the wake of the civil rights era, etc.) that emerged in the late 70s, and which was embodied by the "Reagan Revolution." There was (and still is) a lot of anger and frustration out there for someone like Gingrich (or nowadays Trump) to exploit, and understanding some of that anger (whether you agree with it or not) is also important.

That sounds a lot like what I've been arguing here for the last ~3 years. A lot of irrational fear, anger, distrust, intolerance and anti-democratic, pro-authoritarianism is going on here. For the most part, that toxic sentiment has been fomented by mendacious, divisive radical right demagogues. IMO, divisive modern Republican radicalism predates Atwater and Gingrich. 

One can arguably trace the origins of modern poison conservative politics to federal civil rights laws in the 1960s, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court public school desegregation decision, and maybe the US Civil War or even the drafting of the US Constitution. Authoritarian mindsets do not arise from nothing. That is inherent in the human condition, along with all other kinds of mindsets. But sometimes, it takes a few talented demagogues at the right places and times to unleash the full potential of anti-democratic authoritarian politics.