A rebuttal to "Who is most at fault for the mess?"

My post yesterday was based on this 11 minute video by Steve Schmidt, a former radical right Republican operative. 

PD strongly criticized the video because of Schmidt's culpability in fostering the rise of the radical right wing in the Republican Party. 

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Comment: This brought to you by a former Republican and former chief of staff for Presidential candidate John McCain. Someone who saw it change from the inside. He knows of what he speaks.

PD's response and criticisms: I also find it difficult, and at times enraging to hear Schmidt's pious history lectures. Though he once admitted the gravity of his role in the problem he's discussing, he has become fabulously wealthy while conveniently revising the real history of Trumpism which begins with Sarah Palin. When the HBO movie Game Changer came out in 2012, Schmidt confided that watching himself (played by Woody Harrelson) on the screen gave him a "little bit of PTSD." He succinctly spoke a very important truth in a TV interview-- one that is simply left out of the history lesson above:

The experience on this[2008] campaign is that there are worse things than losing…. I think the notion of Sarah Palin being president of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly. And I played a part in that.

It's a severe understatement, and he didn't bother to lay out the depth of that "game change" in legitimizing, as he now puts it, "all those [bigoted] forces that William F Buckley had worked hard to expunge from the Republican Party" (paraphrase fr above vid). A few corrections are in order.

1) The extremist group Schmidt credits Buckley with evicting from the party was called the John Birch Society. Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, and Buckley met with soon-to-be presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Russell Kirk, a Christian "traditionalist" conservative, was adamant about there being no place for the conspiracy theories and proto-fascistic tendencies of The JB Society in the GOP. He said, Buckley later recalled, “The John Birch Society should be renounced by Goldwater and by everyone else — Kirk turned his eyes on me — with any influence on the conservative movement.” 

Goldwater protested (much as Trumpists would do with the poisonous militias, Qanon and others that made JB Society look moderate) that renouncing JB Society would "alienate his base." The Arizona Senator said, "every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society." As for the supposedly ethical Buckley, he had accepted donations from the Birch Society's founder/leader, Robert Welch-- a man who had accused Eisenhower (!!) of being a communist puppet. This had not prevented St. Buckley from accepting his donations. 

Now, scared of alienating Welch's followers (the JB Soc itself), Buckley suggested they criticize Welch, suggesting he was not fit to run JB Society. The compromise was designed to NOT alienate JB members, by putting all the emphasis on the leader which in the end would hopefully influence some members to leave the group, while those remaining would become discredited by association. Conservative authors often portray this as high-minded idealism, but it was all about PR and a viable path to the White House for Goldwater who would have preferred it if he could have gotten away with running AND accepting the endorsement of JB Society. Pure calculation; not a sudden burst of ethical insight by those who would fight against civil rights laws and then desegregation in the coming years. 

So, Schmidt's version of history as a Southern Lost Cause takeover (while partly true) is vastly simplified. The powerful New Right forces were not from Jim Crow states, but racist, WF Buckley of Conneticut wealth who wrote God and Man at Yale; Russell Kirk self-professed Christian Conservative philosopher from Michigan with advanced degrees in Literature; Barry Goldwater, senior senator of Arizona, an Episcopalian, self-styled radical Right Libertarian who hated New Deal Liberalism, labor unions and fought against Civil Rights-- the man Martin Luther King declared unfit to become president if the racial divide was to be healed. Oh, and he talked somewhat glibly about using nukes in Vietnam, much as McCain who proudly took his seat in the Senate in the 80s would later talk about "bombing Iran." So, the "conscience of conservativism" opposed civil rights, desegregation, the New Deal and all social programs for the disadvantaged while supporting a vast military industrial complex that would make nukes that should not be limited to deterrence but seriously considered for use against countries like Vietnam. Yeah, I get it now.

2) More serious are Schmidt's own sins of omission above. Did Trump really open the floodgates to all manner of formerly marginal racist, conspiracist, gun-toting, government hating far Right groups and individuals? NO. His approach built very consciously on the inroads of one Sarah Palin who tarred Obama as an American Hating socialist who "pals around with terrorists." She brought gun violence explicitly into election ads while MTG and Boebart were still in High School, with one ad putting House democrats on a map as targets of shootings. One of the targets--Gabrielle Giffords-- was later shot leading to a controversy over the possible role of the ad. The Alaskan, speaking-in-tongues, extremist Christian Nationalist, sharp shooter, who Trump admitted inspired his approach, also threw her support behind Trump's disgusting entry to mass politics as a central proponent of Birtherism. Although she had said that Obama was probably born in Hawaii, she also said cryptically that:

[T]here is something there that the president doesn't want people to see on that birth certificate. [adding that]....I appreciate that The Donald wants to spend his resources on something that so interests him and so many Americans, you know more power to him.

In 2016, Palin's endorsement of Trump was billed by Trump as the "most special of all endorsements." Palin was still wildly popular, a symbol of everything the "alt-right" and Trumpism would soon take to the White House.She was then a darling of such hateful figures as Pat Buchanan and David Duke. Her proudly held adherence to Pentacostal and prosperity gospel (not unlike that of Trump's WH appointee for chair of the evangelical advisory board, Paula White) has since become a staple of the GOP base, and its Christian Nationalist bent. We saw more crosses than American flags on 1/6-- and the flags were used as weapons to injure the police.

I can't read minds, and I don't know with any certainty just how much contrition Schmidt (and for that matter Nicole Wallace who mentored Palin) feel in retrospect. Ironically, they have both built careers as moral "truth-tellers" when it comes to the state of the GOP. 

I hope my comment here has made it clear that there was no "golden age" of enlightened Republicanism in which people like WF Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, and McCain represented "decent" and "ethical" conservatism. 

I hope its clear that The John Birch crazies were displaced reluctantly and only in order to clear a viable path to the White House for the radical Right Wing ideologue, Barry Goldwater who MLK warned Americans against. There are plenty of good histories of the "New Right" for those who want a more honest and long-term accounting of the nihilism and ironic government bashing Republicans who (while bashing gov't as "the problem and not the solution") captured many of its leading institutions, dragging in to their coalition all manner of religious and ideological crazies. It was new in the late 60s and early 70s and culminated in the merger of Christian Nationalists like Falwell, Cold War hawks, Federalist Society radicals, and et al.  

I hope it is abundantly clear that there's a reason the book and movie on Palin was called "Game Changer," as she was the first nut-case ideologue with no education to be cleared by the GOP as a reliable PRESIDENT should the aging and cancer-striken McCain die in office had he been elected. That means she cleared a bar that otherwise would have remained (at least for a while longer) a barrier for would be inexperienced, ignorant and hateful radical Right Wing candidates.

So, who recommended her in order to help a very flawed candidate (McCain)? Who interviewed her and argued that she was the Hail Mary pass that Team McCain needed? That would be 2 young Republican operatives, both seen widely as paragons of morality today, viz. Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace.

If they had actually admitted the calamitous effects of their choices, rather than rewriting history along the lines of the video above, I might welcome their conversion to sanity and acceptable ethics. But to my knowledge, and based on the above, they are self-righteous (esp. Schmidt) in ways I find disturbing given the roles historians will someday assign them for ushering in right wing populism with a vengeance via Palin. 

Until then, I do think they are useful as anti-Trump/never-Trump propagandists. But their analyses are self-servingly myopic and superficial as far as the roots and causes of our political moment go. Anyway, that's what I believe to be the case, and with much evidence to support such an interpretation. Maybe this should have been an OP rather than a long comment.

(some minor edits are made to increase ease of reading)