Tom Nichols: The Republican party is now in its end stages
“Looking back on it,” he added, “it was so obvious. You see it in people—in a minor thing, in people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who stoke the outrage of the day, and they can be completely on the other side of the subject that they were on six months ago and nobody calls them out on it. And you realize that if you don’t have a commitment to truth, you can get by with a lot of stuff. I think those warning signs were there.”
What he never expected, he told me, was “the authoritarianism … but looking at the fact that truth doesn’t matter, anything now is possible.”
But the abandonment of truth wasn’t the only factor that reshaped the GOP; the politics of fear contributed, too. In the past, there was significantly more focus on policy, Kinzinger said. But today “we feed fear. That’s all we do.”
Worse, politicians are rewarded for fearmongering. “I don’t do emails like this anymore,” he explained, “but if I sent out an email that said, ‘Chip in five or 10 bucks because otherwise Nancy Pelosi’s going to burn down the entire country,’ I would raise a lot of money on it. If I send something out that says, ‘Give me five or 10 bucks because I want to present a future that’s optimistic for this country,’ I’ll raise an eighth as much.” He said both sides do it, but it’s the Republican side he can speak more authoritatively about. He added this ominous note: “By the way, fear works. And if you have a leader that speaks your fears right back at you, boy, that is the most compelling thing to get a vote.”
Kinzinger is trying to break that cycle and reverse the incentive structures. He’s announced a new initiative, the Country First movement, to provide financial support to Republicans who stand against, and offer an alternative to, Trumpism.
Those Republicans need to “present an optimistic view, to reinspire people,” he said, “but I think, just as importantly, you have to call out BS. If somebody is peddling fear, you have to call that out. It’s calling out that stuff openly and aggressively and shining light at darkness. I think that‘s part of it.”
Kinzinger added that for the past four years “nobody’s heard anything against [Trump], so then when I come out and I say this stuff as aggressively as I am now, people are blown away, like ‘How dare you! He’s the messiah.’ Because nobody had said otherwise.”
Leaders have to lead, he said. “For too long, we just tried to reflect back what people wanted to hear, and so they heard no alternative.” And voters, for their part, have to demand better. But he has hope that if they do, they can turn the situation around. “It took us awhile to get in, it may take us a little bit to get out, but I also don’t think Donald Trump is as inevitable as people think. But he will be if nobody speaks out.”