(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The Trump presidency has been a boon for publishing if nothing else. In the past four years, there have been around 200 books about the man and his administration: meticulously reported accounts of what went down in the White House, punchy jeremiads about the death of democracy and/or truth, earnest anthropological road trips through Trump country, juicy tell-alls from former staffers who figured they might as well get a sweet book deal out of their spell in the belly of the beast. I lack either the pay cheque or the masochistic instinct necessary to have read them all but none I’ve encountered is as bracing as Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, a pre-election US bestseller that has just come out in the UK.
Stevens is a former Republican political consultant who began his career on the 1978 campaign of Mississippi Senate candidate Thad Cochran. His clients include Bob Dole, George W Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney and dozens of down-ballot Republicans over four decades. In the summer of 2015, he declared that Trump shouldn’t, and wouldn’t, win the Republican nomination. “For Donald Trump to win, everything we know about politics has to be wrong,” he told New York magazine. “And I don’t think it is.” It was. The annihilation of that assumption set off a chain reaction that ended with Stevens utterly alienated from the party to which he had given so much. “It is a strange, melancholy feeling to turn sixty-five and realize that what you have spent a good portion of your life working for and toward was not only meritless but destructive,” he writes in his book.
For Stevens, the easier path would have been to claim that the Republican Party was an honourable institution hijacked by a boorish narcissist and that he got out the moment he realised that it was betraying its professed ideals. In his analysis of Trumpology, What Were We Thinking, the critic Carlos Lozada calls such books “meh culpas”: “Had Trump come close but failed to win the 2016 Republication nomination, the conscience and corrosion of conservatism, the mind of the Right, would remain undisturbed and unexamined.”
Unlike those writers, Stevens punishes himself for his own complicity in the long-term decay from which he averted his eyes in order to keep drawing a handsome salary and remain in good standing with his tribe. “So yes, blame me,” he writes. “Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane.”
Stevens argues that Republicans could only have abandoned the principles they allegedly believed in — the importance of character, free trade, balanced budgets, a muscular foreign policy — if they had never really believed in them at all. Such a swift moral collapse could not have occurred unless the foundations were already rotten. Even as he derides the current voices of conservatism as “paranoids, kooks, know nothings, and bigots,” he describes the late William F Buckley, the dapper avatar of a more gentlemanly and intellectually robust phase of conservatism, as “a well-educated racist”. The current disaster is a culmination, not a twist. “Hold Donald Trump up to the mirror and that bulging, grotesque orange face is today’s Republican Party.”
Stevens’ argument is well-made but it’s the sense of painful personal catharsis that makes It Was All a Lie so compelling. The book belongs to a powerful genre that you might call the heretic’s confession, or the renunciation narrative, which draws its energy from the act of denouncing one’s own sins and throwing off the baggage of years of self-deception. This form of writing traditionally comes from the opposite end of the political spectrum, as Stevens noted in a recent interview with Mother Jones. “The only analogy I can find is the collapse of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union,” he said, “when the difference between reality and what is believed became so disjointed.”
He chose the right party but the period he described was 40 years too late. In 1949, the Labour MP Richard Crossman edited The God That Failed, a collection of six essays by former communists — Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer, Stephen Spender, André Gide, Richard Wright and Ignazio Silone — who had dramatically rejected the party. “You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies,” Koestler told Crossman, “but, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.” The book is remembered now as a cornerstone of early Cold War propaganda, but it is out of print and rarely read. When you do read it, the emotional impact is startling, the urge to confess being far more potent than the desire to persuade.
Such books and essays are written at great personal cost. An ideology is not just a belief but an identity, which defines your place in the world and moulds your social circle. Reject that and you risk losing everything.
In his 1938 book Assignment in Utopia (an important influence of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), the former US communist and Moscow correspondent Eugene Lyons described in self-flagellating detail the part he had played in Stalin’s propaganda machine, most shamefully the destruction of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who exposed Stalin’s man-made famine in Ukraine and was rewarded with denials and character assassinations from his fellow reporters. On his return to New York, Lyons agonised over whether to spill the beans, knowing that he would be shunned and smeared by his old comrades. That is exactly what happened. “I was guilty of the most heinous offense: puncturing noble delusions.”
This willingness to be lonely is one essential quality of renunciation narratives. Stevens, a wealthy man with a second career as a travel writer, is no shivering outcast but he hasn’t crossed the floor to join the Democrats, most of whom regard Never Trump conservatives with suspicion. While the Right is inclined to welcome fugitives from the Left and brandish them like trophies, recovering Republicans occupy a very small, inhospitable niche in US politics. “While such a loss can be melancholy it can also be liberating,” writes Tim Miller, another consultant turned GOP refugee, in a recent blogpost called Goodbye to All That. “Getting rid of the shackles of toxic identities give you new perspectives and the freedom to be honest. You don’t have to make excuses for stuff you know is wrong.”
Such political solitude is hard to maintain, which is why many anti-communists rode the pendulum to the opposite extreme. Eugene Lyons dabbled in Trotskyism as a kind of ideological methadone but wound up as a full-throated member of the red-baiting Right. In a little over a decade, James Burnham went from being America’s most prominent Trotskyist to a McCarthyite and pioneer of neoconservatism who quit his consultancy role with the CIA because he deemed it insufficiently anti-communist. In The God That Failed, Louis Fischer criticised this personality type for gravitating to “a new pole of infallibility, absolutism and doctrinal certainty. “When he finds a new totalitarianism, he fights Communism with Communist-like violence and intolerance. He is an anti-Communist ‘Communist.’” To remain in political limbo, absent a replacement clique, requires an unusually strong personality.
The second crucial feature is timing: you have to leave the ship before it becomes clear that it is sinking. Many western communists abandoned the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 but they deserved no bravery medals for that, just as Republicans who are waiting until Trump is out of the door before they speak out will have missed their shot at integrity. As Stevens observes, “the ranks of ‘Good Republicans’ who maintain they really didn’t know the extent of what Trump did will make Washington feel a lot like 1946 Berlin.”
The third and most important quality is brutal self-examination. In order to remain a valuable member of the party, Koestler wrote, a communist had to “confirm and deny, denounce and recant, eat your words and lick your vomit.” Real liberation is not possible without admitting guilt. The prose trembles with the nervous exhilaration of throwing off a lie and giving full vent to all the doubts that have been suppressed for too long.
Louis Fischer minted the idea of the “Kronstadt moment”: the epiphanic realisation, named after Lenin and Trotsky’s crushing of the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, that Soviet communism was a murderous lie and there was no way back. “Until its advent,” Fischer explained, “one may waver emotionally or doubt intellectually or even reject the cause altogether in one’s mind and yet refuse to attack it.” Stevens’ Kronstadt moment was the de facto nomination of Donald Trump in May 2016, which convinced him that the Republican Party not only could not be saved but did not deserve to be saved. It confirmed what he had doggedly ignored for many lucrative years. “I was there and, yes, I contributed,” he writes. “This is not an ‘I am better than them’ plea. I’m not.”
Renunciation narratives are valuable because they are rare, particularly on the Right. People generally do not want to admit when they have been colossally wrong, preferring either to double down or blame others. Nor do they enjoy being hated by those they used to call their friends. To confess, in private and in public, that you have wasted years of your life on a fraud, to burn bridges before you’ve built new ones, to see what is in front of your nose rather than what you need to believe is true, takes a certain courage that is, let’s say, not a defining feature of political life.
As Koestler said, you may not like or trust these people but they are the only ones who know what it’s all about. Stevens closes It Was All a Lie by raising the possibility that the Republican Party could still redeem itself and become more than a cynical mechanism for acquiring and maintaining minoritarian power. “But that would be a lie, and there have been too many lies for too long.”
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SubscribeIn what way does the existence of the ultra rich make the rest of us poorer?
Attempts by governments to extract more money from them inevitably seem to lead to more squeezes on ordinary responsible savers
“In what way does the existence of the ultra rich make the rest of us poorer?”
BECAUSE THEY HAVE DOUBLED THEIR MONEY IN THE LAST 18 MONTHS BY REDISTRIBUTING THE MONEY FROM THE MIDDLE CLASS AND WORKERS AND POOR TO THEMSELVES !!!!!!!!!!
They are stealing your wealth if you are typical Middle Class, and here is how it works:
They get the government, which they own as they are ‘The Donor Class’ and finance all the campaigns, etc, like Zucker gave $450,000,000 YES, half a billion to defeat Trump – that is how they roll, Plus they make sure every politico who does their work becomes filthy rich – think of every one of them, Pelosi worth over two hundred million, Blair, Clintons, Miliband… all of them…
Sooo – The Fed, BoE, ECB, all print TRILLIONS, which can never be paid off – so they must use Inflation to make it melt away. Inflation is a TAX. It eats your savings, pensions, spending power, and pay. The Trillions ended up in the filthy Rich pockets where they keep it by getting VAST loans for no interest that they buy assets with, which inflation will melt the debt away leaving the free assets – appreciating and dividend paying assets!!!!! That is on top of just getting the money handed to them – by QE and all the issuing of $ mostly goes right to them…
Sooo – the Corrupt Government prints $10,000,000,000,000 into existence by creating debt, which 90% goes to the filthy rich – then it is all paid back by the Inflation Tax inflation away the working folks savings and pay and spending power to erase the debt, See????
YOU PAY FOR EVERY CORRUPT 10 TRILLION THEY HAVE STOLEN BY THE COVID RESPONSE – YOU ARE POORER, THEY RICHER!!!!!!!!!!!
You silly economically illiterate sheep watch some good education, or just stay sheep and get eaten…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WyEPltVWMM
Realize that the proposed tax on unrealized gains is probably unconstitutional and is certainly totally inappropriate. Not only will be billionaires find loopholes and ways to get round the tax, but the downstream consequences may be incalculable. After all, once established for billionaires why not to millionaires, and then ultimately to anybody who holds any stock at all.
But the fundamental problem is that the proposal entail double taxation. Let us say one has to pay 1% tax on unrealized capital gains. First, one would probably have to sell stock every year to be able to pay that which would not only rapidly deplete one’s unrealized capital but more importantly would involve also paying additional capital gains taxes on stocks that one has sold to come up with the cash to pay the “wealth” tax. Second, it fails to take into account that unrealized capital gains are vaporware. The stock market doesn’t remain constant. Yes it goes up, but it also goes down. You can bet that there won’t be rebates if one’s unrealized gains drop by 50% in a year. But they certainly can do so – all one needs to do is look back to 2008 and for that matter to Feb/March 2020. Third, such a tax is simply unamerican. It is completely unreasonable for the Government to make money off the risks made by others – i.e. the government takes all the money but bears none of the risks. The same is also true of capital gains taxes which in the US, in contrast to the UK, are not indexed for inflation. That’s important because stock held for long periods of time and then sold may appear to have made massive gains but in fact when indexed against inflation represent only very meagre gains.
Lastly, the politics of envy which is all that this is, is simply destructive. Sure Elon Musk is unfathomably wealthy. But he deserves every penny, and when it comes to electric vehicles he is light years ahead of all the major car manufacturers. The Tesla is a combination of not only superb engineering (with 0 to 60 mph is less 3 sec) but the hardware/firmware/software controlling the car is astounding. Right now, there is only assisted driving which is very helpful on long freeway (motorway) trips, but it wont be long before driving will be on almost complete auto-pilot. And Musk is leading the way. Similarly he is leading the way in terms of rocket development and ultimately space exploration as NASA and the US Government have clearly failed to live up to their initial promise after the first set of Moon landings and space shuttle trips.
So let Musk keep his billions. He puts it to a lot better use than any Government ever could, and in the process advances mankind (which is certainly more than can be said for the current Biden administration).
There is a great video series on Musk at his spaceX site here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
i think its very illustrative of the difference between private enterprise and government projects. When Musk talks about the cost of lift/weight to cost ratio, the ambition is to make space travel as cheap as possible, to make it accessible to as many as possible ( not necessarily everyone) was that even an ambition under NASA, they didn’t need to make it cheaper because they had effectively infinite money to accomplish their goals. That isnt to knock NASA’s historical achievements only to say, where are they now? they are effectively going to be a regulator for spaceX or Virgin or Bezo’s one.
“Sure Elon Musk is unfathomably wealthy. But he deserves every penny, and when it comes to electric vehicles he is light years ahead of all the major car manufacturers.”
His money is mostly money given to him by Government and all manner of weird devices like C)2 Credits. He loses money on each car but makes profit on them by the C02 credits….
I think him the least evil of the tech monsters though. Zukerberg, Google, Amazon, Dorsey, Gates, are all totally tied up in creating the global surveillance state which will enslave us all. They are the Dogs the Pigs (Global Elite) use to maintain their total power in Animal Farm…
“If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak […] Instead – she did not know why – they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”
There’s a load of “Debunking Elon Musk” -type videos on YouTube.
The rich like Bezos are only getting richer to such extremes is because of globalisation. Big companies can get exponentially bigger, and can get so big they can destroy any competition and dictate to governments. It’s the inevitable monopolisation that often occurs, just on a global scale. Crony capitalism, state subsidisation, lobbyists, backhanders, lack of competition. It always happens, whether it’s private or state run, because power corrupts
When you say ‘get richer’ you mean in terms of unrealised valuations. This is not really the same thing, someone like Musk is more of a paper tiger as the cashflow woes of Tesla demonstrate.
“someone like Musk is more of a paper tiger”
OK, that is today’s crazy post. He is one of the worlds most dangerious Tigers – he may be less evil than the other most blood-lusting and powerful Tigers, but he is one of them!
I’m all in on replacing all intra-country wealth transfer taxes with mark-to-market, algorithm-based wealth taxes and the end of central banks.
I look more nostalgically at the French Revolution every day.