The Republican Party’s Descent Into Fascism Over 50 Years In The Making

Jane Mayer at the New Yorker reports that the unpublished memoire of Republican strategist Harvey LeRoy “Lee” Atwater – an adviser to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and a chairman of the Republican National Committee – who took Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy national, i.e., increasing political support among white voters by appealing to racism against African Americans – “shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost.” The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized:

It’s a Washington axiom that when a power player dies, their influence and secrets do as well. One night this spring, my phone chimed with a text message that showed otherwise. Sally Atwater, the widow of the legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater, had died. She had been married to the bad boy of the G.O.P. during the Reagan and Bush years until his untimely death, thirty years ago. The Atwaters’ eldest daughter, Sara Lee, who lives in Brussels and is a Democrat, invited me over to her parents’ home to read through cartons of papers from her late father, whom I knew well when I covered the Reagan White House. They included seven chapters of Lee Atwater’s unpublished draft memoir, which had remained untouched since he succumbed to brain cancer, in 1991, at the age of forty, and at the height of his political career.

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Atwater died before he could finish his memoir. What remains of it are hunks of yellowing typewritten pages, held together by rusting staples and paper clips. But the seven surviving chapters suggest that, far from dying along with him, the nihilism, cynicism, and scurrilous tactics that Atwater brought into national politics live on. In many ways, his memoir suggests that Atwater’s tactics were a bridge between the old Republican Party of the Nixon era, when dirty tricks were considered a scandal, and the new Republican Party of Donald Trump, in which lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost have become normalized. Chapter 5 of Atwater’s memoir in particular serves as a Trumpian precursor. In it, Atwater, who worked in the Office of Political Affairs in the Reagan White House, and managed George H. W. Bush’s 1988 Presidential campaign before becoming the Republican Party’s chairman at the age of thirty-seven, admits outright that he only cared about winning, not governing. “I’ve always thought running for office is a bunch of bullshit. Being in a office is even more bullshit. It really is bullshit,” he wrote. “I’m proud of the fact that I understand how much BS it is.”

In the nineteen-seventies, Atwater rose to prominence in South Carolina politics working for racist segregationists like Governor Carrol Campbell and Senator Strom Thurmond. During his years in South Carolina, Atwater became well known for managing hard-edged campaigns based on emotional wedge issues.

In the nineteen-eighties, Atwater became infamous for his effective use of smears. Probably his best-known one was tying Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic Presidential opponent in 1988, to Willie Horton, a Black convict who went on a crime spree after getting paroled in the state. A menacing ad featuring Horton was a blatant attempt to stir fear among white voters that Dukakis would be soft on crime. At the very end of his life, Atwater publicly apologized to Dukakis for it. But Atwater’s draft memoir makes clear that he had already mastered the dark political arts as a teen-ager. In fact, it seems that practically everything Atwater learned about politics he learned in high school. It’s easy to see the future of the Republican Party in the anti-intellectual dirty tricks of his school days.

[He] sneered at the top grade-getters and student-government leaders. His aim, he wrote, was to be seen as too smart and too cool to care. In high school, the only office he sought was to be voted the “wittiest.” To that end, he tried every day to do something funny. “If it wasn’t funny, it at least screwed somebody up. Every damn day, I’d screw people up. And that’s fun and funny. And I pulled a lot of shit.” Over time, he organized a group of about a hundred students to disrupt the school at his command. When speakers came to assembly, Atwater would signal his followers to rise in unison and turn their backs for a few seconds, or cross their legs in synchronized motions, or break out in wild applause. But Atwater was cunning. He writes that there was a “secret to screwing everything up” successfully. He always “understood the line” that he needed to stay within in order not to get caught. The No. 1 lesson was to be “so subtle that they can’t nab you for anything.”

[T]hroughout his life he displayed more than a tinge of amorality. In his memoir, Atwater describes, without remorse, falsely accusing another student of instigating a fight that he had started, and remaining silent after the student was paddled twenty-five times. “I didn’t tell the truth worth a shit,” he admits. He describes organizing six hundred and fifty students to spew spit wads at a female official who, he writes, hadn’t “been screwed in 20 years.” The best moment, in his view, was when a fellow-student threw a glass of ice at her, “and it really hurt her which was the funny part.”

The first presidential campaign that Atwater managed was a bid to get a friend of his elected as student-body president—against the friend’s wishes. He created a list of false accomplishments and devised a fake rating system that ranked his friend first. He plastered the school with posters declaring his friend’s platform of false promises of “Free Beer on Tap in the Cafeteria—Free Dates—Free Girls.” The campaign took a darker turn when Atwater’s sidekicks stomped on the bare feet of a hippie-like student until his feet bled profusely. Afterward, the group threatened to do the same to younger students unless they voted for Atwater’s candidate. Atwater recalls that he privately revelled in the tactics, and was proud that he could participate in “intimidating” his fellow-students. But publicly he feigned concern, or, as he writes, “I was acting like Eddie Haskell saying, ‘My gosh young people, you could be next.’ ” His candidate won an upset victory, but the school declared it void owing to a technicality. “I learned a lot,” he writes. “I learned how to organize . . . and I learned how to polarize.”

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In the final months of his life, when it was clear that he wouldn’t recover, Atwater lamented the dirty, divisive campaigns he’d run, and apologized far and wide for them. His memoir calls on politicians to instead follow the Golden Rule. [An unrepentant] Roger Stone, who formed an early consulting and lobbying firm in the Washington area with Atwater, along with Paul Manafort and Charles Black, remains unconvinced about Atwater’s spiritual awakening. “Lee was a great storyteller,” Stone told me in a recent interview. “But, in the end, he was just grasping at straws. The Atwater family disagrees and has no doubt that he became a Christian. But at that point he was also Buddhist, Hindu, and everything else.”

Stone, of course, has had his own checkered track record in Republican politics, including a 2019 conviction for lying, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice, during the Mueller investigation—all of which Trump pardoned. In Stone’s view, however, Atwater was more of an opportunist. “We both knew he believed in nothing,” Stone told me. “Above all, he was incredibly competitive. But I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it.” [Takes one to know one.]

[A] half century later, Atwater’s personal papers have had more luck. According to his daughter, the university has offered to find room for his memoir and other records in its archives. The Republican Party, however, doesn’t need to study Atwater’s lessons. It’s still using his playbook.

Another longtime Republican strategist, Stuart Stevens, author of It Was All a Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump, was interviewed b MSNBC’s Chris Hayes this week.

Susie Madrak at Crooksandliars reports, ‘We Are Really In A Battle For Democracy, And I Can’t Tell You Which Side Will Win’ (video link):

Chris Hayes was talking to Stuart Stevens about how even though Trump is out of power, Republicans are still debasing themselves to curry favor with him.

“It’s making grown individuals act in a way that would be embarrassing in normal circumstances. Like Kevin McCarthy,” Hayes said.

“I mean, we assume that Kevin McCarthy has shame. I think that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt,” Stevens said.

“I think Kevin McCarthy is quite happy. I don’t think he feels debased. He feels power. These are people that are different than us. They are people who have decided that they are defined by power. Power to no purpose. It’s a very dangerous reality,” Stevens said.

“Look, we’ve have seen this before in America. In the ’30s, there was a fascist movement in America. [America First]. We didn’t become fascist. Why? Probably because Roosevelt was president and not Henry Ford, or Lindbergh. So we elected someone who does not believe in American norms, who has strong autocratic tendencies, and what we’ve discovered is what we used to study in civics, and we still do, which is that leadership matters.

“When you say it’s okay to embrace the worst part of yourself, the self that doesn’t want to admit the other side won, you are on the road to autocracy. That’s the threat out there,” Stevens said.

“Democracy doesn’t work if you’re for democracy when you win, and you’re not for it when you lose.”

Hayes said he was glad Steven brought that up. “Something I think has gone somewhat unremarked on is that something really dangerous — aside from the violent insurrection, happened on January 6, was introducing the notion of essentially a congressional veto on the people’s vote for president. Right?

“Like, this idea that you got this big thing on January 6th, which was seen as pro forma. They’re just there to move the paper around and make it official. The idea that, well, maybe you lose the presidential election, you lose, but if you hold both Houses, and you can whip the votes, who knows? That is a genuine fear of mine that now looms. To me, the Liz Cheney thing is a microcosm of that bigger fight,” Hayes said.

“You’re absolutely right, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves. This is the plan. The plan is to be able to take the House in 2022, go about impeaching Harris, probably Biden,” Stevens said.

“When you have something that happened as it did on January 6th, and it goes unpunished, it becomes a practice. And what happened when those Republican senators voted not to hold Trump responsible is, I think will be recorded as the equivalent of the Munich Accord of our time. It is when you’re going to attempt to appease something that you know is evil to gain power and to gain this. Now, Chamberlain was a much more noble figure than anyone involved in this Senate. at least he was anti-war in a very legitimate way — with dreadful consequences.

“This is — we should not grant them the privilege of assuming they will revert to normalcy. This is normal to them. This is what they want. They do not want to believe in a system in which they can lose. Look, when you read books like ‘How Democracies Die’ by two Harvard professors or ‘Twilight Of Democracy,” by Anne Applebaum, it makes it clear most modern democracies die, not because of tanks and coups. It’s not like an end day in Chile. It’s more like Viktor Ormond [Hungary]. The Philippines had a beautiful constitutional model, like the American constitution. Marcos trampled all over it.

“It’s through the ballot box and through judicial fiat that democracies die, and that really is where we’re about now. And I can’t tell you which side is going to win. I mean, I would like to say, of course, people are going to lose. But we have kind of done that. We have proven wrong. I think we have to assume that we are really in a battle for democracy.”

Since the days of Richard Nixon and his desire for an “imperial presidency,” to the autocratic wannabe dictator of Donald Trump, the Republican Party has been becoming ever more authoritarian with fascist tendencies.  The anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian Republican Party now wants a permanent tyranny of the minority of Republicans in order to maintain power. They will do so by any means necessary including rejecting the popular will of the voters, as they are doing here in Arizona. “These are people who have decided that they are defined by power. Power to no purpose. It’s a very dangerous reality,” as Stevens said.

This is how democracies die.