"How the Right Lost Its Mind", by Charlie Sykes

In this book, written in 2017 in the wake of Trump's election, conservative commentator Charlie Sykes examines how "a movement that was defined by its belief in limited government, individual liberty, free markets, traditional values, and civility found itself embracing bigotry, political intransigence, demogoguery, and outright falsehood".

Sykes' account is not very interesting when he is pontificating on the history of conservatism. Where it comes alive is when he gives his personal story. Sykes grew up in the '60s as a liberal Democrat, supporting civil rights and oppsing the Vietnam War. His dad was also a prominent liberal activist. But his father was outraged at the violent student protests at the university where he taught. When strikers tried to shut down the student newspaper, where his father served as faculty adviser, a 17-year-old called him a "fascist pig". Sykes concludes that "left-wing politics came to be dominated by humorless and strident ideologues, who did little to hide their contempt for the older generation, bourgeois values, and for American culture in general."

As for Sykes himself, he graduated from college and became a newsaper reporter. He says that he "watched as the good intentions of the Great Society often failed to match the results, creating as many problems as they solved. Covering urban issues, I watched the multiplication of programs that had increasingly abstruse acronyms but seemed to exist for no other purpose than to satisfy a voter bloc and provide employment to various hacks and mediocrities. They did not discernably imporove any lives or fix any problems. As it turned out, bureaucracies made poor substitutes for famlies and neighborhoods and were often insensitive to their unintended consequences they left in their wake." This strikes me as a fair commentary on the failure of LBJ's Great Society.

By the late 1980s Sykes' shift to the right was complete, and he became a talk radio host in Milwaukee in the early 1990s. Sykes refused to support the Trump campaign of 2015-2016, and he was vilified by his former listeners and supporters. Many called him a "cuckservative", a favorite epithet from the MAGA crowd. Sykes then ended his radio show at the end of 2016 to write this book.

One think that struck me was the significance he attributes to Rush Limbaugh's attacks on Sandra Fluke, who was a law student who advocated in 2012 for health insurance covering contraceptives for females. I remember this well, as at the time I would occasionally listen to Limbaugh, and I was listening when he called Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute", and when he said "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch". I remember being outraged by this and I never listened to Limbaugh again.

But what I was unaware of is the retribution Limbaugh faced as a result of his despicable attacks on this young woman. Dozens of advertisers dropped him from their advertising, and he lost key stations in major markets throughout the country. Sykes says this was "a prelude to what would happen in 2015-2016", when allegations of Trump's abuse of women didn't seem as serious due to Limbaugh's normalization of this sort of behavior.

Sykes ends with advice to his fellow conservatives, but this will fall on mostly deaf ears in the current political climate. Some day conservatives will likely look back and realize the wisdom of Sykes's advice, and the foolhardiness of supporting Trump, but that's a long way into the future.