IT WAS ALL A LIE

“Blame me”: A one-time Republican operative recounts the transformation of the big-tent GOP into an organ of white nationalism.

Stevens has been working in Republican politics for decades. Looking back at the age of 65, he regrets being “focused on winning without regard for the consequences.” Whereas a Republican presidential candidate could once expect to win between 30% and 40% of the black vote, that figure tumbled in the years after Barry Goldwater, when, successively, leaders like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sounded racist dog whistles to get the votes of insecure Southern and rural whites. Stevens himself admits, “I played the race card in my very first race,” driving just those white voters into the arms of the GOP by highlighting the fact that an otherwise unknown black man was running as an independent for Congress. Fast-forward to the present, when the party is headed by a man whose values should be anathema to it: Like the man himself, the GOP is “addicted to debt and selling a false image of success.” While Stevens does not place all blame on the current president, he avers that “in retrospect, the Clinton presidency adhered to the values espoused for decades by Republicans far more than the Trump years.” Ouch! As for the party, Stevens writes that it’s nearly impossible to imagine a GOP that adheres to the values of “compassionate conservatism” advanced only two decades ago by George W. Bush or one that will stand up to a resurgent Russia. He closes by predicting that Republicans who have given Trump free rein will one day “look back on this period of their lives with a mixture of shame, sadness, and regret,” holding some dim hope for a return to the values of old by virtue of moderate Republican governors and state legislators.

An epitaph, of interest to all politics junkies, for a formerly venerable party by a champion-turned-gravedigger.