Just Finished Reading: How the Right Lost Its Mind by Charles J Sykes (FP: 2017) [232pp] 

My regular readers may remember me mentioning the idea of ‘knowledge streams’ in respect of my reading plans. These ‘streams’ are long term projects to read up, and read more deeply, about a few topics that particularly interest me. One of them I’ve labelled USA:WTF and is my attempt (hopefully achievable) to understand – or at least increase my appreciation of – the craziness that is the United States of America. As a recent side-quest to this stream (or would that make it a tributary?) I’ve added ‘Reading Trough Trump 2.0’ for this year and (presumably) the next 3 in an attempt to understand why Trump was elected President in the first place and why (oh, why) he was Re-elected knowing what he was like and the likely consequences of him getting his small hands on the levers of power again. This book was part of the side-quest (I’ll be posting a full list each January). 

The first thing I have to say that I was, overall, disappointed with the book and this was probably, in large part, because of me. The book attempted to answer the ‘How’ question whereas I was looking to answer the ‘Why’ question. So, rather a disconnect. The other did touch on the why question but only really tangentially. This was more the history of the drift (and then the gallop) to the Right of the Republican party by people/groups that were previously sidelined/ignored/ridiculed on the fringes of the Party finally gaining the centre.  

It was a tale of growing disappointment with the established traditional conservative Republican party which seemed to (and actually did!) ignore a considerable percentage of their voters and assume that they’d vote RED regardless of outcome (to be fair the Democrats were doing exactly the same to their core voters). For a long time, these increasingly frustrated voters had little recourse and little idea that their grievances were WIDELY shared. Then came Talk Radio and people across the country learnt that they were most definitely NOT alone. It wasn’t long before the disparate, displaced and scattered individuals and groups found a voice, and it wasn’t long after this that politicians and political movements took that energy and ran with it. Before long the drift to the Right (or actually further Right) became a flow and then a flood. Before anyone really knew (or maybe just recognised) we had MAGA and we had an opportunist like Trump. 

Most of this I already knew (though maybe not the initially significant impact of Talk Radio) from other reading but it did provide a structured narrative to hang things on. One of the things that I felt both added and detracted (or even distracted) from the narrative was the author himself – a more traditional Republican from the more Liberal end of the spectrum. You could feel his disappointment that “his” Party had been subverted by those who didn’t (and maybe never) hold what he regarded as conservative values. It was obvious that he definitely had ‘skin in the game’ and that writing this book may have been a sort of therapy to enable him to understand what, in his mind at least, went wrong with the Republicans. Despite my overall disappointment I did find this worth the read. I will, however, be looking for some more cogent analysis of what exactly happened in US politics in the post-Raegan era. Reasonable and much more to come on this fractured side-quest.