Tim Alberta’s American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump is a concentrated distillation of a decade’s worth of political trauma. Its account of the Republican Party’s descent into populism begins, aptly, in 2008, with an exploration of two countervailing forces: the ascension of Sarah Palin and the collapse of the mortgage market. At the same moment that the Republican Party’s faithful fell in love with a media-savvy neophyte with an instinct for populist demagoguery, its governing class was tasked with taking the painful steps necessary to contain an unfolding economic catastrophe.
Amid the wreckage of the financial meltdown, the architects of the GOP’s fracturing made the most of their moment. The Tea Party, an amalgam of center-right interests galvanized into a movement by the bailouts for America’s most exposed asset-holders, adopted the language of limited-government principles while expressing social anxieties. The conservative movement’s media complex made heroes of figures in and out of government willing to sacrifice decorum in service to emotional displays of distress. Outside groups compelled Republican politicians to mount doomed charges of the light brigades in defiance of insurmountable odds—two government shutdowns—only to use the predictable failure of these charges as an opportunity to fundraise against those very politicians. It was a period of cynicism and paranoia, two conditions Donald Trump capitalized on in the early part of the 2010s by advocating “birtherism”—a baseless and racially antagonistic attack on Barack Obama. All the while, the sources of institutional authority within the Republican Party atrophied, audiences replaced constituencies, and ideas were subordinated to clickbait.
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