How can this election be this close?

Welcome back to my more-occasional-than-I-intended newsletter, Doomsday Scenario, exploring whether things are really as bad as they seem. Today, a week out from the election, the answer in this moment is almost surely: Yes.

It’s impossible to watch clips of Sunday night’s Nazi-esque rally at Madison Square Garden and not wonder how America came to this—how the United States, in a time of what is by almost any objective measure a remarkably strong and prosperous economy, is flirting with authoritarian fascism a week out from a coin-flip election.

We’ve seen weeks of serious warnings from serious people like Mark Milley and John Kelly that Donald Trump is an aspiring fascist, and Sunday night only underscored that the vision the current GOP candidate has for our country is bleak and fundamentally un-American.

I often joke, semi-darkly, that my journalism career largely focuses on topics that should be history, but instead are current events—subjects like nuclear war, the rise of the far-right, investigating corrupt presidents, and the like. Sunday, as the long and overtly racist program unfolded in New York, one-time GOP strategist Reed Galen tweeted about how my podcast “Long Shadow” last year captured so much of this moment:

That season, indeed, was some of the best journalism I’ve done in my career. Earlier this month, I had the honor of receiving and celebrating an Edward R. Murrow Award for the second season of “Long Shadow,” which as Reed says focused on the rise of the American far-right. (It was a fantastic evening, and I even got to meet the series producer, Ryan Sweikert, in person for the first time as the news organization that produces the podcast, Long Lead, brought us all together to celebrate.)

Since Long Lead’s John Patrick Pullen and I started the podcast three seasons ago, the goal of “Long Shadow” has always been to help explain why America today is the way that it is—each season traces the history of a subject to show how conscious choices and strategies, on topics like the far-right and guns, have led us to the country we live in today.

As part of that, I want to offer today one specific theory about how the GOP ended up in Madison Square Garden Sunday night.

Earlier this fall, I read an interesting one-two of Tom McGrath’s TRIUMPH OF THE YUPPIES, about the 1980s, and John Ganz’s WHEN THE CLOCK BROKE, about the early 1990s — both books published earlier this year — and while they obviously weren’t intended as sequels or a two-volume series, they inadvertently work pretty well together. Ganz (NYT review here) picks up mostly where McGrath leaves off (NYT review here), and together they trace in colorful and head-smacking detail how America began to unravel politically and economically in the ’80s and early ’90s. But when I finished the two books, I found myself wanting more—Ganz’s book mostly ends in 1992 and I know there’s a lot more chaos ahead. That’s when my eyes settled on Nicole Hemmer’s PARTISANS, sitting in the middle of my bookcase of books-I’ve-been-meaning-to-read. I had interviewed Nicole last year, for that second season of “Long Shadow,” and she was the core of the episode looking at the rise of right-wing media and how it turbocharged the far-right.

Her book had the perfect answer and filled in the final chapter of the transformation from McGrath’s 1980s and the Reagan era, through Ganz’s 1990s, and onward in Hemmer’s book. Together, I think they’re one of the great political trilogies of American politics (albeit unintended)!

I devoured PARTISANS, which came out in 2022, in as close to a single sitting as I could and just loved it. The book’s subtitle is “the conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s” and it explores how right-wing leaders like Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, David Duke, Dinesh D’Souza, and Helen Chenoweth built a new post-Cold War vision for right-wing politics that so decidedly turned its back on the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan’s years. “They all worked to develop a politics that was not just conservative but antiliberal, that leaned into the coarseness of American culture and brought it into politics, that valued scoring political points above hewing to ideological principles,” Hemmer writes.

Her book is a terrific piece of research and an even more awesome accomplishment of engaging storytelling. I was as close to pumping my fist in the air reading the book as I could be. It will be on my top ten books of the year, surely.

In reading Ganz, as he discussed the '92 primary campaign, where upstart firebrand Buchanan challenged incumbent president George H.W. Bush, I had scribbled in the margins at one point “Did Pat Buchanan actually win?” and then lo and behold that’s basically the takeaway from Hemmer’s book entirely. Pat Buchanan may have decisively lost the primary, but his vision for the GOP has turned out to be triumphant; Trump and the numerous other speakers Sunday night at Madison Square Garden sound much more like Buchanan than either of the Bushes who served in the White House.

Hemmer’s book begins to explore what to me has always been the core problem with the modern GOP: The rise of conservative media in the 1990s disconnected politics from policy on the right—the people who had the loudest voices and who were the main drivers of the party’s direction were no longer party leaders responsible for governing or legislating, people who had to temper their promises with political realties and who had to achieve the things that they said they would.

That shift meant that personal profit became the main driver of the GOP—the pundits, radio hosts, and right-wing media stars could say whatever they wanted and there was no one that they were accountable to. There was—and still is!—more money in being more outrageous than being pragmatic. It’s far more profitable to be the person telling party leaders what to do than it is to be the person actually responsible for the problems. And, as that power shifted and the center of gravity in the party moved from the inside to the outside, the party’s rhetoric became increasingly disconnected from the realities of governing or well, simply, any reality at all.

That shift began the path that led to Donald Trump taking over the party—Donald Trump, a man whose myriad problems have been well-documented and someone who at the most basic level shares none of the values of the traditional GOP. Trump understood there was nothing to be gained from being good at politics; you just had to be good at using the megaphone and used that insight to run roughshod over the traditional GOP; at the same time, I’ve always believed he was a symptom rather than the disease inside the modern GOP, which had been metastasizing for decades.

Often you’ll see analysts or historians talk about how the entertainment factor became bigger in politics—that’s still how a lot of people talk about Trump, whose rise was driven by the vision of him put forward in “The Apprentice.” But to me, “entertainment” is the wrong motivator — that may be what mattered to voters, but what mattered to the politics was the profit motive in being the outrageous voice. The curse of Fox News has always been it was wildly profitable for News Corp—that’s why no one wanted to rein in it or its outrage-creators like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson.

You can’t understand the ideological corruption and antiliberal tendencies of Trump’s MAGA movement without understanding how much of the traditional GOP’s power slipped away to right-wing media provocateurs. Personal profit remains a key motivator for nearly everyone left in the Trump orbit—and that motivation is an important lens through which to look at the list of people who spoke Sunday at Madison Square Garden: Everyone on that stage hopes to make money and have access to power if Trump wins. They’re in it for themselves, not the good of the party, nor the good of the nation.

Given the stakes of this election, I figured I ought to be clear about something I’ve never spoken about publicly before: I will be voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz this election; I could write a long explanatory essay comparing policy points of view and explore at a degree of nuance the relative policy positions around domestic issues I care about and foreign policy questions that concern me, but the reality of my choice is very very simple: I am supporting Kamala Harris because there is no more important issue to me on the ballot than American democracy. And, despite whatever both-side-ism you may see in the day-to-day coverage, there’s only one ticket and one political party right now committed to the future of the United States as a liberal democracy.

Thanks for reading — I’m going to try to write more regularly in the days and weeks ahead, particularly in terms of offering some more book and reading recommendations! It’s clear that whatever happens next Tuesday, we’ve got a long road ahead.

GMG

PS: A critical side observation: It’s notable that even as this right-wing media ecosystem took off, the left historically never had a similar media echo chamber—leaving individual party leaders more in control of the party narrative and more beholden to reality. Ironically, it’s in this election arguably that such an outside left-wing media ecosystem first fully exists—an ecosystem led by the Obama alums of Pod Save America, Ezra Klein at the New York Times, and Rachel Maddow and Morning Joe at MSNBC, among others. Interestingly, it’s that *exact* ecosystem that did so much to force Joe Biden from the presidential race following the June debate—a sign, remarkably, of a healthy party ecosystem and one that stands in sharp contrast to the toxic cult that has built up around Trump and the GOP.