It Was All a Lie

March 15, 2020
"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.

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March 23, 2020
Political consultant Stevens, a strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential bid, debuts with a searing critique of the current state of the Republican Party. Contending that Donald Trump’s rise calls the GOP’s fundamental integrity into question, Stevens connects Trumpism to the rhetoric and policies of predecessors including Joe McCarthy and Newt Gingrich. In reviewing the party’s “Southern strategy” of appealing to former Democrats aggrieved by the civil rights movement, Stevens admits to playing the race card in his first congressional campaign in 1978, when he promoted a rival candidate in a successful effort to split the black vote between the Democratic incumbent and an African-American challenger. He questions the Republican Party’s commitment to family values, fiscal prudence, and intellectual rigor, successfully illustrating the gap between rhetoric and reality. Stevens, who claims to have amassed “the best win-loss record of anyone in my business,” admits to having been duped by Republican candidates who professed conservative principles but abandoned them in order to “embrac a racist unprepared to be president”—a confessional quality that distinguishes this account from others by center-right figures. Readers hoping that the post-Trump GOP charts a new path will savor this thoughtful exposé.