Facts & Fury

The following is an excerpt from Facts & Fury, by Bill Kuhn, available on May 31, 2022 from Greenleaf Book Group.

“In this important book, Bill Kuhn spells out in a clear, easily accessible and well-researched manner the depth and breadth of the damage the Republican Party and the rest of the far-Right has done to the American people and American democracy in recent decades. Facts &Fury makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of why our country has gone so far off track.”

— Lincoln Mitchell, Columbia University

“We are lucky to have Bill Kuhn out there in the trenches fighting for a better America. Now, he has written a powerful, timely, and much-needed analysis of how the Republican party went off the rails, abandoned its mandate, and embraced extremism. It’s a scary book, but still manages to be hopeful.”

— AJ Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically

INTRODUCTION

IN FEBRUARY OF 2021, after having incited the January 6 coup attempt at the Capitol, during which five people died, former President Trump went on trial in the United States Senate. This was not his first but his second impeachment — and thanks to the Republicans in the Senate, he was acquitted for a second time, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt.

That alone is appalling. But there is so much more. A group of right-wing Rambos not long ago hatched a detailed plan to kidnap and murder the governors of Michigan, Virginia, and Ohio — a plan replete with decoy strategies and pipe bombs — and nearly carried out that plan. Moreover, as I write this, we are living through a pandemic in which, until very recently, more than four thousand people were dying every day, and yet we’ve been fighting over mask-wearing and other basic health protections.

Even after the January 6 insurrection, during which their own lives and staffs were at risk, more than 150 congressional Republicans officially objected to the Electoral College results of the November election, which had been certified by each of the states and their attorneys general.

Many have pointed the finger at Donald Trump for orchestrating all this. And it’s true that in his four years in office, he stoked hatred and violence among his supporters and labeled anyone he didn’t like or agree with an enemy. Obviously, he’s contributed to our present predicament, in which the institutions of our democracy are weakening and public trust in government is fraying. But Trump is only the gallon or two of gasoline poured on a conflagration that’s been burning for forty-plus years. As the renowned conservative scholar Norman Ornstein puts it, “The Republicans waged a three-decade war on government. They got Trump.”

I won’t mention Trump much in this book, because we all know what a colossal failure he was. Let’s save our outrage for the conditions that allowed him to take power. How were voters effectively conditioned — through decades of corruption, fearmongering, and destructive policy — to put a guy like him up as a candidate? How was he able to win? How was he allowed to wreck the executive branch and make the legislative branch look like whimpering children? He had lots of powerful enablers. Did you see Lindsey Graham perform his impression of a lapdog for four years?

So how did we get here? Do you ever wonder why government is always portrayed as dysfunctional? Why you hear the phrase “nothing gets done” ad nauseam? Why Obamacare is mostly hated but its primary provisions are cherished? Where all the conspiracy theories started? Why we don’t have good access to health care and why education isn’t funded properly? How about taxes? Why do the rich keep winning? Why is it that senators representing 10 percent of the population can block any major legislation that helps the other 90 percent?

If you’re asking yourself those sorts of questions, this is the book for you. There are a lot of great scholarly works, both conservative and liberal, that address such questions, but you probably haven’t read them, because you don’t have the time or would rather not spend your nights with a five-hundred page tome about the evolution of conservatism. I can probably name fifty amazing and knowledgeable researchers and academics who have studied this topic intensely for several years, or even decades. But most readers will never read them.

Everything I say in this book is based on the work that these scholars have done — work that proves that our current moment is the result of a decades-long siege on American democracy and the American people, led by congressional Republicans, Republican presidents, and their wealthy benefactors. But I have used these scholars’ work to write a different kind of book, one organized as a series of short, engaging chapters that are designed to educate and entertain readers who have been on the sidelines but have a sense that something has gone deeply wrong. I’ve devoted each chapter to a different idea, and in each case, I frame it with my own outraged commentary. Sometimes I curse, because I can’t help myself.

WHO AM I TO WRITE SUCH A BOOK?

Primarily, I am a concerned citizen — very concerned. The havoc and destruction wreaked upon our political system keep me up at night. I can no longer stand by as our institutions continue to buckle under the weight of one party’s greed and disdain for the people it claims to serve. The truth is, our system wasn’t built to cope with the Republican Party of the last forty years, and everyone needs to be concerned about it.

But I’m more than just a concerned citizen. I’m also a passionate political organizer.

I grew up in a political household. My mother was a key fundraiser for the Democratic Party, most notably for Walter Mondale during his 1984 presidential run against Ronald Reagan. My stepfather served as a lawyer on the Judiciary Committee during President Nixon’s impeachment, and as White House counsel to President Clinton. Politics and the Washington experience were the air I breathed during my formative years.

Early in my career, I worked in investment banking. But ultimately that didn’t sit well with me — I was a privileged White male, after all, benefiting from conservative economic policies at the expense of others whom I believed deserved more from our system. So after Trump’s election in 2016, I cofounded an organization called Fight for a Better America, a 501(c)(4) dedicated to voter engagement and grassroots organizing.

Fight for a Better America raises money to invest in key battle- ground districts and states through the US, with the goal of either flipping them blue or maintaining a Democratic incumbent. Through my travels with the organization, I have made hundreds of contacts with folks in local civic and Democratic clubs throughout the country, primarily in California, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, and New Jersey, and I’ve organized hundreds of volunteers on the ground. I’ve had thousands of conversations with voters and prospective volunteers about the issues that affect them the most.

I’m also a teacher who understands the learning process. For the past eight years, I’ve also been teaching high school at all grade levels, and I know just how difficult it can be to get ideas across. People who are fairly new to political history are like the students in my class- rooms. They often need help engaging with the material. They need some humor and entertainment. They need visuals. They need emotion. Drawing on my skills as a teacher, I’ve provided all of that in this book. The chapters are all brief, and each breaks down the works of expert researchers and academics into enjoyable chunks. Very deliberately, each begins with a What? and a Why? so that you’ll always know at the outset of each what I’m talking about and why it matters.

I should say that this book does not absolve congressional Democrats and past Democratic presidents of blame. They’ve been part of the problem, of course. But the fact is, they’re a thousand times saner and more committed to the public good than Republicans, and they don’t tend to collapse the economy or unilaterally start wars over commodities. I should also say that there are plenty of Republicans who don’t approve of their party. When I talk about Republicans in this book, I mean primarily members of Congress, the conservative media ecosystem, and a group of elite financial backers.

For too long, we’ve allowed corporate interests and those representing them to cast government in a bad light. John Dewey said, “As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” Indeed, our government functions more like a shadow than an entity. Government is supposed to mitigate the harmful consequences of private industry, not make those consequences worse. Government is supposed to level the playing field for people who are left behind, not make it less level. Government is supposed to help those who suffer needlessly with no private source of assistance to turn to. Government is supposed to be progressive in its response to our rapidly changing society.

So why doesn’t our government do that? Because, beginning in earnest in the 1980s, the Republican Party has devoted itself to waging war on government, deploying a whole range of tactics to weaken public institutions and erode the public’s trust in them. They’ve committed themselves to breaking our government, condemning its brokenness, and then claiming that only they can fix the problems that they’ve created.

How have they gotten away with this? Well, in part by developing a highly sophisticated propaganda machine to cover their lily-white butts. Remember, politics is a highly complex process, with millions of moving parts and not a great deal of transparency. It’s easy to blame the other guy for something for which you are entirely at fault. Nothing is ever clear cut. With the right tools, it’s possible to fool a lot of people, at least for a while.

But no longer. After forty years of this irresponsibly destructive behavior, millions of us are now outraged by their behavior. They have been exposed — and as I hope this book will convince you, it’s now time to do something about it.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

Unlike most books on politics and government, I’m not trying to impress academic colleagues or the Pulitzer committee. I’m not trying to win favor among pundits, journalists, and campaign veterans. Rather, I’m trying to inform and entertain the average voter.

As I’ve said, this book is broken down into a series of relatively short entries that detail various conservative attacks on democracy. I’ve written each to stand alone — you can read them in order to get a full picture of our current reality, or you can just pick the ones you’re most interested in. I open each chapter with a damning quote or two, present the What? and the Why? and then dive into the meat and potatoes — lots of research from brilliant academics who’ve been studying the problem in question for decades. My paraphrasing of their work is colorful and exasperated, because I can’t believe Republican chicanery has been going on right in front of our noses for this long.

More generally, I’ve organized this book into nine thematic sections:

In the first section, I discuss the far-reaching effects of conservatives’ attitude toward government during the past forty-plus years and how it’s shaped our politics and way of life. Let’s just say that their attitude has been one of . . . antagonism. They hate government. As the prominent conservative activist with that most unlikable of faces Grover Norquist crowed in 2012, they want to shrink government down to the size where they “can drown it in the bathtub.”

In the second section, I’ll discuss Republicans’ unhealthy obsession with private enterprise. I’m sure you have a relative and/or friend in your life who blathers on about the saintly ethos of “free markets” and how they should never be trampled on. If you don’t, consider your- self lucky. These ideologues believe first and foremost that there are actually such things as totally free markets — and that there’s nothing that the government should do about the ridiculous inequality in this country, because that would be socialism. In this section I’ll make clear, first, that markets are never free (their rules are made up by the people who create them) and, second, that government plays a vital role in protecting people’s rights, alleviating poverty, and, most importantly, ensuring capitalism works for all. If we deny these truths, we will only make our present predicament worse. And that’s not good for anyone, including the rich.

In the sections of the book that follow, I’ll discuss all sorts of other enraging subjects, including:

· How the GOP has been able to keep or come within a slim majority in the House and Senate for so long through artificial electoral advantages that are downright fascist.

· How congressional conservatives, spurred on by corporate money, have brazenly deployed alternative facts to wage their wars on science, experts, and education.

· How during the past seventy years or so, conspiracy theories — or, as I like to call them, “distractions for when congressional conservatives can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas” — almost always originate or flourish in Republican circles.

· How the GOP and conservative media have worked tirelessly to manufacture outrage, and how they’ve weaponized a whole set of buzzwords: socialism, cancel culture, radicalization, welfare queens, deficits, and on and on.

· How they accuse Democrats of engaging in the kinds of harmful behavior that they themselves are engaging in. If it weren’t so damn harmful to our country and democracy, it would be quite pathetic.

· How screwed is American democracy and society compared to other wealthy nations? How do we stack up against, say, Germany or Japan in terms of health care, voting rights, and food safety? As you’ll see, we haven’t caught up to our more advanced peers — but, as I’ll try to show, there’s hope.

In the final section of the book, I’ll provide perspective on our current situation and where we’re headed. Most people like government and its policies. This is borne out in survey after survey. I discuss strategies for Americans to reclaim the rhetoric on how government is one of our strongest assets and how to combat attacks from congressional conservatives seeking to render it ineffective.

I’ll leave you with this thought: The GOP has been operating in bad faith for years, striving not to improve but to sabotage our government and our society. That, above all, is what I hope to convince you of — and make you angry about — in this book. Only when enough of us recognize that the Republicans are waging a war on our democracy will we be able to rally a resistance, fight back, and reclaim our government.