The RNC's 2016 Primary Post Mortem

Probably the most famous line in The Third Man celebrates the creative forces that are generated by turmoil and strife:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The cuckoo clock is German, not Swiss.  But is the logic still true on a fundamental level?  The Republican National Committee is testing that hypothesis by taking the highly unusual step of commissioning a "post mortem" on the 2016 primary before the general election has even happened.  And it turns out that the stormy political scene has created fertile ground for unconventional, piercing analysis.  Partly this is because the RNC hired writers operating outside the usual collection of think tanks and conservative groups.  It is hard to think of a less likely roster than the one that ended up producing the post mortem:  Alan, Calista, Sarang, and Dave.

I should say post mortems, because fractious infighting meant that each writer produced a "minority report," none of which attracted any co-signers.  (There was no "majority report.")  The RNC made a virtue of necessity and published the reports as four separate books, with Reince Priebus noting wryly that the process of producing the post mortem was a pretty good metaphor for the primary itself.

Sarang's entry, Race Ipsa Loquitur, is the longest and has the broadest scope, starting with the strong civil rights plank in the Democrats' 1948 party platform (which, incidentally, was adopted in Philadelphia, the same city that will host the 2016 Democratic National Convention) and exploring at length the Republican Party's troubled and troubling connections to racial animus and resentment.  Sarang is at his most persuasive when he unpacks Trump's statements and connects the dots between his attacks on President Obama and his appeal to white racists.  Unfortunately for Priebus, Sarang's concluding advice to the GOP ("close your books, pack up your things, slink away in shame, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out") is less than constructive.

Dave's book, Behind the Veil, argues that the defining characteristic of the modern Republican Party is its embrace of ignorance.  Most groups are imperfect at acquiring and processing knowledge, Dave argues, but the Republicans are unique in their cheerful celebration of idiocy and their elevation of the conservative pundits and "journalists" who peddle it.  Dave's case is compelling, but my advice to the casual reader is to skip chapters 5-14, in which Dave explores the too-cute conceit that the Republicans are actually trying to replicate the Rawlsian conditions for discovering social justice.  The book picks up steam again as Dave turns to his stark prescription for the party:  cut itself off from Fox News and its ilk and return to mainstream sources of knowledge.  Dave persuasively argues that the Democrats have been well-served by the absence of a "partisan comfort blanket" that merely parrots their views.  The Republicans might lose a few elections without their propaganda machines, but ultimately the party and the country would be better off because of it.

Alan's book starts with a cheerful message for Priebus:  keep doing what you're doing, everything is fine.  But if Priebus keeps reading Worse Than the Disease, his comfort will evaporate pretty quickly.  "The Republican Party is sick all right," Alan writes.  "And the disease is conservatism."  Alan argues that conservatism as it is understood and practiced in the United States is a force for evil.  The only hope for our country is to channel conservatives into futile political projects that seldom or never attain power and that alienate as many voters as possible.  By that standard, the 2016 primaries were a rousing success.  Not only is Donald Trump one of the least electable candidates of all time, but the nomination process unearthed rich veins of idiotic and offensive statements that the Democrats can use to bury him in November.

To finish on a lighter note, Please Clap, Calista's chronology of the primary, recounts the hilarity that was one of its most remarkable features.  Calista shifts focus between small moments of levity, like the inartful Bush phrasing that gave the book its title, to the larger and darker jokes, like Ben Carson's endorsement of a man who compared him to a child molestor.  Calista mostly keeps the book light, but over the course of her narrative she develops a deep and troubling theme:  when people start laughing they often stop thinking.  This all-too-human response was crucial to Donald Trump's ascent, and may yet catapult him to the White House.  Don't stop laughing, she advises, but remember that if we don't work to defeat Trump, the joke may be on all of us.