An interesting read, and one that has remained interesting throughout Trump's presidency. If you're familiar with Sykes already, then you will probably know where he falls politically. As a progressive, it's always interesting to me to read books by the Never Trumpers (Rick Wilson jumps to mind, in particular). It's difficult to separate Sykes from the movement that ultimately elected Trump, and the base of the GOP that he appeals most to. However, if you're looking for some insight from "inside the house", then you might find some of what you're looking for here.

It’s very hard to keep up with the political landscape at the best of times, but in the chaotic era of Donald Trump, it’s downright impossible. This becomes even more the case when someone wants to write a book about it, but I found Charles J. Sykes’ take on the situation fascinating (and fact-filled, which is always nice).

Not being American, I had no idea who the author was when I received and began to read this book (he’s a *conservative* political commentator). What makes this book so fascinating is that it is written by a man on the Trump/Republican side of things, and it’s an honest look at a conservative movement self-imploding and becoming a personality cult.

While I sympathise with domestic American causes that have come under attack since 2016, for me, as a foreigner, my two main issues with Trump and his supporters are the hatred he fosters for anyone without US-of-A on their passports, and his support for Russia (my now-homeless family members in Ukraine would really like him to stop supporting Putin’s war).

I suppose the most hard-line right-wingers will detest this book and label Sykes a “loser” and a “traitor” and every other word Trump likes to throw his critics’ way, but How the Right Lost Its Mind should be read by people on both sides of the political divide.

In my quest to get "out of my liberal bubble" as Charlie Sykes would say, I decided to take a step out of my comfort zone and read a book by a conservative. Now granted, this is a Never Trump conservative but it was still a baby step.

How the Right Lost Its Mind was actually a very interesting and informative look at the rise of conservative media and the shift from more conventional Republican thinking to the Alt-Right. It really laid out nicely the original formation from the earlier days of talk radio through the shift at Fox News and rise of Info Wars.

As a liberal, it can be difficult to read at times since the opinions differ, however it did get me thinking a bit about how the media in general could tone it down at times. How some may have went after earlier conservatives potentially too harshly, paving the way for increasingly shocking behavior.

I cannot say it changed my mind in a way, but it did get me thinking.

In How the Right Lost Its Mind, Sykes presents an impassioned, regretful, and deeply thoughtful account of how the American conservative movement came to lose its values. I believe that people have the right to be a conservative, believe in that political ideology but currently the American conservative movement seems to represent racist, non-accepting, pro-big corporation, screw the little guys party. The purpose of this book isn't to hate on anyone but to ask how did a movement that was defined by its belief in limited government, individual liberty, free markets, traditional values, and civility find itself embracing bigotry, political intransigence, demagoguery, and outright falsehood?


I really enjoyed this book

I picked this book because I wanted to read a conservative's perspective on Trump and his followers and enablers. I rolled my eyes and flipped through the pages of slobbering, cartoon-heart-eyed adoration for Buckley and Reagan and others, which was about the first 1/3 of the book, before we finally got to the point. For the most part, Sykes' dissection was right on the money - he examines, in turn, the Alt Right, the conservative media echo-chamber, the rejection of truth and intellectualism, the hypocrisy of the Christian right, and a too-tiny section about bigotry and racism.

But I keep wondering...what took you so long? These are all things that people have been saying for YEARS. YEARS! And all the while, "sane" conservatives like you just stuck your head in the sand, laughed when Ann Coulter or Hannity or Limbaugh or Michelle Bachmann or any number of whackadoos said something completely off the rails, didn't push back forcefully against birtherism, legitimized the alternate reality of Fox News/Rush/Drudge etc. And only when the inmates started to take over the asylum and could no longer be ignored, did you actually wake up and try to put a stop to all this nonsense, and it's all just too little, too late.

I believe Sykes' dissection of conservative radio talking head Mark Levin's flip-flop on supporting Trump could be applied to most Republicans, and across many decades before Trump came along:

"Levin had been prepared to back Trump despite the fact that Trump had routinely smeared his opponents. But those were other people. He spread vile gossip about women. But those were other people. He mocked the disabled, and lied with impunity. But until Trump's thugs turned their sights on him, Mark Levin saw none of this as disqualifying the man from the Oval Office. In that respect, he was like so many other conservatives who decided that what was happening to their movement was somebody else's problem."

As one of those "other people," I'd like to thank you for finally coming to your senses, but it's past time to get to work. Writing this book was a good start. Now what?

I am a Democrat that is very liberal in my views, but I am extremely concerned about the direction that the Republican Party has been heading towards the past few years. First, there was the tea party and then Donald Trump came along and made the Republican Party one that is unrecognizable. I have Republican friends that say that they feel like they do not belong to a particular political party anymore, as it has changed that much. As a Democracy, we need to have different views and political parties, but we do not need the hate and chaos that the Republican Party currently represents. The author of this book really captured the crisis that Republicans are facing and how they got to this point. As a Democrat, I found it a very interesting read and I recommend it, no matter what your political affiliation.

TL;DR

How the Right Lost Its Mind by Charles J. Sykes is a must-read for political junkies looking for the conservative never-Trumpers assessment of the current Republican party. Highly recommended.

Review

It’s a truism that converts to an ideology are often the most zealous, and for a while, that described me. As I moved from Republican to conservative to independent to liberal to Democrat, I often found myself too partisan. In that leftward drift, I maintained conservative friends and sources that I could disagree with yet respect. However, in the era of Trump, a number of those same sources lost their intellectual grounding to defend the indefensible. When I read through Charles J. Sykes latest book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, I found an intellectual conservative that I could respect and with whom I have, do, and will disagree. Through his radio program, one of the many Right wing talk shows that populated the airwaves from the 90s through today, Mr. Sykes became a political player in Wisconsin. As candidate Trump converted the conservative establishment, Sykes remained true to conservative principle. His career suffered for it. He lost his audience and more, but he embodied the conservative virtue of personal responsibility. He chose principle over power. For this, he was ridiculed and ostracized. He watched as the party of limited government, his party, became consumed with owning the libs and populism while also becoming a welcome home for white supremacists. In his latest book, Charles J. Sykes traces the conservative movement from the intellectual days of William F. Buckley Jr. to the inspiring yet flawed presidency of Ronald Reagan to the scandal laden chaos of Donald Trump. Mr. Sykes dives deep into How the Right Lost Its Mind.

How the Right Lost Its Mind

The first line sums up the book as a whole. “This is not a book about Donald Trump, even though he will play a central role.” (xiii) (1) Charles J. Sykes is a true believer when it comes to conservative ideology. For him, conservative principles are the whole point. How the Right Lost Its Mind documents how many so-called conservatives betrayed their ideology in exchange for power or to keep their audience. It’s a scathing indictment that spares no one, not the conservative establishment politicians, conservative commentators, or evangelical Christians, not even Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Sykes establishes the modern conservative movement with William F. Buckley Jr. This history lesson gives the Right a history of intellectualism that I only knew superficially. Mr. Sykes dives in and gives us examples of Buckley’s principled stand and the troubles he faced with the conspiracy theorists of his own time. He continues the Rights evolution through Goldwater to Reagan and on to the heady days of the conservative talk radio ending with Trump’s embrace of conspiracy theorists and white supremacists as his base. The sad decline in the Right’s intellectualism is beautifully laid out with academic precision by a conservative who hates the academy.

A Liberal's Thoughts

To be clear, I am politically left of center, a liberal, and, as of 2018, a Democrat. (2) Since the 2016 election and since leaving Facebook, I’ve been glued to Twitter where I’ve found new sources of liberal political thought. But I’ve dropped a number of conservative sources since they have become little more than a cult of Trump. At least, that’s what I thought. When I saw an opportunity for an Advanced Review Copy of the paperback edition of How the Right Lost Its Mind, I saw a chance to learn. Really, I expected a book about a Republican jumping ship to join the liberals in their resistance. Instead, Mr. Sykes remained a conservative as Republicans moved on to populism, and the book is better for it being about a conservative remaining a conservative. For standing firm, he was labeled a traitor and with the idiotic acronym RINO. (3) Near the end of the book, he summed up the problem of politics in general but Republicans at this moment in history with the following quote: “Of all the areas of American life, politics may be one of the very few where you can get booed for saying that people should follow their conscience.” (pg 231)

The history of the modern conservative movement fascinated me. It appears that the Right has always had a conspiracy theorist problem, but traditionally, they eschew the crazy. By embracing it in 2016, Republicans have gone against their own history. The intellectual lineage is wholly at odds with how I view modern conservatives. Mr. Sykes in-depth documentation of where the party came from gives me hope that the Right can return there in the future.
Those Mean Liberals Made Us Do It
Unfortunately, Mr. Sykes sprinkles in that special brand of conservative victimhood that makes no sense. While he reserves the majority of the blame for conservatives, he puts part of the blame on mean liberals. These are the least convincing arguments of the book. For example, he says that the Lefts use of racist/racism made the Right numb to the more blatant examples of racism displayed by Trump’s supporters. It’s lazy thinking that places all responsibility on liberals to operate only under the conservative definition of racism. To be clear, there exists a fundamental disagreement between the Left and the Right for what racism actually is. Liberals tend to consider how racism is inherent in the modern systems that slavery, Jim Crow, and the Southern Strategy created. Conservatives tend to view racism only based on definition without consideration of how society treats people of color. When it comes to racism, the Right and Left talk past each other because they’re not speaking a common language.

But absent that, if Democrats being mean makes racist words and actions acceptable to you, maybe you were always going to find them acceptable. It’s here where the party of personal responsibility decides to shirk its duty to blame the mean Democrats. While some liberals could work on their delivery, any discussion of racism will cause defensiveness in anyone. This defensiveness results in a sensitivity and belief that an accusation of racism is more malicious than it is. Conservatives, for all their talk about snowflakes, play victim just as quickly and often as liberals.

Racism

While we’re on it, Mr. Sykes does inquire into the Rights easiness with racism. He correctly sums up my and a number of folks on the Lefts thoughts about Trump voters and supporters. “It is impossible to say how many conservatives actually harbor racial resentments, but what is undeniable is that a great number of American conservatives have proven themselves willing to tolerate and even accept racism and racial resentment.” (pg 14) This is the statement that stood out most for me in the book because it connected liberals with Mr. Sykes brand of conservatives. I’ve seen it in a number of places on the Left but nowhere on the Right. This type of party-examination showed that Mr. Sykes is genuine in his attempt to document the departure of Republicans from conservatism.

Further Reading

Before this book, I only knew of popular conservative media, like Fox News, Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and, well, mostly talk radio hosts. But throughout, Mr. Sykes uses supporting evidence from various conservative thinkers that I’ve heard of but never sought out. The quotes and excerpts provided a number of resources for me to check out. In fact, I bought Johnathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind simply because of the quotes that Mr. Sykes used.

I firmly believe that the only way to know if your ideas are good is to test them. But my normal conservative sources have joined the cult of Trump, and for the last year, I haven’t found conservative think pieces worth reading. But Mr. Sykes has given me resources to check out. Besides his own blog, The Contrarian Conservative, I’ve begun to visit the Weekly Standard and National Review’s websites. Of course, I don’t agree with either very often, but the intellectual aspect of the essays are a much needed addition to my political reading.

Conservative Media

Mr. Sykes’s analysis of the transformation of conservative media is one of his most convincing arguments. He correctly discusses how conservatives have built their own echo chamber as a backlash to the liberal bias of the so-called traditional or mainstream media. (4) While I think he’s again playing the victim card a little too much about the traditional journalism, the liberal bent does exist. Mr. Sykes looks at how conservatives ran so far out of balance that individual stories are no longer questioned but the whole institution is considered fake. All the time on social media, news is dismissed not because the story got facts wrong or because it’s fake. No, now, people dismiss it out of hand based on the source of the news story. To be fair, both sides do this. The Left dismisses Fox News out of hand, which I think is too simple. Fox does deserve some of the blame for this because they do not clearly delineate news programs and opinion shows. When I hear the accusation out of conservatives (5) that the New York Times has opinion even in its weather reports, I ask for proof. Zero evidence that the NYT does this has ever been presented to me. And on the flip side, when it’s a Fox News news show, it tends to be good reporting that focuses on stories I do not find interesting. (6) Mr. Sykes shows how conservative media has built and become prey to an audience fueled by anger and purity. Woe unto the show host that challenges the audience.

In Wisconsin, Charles J. Sykes hosted his own radio talk show, which propelled him to a force in state politics. He built an audience and helped turn Wisconsin into what it is today. In other words, he participated in the industry that propelled the Republican Party to the far Right. In his mind, he discussed policy and conservative philosophy, but he soon found out that the audience wasn’t interested in either so much as returning to power. Sykes stuck to his principles as Trump rose to prominence in the Republican Party. His audience, however, ditched conservative philosophy and principle to jump on the nationalist band wagon attached to the Trump train. Trump supporters, once loyal listeners, began to insult Sykes and engage in the low behavior that the internet age encourages. Where he once helped elect Scott Walker, he was no longer Republican enough. He was labeled a RINO. Tangentially, he wonders if he contributed to the current environment but only momentarily. I don’t think he interrogates his own role in pushing the Right from a party of small government to the current authoritarian loving regime it is. I know that’s the purpose of the book, but it would have added to the personal journey that he’s clearly on. The book is excellent without it; I think it would have been better seeing him wrestle with his role rather than acting as a neutral observer.

Conclusion

Politics in the Trump era is a toxic cesspool. In this environment, political norms are dead and buried. With each escalation, Trump wins, and our democracy loses. One of our major political parties has abdicated their principles and decency. How the Right Lost Its Mind documents this decline from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump. It’s well researched, well written, and compelling. Anyone interested in politics – Left, Right, Undecided – will get a new perspective on conservatism based on this book. How the Right Lost Its Mind gives me hope that intellectual conservatives understand the danger that Trump and his most fervent supporters pose to our Republic.

Notes

1. All quotes are from the hardcover edition since it is out in print.
2. Typically, I leaned Left but didn’t vote straight Democrat. In 2016, I voted for Eric Greitens, who ended up being another compromised Republican. Between Trump and Greitens, I vowed never to vote Republican again. Lindsey Graham’s antics during the Kavanaugh hearings have solidified that vow.
3. Republican in Name Only – the Right’s version of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Not only is it further proof of the Right’s obsession with purity, no one can tell me who gets to decide what a real Republican is. Trump? The Base? The voter?
4. With Fox News, Hannity, Drudge, and Limbaugh getting audiences in the millions, I don’t see how they can be anything other than mainstream.
5. To my shame, I did the same thing when I was a conservative. Seeing that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about is partly what led me to the Left.
6. Another irritating complaint conservatives make is, “Why don’t the media report on [insert story that conservatives think is awesome here].” Where they see some conspiracy to keep ‘real’ news that helps the conservative cause out of the press, I see a business making decisions on what will sell. If conservatives want the press to cover their stories, they should become customers of that company. Isn’t that how the market works? Instead, conservatives complain that the press only covers news that appeals to their customers and not their non-customers.

This book answered a few questions I've had since Trump came into office. Yet, I'm still befuddled by his supporters. Not just his solid core. Because unfortunately I understand them. Ugh! But, even Republicans who don't believe in Trump nor his false values still support him. I'm not talking voters now. I'm talking Republican Politicians. I think they mostly despise him, but now that they're in the majority they back some "definitely not all" of his lame brain ideas. I'm a Democrat, but I was always an Independent before. I always voted for who I thought was best. No matter the party. Because of bipartisanship. This word has no meaning anymore in D.C. Trump though has made me into a liberal Democrat. Not the totally crazy ones, but if he's not gone in 2020, I just might start wearing a pink pussy hat! Also, #Me too. Trump, or Mr. Grab 'em by the pussy, needs to be tarred and feathered and sent out of Washington. Let me and the nation heal from all the lies, and hatred that spews forth from his selfish, ego-centric body. I did enjoy this book, although I had to take breaks from reading it because I'd get so durned angry at times! Thanks to the folks at Netgalley, and St. Martin's Press for the ARC, and letting me read and review this book for the price of one little review.

Here, conservative writer Sykes explores the reasons why the supposed party of small government, fiscal responsibility and integrity transformed into the party of Trump over the last few decades.

In the recent avalanche of political books and articles published since Trump came to power, it's exceedingly difficult to offer new perspectives on the hows and whys of the U.S president's rise in popularity within the Republican Party, but Sykes does make a valiant attempt. Coming from a conservative viewpoint, his insights were interesting, even if I didn't always agree with them. Also liked how he broke down each factor of the conservative movement's evolution, as well as chart the growth of right wing news, from the repel of the fairness doctrine to Info Wars.

Of particular interest was his examination of the rise and fall of Tea Party movement, which was something I didn't pay a lot of attention to when it was going on, it was definitely a learning experience to a degree. Additionally, Syke's account of the backlash he received from fellow right wingers when he continued to criticise Trump after other conservative commentators had fallen into line after his candidacy in 2016 was confirmed made for a fascinating read.

Overall, in a sea of books examining the Trump phenomenon, this is certainly one of the stronger ones that I've come across.

This was an ARC from Net Galley and St Martin's in exchange for an honest review. With thanks.

I love, love, love this book. I, for many years, was a very strong conservative. I DID NOT vote for Trump and still do not understand how we have so many ignorant, uneducated, and very racist people in the world. I am not saying that everyone who voted for Trump has those qualities, but one must wonder why they felt that he was so much better. Now as this book has described, we are the laughing stock f the world. I did not realize how much the conservative side had given up to support him. Ther are many conservatives that do not wish to support him and I applaud them. Charles Sykes started his career in journalism and then went on to become an author and commentor. What I love about this writer is his ability to discuss things and use positive points while doing. Also he has the ability to write about whatever and make you love it. He could talk about butternut squash and you would want to eat it.

Thank you netgalley as well as the author/publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest review.


5 ⭐️ out of 5