Paul Rosenberg — From Nixon to Paul Ryan: How right-wing radicals deceive America

By shifting the spectrum of debate, here's how America's rightward march has been normalized throughout history

From Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush to Paul Ryan and Chris Christie today, leaders who’ve shifted America to the right have been aided by moderating misrepresentations. In the case of Reagan, it was not just the man, but conservatism itself that received the flattering reinterpretation. That was a difference that mattered; it goes to the heart of why Reagan is the American right’s touchstone. But the more general process of misrepresenting and reinterpreting increasingly radical ideological figures as if they were normal, everyday pragmatic problem-solvers is one that’s been a repeated leitmotif in America’s political trajectory since Richard Nixon’s political resurrection in 1968.

As Elias Isquith wrote here after Christie’s reelection, Christie is not the next great moderate hope, he’s just very good at executing what Blake Zeff identified as the GOP’s blue-state playbook, breaking with red-state conservative orthodoxy on a few secondary issues. But it takes more than a column or two to expose the emperor’s new clothes. For the moment, George Washington Bridgegate notwithstanding, Christie remains the GOP’s best hope of winning the White House in 2016, largely because he’s so good at the game that Isquith pointed out, orchestrating his own misrepresentation as a mainstream political figure. What’s more, battling against 2016 GOP rivals will only make it more difficult and more important to see beyond the illusions to what Christie is actually doing. That’s why is helps to look backward to similar figures in the past, and how they managed to so successfully deceive. And it’s not just Christie. Paul Ryan’s role in shaping GOP budget politics — and all the attendant economic fantasizing — provides another key reason why we need a far better grasp of the process of normalizing reactionary radicalism. 

Salon
From Nixon to Paul Ryan: How right-wing radicals deceive America

Paul Rosenberg