The Hangover with Chris Stirewalt

The Hangover has now concluded, and Chris Stirewalt thought it appropriate to provide an epilogue to the series. If the last four years have taught us anything, Chris observes, it’s that “people are terrible at predicting the future.” After the GOP’s victory in 2016, nobody could have guessed that the party would be swept out of power four years later, or that our lives would be upended by a pandemic. Going forward, there’s no way of knowing whether the GOP will overcome its current craziness or completely self-destruct, but the rot within the party reveals as much about America itself as it does Republican politicians. Making our republic healthier and stronger is a job for all of us, and we can accomplish it by engaging with our institutions and communities. This series has been a pleasure to put together, and we at The Dispatch send our thanks not only to all of Chris’ guests, but to all of you for listening.

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Conservative journalism has changed markedly since John Podhoretz began his career at the Washington Times in the early 1980s. When Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998, it was clear that things would never be the same. On today’s episode of The Hangover, John joins Chris Stirewalt to explore how the changing media ecosystem contributed to Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The pair reflect on the creation of The Weekly Standard, electoral politics in the Clinton and Obama years, and how Trump’s victory affected the conservative movement. Even though Trump is no longer president, will his presence in conservative media continue to be felt for the foreseeable future?

Show Notes:

-John’s page at Commentary

-John on the history of The Weekly Standard

-Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address

-Matt Drudge breaks the Lewinsky scandal

-Josh Marshall: “The Digital News Industry Was Built on Lies”

-Glenn Beck and Roger Ailes

-Obama’s birth certificate coffee mugs

-National Review’s “Against Trump” issue

-Chris Christie’s takedown of Marco Rubio

-16 magazine

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While it’s true that Chris Stirewalt came to perform an autopsy on the GOP’s 2020 election strategy and results, it’s worth pointing out that “the GOP” as a rule didn’t do all that badly in 2020 – the real problem was Donald Trump. Given this state of affairs, Chris decided to reverse course momentarily by speaking to Parker Poling, the 2019-2020 executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee and one of the primary architects of the GOP strategy for congressional elections in 2020. Parker helps to give us a better sense of why Republicans entering the party without Trumpian baggage were able to outperform the president in their own state and local elections and what it was like to make such strides in diversifying the GOP cohort to include more women and racial minorities at a time of revanchist populism. Parker even gives us her advice for freshman members of Congress (Hint: Most of them don’t follow it, even though they should).

Show Notes:

-Parker’s time in the GOP

-Patrick McHenry’s unexpected congressional career

-Congressional Republicans outperformed Trump

-Florida’s 27th Congressional District had an unpredictable election

-Iowa’s 2nd District, and the election with a six-vote margin

-A hint of what the NRCC could’ve run on before January 6

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NBC’s Steve Kornacki saw his star shine a little brighter on November 3rd, 2020 and the succeeding weeks as he walked Americans through the results of a long, arduous, and oftentimes confusing election. But Kornacki has been providing that kind of astute analysis for a long time, and he’s bringing it to this episode of The Hangover to discuss how our changing electorate has contributed to the sense of political chaos from the 90s until now. In a political culture where polling seems less and less accurate, and where the weak parties contribute to strong partisanship, how can the GOP claw its way back to a sensible-but-popular agenda?

Show Notes:

-Steve Kornacki’s The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism

-Republicans were not enthusiastic for Romney

-“The Growth and Opportunity Project,” or, the 2012 GOP autopsy

-Ohio is much more Republican now than it was four years ago

-Wisconsin’s “WOW” counties

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Chris Stirewalt’s third guest is AEI Fellow and Washington Free Beacon founder Matthew Continetti, who gives voice to the story of the GOP’s ascendant populism from the historical perspective of the American right and the conservative movement. As Matt says, while Trump may have proved the usefulness of populism as a last-ditch electoral strategy, the long-form history of right-wing populism shows that “apocalypticism is a feature, or even the dark side, of populist movements.” By Matt’s lights, conservative politicians in Washington had a vastly different understanding of what “constitutional conservatism” meant compared to the grassroots, but they kept in lockstep regardless. These contradictions simmered under the surface for years, only to explode into the Trump campaign. “For the Tea Partiers, [it meant] that the current government in Washington D.C. was something of an alien, invasive presence. And radical measures were necessary to beat it back.” Additionally, tune in for an analysis of Trump’s “mental jiu-jitsu” and a unique critique of the 2012 GOP autopsy.

Show Notes:

-Matt’s book on Sarah Palin

-Joe Wurzelbacher becomes ‘Joe the Plumber’

-Rick Santelli starts the Tea Party on live television

-“The Two Faces of the Tea Party”

-Matt discusses Bush’s immigration reform proposal

-Buchanan’s 1992 “Culture War” speech

-Obama, a pen, and a phone

-David Shor speaks to the importance of “ideological positioning”

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With a country split practically down the middle when it comes to politics, it’s a truism that the GOP needs to broaden its base if it wants to win elections. But it’s hard to make progress when the party’s leadership is struggling to make heads or tails of its own voters, let alone outsiders. Republicans could stand to take a few lessons from former Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, who was the House Majority Leader for the 112th Congress. Cantor tells The Dispatch’s Chris Stirewalt that he developed a necessary trait for a Republican coming to political consciousness in a deeply suburbanizing, ever-more purple Virginia: It was “a vision [to] add more people to the armies and champions of liberty,” and he makes the case that this should still be the priority for elected Republicans.

Show Notes:

-Richard Obenshain

-Virginia’s population boom

-Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders

-Boehner’s “Dollar-for-dollar” plans

-Eric Cantor talks about a refusal to tell the truth in our politics

Chapter 3: Chris and Matt Continetti look at the rise of the New Jacksonians

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The Hangover begins with Richard Brookhiser (American historian and longtime editor at National Review) making a statement that is both clear and simple and yet seems like a revolutionary point to be made among Republicans: “Trump had his day, but it passed.” The question remains, why aren’t they acting like it? Furthermore, how did the Republican grassroots go from Tea Partiers tidying up after themselves on the National Mall to rioters breaking into the Capitol in the space of just over a decade? Brookhiser explains this populist overthrow within the tradition of political factionalism stretching all the way back to Madison.

Show Notes:

-Founder’s Son by Richard Brookhiser

-I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics, by Jeanne Safer

-The Tea Party was notoriously clean

-Some U.S. cities are semi-permanently wrecked from 20th-century rioting

-Democrats have become the party of the rich

-The “anti-elitist” Democratic-Republican Party was made up of rich guys

-A giant list of Israeli political parties

-Brookhiser argues that liberty is the core of American politics

Chapter 2: Chris Talks With Eric Cantor

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