How the Right Lost Its Mind

While Charlie Sykes refers to himself as a “recovering liberal”, I am a lifelong liberal. As such, I REALLY wanted to know what brought our country to this place, with this person as our (sort-of) chosen president. I wanted to understand how & why many of my fellow Americans could bring themselves to vote for a self-avowed sexual abuser, an undeniable misogynist, and clearly one of the least self-aware and most narcissistic individuals in public life. So, I turned to “How the Right Lost Its Mind” – not only for its incredibly accurate title, but also because I’ve heard/seen Sykes speak on the subject and thought he might be a good source of information.

And he Is a good source of a LOT on information. Even for a wonk like me, show more this book really gets into the weeds of the turning of the conservative movement into the lunatic fringe we have now. He gets right to the point in the Introduction: “Another obvious question is whether the sweeping successes of Republicans in 2016 essentially refute my argument that the Right has indeed lost its mind or render this book irrelevant. Actually, I would argue that the 2016 victory makes the need for a reassessment even more urgent. After Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats need to perform an autopsy; Republicans need an exorcism.”

Sykes identifies pivot points and sea changes in the road to the 2016 election, and does an excellent job walking the reader through the highlights (lowlights, really). “…I’ve tried to identify certain pivotal moments for conservatives (e.g., the selection of Sarah Palin, the Drudge Report’s decision to link to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh’s attack on a female law student….” (I’d almost forgotten about that insane week of hate, misinformation and attack in our country. Now it just seems like a typical Wednesday.)

His points are excellent ones. Sykes, a talk radio host from Wisconsin, certainly does a good job of examining the world he lives in and how it has changed over the years. He quotes Caleb Howe (RedState.com), “The problem, obviously, is that the talk/radio/conservative publishing/Fox opinion show model isn’t about conservative policy and ideas, or good governance, or increasing our liberty, or social conservative values, or even really about the Constitution,” he wrote. “To a great extent, it is essentially about getting the audience outraged.” This country and its president, now runs on outrage. And the volume keeps turning up – beyond 11. Once upon a time, a candidate for president caught admitting on VIDEOTAPE that he often sexually abused women would have destroyed his campaign. Again? In a Trump adjusted world, that’s just midway through a daily news cycle.

I must end with one of the best quotes of the book, one from Sykes himself. In it, the level of his frustration and what his industry and what our country has become, comes through blazingly clear. “There’s a kind of fundamental decency about Wisconsinites that you can’t downplay. We’ve never had a huge division between the Tea Party and the establishment. We’ve got think tanks and radio talk show hosts that have been through the fire and are intellectually driven. And you don’t get that elsewhere. I was driving here (DC) listening to Sean Hannity and after 15 seconds, I could feel myself getting dumber.” show less

I feel a little sorry for Charlie Sykes.
This sometimes despairing plea for conservatives and republicans to wake up to what is going on; to not tolerate the lies, insults and smears that are used against anyone not completely for Trump.
I say I feel sorry, because this book was published in 2017, at the beginning of Trump's first presidency. Sykes might have thought, four years later, that the USA could return to some sort of normalcy, even though the Democrats and Biden won.
But clearly, the Republican Party was so far down the rabbithole it all happened again with the 2024 election.
And it's so much worse this second time around.

I'm not quite sure what was the point of this book. I think it was to explain how Wisconsin radio talk show host, Charles J. (Charlie) Sykes became disenchanted with being a far-right conservative who could not support the Republican party and their candidate for president, Donald J. Trump. There were many words used in the book that aren't in my vocabulary. I didn't take the time to look them up. The book has many footnotes, back of the book source citations and an index. Overall I thought it was a good conservative account of the situation we are in.

A good insider account of the transformation of the Republican Party in recent years.