I have pre-ordered the book It was All a Lie - How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens.

Stevens, a long time Republican media consultant, is responsible for the election of dozens of governors and senators, but more closely identified with the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Knowing Stevens (I know him a little but his reputation more), I suspect we are in for a tour of how the Republican Party turned into a collection of pissed off white people with grievances against most things, but especially a changing America.

I couldn’t get an early review copy. But John Harwood of CNN got one and quotes Stevens as saying:

"Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows.’’

Coming from Stevens, A REPUBLICAN who now lives 40 minutes from me in VT, this is a very big sentence. 

Stevens is a long-time Republican media consultant. He is good at his job and like all consultants, he won some and lost some. Bush, Romney, McCain and lots of undercards. He spent decades electing Republicans to office under the banner of family values, lower taxes, freedom and the like. Now - “It was all a lie.’’

Background/Context and my view:

The current disaster in our politics began in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan and a group of budget-cutting ideologues that hate government and what it stood/stands for. (Side note: The great journalist Charlie Pierce says it started in 1964 with the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign. He is probably right but let’s go with my view for now)

The Reagan era of the 1980s saw the creation of an entire industry of propaganda vehicles to deliver their message of smaller government and lower taxes no matter the cost to a civil and civic society. The Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Free Congress Foundation - all created to drive the fiction that a bloated federal government could do nothing right, couldn’t build anything and was being ripped off by black welfare mothers in the Bronx. 

The data never supported these claims, and still doesn’t today. I suspect Stevens’ book will confirm this. 

The Reagan people stoked those flames and gave rise to Newt Gingrich, a small time history professor from Georgia who became Speaker of the House and began the hate-filled wars that consume us today. He pushed for the impeachment of Bill Clinton so hard that he eventually lost his speakership amid his own corruption scandal. (Cheap shot here - Why do so many family-values Republicans like Gingrich and Trump marry multiple times and cheat on their wives?)

Republicans began to see that elections could be won and - most importantly - money could be made. Rush Limbaugh, a small time radio jockey in Sacramento, discovered the Reagan/Gingrich audience. Disaffected, angry white men left behind by the Clinton economic boom and ripped off by Wall Street. Rupert Murdoch, another small time media guy from Australia, smartly recognized the audience and capitalized. He creates Fox News to speak directly to these people. As his henchman, the now dead, sexual assaulter Roger Ailes told Murdoch they only needed a tiny sliver of the American TV audience to make millions. 

A host of others followed. Drudge, Breitbart and now QAnon, all preying on people’s fear and insecurities about a changing America and whether Obama was a Muslin born in Africa.

We are left with a broken society, unable to pass a federal budget, battle a pandemic or conduct foreign policy. Leave the big stuff like climate change off to the side as we are not even in the ballpark on that one. 

These folks are not in it for the crusade or the policy or the ideology. They are in it for the money. Murdoch, along with Mark Zuckerburg, feed Americans a daily dose of junk news intended to rile them up about left-wing, socialist conspiracies and black kids breaking into their houses.

And now under Trump, who cares only about his brand/ego/wallet, we have the ultimate dark force that undermines a working democratic Republic that Madison and Hamilton designed.

So the question becomes - who is responsible for all this? Surely it is the Republican office holders and media organizations that write, spew and profit from all this. But who are the people who gave us the politicians who led us here?

There is a good clue in a great column by Frank Bruni in The Times about the anti-Trump Republican movement led by The Lincoln Project. You might have seen the Lincoln Project’s ads online attacking Trump. They are led by a group of Republican political consultants, including Stevens, who are largely responsible for electing many of the Republicans who led us here and who toady to Trump despite their private horror. Mitt Romney, Jeff Sessions, Lamar Alexander, Pat Twomey, Joni Ernst, Susan Collins. All senators who know better, but for some reason don’t have the spine to stand up to the Trump people.

Who got these people elected? Guys like Stuart Stevens, who now seems to be coming to grips with that legacy.  

Stevens worked with a colleague named John Weaver to elect the late Sen. John McCain to office. Bruni writes that Weaver is now looking for “atonement’’ in the Trump era.

“Jeff Sessions wouldn’t have gotten to the Senate had I not overseen his race in 1996,” Weaver told Bruni. “Now I look back at that and say, ‘What kind of goddamn penance do I have to pay for that?’”

The answer is: A lot.

Stevens’ atonement may be the upcoming book. I hope that “It was All a Lie,’’ confronts this legacy honestly. From what I know of him and the people he hangs with, it will be an honest, important - and depressing - read.