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Thursday
“Kim” on Spoutify has just reminded me of a passage from 1984 that describes all too well many of today’s GOP apparatchiks, one of whom has just announced she will be running for president. In the words of Atlantic columnist and former Republican Tom Nichols, the video announcing the candidacy of South Carolina governor Nikki Haley
was as vapid and weightless a product as any in recent political memory. Of course, it checked all the right boxes: Family, devotion to public service, all the usual generic gloss, and all of it presented as if the past seven years had never happened.
Quoting fellow NeverTrumper and former GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, Nichols notes that, just days after the January 6 insurrection, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” And then a few months after that Haley said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” “She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham,” Nichols concludes, “but she’s certainly putting in the effort.”
The reason Nichols singles out Haley for special scorn is because, as a youthful and formerly moderate woman of color, she once seemed to offer the GOP a different path forward. But like so many of these figures—New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik also comes to mind—she has totally thrown in with Big Brother.
That’s what political cult worship does to one: it hollows out your principles (if you ever had any) and renders you stupid. That’s why comparing Haley to Winston Smith’s next door neighbor Tom Parsons is altogether apt. Both have drunk the Kool-Aid:
Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.
The stability—or at least continuance—of Trumpism depends on people like Haley. Like Nichols and Stevens, I don’t believe anything less than continued electoral defeats will bring the GOP back to its senses. Or as Nichols puts it, “no person or party should ever get a second chance to betray the Constitution.”