Third Party Anyone?

This is a perennial question in American politics.  It crops up regularly.  It cropped up ahead of the recently completed midterm elections.  The long version is:

Both political parties are screwed up.  What we need is a third party that is not tainted by the sins and flaws of the two current parties.  This new party will be better than either of them could possibly be given their unrepairable state of advanced decay.  If we start with a clean slate and build a brand new party from the ground up we can finally get the political party we desperately need.

Stripped of all policy baggage, this is the argument. But there is always policy baggage.  It's just that the specifics of the policy baggage change from era to era while the core argument I have reproduced above stays the same.  So is there any merit to the argument?  In a word, no.

Let's start not with my usual historical survey (don't worry, I'll throw some history in below) but instead with a geographic survey.  What do we find in the rest of the world?  What we find in the rest of the world is a lot of third and even fourth and fifth parties.  A lot of parliamentary democracies, and there are a lot of these scattered around the world, have a political structure that features multiple political parties.

The United Kingdom ("England" for the ignorant) has many political parties.  The big two are the "Conservatives" (currently the largest) and "Labour" (second largest and spelled the way the British spell it).  Traditionally, the third party there has been the "Liberal Democrats".  But Scotland has been feeling frisky recently (there was a referendum on Scottish independence not all that long ago that almost passed).  As a result, the Liberal Democrats are in fourth place and the party that is actually third largest (as measured by number of seats in Parliament) is the "Scottish National Party".

Roughly speaking, the Conservative party corresponds to our Republicans and Labour to our Democrats.  But the correspondence is very rough.  Why?  Because of the presence of the other parties.  And I have left out the four other parties that hold at least one seat in Parliament.  Yes!  There are eight political parties with enough support to merit at least one seat in Parliament.  In the US only two parties hold seats in the House and, if you count the two "Independents" as a third party, three parties holding seats in the Senate.

And the situation in the United Kingdom is common.  France, Germany, Israel, and many other countries have some variant on this idea.  The specifics vary from country to country but each country has been forced to come up with a method for forming "coalition" governments.  It has been ages since "Likud", the party that has long been the largest party in Israel, has held enough seats to govern unilaterally.  And before it was supplanted by Likud the Labor party, which also had a long run as the dominant party, was often forced to form a coalition with "splinter" parties in order to reach a governing majority in the Knesset (what the Israelis call their parliament).

The deals necessary to assemble a coalition government often results in a weak government.  The splinter parties are in a strong negotiating position in the runup to the formation of the governing coalition.  They use this leverage to exact promises that are loved by their supporters but hated by the larger party.  Neither side is completely happy so threats to bolt (or actually bolting) are common.  And this "mutual hostage situation" cuts way down on the maneuvering room of the people trying to actually run the government.

The benefit of this sort of thing is that extremists are siphoned out of major parties by the splinter parties.  But this benefit is undone by the wheeling and dealing necessary to create the coalition and by the posturing, etc. that follow.  This sort of thing is not what US advocates of a third party are after.

Instead they want the US government to start (or stop) doing certain specific things.  That requires that the government be strong so that it can overcome entrenched opposition.  After all, if the opposition was not entrenched one or the other of the major parties would have done (or undone) whatever it is the advocates of a third party are so exercised about.

So we can be clear.  People don't want a third party in the style of parliamentary democracies, a relatively powerless entity that is more of a pressure group than a robust political party.  They want a "new and improved" political party that replaces one of our current parties.  And, as it will manifestly be wonderful, it should quickly rise to become the dominant party.  Okay.  Now for some history.

Third parties have arisen from time to time in the US going all the way back to the beginning.  The US started out with no political parties.  But that didn't last long.  Soon we had the Federalists and the anti-Federalists.  These parties quickly evolved into the Democratic Party (under various names) and the Whig Party.  (For some reason the British like the name "Whig" for a political party and that's where the name of the US party came from.)

In the middle 1800s the Whig party imploded over the issue of slavery.  The anti-slavery wing of the Whig party reorganized and became the "Republican" party in the runup to the Civil War.  The Republicans won the war and have displayed a remarkable instinct for survival ever since.  The Civil War Democratic party has also displayed a remarkable instinct for survival.  As a result we have had the same two major political parties ever since.  Many have argued that this is far too long.  Hence the periodic urge for a third party.

More recently we have had various "Dixiecrat" splinters.  For historical reasons the "Solid South" was firmly in the hands of the Democratic party for a long time.  But the Democratic party contained a lot of people who favored civil rights.  So southern Democrats, who opposed civil rights, staged various revolts under the "Dixiecrat" banner.  But rather than trying to be a "new and improved" version of the Democratic party these were throwback movements.  They never got much traction outside the South and eventually the need went away.

Someone who could more credibly be seen as being seriously interested in forming a new and improved major political party is Ross Perot.  Perot was a successful businessman from Texas.  He hijacked the "Reform" party, a then largely unknown splinter party, and had quite a bit of success in the 1992 Presidential election.  He collected almost 20% of the popular vote.  The Reform party is still around today.  But the '92 campaign turned out to be mostly Perot (who turned out to be a, shall we say, "quirky" candidate) so it hasn't had significant success since.

Before moving on let me explain why the Dixiecrat party went away.  It got replaced by the Republican party.  In '68 Nixon embarked on the "Southern Strategy", an effort to lure southerners away from the Democratic party.  He was successful.

Except that what he wanted was for southerners to become merely a loyal faction within a larger Republican party.  The party as a whole, however, would continue to be dominated by people (and ideas) from elsewhere.  That part didn't work out at all.  The southern "faction" has now taken complete control of the Republican party.  Trump may be a New Yorker, born and bred, but his governing style and philosophy is pure "old south".  And that demonstrates a key point about third parties.

The fundamental force driving the movement is the perceived need for a party that behaves differently than either currently party is apparently capable of.  But every election subjects each political party to fierce evolutionary pressure.  They do what they do because they believe what they are doing will win them elections.

If a pattern of behavior results in consistent election losses then the political party employing that pattern of behavior will change its pattern of behavior.  The heart of every political party is its elected officials.  If a bunch of them engage in a specific pattern of behavior and that pattern is unsuccessful they will be turfed out of office.  As a result, their ability to impose that pattern of behavior on the rest of the party will be diminished or eliminated completely.  Other patterns of behavior will come to dominate.

Political parties behave the way they do because it leads to election success.  The Republican party became the Southern party because people employing the "Southern" pattern of behavior won elections and other Republicans who employed a different pattern of behavior lost.  This is not true of every race in every election.  But it is true of most races most of the time.  And that is enough.

As late as 1990 the Republican party was not the Southern party.  But in the roughly 30 years since, on average "Southern" candidates in the Republican party have won and non-Southern candidates have lost.  And until a few weeks ago Republicans controlled the White House, both chambers of Congress, and many state legislatures and governorships.  Their success has been undeniable.

And that leads to the fundamental truth about third parties.  They are only seen to be necessary because the two current political parties don't behave as they should.  But they behave as they do because that behavior leads to success with voters.  The current political parties behave as they do because voters have made them behave that way.  To bastardize Shakespeare:

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our political parties but in our voters.

If you want to change the behavior of political parties change the behavior of voters.  And the first thing to understand is that voters hate the way the current political parties behave.  But they love and, therefore, vote for the elected officials of those very same political parties who represent them.  The typical Incumbent wins reelection something like 80% or more of the time.

If a large group of voters voted like they actually thought both current political parties were horrible the logical thing would be to vote for the non-incumbent, regardless of political party.  But they don't.  Somehow, the bad behavior of the party as a whole is not the fault of the voter's own elected officials, who just happen to be members of that very same party.  It's the fault of all the other elected officials that represent those other idiot voters.  If this sounds stupid to you it's because it is.  But it is also true.

This irrational behavior is the foundation of the yearning for a third party.  But it is misplaced.  A major political party is a massive undertaking.  It takes obscene amounts of money.  It requires giant staffs of skilled and talented people.  It requires the collection and effective use of vast amounts of information.  Ideally, it requires the recruitment, training, and deployment of thousands upon thousands of volunteers.  Putting an operation of this scale and complexity together from scratch is a herculean endeavor.

It is far easier to change the behavior of one or the other of the current political parties than it is to create a new one. But admitting that would also require voters to admit their own complicity.  They can get exactly what they want.  All they have to do is to change the criteria they use to decide who they are going to vote for.  This does not require any money or any great amount of political organization or anything else.

Besides the "hate the group but love the individual" behavior, here are some other criteria voters actually use.  They like tall handsome (but not too handsome) men with a full head of hair.  (This applies only to their first run for their current office.  After that, the "incumbent" factor dominates.  There are a lot of fat, homely, old, elected officials.  But for the most part (Trump is an exception) they are long time incumbents.)  Voters also like good looking women (but not too good looking and preferably blonde) with good figures.  (Palin fits the mold to a "T", except for the hair color part.)

Voters also like charmers rather than people with demonstrated competence.  Everybody can list a bunch of people who fit this criteria.  But most people's list will consist primarily of people from the opposition.  We love our own charmers most of all.  If you want "new and improved" none of the criteria on this list should be there.  But in the real world, sadly they all are.

More generally, people say they want money out of politics and they say they hate negative ads.  But the only candidates who win without bags of money are people running (usually for reelection) in super-safe districts where the electorate is heavily skewed in favor of one party or the other.  (I live in just such a district.)  And the problem with negative ads is that they work.  Lots of candidates have run without employing them.  Mostly, they lost.  Now all politicians swear they hate them and they wouldn't use them, but they do.  They rightly believe they can't win without them.

The call for a third party has died down for the moment. The Republican party has evolved under the influence of Trump.  It is not the party it was four years ago.  And many would argue that the Democrats have evolved in response to Trump.  We'll see.  But we will also likely see chatter about the need for a third party emerge yet again once the campaigns for the 2020 election are well under way.  You just can't keep a bad idea down these days.

Dr. Phil is Wrong

Dr. Phil McGraw was a guest recently on the "The Late Show with Steven Colbert".  Specifically he was on the Season 4 Episode 33 show.  That episode aired on October 26, 2018 on CBS but was actually recorded the day before.  You can see the segment at https://www.cbs.com/shows/the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert/video/W9ZiZBuwoE7htzZq4LhfH0v8bQV2lHEQ/dr-phil-on-trans-rights-rollbacks-kiss-my-ass-/.  It runs a little over ten minutes in length.  So who is Dr. Phil and why does this matter?

McGraw has a Ph. D. in Clinical Psychology so he is an actual certified professional.  But at some point the "show biz" bug bit him and he started appearing regularly on Oprah Winfrey's show.  The appearances were popular so Winfrey decided to produce a stand-alone show called "Dr. Phil" and starring McGraw.  That show has been on the air continuously since 2002.  It has aired over 2,000 episodes.  As part of the interview Dr. Phil announced that his show had been renewed for an additional couple of years.

"Dr. Phil" is now a household name.  He is popular enough to routinely score interview segments on shows like Colbert.  Shows are happy to book him because he is a popular and entertaining guest.  His show falls into the general category of "advice givers".  It is not a category he pioneered.

The concept probably dates back to the mists of time but I cam going to start in 1943 with a newspaper column in the Chicago Sun Times called "Ask Ann Landers" (or something similar).  People would write in with their problems.  Each column would reproduce a couple of letters.  After each letter "Ann" would weigh in with a response.

The column was pioneered by Ruth Crowley.  But in 1955 Esther Lederer took over and the column became wildly popular.  It was so popular that her twin sister jumped in with a column of her own called "Dear Abby".  There she wrote under the name of Abigail Van Buren.  "Dear Abby" was very popular but never quite as popular as "Ask Ann Landers".

The formula, then and now, consisted of someone writing about something odd, difficult, or downright silly.  The columnist would then provide a sensible answer.  The formula works because readers associate themselves with the sensible columnist and feel better about themselves.  "At least I am not as silly or unlucky or clueless as the writer."  The successful columnists figured out this formula and picked letters to publish that fit the formula.

And the "Dr. Phil" show is just the evolution of the same idea into a daytime television format.  Dr. Phil freely dishes out advice and perspective left and right.  People feel that if they had a serious problem Dr. Phil would provide some help.  And as a bonus they get to feel good about themselves knowing they are not as silly or stupid as other guests.  McGraw did an excellent job of showcasing this particular formula in his segment on Colbert.  So what's to complain about?

At about 5:20 into the segment he said "I don't follow politics because I don't think I should use my platform to influence people".  If he had stopped there I would have no complaint.  He gets paid a lot of money because his show gets high ratings so it pulls in big advertising fees.  Alienating part of your audience risks driving a good chunk of that audience away.  And that means lower ratings and, more importantly, lower advertising fees.

The problem is he continued talking.  He pasted "on things I don't know enough about" onto what I have quoted above.  Really?  His whole format depends on people believing he is a sound thinker of above average intelligence.  It also depends on him knowing things and being willing to impart that knowledge to others.

Finally, he is a certified Clinical Psychologist and a big issue in our politics is a psychological one.  What he does for a living is diagnose and try to remedy psychological disorders.  He should be very familiar with this particular disorder and he should have a remedy close at hand to share with us.

More than one person has observed that I have lots of opinions and I dispense them freely.  Dr. Phil is the same way.  He freely dispensed several opinions within the span of the interview on Colbert.  If he had said "I don't publicly weigh in on political matters for business and other reasons", that would have been an honest statement.  What he said instead was deeply dishonest.  And credibility is part of his stock in trade.  You can depend on what he has to say because "he tells it like it is".

He succeeded in his mission of entertaining Colbert's audience and creating good publicity for his show.  But he did the country and his audience a disservice by being dishonest.  So far I have been beating around the bush about what the problem is that he should have been willing to talk about.  (Or he should have given an honest disclaimer about why he wouldn't talk about it.)  That problem is the blatant dishonesty that infects the White House and the Republican Party today.

Dr. Phil has something to say about the behavior that is routinely on display in both of those institutions.  I know this because he discussed the exact same behavior during the interview.  He told a number of stories but I am only going to focus on two.  The first one concerns some guests who appeared on a recent "Dr. Phil" show.

According to Dr. Phil there is a thing.  That thing consists of women claiming to be pregnant for 3-5 years straight.  This is a single pregnancy and it does not even result in a birth at the end. Instead the pregnancy goes on, apparently indefinitely.  He contrasts this situation with another situation that turns out to be strange but true.  In the other situation there is abundant evidence available that what those women are experiencing is an actual thing.

In the case of the "indefinitely long pregnancy" women, and apparently there are group of them.  We know this because, according to Dr. Phil, there are places on the Internet that cater to them.  A proper examination by competent professionals quickly determines that nothing is going on.  These women are not pregnant at all.

Dr. Phil's "solution" was to tell them to their face that they were not pregnant.  Needless to say he convinced none of them.  But both he and his audience felt better.  His point was that what these women were up to consisted of a lie that could be, and in this case was, easily disproven.  He denigrated them for failing to take cognizance of the evidence, evidence he presented to them on his show, that they were wrong.

His second story arose out of the question of "when did you discover that you were 'Dr. Phil'".  The short version of the answer turned out to be "in the fifth grade".  This story begins about 9 minutes into the interview.  He began his explanation by outlining the circumstances of a fight he got into at the time.  He got involved because some kids were picking on a fellow student.  Eventually this led to a trip to the principle's office.

That in turn led to was confronted with his teacher at the time, Mrs. Gates.  Here the problem was that Mrs. Gates was completely uninterested in learning the facts of the situation.  As a result McGraw decided she no longer deserved to be seen as an credible authority figure.  And he told her so.  He quotes himself as saying to her at the time "that's right lady -- that includes you".

So Dr. Phil establishes that he disapproves of people who deny the facts even when they are presented by competent authority.  He also disapproves of people who are not interested in finding out what the facts are.  But wait!  It gets worse.  At 4:15 into the interview he asks "when did it stop being okay to disagree?"  So it turns out that there is an aspect of our present political climate that he disapproves of.  He does have an opinion about politics.  And at its most simplistic level he has a solution he recommends.  "Make it okay to disagree."

We can argue about the hour or the day or the year when it stopped being okay to disagree?  And Dr. Phil may not have yet spent the time and effort necessary to figure out how we got to where we now are.  But he owes it to us to follow his own advice to Mrs. Gates and learn the facts of the situation.  Maybe he has and he doesn't want to alienate a part of his audience by disclosing what he has found.  Before continuing let me provide a longer version of "make it okay to disagree".

People need to be willing to listen, to be willing to find out what the facts are.  And people need to be willing to modify their opinions when the facts unambiguously say their opinion is wrong.  But we have a large group of people who behave otherwise.

Everybody does it some of the time.  We sometimes choose to ignore facts or are uninterested in determining what the actual facts are.  But not everybody does it to the same extent and degree.  And it turns out that the Trump Administration engages in this behavior to an extreme extent.  This is profoundly wrong.  And they have dragged the Republican along with them.  Both operate in an alternate universe where they believe that if they say something loud enough and often enough it magically becomes true.

Dr. Phil could have contributed to the solution by pointing this out but he has chosen not to.  And we are all the less as a result of that decision.  And this behavior by Dr. Phil and many, many, others is why we are where we now find ourselves.  But Trump didn't invent any of this.  He just took it to an extreme.  For the remainder of this post I would like to examine what led us to this point.  And that involves going back in history.

For a long period of time the Republican party was dominant.  Every once in a while the Democrats had some success but overall, especially at the national level, the Republicans were by and large the dominant party.  This all ended with the Great Depression.

Republicans had been generally seen as the superior stewards of the economy.  Then the stock market crashed in '29 and the Great Depression set in shortly thereafter.  Republicans did not stand aside idly.  They immediately sprang into action.  And their leader, Herbert Hoover, was well respected.  And he did the obvious thing.  He consulted with experts and did what they recommended.  And things got worse.

By 1932 people had enough.  They no longer believed Republicans knew what they were doing and they were desperate.  So the turned to the Democrats and FDR.  Within a year or so they saw forward progress.  Things got slowly better until 1938 when FDR was convinced to adopt some Republican economic ideas because "it's over".  Things immediately got worse again.  This '38 experience destroyed any economic credibility Republicans had left.

Then World War II started and the US was eventually dragged into it.  And the public generally approved of how FDR and the Democrats conducted the War.  So by the postwar period the roles had flipped.  Democrats were now the dominant party.  Republicans could have some success under someone as popular as Eisenhauer but Republican were deeply concerned about how to get back on top.

In 1960 Nixon ran as the seasoned and experienced moderate who had been closely associated with the popular Eisenhauer and his popular administration.  But he lost to the charismatic but inexperienced Kennedy.  Things looked dire.  At the time both parties were seen as centrist.  And each party consisted of various factions and wings.  Put in modern terms, many Republicans were more liberal than many Democrats and vice versa.  Many Republicans saw a need to differentiate.  In a race between two essentially similar parties the Democrats would maintain their dominant position.

While this was going on the patron saint of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, emerged.  He was a brilliant man and a fierce and effective debater.  His creed was conservativism.  He believed deeply in its inherent correctness.  He considered himself smart enough and articulate enough to defend it against all comers.  And he was right.  He was smart enough and articulate enough.  So over the years he took on all comers on his long running TV show, "Firing Line".

Most of the time he won, either by being brilliant enough or by pulling out various debating tricks.  He took this as evidence that Republicans should differentiate themselves and that they should do so by embracing conservatism.  A lot of fellow Republicans agreed with him on the "differentiation" part of the argument but they weren't convinced about the "embrace conservatism" part.  So Buckley and "Firing Line" were a niche phenomenon.  Die hard politics junkies and people concerned about the future of the Republican party followed him carefully but the general public didn't.

Then in 1964 Barry Goldwater, a staunch conservative, ran for President against Lynden Johnson and got shellacked.  To many this meant the death of conservatism as a viable approach to gaining mainstream success.  But others took away a different lesson.

Kennedy beat Nixon not by being smarter, or more knowledgeable, or ever more liberal (their positions on many issues differed in only small ways).  Johnson beat Goldwater in '64 not based on his better ideas but by crass political manipulation.  For instance, he appealed to the Kennedy "legacy" but Kennedy's actual record of legislative success was modest and contained no marquis successes.

So the problem, they concluded, was not the message but the messenger.  Republican standard bearers needed to be more like Johnson, who they believed was deeply cynical and dishonest, and less like Goldwater, who was committed to his beliefs and completely honest.

Before moving on I am going to make one more observation about Buckley.  He believed in honesty, intellectual and otherwise.  Leaving aside the occasional debating trick he believed he was right so he didn't have to lie or ignore the facts.  So he famously read various individuals and groups out of the conservative movement.  Most famously, he read the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement.  It wasn't that that their beliefs weren't conservative.  They were.

It was they peddled numerous quack ideas and made up conspiracies.  Fluoridation (adding Fluoride to drinking water to reduce cavities) was some kind of communist plot.  That sort of thing.  He found them dishonest.  And he had enough power within the conservative movement at the time to make his edicts stick.  While Buckley was in charge, conservatism was about ideas.  They embraced facts because he thought the facts were on their side.  Unfortunately, conservatism soon moved away from Buckley.

In the '70s a new kind of conservative emerged.  This kind valued popularity.  They soon found a suitable standard bearer in Ronald Reagan.  Reagan was a believer but he was an intellectual lightweight.  He believed in conservatism because "he had faith" in it.  He also had a poor understanding of it.  He stuck to a few slogans and left it at that.  But he was a skilled politician and was extremely likable.

He ran unsuccessfully for President in '76 and successfully in '80.  He came to the job with substantial executive experience.  He had been Governor of California, the biggest state in terms of either population or economic power.  And it was the home of Hollywood, one of the most powerful cultural institutions in the world.

So running the US was a step up from running California but it was not that big of a step.  Look at the size of the step up that Kennedy, for instance, took.  Before becoming President he was a US Senator, a job he had not held for all that long and which did not involve running a large bureaucracy.

Reagan was no Buckley and it showed.  He appointed one of the weakest cabinets ever installed.  That is until we saw the Trump cabinet.  And Reagan was easily conned.  To con Reagan all you had to do was to be liked by him and to construct your argument so that it sounded like what you wanted to do was in line with his principles.  And, unlike modern Republicans, Reagan liked to make deals.  So he and "Tip" O'Neill, the long time and very cagy Democratic Speaker of the House, made many deals.

Reagan liked Tip and Tip found ways to structure his arguments as best he could to align with the slogans Reagan believed in.  And he frankly threw in some things Reagan did not want but he was careful to not do that very often.  As long as Reagan believed he was getting the better end of the deal and Tip believed he was getting the best deal he was likely to get, they could and did agree to move ahead.  So a lot of legislation was passed under Reagan and a lot of it attracted at least some Democratic support.

I don't know if he did it on purpose or not but Reagan introduced what I call the "both sides" ploy.  He would say one thing but do exactly the opposite.  For instance, he was a vigorous deficit hawk.  "Deficits are evil and not to be tolerated".  That's what he said.  On the other hand his administration ran large deficits every year he was in office.  And he took no action to reduce them.

I remember grilling a Reagan supporter about this at the time.  I'd say "what about this?"  He would say "well, I really like what he says on this".  Then I'd ask "what about that?"  The supporter said "I really like what he does on that?"

This allowed Reagan to effectively get credit for both sides of an issue.  His supporters picked the "said" or "did" part, whichever they approved of, and gave Reagan credit for being on the right side of the issue.  Talk about a "win", "win", situation for Reagan.  There is no secret as to why he was so well liked.

As I said, I don't know if Reagan had a clue as to what was going on.  I suspect he didn't.  Two more examples.  He also strongly believed "you don't pay off blackmailers".  And, after they kidnapped about a hundred of our embassy staff and held them for ransom he saw the Iranians as blackmailers.  But then along comes Oliver North.  He was a mid level official in Reagan's administration.

The congress had tied the administration's hands with respect to the Nicaraguan civil war.  On one side you had the government and on the other side you had the "Contra" rebels.  Reagan desperately wanted to get funds to the Nicaraguan government to fight the Contras but congress had passed a law forbidding this.

North came up with a deal that involved selling arms to Iran at inflated prices.  The profits would be funneled to the Nicaraguans.  The Iran piece violated Reagan's deeply held belief.  The Nicaraguan piece violated the congressional ban.  But North pulled the wool over Reagan's eyes and put the deal together anyhow.  The whole thing eventually blew up into the Iran/Contra scandal.

In the other example I am going to describe the results were actually beneficial.  Reagan was fervently anti-communist.  He was opposed to communism on ideological grounds but he also felt that communist leaders were untrustworthy liars.  So you couldn't do a deal with them.  But he ended up doing a big disarmament deal with the communist Gorbachev.  Why?  Because his wife Nancy convinced him that a disarmament treaty was a good thing and that he actually could deal with a communist.  He ended up having a warm and friendly relationship with Gorbachev.

There is a thread that runs through all this.  That thread is deception.  Various people convinced Reagan of things that were not true.  That followed a well established trend within the Republican party.  Nixon got his start in politics by using smear and innuendo campaign tactics to defeat his Democratic opponent.  He used similar tactics to climb up the political ladder to the Vice Presidency.

Then in  '60 he decided he could play it straight against Kennedy as he was by far the better qualified of the two.  He lost.  He played it straight again in '62 when he ran for Governor of California.  Again, he lost.  He went back to his old ways in '68 and '72.  He won both times.  Being honest and ethical is for losers.

I believe Reagan thought of himself as an honest person.  But he surrounded himself with people who weren't.  Perhaps the most significant, even more so than North, was Lee Atwater.  He was a mid level political operative.  He was a firm believer in "winning is the only thing".  And he became a master at lying for political advantage and getting away with it.

Various dirty tricks were played against Reagan's primary opponents, not by Reagan himself, but by Atwater and others like him.  Atwater then moved on in the General Election to lying and playing dirty tricks on Democrats.  Reagan might have won (maybe not the first time but definitely the second time) without these lies and dirty tricks.  But he won and neither he nor Atwood paid a price for the dirty tricks played on his behalf.  People liked and trusted Reagan anyhow.

With a well liked person on the top of the ticket the sky was the limit when it comes to lying as long as you take precautions.  It is okay to be found out as long as it is not until later.  Then it doesn't matter.  All of Atwater's deceptions were eventually exposed but only when exposure no longer mattered.  We just recently learned that the famous Gary Hart "Monkey Business" affair was manufactured by Atwater.  But Hart stopped running for President decades ago.  And the Republicans eventually won the White House after Hart was forced out.

The next key event in the story is the rise of Newt Gingrich.  In the late '80s he figured out that there was a lot of money lying around that could be put to good use.  He put it to good use building the "machine" that is the Republican campaign operation to this day.  He is definitely of the Atwater school where only winning counts.

And he represented a move away from the Buckley belief that honesty combined with ideas were "the only thing".  Gingrich started out with a bunch of ideas.  They were the product of intensive polling to determine what could be sold to the public rather than from some intellectually rigorous process.

Gingrich did subscribe to "differentiation". He saw the Democratic party as not moving so he moved the Republican party away from where the Democrats were.  He also introduced the "no negotiation" approach.  To his way of thinking giving up on 20% of what you wanted in order to get 80% was a bad deal.  It was 100% or nothing.

This was a complete repudiation of the Reagan approach.  And Reagan's approach was a repudiation of the Buckley approach.  As most conservatives were not as doctrinaire as Buckley they were fine with Reagan.  They were tired of losing and thought that 60% or 80% of what they wanted was a win.

And if the Gingrich approach had failed badly enough then that would have been the end of that.  But Gingrich won big in '94, two years into the Clinton administration.  Things went backwards for a while but the Gingrich approach roared back in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush.  The Bush people used a strategy that involved a lot of deception.  Compare what Bush said he would do with the budget surplus he inherited with what he actually did, for instance.  Or look at how the Iraq war was sold versus what the truth was.

Bush represented Reagan-light.  He was likable but not as likeable as Reagan.  He too saw his job as mostly to be the front man for his administration.  And like Reagan, he left the details to his subordinates and was careful not to inquire too closely about what they were actually up to.  This approach was successful enough that Bush got re-elected in '04.  But by the end of Bush's second term the public was well and truly done with Bush and his administration.

That brings us to Mitch McConnell.  As with the Republicans in the '60s there was a deep feeling that the Democrats had regained the inside track in terms of the popularity of their agenda.  But the Republican election machine was so effective that Republicans won races in spite of how unpopular their agenda was.

Part of the reason for this unpopularity was that after Gingrich Republicans ran out of ideas.  But by this time they had become heavily dependent on rich and powerful donors.  And the "donor class" knew what they wanted.  But what they wanted was very unpopular with the public.

McConnell hatched the "just say no" strategy.  Oppose everything Obama and the Democrats tried to do and present nothing as an alternative.  That way no one on the right had anything to complain about.

They told rich donors that Obama was blocking their initiatives.  They told doctrinaire conservatives "we're with you but we are out of power".  They told their base that everything Obama was trying to do was evil.  And they invented outright lies like "death panels" to convince them this was so.  And it worked.

It was fundamentally dishonest but it worked.  And as long as Obama was in office to serve as the universal villain who was blocking all the "wonderful" things Republicans wanted to do for their donors, their increasingly out of touch conservative wing, and their base, it all worked well.

It helped that the press went along with this.  Republicans had long since figured out that the press would print anything as long as it was sensational and, therefore, likely to be good for circulation/ratings.  "We don't fact check.  We just report what they say and let the public figure it out."  But the public was spectacularly ill equipped to "figure it out" on its own.

Then Trump came along.  He took dishonesty to new heights.  And he applied all the skills he had developed from his years of manipulating the New York City media, both tabloid and legitimate, to his advantage.  In effect he "turned the knob up to 11".

Much of the Republican establishment was appalled by Trump.  But they were a victim of their own long standing behavior.  Trump wasn't doing anything they hadn't already been doing for decades to a lesser extent.  He just did more of it and he did it better.  He got away with it because they had learned how to get away with it during his business carrier.  Trump's only contribution was the idea that you could get away with far more than anyone had previously imagined possible.

The New York (and later national) press had long since decided that Trump was "good copy".  As a candidate and later as President he has continued to be good copy.  As long as he continued to produce large amounts of good copy the press literally could not stop themselves from continuing to behave as they always did.

Trump would make some outrageous pronouncement.  The press would cover it extensively because it was good copy.  If it was the usual harmless lie or exaggeration, that was that.  The story would die with no one the wiser.  The real story was not good copy so it didn't run.

In other situations actual harm was being done or someone would dig down and find the story false.  But this would take time.  So a small story exposing the falsehood would perhaps appear somewhere days later when everybody had moved on.  There would be no follow up or extensive coverage because the story had reached its "stale date".  And, to the extent that the exposure of the falsehood was covered at all, it would be buried on page A-23 where only true news junkies noticed.

Trump knew this was how the news business worked and he took full advantage of his knowledge.  Recently the New York Times admitted that it had published far too many "puff pieces" (their characterization) about Trump over the years.  And, as you would now expect, this revelation was buried deep in the paper and there was no follow up.

As we have now seen, Republicans figured out a long time ago that you can lie if you go about it properly.  They have by now so inured us to this that neither they nor the rest of us knows how to deal with Trump.  He didn't start it.  He just took maximal advantage of what McConnell, Gingrich, Atwater, and others, laid the groundwork for.

This is not politics in the usual sense.  It is much more Psychology.  And getting to the bottom of things, exposing the psychological truths that underlie this kind of behavior, that's what Dr. Phil is supposed to specialize in.  And he is supposed to be on our side on this.  It is sad and disappointing to find him MIA on this.  On the other hand, based on his total lack of success with the "pregnant" ladies and his fifth grade teacher, maybe he doesn't have anything useful to contribute.

And in a sense Dr. Phil is now right.  If caught before it got out of hand, a psychology-based solution might have been effective.  But that was then.  Republicans now think that this is the way they must do business if they are to be successful.  After all, Trump won in 2016 and the Republican base is largely still with him.  They will not change their behavior until they decide that continuing to do things the Trump (or McConnell or Gingrich or Atwater) way is a recipe for disaster.

Now the only solution left is a political one.  Republicans must lose.  They must lose consistently and by substantial margins.  Otherwise, they will think they have encountered a dry spell not unlike other dry spells they have encountered in the past.  They will only change if election results convince them they must.