In its place, for better or worse, is a new generation of political and financial entrepreneurs running operations online.
In its place, for better or worse, is a new generation of political and financial entrepreneurs running operations online.
W riters for publications like National Review, along with think-tankers and other intellectuals, like to organize politics into ideological contests. The fates of the Republican Party under George W. Bush and Donald Trump seem similar. Both presidents in their second-term midterms saw the party crash over unpopular wars in the Middle East, self-dealing in Washington, D.C., and concern about the cost of living. Both failed to make gains in the Rust Belt more permanent through the political use of tariffs. The scale of their commitment to any of these policies differs greatly, but of course it is easy to see the similarities. In general, the intellectuals treat the Bush-era and Trump-era Republican Parties as separated by a great disjuncture, the rise and influence of populism and nationalism. Trump ran and denounced Bush; Bush has occasionally signaled his lack of interest in Trump’s version of the party. Consequently many believe there will be some neat, organized contest between the Trumper arrivistes and the stalwart traditional Republicans for the soul of the party
But whatever the ideological columns that line up behind them, I can’t help but think that both Bush and Trump shared something in common — and that makes them conjoined outliers in the modern history of the American right. George W. Bush and Donald Trump were the bookends of the Fox News era of American politics, which has now come to an end.
The intellectuals date the rise of right-wing populism to Trump’s 2015 descent down the escalator. But it had the 8 p.m. ET time slot on Fox News for the better part of two decades. The network was run by Roger Ailes, the son of a factory foreman from Warren, Ohio, who had figured out how to make Richard Nixon acceptable on television. Republicanism as presented by Fox News was not about asserting ordered liberty against the administrative state; it was the experience of being informed on what pinhead was looking down on you and how you’d show them in the end. Fox News came to you “Fair and Balanced,” which was an accusation about its mainstream media rivals, and a knowing wink about itself.
Fox News had a certain accent, too. The Republican Party of this broad era and as a mass movement was in some ways an adjunct of Evangelical Christianity in America as it entered its nondenominational days and sought to become winsome. But Fox News wasn’t like that at all. It was combative and driven by hooks. It was made up of conservative Republicans, of course, but Ailes built the core around a certain type. Bill O’Reilly was from Levittown, N.Y., a former high school teacher. Sean Hannity was from Franklin Square, N.Y., the child of a family court office and a corrections officer. Fox could feel like a northern New Jersey parish potluck with its array of Kellys, Kilmeades, and Doocys. If you could turn Kevin Phillips’s emerging Republican majority into a cable news operation, it would be these people, Nixon voters settled in Nassau County. The Catholic tilt on Fox was as obvious but unmentioned as the Jewish world of Seinfeld. But this was a tribal rather than strictly doctrinal form of the Roman faith. Evangelical Mike Huckabee could sneak in on the weekends.
Fox News became a kind of neural system for the Republican Party. Its “message of the day” discipline extended far beyond the network into a constellation of talk radio and the press releases from congressional staffers. For a time, Republican aspirants would try themselves out as Fox hosts and personalities, such as Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Sarah Palin. This system supported and backed Bush to the hilt and then became the theater of party rebellion against amnesty in 2006. Trump was not a diversion away from this Republican Party, but one of its most devoted viewers, and perhaps the culmination to which it always pointed.
Trump’s entrance into the political scene came during the years of Fox’s greatest triumph, along with so much of the rest of cable news. The revolution in American politics was older Boomers and surviving members of the Silent Generation putting Fox News on in their living rooms and kitchens and leaving it on all day. As president, Trump began running the country from the Fox News morning show. But this was also the beginning of the end. Ailes was gone by the summer of 2016. The old slogan was retired. The 2020 election alienated core viewers.
What has replaced it? A new generation of political and financial entrepreneurs running operations online, including former Fox stars such as Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. Six of Spotify’s top 13 podcasts belong to former Trump boosters who are attacking him over the war. Some of them may be fairly unbalanced, like Candace Owens, who floats the idea that Trump is the Antichrist and has called for him to be removed from office. In 2012, Megyn Kelly walked down a hall at Fox News to inquire whether Ohio was really out of reach for Republicans. This hallway was in some ways the central corridor of the Republican system, connecting the news of the day to its interpretation for the party. The importance of that hallway is gone now. There are 40 shows open to Republicans, some tilted toward MAHA, some toward America First, some toward a representation of Reaganism, or to ideas far more exotic.
What is left over of the Fox News Republican Party is consequently acting like a creature whose nervous system has been ripped out. The eyes blink and the limbs twitch, but nothing is sensed through them, and no responses are organized through it. This creature is waiting for some other living thing to take its place.