WILL CPAC BECOME TPAC?

…Rick Wilson, GOP analyst’s latest Book

Few real conservatives attended the Conservative Public Action Conference (CPAC)

If you are familiar with Rick Wilson, the anti-Trump Republican strategist, he stated that on the first day of the Conservative Public Action Conference (CPAC), it was obvious that this is no longer a conference for real conservatives.  In fact, the White House advisor, Kellyanne Conway jokingly stated that they should “re-name the conference to TPAC”, because as Wilson stated the majority of the attendees were flaming Trump supporters.

The other normally conservative strategists that usually attend CPAC were all absent this year.  This year, Wilson noted that Steve Bannon and Reince Pribus were attending early on,  just for laying out the basics of "Trumpism" for the whole conference.

When some had asked where the usual conservatives were, such as Marco Rubio, Wilson commented that in fact, Marco Rubio was far, far away on another continent.  And he stated that frankly no Republican senators, except for Ted Cruz, who was there for the “swimsuit part of the competition”, and he was there auditioning to be the next Trump Supreme Court nominee.

The Trump Personality Cult has taken over from what the forum for the conservatives was for over 30 years.  Back then it was a gathering that used to get the conservatives together to compare ideas, bump up against one another, and talk about where the conservative movement was going.  But today, the gathering has largely been given over to Donald Trump’s personality cult.

So, it is certainly something that as Kellyanne Conway joked, it has become “TPAC”. 

Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC pundit made an observation about Vice President Mike Pence’s speech which was absolutely on target.  If Donald Trump was eaten by wolverines tomorrow, many of the real Republicans in the country would go, okay, that’s cool.  That is an exception for Trump’s dedicated cult that ate up Trump’s 2 hour bizarre presentation with a silver spoon.  But as O’Donnell remarked about Pence, his speech was classic mainstream conservative Republicanism.  Some may disagree with that, but the fact of the matter is, if you pull out the vice president’s praise for Donald Trump, it would have been a speech that real conservatives would have nodded their heads and said, “Gee, that fellow looks like he could be president someday.”

A single year has made quite a difference.  During the run-up to 2016's Conservative Political Action Conference, many activists on the right urged the American Conservative Union (ACU), which organizes this annual event, to actually rescind its invitation to Donald Trump.  Allowing Trump to speak "will do lasting and huge damage to the reputations of CPAC, ACU, individual ACU board members, the conservative movement, and indeed the GOP and America".  This was warned by the Republican strategist Liz Mair, who worked with the anti-Trump political action committee: Make America Awesome.  

The candidate Trump ultimately cancelled his long-planned 2016 speech, pointing to his campaign events in Kansas and Florida as an excuse. There's a good chance he also wanted to avoid answering questions after his talk, not to mention the embarrassment of having hundreds of conservative activists stage a walk-out, which had been a rumor.

Winning a presidential election certainly changes all that.  Yep, as I said, "By tomorrow this will be TPAC," the Trump adviser Ms. Conway had stated.  On that CPAC morning, Trump received a sustained standing ovation and chants of USA! USA!  He told the CPAC crowd that "our victory was a win for conservative values."   Yeah, right!

As the rest of his nationalist CPAC address made clear, Trump is no more conservative now than he was before the election.  (Remember, for years Trump was a Democrat that supported women’s right to choose.)  Nevertheless, his support among Republican voters today stands high, and Republican politicians are falling in line behind him.  That’s because the rank-and-file party members trust him more than they trust today’s GOP congressional leaders.  

Clearly some citizens support Trump because they believe in his "alternative facts" about crime rates, free trade, etc.  They also hope that his hodge-podge of anti-liberty promises will somehow "make America great again."  

But how to explain the surge in support among once questioning conservative CPAC participants and other conservative voters in favor of Trump, that’s a very big question. 

Perhaps it’s the explanation suggested by the Cornell political scientist, Andrew Little in "Propaganda and Credulity," a paper just published in Games and Economic Behavior.  "Politicians lie, and coerce others to lie on their behalf," argues Little. "These lies take many forms, from rewriting the history taught in schools, to preventing the media from reporting on policy failures, to relatively innocuous spinning of the economy’s performance in press conferences." 

Mr. Little observes that most people accept “lying” as playing a "central role in politics."  (And trump has played that role thousands of times to date.)  This poses a game-theory problem: If audiences know that they are being lied to, why do politicians bother doing it?

Little's explanation: "Politicians lie because some people do believe them."  Mr. Little cites psychological experiments that show most people tend to believe what they are told even when they know the speaker has reasons to mislead them. 

In addition, empirical studies show that government propaganda actually works. "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time," Abraham Lincoln had purportedly said this.  Little has constructed a model that suggests that fooling just “some of the people” can be just enough to get most of the people acting like they are fooled.

"While those who believe whatever the government tells them, they are responsive to propaganda," notes Mr. Little, "their presence has powerful effects on the behavior of those who are aware that they are being lied to, as well as those doing the lying." 

Less credulous folks look around to gauge how their fellow citizens are responding to the politicians' claims.  They must then must decide how they will act.  If those fellow citizens seem to believe the propaganda, then the less credulous might well conclude that it's not worth sticking their out their necks to yell that the "emperor is has no clothes".

The upshot, Little says, is that "all can act as if they believe the government's lies even though most do not."  One possibly hopeful result of Little's model is: Leaders like Trump have a strong incentive to keep ratcheting up their lies even "to the point where they can become too ridiculous to be believed by anyone."

As Mr. Little acknowledges, this dynamic of snowballing their credulity is more prevalent in authoritarian countries (like Russia) where the risks of not following the party line are much higher.  Therefore, few people want to be the only person in Red Square bearing a sign that said: "Down with Putin."

Still, Mr. Little thinks this dynamic might operate in party politics in America.  "In a more competitive partisan setting," he tells us, "leaders really want to coordinate with people who are close to them, whether geographically, socially, or politically." More credulous party members accept the lies of their leaders, prompting the less credible who want to maintain valuable social ties and act as though they too believe the party leaders' lies.

So, what does this all mean?

Based on what Mr. Little’s analysis is saying, and if we buy into his explanation, then most likely CPAC will in fact become TPAC before the next annual conference.

Copyright G.Ater 2019