It Was All a Lie, by Stuart Stevens
2.0 Stars
11-30-2021

Kind of a mess. This book was brought to my attention by Driftglass, who singled out Stuart Stevens as the sole Never-Trump media figure to fully admit that the Republican Party's problems did not start in 2016, but rather have been building for decades. And this is true, Stevens does admit problems, and he does have a few genuinely funny zingers about his party. Despite that though the book was unsatisfying to me. This is partly because the history of Republican corruption that Stevens lays out was already long familiar to me, and so I wasn't that interested in yet another accounting of those events. Another thorn is that while Stevens is honest and repentant for a Republican, that is still like meeting an enlightened kobold. Yes, he is quite advanced for his race, but he is still below-average when compared to normal people. So you have these bits where Stevens can look at Trump and realize that "yeah, we must have fucked up to arrive at this point", but he still can't bring himself to say "We should all be supporting the Democratic party". Or he insults orange-racist, but he still can't bring himself to say anything good about Hillary Clinton. Or he thinks he cares about campaign finance reform and reducing the corrupting influence of money in politics, but he cannot recognize that Elizabeth Warren exists. Or the opposite version of this happens, where Stevens realizes that something terrible has happened in the Republican Party, but he hasn't really back-propagated that information through the rest of his brain. And so he is still dropping positive anecdotes about these Republican party figures like they were not stepping stones towards ruin. It has an Eichmann at Jerusalem feel; Stuart Stevens recognizes at some level that killing millions of people was wrong, but he does still very much want to tell you about how nice some of his co-workers were and oh take a look at this medal he got for making the trains run ahead of schedule.

In summary, Never-Trump Republicans are a good example of why Stalin had to send landlords and shopkeepers to work the farms. These people have spent decades steeping in conservative propaganda and it has left their brains raddled and useless. They need long years of de-programming, reflection, and radical introspection just to bring them up to the level of a reasonably intelligent ~20 year old.