The Triumph of Cynicism

04-16-2020

Roger Berkowitz

Jane Mayer’s profile of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offers essential political insight into our times. One of the mysteries of the phenomenon that is Donald Trump is his capacity to lead a successful mass political movement without any obvious political beliefs or ideology. President Trump seems to have loyalty to few causes outside of himself and his own interests. What President Trump cares about, above all, is winning—it is the principle of winning at any and all costs that defines his popularity and our moment. 

This unfettered commitment to winning is also what identifies Senator Mitch McConnell, alongside Trump, as one of the purest political incantations of our time. In spite of McConnell’s personal distaste for President Trump and their many political differences, McConnell has become Trump’s fixer in the Senate. But why? What Trump and McConnell share, Mayer shows, is an unwavering cynicism, a willingness to win whatever the consequences. 

Hannah Arendt worried that the true impact of ideological propaganda is not that leaders succeed in convincing their citizens of some truth. She understood that when factual truths are denied and substituted for by lies, the result is "an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established." Such cynicism, Arendt argues, is the true goal of totalitarians: "The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." 

Only those who fully embrace cynicism are free to give their undying loyalty to a leader who promises to grant importance to the purposelessness of human life.

What Arendt shows in Origins is that movements are so dangerous and can be central elements of totalitarianism because they provide the psychological conditions for “total loyalty,” the kind of unquestioned loyalty Trump rightly understands himself to possess among his most faithful supporters, like Mitch McConnell. “Such loyalty,” she writes, “can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement.”

In exploring how it is that McConnell has become the absolutely loyal foot-soldier to someone like Donald Trump, Mayer focuses on McConnell’s life-long refusal to believe in any motivating principle. She writes:

For months, I searched for the larger principles or sense of purpose that animates McConnell. I travelled twice to Kentucky, observed him at a Trump rally in Lexington, and watched him preside over the impeachment trial in Washington. I interviewed dozens of people, some of whom love him and some of whom despise him. I read his autobiography, his speeches, and what others have written about him. Finally, someone who knows him very well told me, “Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.”

Mayer finds one example of McConnel’s cynicism to be his 1973 op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal in which he decries the “the corrupting influence of money on politics as “a cancer,”” and demands “public financing for Presidential elections.” McConnel is, today, one of the most prolific fundraisers in politics and deeply committed to quashing all efforts to limit corruption in political campaigns. This could, of course, be a simple change of opinion. But Mayer sees a chilling consistency: 

To read the op-ed now is head-spinning, given his current views. On closer examination, though, there is a consistency to his flip-flop. His call for reform reflected the political consensus after Nixon’s disgrace. In other words, the anti-corruption position he took in 1973 was in his political self-interest, just as his embrace of big money has been in recent decades. As he confessed to Dyche, his biographer, the op-ed was merely “playing for headlines.” McConnell, planning to run for office as a Republican, wanted to clear his name of Nixon’s tarnish.

Most Americans first became aware of the truly Machiavellian depths to which McConnell would steep when he blocked a Senate vote confirming Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. No matter that McConnell had earlier argued that politics should play no role in selecting and confirming a Supreme Court Justice. Now, in 2016, McConnell “said it made no difference how qualified Garland, a highly respected moderate judge, was. Before then, the Senate had never declined to consider a nominee simply because it was an election year. On the contrary, the Senate had previously confirmed seventeen Supreme Court nominees during election years and rejected two. Nevertheless, McConnell prevailed.” And it is wholly unsurprising that McConnell has said that the Republican Senate would vote on and confirm a Supreme Court nomination by President Trump even months before the 2020 election. 

Perhaps the most cynical of McConnell’s many ruthless stunts is, however, one that few ever knew of. Here, I’ll let Mayer tell the story: 

In the summer of 2016, while the Senate was in recess, Obama’s C.I.A. director, John Brennan, tried to contact McConnell about an urgent threat to national security. The agency had strong evidence that President Vladimir Putin of Russia was trying to interfere in the U.S. election, possibly to hinder Hillary Clinton and help Trump. But, for “four or five weeks,” a former White House national-security official told me, McConnell deflected Brennan’s requests to brief him. Susan Rice, Obama’s former national-security adviser, said, “It’s just crazy.” McConnell had told Brennan that “he wouldn’t be available until Labor Day.”

When the men finally spoke, McConnell expressed skepticism about the intelligence. He later warned officials “not to get involved” in elections, telling them that “they were touching something very dangerous,” the former national-security official recounted. If Obama spoke out publicly about Russia, McConnell threatened, he would label it a partisan political move, knowing that Obama was determined to avoid that.

As the intelligence community grew increasingly convinced that Russia had engaged in cyber sabotage, Obama struggled to get bipartisan support from the top four congressional leaders: McConnell; Paul Ryan, then the Republican Speaker of the House; Nancy Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat in the House; and Harry Reid, then the Senate Minority Leader. Finally, after Labor Day, Obama convened an Oval Office meeting during which he urged the four leaders to put out a joint statement alerting election officials across the country to the extraordinary foreign threat. According to Denis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff, Ryan, Pelosi, and Reid agreed to work together, but “McConnell said nothing.” The former official said, “It took weeks to get the letter.”

A previously unseen log of the private correspondence among the four leaders’ staffs shows that McConnell edited the draft, refusing to accept any of the others’ proposed changes. He was dead set against designating U.S. voting systems as “critical infrastructure” or urging election officials to seek assistance from the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, he insisted on leaving election security entirely to non-federal officials.