Why the Republican Party Was Ripe for a Takeover

So I’m going to do something new for me tonight, which is essentially combine some of my own personal experience in American politics with some of the work that I do on political theory. Um, I’m going to go ahead and start out kind of talking a tiny bit about how Trump has been viewed by most people who are critical of him. Talk a bit about how it’s useful to pull in a more institutional and ideological focus perspective on that. Uh, and then try and give you some idea of what happened to the Republican Party before Trump came onto the scene in 2015. That made it so that he had an easier time taking over a major political party in the United States than anybody at that time. Certainly me would have expected.

Objectivity is Aspirational: My Decade as a Political Consultant

So, uh, to go ahead and give you get you started. Tell you about myself. Before I started doing the PhD, I worked as a political consultant for ten years. Uh, the beginning of that, uh, was my career in the Republican Party. I was in, uh, what was called the New England Republican, which meant that to the rest of the country, I was considered liberal and progressive. Then we called ourselves conservatives to kind of fit in. Uh, so my political science advisor and undergrad always said objectivity is aspirational, not necessarily achievable. So give them transparency instead. So I’ll give you that at the beginning of the talk, so that you may take as much salt as you want with with my observations.

Beyond Ideas: A Functional Understanding of Political Ideology

Before I get into the history of the Republican Party, I want to give you a tiny bit of theory and political philosophy that I think will help us understand what happened. So the first piece that I want to give you is an is an understanding of ideology that’s slightly different than what you normally get. The understanding of ideology that we’ll talk about tonight isn’t necessarily about a systematic set of ideas, or a false set of ideas that hides power or anything, although these can be useful ways to use it, but instead a way of understanding what to do and who to do it with in politics. How most of action works for us. Like, for instance, if I throw a pen and catch it is we don’t actually think about it before we do it. We kind of have some sense, some pretense of what’s going to happen. This is called protection. We have an expectation of what happens if we toss something up and then remember we’re going to catch it. This is true for most actions. It’s also true for actions in politics, except it’s a lot more complicated because we’re doing a number of different fora. We’re doing with allies, we’re trying to coordinate a particular direction. And this is the function that the ideology serves for the most part. It’s what makes it so that a group of Republican legislators who are coming into a committee room, or Republican justices in court, have an idea of how they think and what the larger movement and already have an instinct before they even see what’s on the agenda of how they move towards it, and the ability to go ahead and recognize their colleagues. So we can think of this as essentially consisting of three different as ideology tells us how we can act, it tells us who our allies are, and then it tells us who our antagonists are.

Building a Vision: Reagan, Buckley, and the Birth of Movement Conservatism

Now, this can be useful if our job is political in any particular sense of if I’m a canvasser, it tells me how I’m supposed to approach doors. Uh, naturally understand that the other Republican candidates, I have to align myself with them. Uh, in terms of being a columnist, it gives me an idea of how my columns are supposed to interrelate with other conservatives and other Republicans, but that, on its own, doesn’t actually suffice to go ahead and navigate politics. To navigate politics, we also need some type of vision that places us in history so that we have an idea of where this is all moving towards, and this is perhaps a bit closer to what most people think of when they think of ideology. Sometimes a vision or grand historical statement or argument. The vision I’m going to talk about tonight. Both the rise of it and the collapse of the so-called movement conservatism. And it was largely brought into being by two different figures, uh, Ronald Reagan, who was the governor of California and then later the president of the United States and considered one of the most important twentieth century American conservatives. And then William F Buckley, who was considered the intellectual founder of conservatism and a magazine called the National Review. They ended up bringing in conservatism as a way to move the Republican Party back to what they saw as conservative values.

The Loose Alliance and the Shining City on a Hill

Now, these conservative values likely never existed in history before that point, before Reagan and Buckley took the Republican Party. It was a loose alliance of different factions of people who largely agreed to cooperate together because they didn’t like FDR, Franklin Delano Eleanor Roosevelt and continue to get beat by him systematically throughout the thirties and the forties, and then by Harry Truman, surprisingly, at the end of the forties. And they ended up essentially being two strategies for dealing with this. One strategy was a strategy that Dwight Eisenhower would use as president, which is we need to move the party more towards what FDR is talking about in terms of progressive economic policies and a middle position on social policies. And then there was what came out to Eisenhower’s right. And this is the position that Reagan and Buckley tried to consolidate. And movement conservatism largely worked by enunciating a vision that brought together American exceptionalism and anti-communism. And it did this around a series of four institutions classical liberalism, Christianity, Western civilization, constitutionalism. You don’t have to necessarily have to remember the last four of those, because the really crucial one to focus on here is American exceptionalism, which is an enunciation of what they thought was American identity. In particular, the reason why the United States was an exceptional actor in the world. When Ronald Reagan winning the presidency in 1980, he ended up giving a speech where he ended up talking about the United States being a shining city on the hill. So when he gave that speech, it gives us an idea of what he meant by American exceptionalism.

The Language of Coordination: Movement Conservatism in Practice

So the city on the Hill part is a reference to an old sermon that was supposedly given by the Reverend John Winthrop before his shift ended up leaving and describing what he wanted the Massachusetts Bay colony to become. The idea was that they were Puritan Christians, and they wanted to build some type of Republican government dependent on self-sufficiency and supremacy of nature, so that they could demonstrate their Christianity as if they were sitting on the hill. So the imagery was sitting on the hill and Winthrop’s original speech is actually, if not dark, at least very serious or self-serious. The idea, the idea being that this is a challenge that’s in front of us. We need to pay attention to our behavior and our politics, because we’re supposed to be an example for the world. Reagan actually only added one word, although the funny thing is, is that people will go ahead and mistake this and actually attribute the Reagan quote to Winthrop. And in work that you see now, he actually shining. And that actually essentially turns it from a reference Winthrop into an actually completely different idea, because now instead of our responsibility is to build the city on the hill and be the city on the hill, something that’s more future oriented. It’s the idea of sitting on the hills are here. It’s shining out to the entire world. And that ended up essentially being the future oriented message to the vision that Reagan and Buckley articulated. And it was incredibly successful through the 1980s and 1990s. Nineties. It brought together a large coalition of people within the Republican Party, including the. The Eisenhower style moderates that they ended up beating, and it made it viable for the Republican Party and movement conservatism to exist as broad. Ideology and political movement that was responsible and identifiable in multiple different contexts. To give you an idea of just how wide this is, the Republican Party institutionally is essentially headquartered in Washington, D.C., but it’s actually a fairly unimportant. It’s essentially governed by the chairs of the Republican parties of the fifty different states within the fifty different states. Those organizations are also federated. They’re made up by the chairs and the officers of the state parties from all the different counties. And the responsibility of the party is to make sure that any elected office that has party candidate on the ballot as a Republican in that party, part, the Republican has a chance to win. And then once that Republican is in office, trying to loosely coordinate that Republican with all the other Republicans so that they’re acting together as a party in such a way that they can continue forward, we can see where movement conservatism end up providing this vision in terms of thinking through how these branches ended up interacting with each other. So, for instance, Chuck Grassley uses with the senior senator from Iowa for a very long time, he was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which meant that he would have candidates for the Supreme Court come in front of his committee and essentially give interviews for how they would act as Supreme Court justices. Now, lawyers in the United States are not supposed to go ahead and tell you how they would rule on particular political issues. The idea being that it’s inappropriate to go ahead and give an opinion of what’s supposed to be based on the facts of the law. But this is a little inconvenient politically. So what happens with any allergies. There are certain words the candidates can go ahead and use for certain ways of phrasing things. I can’t tell you whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, but I think in this case, rather than that case is important in terms of thinking through how a court justice can communicate using the symbols of ideology with the senators that are sitting on the committee, that have to go out and determine if they want to use their political capital to push them through the Senate for confirmation, essentially whether this person is a reliable ideological ally. So when John Roberts and Alito, all of the conservative justices that we think about went in front of Chuck Grassley, movement conservatism was basically the language that they end up speaking. And it was a language that not only that they could both understand, but also the party activists in the base, uh, you’re people who are field organizers, your fundraisers, your people who are on Fox News and all the people who are watching Fox News. None of this made sense from the outside. A lot of this looked like ideological posturing because that’s essentially what it is. But this is the language through which the movement was coordinated.

The Cracks Emerge: Immigration and the Republican Civil War

Now, this worked well enough for a lot of the era during which movement conservatism was dominant. But as we got to the end of the second Bush administration, things started to fall apart. And in particular, the portion that ended up falling apart was the narrative around American exceptionalism. So American exceptionalism had essentially been based on the four institutions that I talked about, and the idea that these institutions made the United States somehow unique and special in history, and a model for the rest of the world. So this is part of the reason why Republicans were so in favor of the Washington consensus, and the idea that people ought to model their democracies off of what the United States was doing. But what steadily happened over the course of the Bush administration is there started to become a gap between the people who were mostly enmeshed at the ideological language at the top, and partly the people who were working in Washington, D.C., who would take campaign positions, who would be on TV, but speaking more to the audiences. And then the party base, who were more attuned than ever through cable news and first direct mail, and then things like social media, who were paying more and more attention and realizing that many of the things that movement conservatives within Congress and movement conservatives within the state leadership Party wanted to do to make the party more competitive didn’t make sense with their worldview. And we saw this in particular on the issue of immigration beginning in 2006 and 2007. A number of conservatives like George W Bush and John McCain ended up starting to see immigration as a vulnerability for the Republican Party, they thought that it was a natural idea that if the Republican Party pushed immigration reform forward, that many Latin American voters, Mexican voters, Cuban voters would be more enthusiastic about voting for Republicans, because in many ways, a lot of these immigrants in the United States were more friendly to the idea of open markets. They were more Catholic, and they were more socially conservative than many of the other swing voters, in spite of the fact that in many cases, they ended up voting for the Democratic Party because of the Democratic Party’s stance on illegal immigration, and in particular, the idea that amnesty ought to be granted to people who ended up coming to the United States illegally as children. So in 2007, John McCain, who was at that time the frontrunner for the Republican Party nomination at the request of George Bush’s former political rival of his, ended up sponsoring a bipartisan bill with Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, that would essentially end up giving amnesty to what were called the dreamers. The children that I mentioned. The bill would actually end up passing and would actually end up providing a certain path, narrow path to citizenship for that group, and was supposed to be the first of a number of different measures that John McCain would try and push through if he ended up winning the presidency in 2008, but ended up backfiring almost immediately with the Republican base. That became very upset. They actually ended up calling John McCain on Fox News for a number of months, and it ended up being the lightning rod that made it so that what was supposed to be a cakewalk for John McCain of taking the Republican nomination after Bush had essentially agreed, he went back into the state of the race and not endorse another candidate, it ended up turning into an absolute slog as all of the other ambitious candidates in the race saw an opportunity. One particularly ambitious candidate in the race was Mitt Romney, who at that point was much younger, just coming off of his two terms as governor of Massachusetts. And immigration is essentially his only way to make any headway with the conservative base. He was from Massachusetts already. He was affluent. He was from the world of finance. He lined up the right way on issues like taxes and foreign policy, but he couldn’t really speak to religion because he was Mormon, and he couldn’t really speak to issues like health care, because he had actually passed the health care reform. That was the model, the model for what the Obama administration did or would later do. And so, essentially, immigration ended up being the only thing that he could end up talking about. And he actually came with it over and over and over and over again, extending the primary way longer than anybody expected before finally resigning in March or April. But the damage, in many ways was already done. And this discourse, the idea that the Republican establishment was out of line with the base and the base in some ways had to end up punishing the establishment was already there. And this ended up inaugurating a series of increasingly visceral struggles between the base on the one hand, and then the establishment on the other. What reporter Tim Alberta ended up calling the Republican Civil War. The Republican war was not only about immigration. There were a number of other issues where Republicans felt that the establishment had also dropped the ball. Abortion where people were still accepted. Roe v Wade was the way of land gay marriage, which would end up becoming a court case that would go forward and get through the Supreme Court. All of these issues ended up being changed together for conservative activists, as a way in which the Republican elite and those people who were seen as the custodians of Movement conservatism were out of line.

The Pyrrhic Victory and the Empty Center

So as we entered 2010, you started to see a number of primary challenges of establishment Republicans. Two that stuck out in my mind. I was a college Republican at the time. Uh, was Christine O’Donnell, uh, who’s a lifelong political activist focused mostly on abortion issues, who lost three times miserably, uh, challenging Joe Biden for Senate in Delaware and ended up knocking off the twenty year incumbent, uh, like, uh, Mike Castle in 2010 by by multiple points in a primary that nobody expected her to win. Joe Miller, a military officer who received nothing other than Sarah Palin’s endorsement, ended up knocking off Lisa Murkowski, who was a similarly long tenured moderate Republican. You saw this across the country, and it actually ended up working in the general election as well. Uh, the Tea Party wave winning more seats in the House than anybody had since 1994. So going into the 2012 election, uh, Mitt Romney, who had received John McCain’s blessing and essentially moving forward with the idea being that Republicans didn’t like this, really challenged primaries, ended up seeing one challenger after another come up behind him in the polls and nearly topple him. Moderates also worked with him because they remembered his own attempted challenging John McCain. So being a moderate Republican myself ended up finding three other candidates that I supported before they all bowed out, before I finally ended up being frustrated and just backing Romney. But when Romney ended up losing in 2012, it ended up giving the Tea Party and the insurgency even more energy. And you saw the split between the establishment and the Tea Party split even further. The establishment assumed that it was because of the aggressive use of the Tea Party that were incredibly unpopular with the rest of the country, that the Republican Party didn’t end up doing well, and they ended up coming up with a plan that was supposed to bring Republican Party back on track. Centering the idea of the Dream act and extending even more amnesty and reforming border controls, focusing on a middle class economy that would involve raising the taxes somewhat on the wealthy in order to provide more benefits, and essentially focusing the idea of the Republican Party that it ought to be about middle class. This was an agenda that many of us who were working in the party and who who were within the more educated positions, were taking campaign positions really supported. I absolutely thought that this was an incredible idea. The insurgents, not so much. You started to see that vision of what movement conservatism was supposed to be, what American exceptionalism was supposed to be, merging further and further away from providing the coordination and unity that was supposed to provide for the Republican Party. Eventually the establishment would would end up winning, but it would end up being something of a Pyrrhic victory. In 2014, they managed to win most of the primaries, largely through Mitch McConnell, who was the head of the Republicans in the Senate. Using a lot of money to target insurgents in primaries. And by the end of 2014 and early 2015, there were essentially no insurgents or Tea Party groups really left to actually challenge for the nomination in 2016. If you looked down the line of candidates who were running for office, it was essentially all establishment figures. It was Jeb Bush who is the brother of George Bush, who was talking about immigration to his wife with Mexicans. Chris Christie, who is the governor of new Jersey, also talking about immigration. Marco Rubio, who talked about himself as being a dreamer and a Cuban refugee. Even the more radical oriented candidates like Ted That proves or Mike Huckabee were moderating themselves on the issues, and you started to see a real sense of unrest within the base. They didn’t have any elites who were representing them anymore, but they weren’t they weren’t happy with what was being served to them by the Republican establishment, either. So this bet that all of us who are in the positions of making the strategy for the Republican Party, that we could go ahead and moderate the policy in order to appeal to the middle and win. And what the hell is the base going to do? Just vote for the Democrats. Starts to fall apart.

The Trump Catalyst and the Failure to Respond

And this all brings us to when Donald Trump, constantly bankrupt, never Republican before actually been a Democrat at various different points. He also supported Pat Buchanan, uh, failed the casinos, tried to open up an alternate to the NFL, uh, in the nineteen eighties, failed at that, declared bankruptcy several times, ends up essentially reaching out to a number of exiled political consultants, comes down the escalator and gives probably the most visceral and hateful speech that’s been in prime time American television in about thirty or forty years, up to that point. The assumption was that anybody who is involved with movement conservatism wouldn’t be able to do that. It essentially was completely out of character with what Ronald Reagan talked about with the shining city on the Hill. You wouldn’t talk about prisoners of war being losers on the shining city on the hill. You wouldn’t talk about countries to the south of the United States as being shitholes, or saying that most immigrants coming into the border were drug dealers or thieves. This was the way that people talked in bars when they were drunk. This was not the way that people talked publicly in US politics. But as a result of that because it was so unexpected. None of the candidates on the stages in the debates with him knew what to do. You can see this now if you go back and look at the YouTube, since it’s amazing the extent to which you would say these things during debate, and then everybody else on stage would just go quiet. It took them months, some of the candidates never actually being able to say anything. Jeb Bush never figured out how to actually respond to Trump. He would essentially just freeze. It would take Chris Christie and Marco Rubio, who were probably amongst the moderate Republicans who pushed back the most supplements to figure out how to push back. Kind of worked for Chris Christie, but his candidacy was already done anyways by Marco Rubio’s case. Even when he started pushing back, Trump just fed into it even more. He started talking about angry little Marco and talking about the size of his hands. It was just nothing that anybody in the American Republican Party had ever seen before. It was not. It was completely outside of the ideological language, and it took me a while to figure out what happened because I ended up finding this remarkably confusing. I didn’t find many of the candidates particularly interesting. I think I supported George Pataki, who’s a moderate Republican who probably none of you have ever heard of at the beginning of the race. From then, I supported John Kasich, who’s another moderate Republican from Ohio who probably never heard of us before. I think I ended up finally supporting Ted Cruz just to see him failing the fail at challenging in the convention. And then finally deciding that I would be never-trump myself and essentially say, although for anybody in the general but Trump, I wouldn’t say that I voted for Clinton, but people have the idea that I had to answer to because I was also on the ballot that year. I was a state Senate candidate for Republicans in Maine. I wasn’t in a district where I was expected to be competitive, but I was having to figure out how to answer these questions. I had essentially decided to run myself because both my party chair and I had thought that would be a good idea to have a Republican on the ballot who was pro-immigration and who was saying things about immigration reform, because we were in a city full of immigrants in Portland, and we wanted to grow the party. And we figured there were in particular, there were a lot of Somali and Sudanese immigrants who have more conservative values, so that we figured that if somebody like me was up on stage talking about these issues being never-trump, that would be an effective way for the party to try and retain some value in what we assume is going to be a really embarrassing loss for Republicans in November. Um, didn’t end up being the case gets closer to November. Trump starts edging closer and closer in the polls. Some of Hillary Clinton’s emails get leaked where she talks about American Catholics being particularly reprehensible. It gets closer still. Election night. And remember, I was supposed to be giving a forum, uh, to a number of middle schoolers talking about wives or Republican wives involved in politics. And I remember the moment in the room where I was speaking, and then a friend of mine who was a Democratic city councilor who was there to essentially the opposite point of view, was speaking as well. And we could see all of the parents in the back of the room start whispering to each other. The kids were still looking at us and paying attention to us and asking us questions, but the parents were paying attention to all of this TV on silent behind us. And I didn’t end up realizing until I ended up getting in my car and calling my wife, who said the election party that I was going to that evening for the campaign, that I’d been working on, that essentially the estimates for Florida, and I think it was Pennsylvania had flipped suddenly. They they thought they were confidently going for Clinton and they were going for Trump. And that ended up being even though the campaign that I was working on ended up winning, uh, winning majority of the votes, we actually end up getting the the second most votes in Maine history for a ballot initiative is probably the most depressing victory party that I’ve ever been at. Um, because everyone’s focus was on was on the TV and watching what was happening.

The Collapse of Unifying Vision

So it’s taken me a while, and I think I actually ended up going into political theory, political science, to essentially just figure out what happened, because as I saw it, as I thought politics was supposed to be conducted. But then in the United States, the 2012 working group that had given had talked about a moderate, reasonable, small liberal agenda for the Republican Party should have been running. That should have been competitive. It should have worked. So this has really got me interested in the idea of political political disintegration. And what I’ve come to realize that what essentially ended up falling out from the Republican Party and from movement conservatism, was any idea of unifying vision of what Americans were. The people at the top of the party, like myself, believed that American exceptionalism was about a set of values constitutionalism, market economy. Republican deliberative legislators, uh, civic democracy, all these types of things that people like us who end up in these rooms, for the most part, end up taking for granted and thinking that are important to me. American exceptionalism was the United States did this particularly well, and that we welcomed essentially anybody who wanted to take part of that into the country. But for people in the base of the party who were upset that people like me were in control of the rods and levers that determined what the party was doing in elections and legislators. And as legislative testimony was being drafted, they ended up seeing American quite differently. They saw American as essentially what they were born as, essentially as a promised dream that Ronald Reagan talked about. They ended up seeing Ronald Reagan talking about the shining city on the hill, and they didn’t think that it was about the principles. They thought about that. He was describing the city that they could end up living in. They thought that they were essentially in line by doing the right thing and supporting the Republicans. This was the life that they were promised. And as it got further and further and further from Reagan’s speech and that promise, the idea of that promise ended up tasting sour in their mouths. And it made him angry. And that anger first fueled the insurgency, which none of us within the establishment understood as anything other than people who didn’t understand politics being where they should be, and ended up being the anger that made it so that when Trump walked down the escalator, he ended up having that anger that he could tap into. And to this day, I couldn’t tell you if Trump actually is canny enough to understand that that was an opportunity, or if he was just crazy himself and ended up essentially identifying with this anger. A lot of people said that he ended up starting watching Fox News around the same time that, uh, the birther stuff started coming up in 2010, and his entrance into Republican Party politics was essentially talking about that particular issue. I think he ended up, uh, hiring the private investigator who went to Hawaii to investigate Barack Obama’s birth certificate. And I think probably part of him, even if he did see the opportunity, um, and he was a very good reality TV star. So maybe he did see some something in the polls, in the ratings. Um, a part of him actually did believe this, uh, and the metaphor that stuck with me of of, um, the writing, I think, is written the most poignantly about the rise of this particular type of angry American conservatism that would turn into Trump supporters. Is Arlie Hochschild a sociologist? She wrote an ethnography of Tea Partiers in South Mississippi, and she spoke with a number of these people. Some of them were angry and right wing and didn’t operate in politics at all. They were more the types of people who would show up at Klan rallies and who would be part of right wing militias. Others who were actually party activists. But the metaphor that they all used was talking about the basis of their anger being that they had imagined that they were waiting in line for the American dream, and that this line was long and they couldn’t quite see the end of it. But that was okay, because they thought that the appropriate thing to do was to wait in line. But what made them really angry was the idea that there were all of these political elites that didn’t find them interesting and didn’t care about them. Who decided that they were going to care about people in other countries instead? And they were bringing them into the line and they were cutting in front of them. This meant this this metaphor, this image of people cutting in line came up again and again and again for us as my career ended up going on in politics, and I left the Republican Party and started working on on outreach campaigns, I started noticing a lot more of this imagery as well. A lot of it was based on the idea that. They were angry that the elites didn’t think that they were part of the country, that the elites were part of, that they that they weren’t part of the political project that they were part of.

The Coordination Collapse: Antagonism Replaces Vision

So it’s that vision component that I think ends up ended up dropping out for the Republican Party. But there isn’t really anything that’s replaced it, because if you think about that anger, the metaphor and the image of people cutting in line, it doesn’t really provide that same coordinating mechanism that American exceptionalism does or that say that progressivism ends up providing for the Democratic Party or for many parties here in Europe. There isn’t really any image of how all of the different parts of government are supposed to work together. So now that Trump has been in government, we’ve seen him have a remarkable amount of trouble getting anybody to actually cooperate with him in the Republican Party. And to a certain extent, this is because there’s still some portions of the Republican Party that are angry that he’s there and thinks that he doesn’t deserve to be. They find it crass. Um, and they’re still upset that that his brand of politics works, but to a much greater extent, it’s because that idea of what ideology is, that ability to walk into a room and then suddenly recognize what it is that you do in terms of your actions with your political program, forward who your allies are, both of those portions of recognition that make up part of ideology, or al the only part of ideology that’s remaining for Trump is who are the antagonists. And that’s what he ends up focusing on. He hammers on this again and again and again the idea that elites have betrayed the United States. The idea that other countries ought to be less than. Uh, the idea that the United States is no longer a shining city on the hill. The language that he ended up using in his first inaugural is that the streets of America are filled with blood and carnage. So the idea that essentially he’s basing the entirety of the politics, that he’s managed to unite portions of the Republican Party behind around this idea of just focusing on antagonism. So lots of that ability to actually coordinate everything from the layer of talking with voters on the street to town council meetings, to state legislatures, to congressional committee hearings, to what’s happening in the judiciary, to what’s happening in the media that’s fallen away. There’s no coordinating mechanism other than essentially competing over who can say that they hate Democrats and foreigners the most.

Conclusion: The Empty Center of the GOP

So I think in many ways, what we ended up seeing was that Trump came about because movement conservatism. The Republican Party was already collapsing. Something about what’s necessary in order for a political party to work in mass democracy, like the United States, ended up failing at some point. Now, a lot of these, as you can tell, is still very much in early stages. For me, it’s, uh, as I said, I do parts of this work because I really like political theory and reading about history. I knew parts of this work to kind of explain to myself why the hell I’m doing political theory PhD at CU, as opposed to the career of the Republican Party that I thought I would have had in my early twenties. I’m not particularly upset that I am where I am, but actually I found academia to be a lot happier than campaign politics in a lot of ways. Um, but it does end up being a much different world than I imagined myself working in. So I think I’ll probably wrap up my talk there and just to open it up to questions or conversation.