Is Joe Walsh Really ‘Woke’?

This has put the “woke” in Woke Joe, as some social media jokesters call him, garnering Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman, the strange new respect afforded to someone who was knighted “Trump’s fiercest conservative critic” this year by the Daily Beast. A mishmash of Trump adversaries—anti-Trump conservatives, “the resistance,” sundry Americans with a capacity for objectivity—have nodded in agreement or cheered Walsh on, given the person’s level of fervor.

But today, he’s widened the scope of his condemnation to include the president’s general comportment and how it’s met with tolerance or even sycophancy from the right, from the vice president to the House speaker to fellow media personalities. Walsh never has had much of a relationship with the Republican party—he acknowledged to the Chicago Tribune that he mostly was on his own during a failed 1996 congressional bid, and he won his lone term in 2010 representing Illinois’ 8^th District much the same way. He says he was “a Republican in name only” during the latter run, though not by the definition of “RINO” most voters and Washingtonians know. There is no indication, however, that a journalist visiting his office has opened the outside door for him to air some dirty laundry. He simply is expressing a nuclearized way of saying that Trump corrupts.

“It blows me away that guys like [Freedom Caucus chairman Mark] Meadows and these guys are allowing him to do what he’s doing with the Mueller investigation. And so I’m thinking to myself, what is different about me?” Walsh says. “If I were in Congress, I wouldn’t stand by him. I would say, ‘Leave Mueller alone. Do your job.’ Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows are in safe seats. Do they really believe … Bob Mueller is a dirty cop? And Bob Mueller is part of the ‘deep state’ to take Trump down? Jim Jordan! Mark Meadows! These are good, decent, genuine conservatives. Is it just because they’re still in elected office that they say this?”

He continues.

“Now, I’ve gotta be careful—I’m not really careful—but where’s Glenn Beck these days? I mean, if you were a never-Trumper, you’re f—d right now. If you are a stupid-ass Sean Hannity, and you’re [Trump’s] towel boy, your ratings are through the roof. Guys like Ben Shapiro and me who are kind of in that middle fuzzy ground, every day is difficult. I lose listeners every day. Every single day. I pick up new ones. I don’t care, I’ll just say what I think. But it’s—I never liked Glenn Beck, but I feel sorry for a guy like that. He’s done. Done! And a week ago he put on a MAGA hat,” he says, referring to a video in which The Blaze founder declared, “If you can drive me to the point to where I’ll wear one of these stupid red hats, I’m telling you, you’re making a gigantic mistake, and I welcome it.”

“[Trump] has really created an interesting dynamic: He’s forcing all of us to look at ourselves and see who’s honest in that,” says Walsh. “That” seems to be an extreme vetting of the president and evaluating him with the skepticism he’s earned as a result. But this standard doesn’t apply only to the apolitical facets of Trump and his team: his place in the special counsel’s probe, and his untamed rhetoric about the “witch hunt” and regard for Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. In that context, Walsh can judge Trump only negatively. But in a different context, that of the Trump agenda, he’s more favorable—even laudatory, in some cases.

“So what’s interesting is, Trump and I really married on a number of these populist issues: secure the goddamn border, get illegals out of this country, blow up sanctuary cities. And Islam has a problem—let’s not be Europe,” he says. “These issues of populist security resonate—stuff I’ve been talking about for a long time—I think more than anything with Trump’s voters. When Donald Trump said, you know what, you’re not a country if you don’t have borders—duh. Such an obvious thing. That got him elected. So I think it’s those issues that the average American felt like, ‘I got a government that’s more concerned about people in this country illegally than me; we’re letting Muslims into this country who aren’t assimilating. What the f—?’”

Which is the question many of his new admirers ask when they discover more about him. He uses Twitter as an obvious and measurable example. “So I’ve been on a tear lately because [Trump] has been doing stupid stuff with the investigation, and this ‘Spygate.’ So whenever this happens, it’s a wave: I get a lot of smart liberals who start to follow me, and a lot of smart conservatives. And then I’ll tweet out something—‘nobody should be in this country illegally’—and boom, I’ll lose a lot of my smart followers.”

A big-picture takeaway emerges from this: What makes Joe Walsh a unicorn on the right is that he roasts and praises Trump with equal intensity. He says he’s “not a Trumpist,” which is indisputable, accounting for such extra evidence as his opposition to the president’s trade policy and his doubt that Trump is much of a “tough guy” after the way he handled the North Korea summit. (He instead calls himself “a free-market libertarian who has a populist streak to him.”) But Walsh is sure there’s no such ideology as Trumpism, anyway: “There ain’t a core idea in his body,” he says of the president. “We got him because the Republican party—and pardon my language, Chris, I didn’t start swearing until I got into radio—the Republican party just f—ing sucks, the Democrat party f—ing sucks, our politics suck.”

What Trump adopted as a platform, however, overlaps with much of what Walsh has to say—certainly with respect to perceptions of foreigners. Walsh “was pushing a Muslim ban before Trump even talked about it,” though when challenged on what that term means, he says “at the end of the day it’s not really a Muslim ban” and instead is a mechanism to “not let a Muslim in this country unless they could come in and say, is it OK for a Christian to be a Christian, you’re OK with that; with other people practicing other faiths; you’re not going to blow anybody up; you’re not out to convert everybody to Islam; people are free,” which has notes of Newt Gingrich’s proposal two years ago of a Muslim “test,” not “ban.” This contrasts with the president’s executive order in January 2017 barring the entry of individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries, which quickly was placed under a temporary restraining order in federal district court. Maybe Trumpism is a work in progress.

“I just don’t think there’s anything there,” Walsh says of the president and his value system. “I mean, if Trump left tomorrow, because he’s an empty vessel, the party really hasn’t changed.”

I’m not as certain.

If the accepted opinion is that the GOP is now the “party of Trump,” there are equal and related claims that it is the party foreshadowed by Mencken and Hofstadter. The former, who conveyed racist and anti-Semitic views in his personal writing, compartmentalized his prejudices while describing the nature of an American politician. “He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish,” Mencken wrote with contempt in Notes on Democracy. Today’s Republicans have a claim to detesting these people similarly—Democrats are prone to give elected members of their party purity tests in primary elections, too, but they have fundamental beliefs in government as a force for good and announcing for Congress as a noble act. Mencken did not. “[T]here are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way out of the quagmire,” he wrote. “The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate.”

GOP voters, by contrast, elected the man who promised to “drain the swamp.” Mencken spoke acidly to their concerns. “[The politician] is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole, aim in life is to butter his parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an armamentarium of deceits. It is his business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out he will try to hold it by embracing new truths.” Politicians are of an irredeemable class—and so must the bums be thrown out! But thrown out always. Because a politician’s deficiencies are inherent—fundamental, of a higher order than their philosophy—a right-leaning skeptic sharing Mencken’s perspective has an insatiable craving for turnover. The Tea Party did not satisfy it. Nor will Trump.

I’m thinking this as I relisten to Joe Walsh begin reproaching his former House colleague and self-described mentor Mike Pence for being slavish, the price right now of being a VP in good standing, the last coin of the “all costs” paid to hold that job and reputation. It’s an extended riff, full of anger, disappointment, and pity, the latter two because he regards Pence so highly.

“What a f—ing lapdog. And you know what, my first two years there were his last two. He was a mentor of mine. I just really loved him. I despise how he has gotten down on his knees in front of Trump almost every day: ‘You’re the greatest.’ I hate the way he talks about him!” Walsh growls. “He’s so subservient. It’s like he’s a shell of a man. And if he thinks—and I like Mike—but if he thinks he’s next in line to become president, oh, my God. He’s, like, just emasculated himself, to sit at this guy’s knee. It’s embarrassing, because I like Pence so much.”

There are a few explanations for obsequious behavior, including the hope of career advancement, the seduction of cultism, and the motivation of fear. But some defend an unbreaking fealty to Trump with an interpretation of Walsh’s own advice: “Don’t pay attention to ANYTHING Trump says. Just pay attention to WHAT GETS DONE.” It’s clear he meant that in the context of measuring the president by his policy accomplishments, not his promises. Then there’s the way Republican senator Roy Blunt meant it, in an interview with Jake Tapper: “I think the way the president communicates, whether he intends to mislead the facts, mislead people, or just doesn’t have all the facts in his mind at the time, he is a—very accessible to the press. His team is very accessible to the press. … But the more important thing, I would suggest, is doing what you say you are going to do when you’re elected president.”

Walsh said that argument was “so, so wrong.” But it is so, so predictable, in the context of history. Richard Hofstadter described the “paranoid style” of the right in the ‘60s as believing “(1) [t]he old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; (2) the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; (3) the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.” It appears the only thing that changed in the last half-century is that the people who held these suspicions eventually became the faces of the federal government.

You can see how the first one inspires a rallying cry against “the elites,” which is part of what elevated Trump to power; you can see how the second propped up the first, following eight years during which many on the right feared that Barack Obama was a socialist; and you can see how the third is what the new order reached for the moment it was installed in power, with all its conspiratorial cries of “deep state!” But as Hofstadter observed, this paranoia was “not necessarily right-wing,” and it remains so.

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” he wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”

In 2000, the president of the National Rifle Association, Charlton Heston, described the Bush-Gore presidential contest as “the most important election since the Civil War.” In 2004, Democrat George McGovern told Hunter S. Thompson that Bush-Kerry was “the most important election of my lifetime, including my own race.” It was the gist of what Biden, MoveOn, a New Yorker editorial, and who knows who else called the Obama-McCain race in 2008. These takes were representative of a prevalent outlook, a few voices isolated inside the hue and cry.

“The Most Important Election” became such an Internet cliché that it eventually was cliché even to mock the phrase. Perhaps its message is better described as hyperbole than paranoia, though either corrodes the country’s psyche just the same. If America is told by its influencers in politics and culture that the nation is at an historical inflection point every four years, doesn’t the population ultimately snap? If, in fact, we are not friends but enemies, and defeating those enemies is paramount, then of course you will see pop up on Jake Tapper’s Twitter feed “On #CNNSOTU @RoyBlunt says that @realDonaldTrump’s agenda is ‘more important’ than his lies.”

It is a judgment that Walsh now says he is having a difficult time rendering himself. “[Trump] is—a silly, stupid way to think about it is—he’s acting like an authoritarian, a dictator, a king. Do I want to support a dictator who’s going to cut my taxes? And the easy answer there is hell no. Because we can never have a dictator. He’s coming perilously close to that,” he says. “No man is above the law. He’s at that precipice right now. And it’s going to take a few voices when he crosses that, because he will.”

Whatever limit Trump exceeds, or whenever his tenure expires naturally, there is little reason to expect American politics to reset rather than proceed apace. As much as the current president says he loathes politicians, he fits Mencken’s definition of an “adept” one, the type who “can hear the first murmurs of popular clamor before even the people themselves are conscious of them.” And “if he is a master, he detects and whoops up today the delusions that the mob will cherish the next year.” What Mencken called “popular clamor” and “delusions,” some voters—“good, decent Americans,” Walsh describes them—have called legitimate concerns about the nation’s economic and national security. Whichever way they are characterized, the point is they were seeded in society and watered by a capable person. Because this person won’t be around forever does not mean the attitude and issues that sprouted upon his arrival will wilt upon his departure. A different one could appear, maybe someone of a less extreme temperament, relatively less wild, maintaining the plant without its planter.

Amid Donald Trump’s political ascension, myriad individuals identified themselves or were identified in the press as being “Trump before Trump.” In the case of Joe Walsh, it was his fellow Chicagoans bestowing the label, he recalled to the Washington Post a few years ago. “People all say to me: ‘Joe, you were the local Trump before Trump.’ I had spoken like Trump as a congressman. The national media hated it, and they went after me, but people found it very refreshing. I knew there was a pent-up demand from people to hear someone talk like that.”

Walsh elaborates to me. “In many ways, maybe we are alike. The difference is, he’s a dumbass and he doesn’t believe anything. And that’s a real problem. That’s what really frustrates me,” he says. “And my wife yells at me, because she says, ‘You and Trump are so much alike. You talk alike, you’re always getting in trouble because of what you say.’ But he doesn’t believe anything he says.

“I do!”