Quotes from Stuart Stevens

When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.

They tell themselves that the alternative is unacceptable: that if they don't support and encourage a man who assaults women and lies instinctively, they will soon find themselves facing the red armies of socialism and the country will start to look like…Sweden. There is nothing new or particularly interesting about this deceit. Republicans are linked to a vast life-support system of lies, terrified that the truth will unplug the machine.

When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty.

They aren't voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans.

They aren't voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side.

As Steve Goldsmith, then mayor of Indianapolis and the chief domestic policy adviser for Bush, put it, "The Republicans' message was that government had been harmful. Therefore, eliminate government, and people in tough circumstances will suddenly be better off. Both the public and many Republican mayors said that's naive. Merely the absence of bad action is not going to be sufficient.

In Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, Jennifer Burns described how Rand toward the end of her life "had one last word of warning to issue. Referring to the upcoming Republican primaries she wrote, 'I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan.' Reagan was a conservative in 'the worst sense of the word,' she told her readers.

How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don't. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren't deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power.

So the Nixon White House laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies, and legal challenges. It was this road that the Republican Party took to the Trump White House.

For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by "situational ethics," but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic.

The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as "normal" and everything else as "not normal.

So many Republicans embraced Trump's view that they were victims, as was he, because they had actually believed this all along. Theirs was a white birthright, and the rise of nonwhites was an unjust usurping of their rights.

a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.