Be Grateful: In Massachusetts politics we can still have nice things

I’m on all the mailing lists, electronic and otherwise. The communications from the MassGOP have never been particularly impressive, but under its current leadership the MassGOP has become a laughingstock. The MassGOP, perennially ineffectual, has understandably employed snark and disingenuousness as a regular feature of its rhetorical portfolio for a long time, but the strategic choice to make “trolling” virtually the only mode of communication at the MassGOP was made by the newly elected chair, former Republican State Representative Jim Lyons.

The purpose of a state party organization is to elect its members to public office. By this measure the MassGOP has not performed well for more than half a century. While previous Republican governors made half-hearted efforts to help build their state party, Governor Baker seemed to make at least a good faith effort in this regard early on. He was able to install respectable leadership at the MassGOP and minimize the inevitable awkward moments when his liberal policies and profile clashed with the GOP party line. However, all that ended late last year when his hand-picked Chair stepped down and the always erasable and combative far right faction of the state party managed to harness enough Trumpist momentum to take over the Republican State Committee and to elect one of their own as the Chairman.

After being defeated in his run for a fifth term in the State House of Representatives in 2018, Jim Lyons took over the MassGOP in January of 2019 and has proceeded to transform the low key state committee into a high profile embarrassment. No lie or imaginary enemy is off limits for Mr. Lyons propaganda operation, which has apparently thrown in the towel on winning elections in Massachusetts and has instead become a rhetorical Ponzi scheme designed to extract cash from frustrated right wing voters in the state. The folks who listen to Howie Carr may not be able to elect a dog catcher in Massachusetts, but Jim Lyons was clearly hoping they would be willing to part with more cash in order to make themselves feel clever and confident in a world where everyone else sees them as just the opposite.

A quick check of the MassGOP fundraising totals since Lyons took the helm, however, suggests that Lyons’ hopes are not being realized. His predecessor was a much better fundraiser than Lyons.  It turns out that being an embarrassment to our popular liberal Republican governor isn’t great for raising money in the Bay State. Who’d a thunk it?

It is clear that Chairman Lyons and his small band of Bay State Trumpers have gone all in on what Jonathan Rauch calls “troll epistemology,” which is essentially a nihilistic way of understanding the world cultivated by a steady diet of disinformation. Rauch describes it as follows:

“Unlike ordinary lies and propaganda, which try to make you believe something, disinformation tries to make you disbelieve everything. It scatters so much bad information, and casts so many aspersions on so many sources of information, that people throw up their hands and say, “They’re all a pack of liars.””… “Although disinformation is old, it has recently cross-pollinated with the internet to produce something new: the decentralized, swarm-based version of disinformation that has come to be known as trolling. Trolls attack real news; they attack the sources of real news; they disseminate fake news; and they create artificial copies of themselves to disseminate even more fake news. By unleashing great quantities of lies and half-truths, and then piling on and swarming, they achieve hive-mind coordination. Because trolling need not bother with persuasion or anything more than very superficial plausibility, it can concern itself with being addictively outrageous. Epistemically, it is anarchistic, giving no valence to truth at all; like a virus, all it cares about is replicating and spreading.”

Clearly, Chairman Lyons assumed that since this approach has brought millions into Trump’s coffers it would surely do the same for the MassGOP. Unfortunately for Lyons, average Massachusetts Republican voters (and more importantly donors) are not fans of or moved by blindingly obvious disinformation. There simply aren’t enough voters in this state who listen to Howie Carr, or Rush, or Fox News, and who take them seriously to either elect Trump clones to office or raise significant campaign cash. There is a reason why Governor Baker is more liberal than Democratic governors in red states.

Chairman Lyons drank the cool aid but didn’t do his homework and the result is a MassGOP that has gone from ineffectual to comically absurd and embarrassing to the only people with the wherewithal to fill the party’s coffers. Not only has Lyons failed to raise enough money to compete on Election Day, his efforts can be very easily re-purposed by Democratic Party fundraisers. He’s not only hurting his party, he’s helping the other party.

Unless Lyons can figure out a way to compete with national wingnut disinformers for cash from right wingers in other states, it seems extremely likely that this “go for broke” approach to party building will result in going broke, or worse, continuing to raise just enough money to limp on as an increasingly embarrassing sideshow.

I don’t think this is just about liberal domination in Bay State politics. Anyone who closely follows politics on Beacon Hill knows that fiscal conservatives and the state’s business community are not hurting for representation on Beacon Hill. In Washington, the GOP is a real player struggling to hold onto power in the face of the takeover of their party by Trumpists, who (like it or not) have real leverage and power in the party. In Massachusetts, the situation couldn’t be more different for the GOP. Not only do they have no power or leverage as such, but the most influential potential benefactors in the state actively prefer investing in fiscally moderate Democrats because the conservative populism at the heart of Trumpism is very clearly bad for business.

Massachusetts is not entirely immune to Trumpism. We have our share of knuckle dragging wingnuts, but their bark is much worse than their bite because when push comes to shove, not nearly enough of them are willing to put their money where their mouths are, leaving our small band of crackpots and right wing provocateurs hopelessly out numbered when it really matters. As the national Republican Party melts down in front of our eyes and the Trump presidency lays waste to the second oldest constitution in the world, the folks who live under the oldest constitution probably ought to be grateful for the Bay State’s unique political culture, which seems to inhibit extremists, left and right.