What I Learned From Mitch McConnell

For decades, Kentuckians have been electing a man everyone in the state hates. The secret of his success can help us understand what happened in the 2024 election.

“In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings...

…Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them…

…In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”

(From Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American,” November 8, 2024)

Why do we keep electing Mitch McConnell?

That’s something that’s baffled me since I came to Kentucky 30 years ago to take a position at University of Kentucky. It would be one thing if he’s done great things for our state — which he hasn’t — or even was just a fun guy — which he most definitely isn’t. The fact is most Kentuckians not only don’t want to have a cup of coffee with Mitch, they actively dislike him.

I learned this from Matt Jones, sports commentator (and very entertaining writer) who considered a run against Mitch in 2020 and travelled to every one of Kentucky’s 120 counties interviewing folks. He found few people with a good word to say about Mitch, and wrote a book about it.“If Mitch McConnell was a hound dog, even the fleas would stay away from him,” says a flannel-shirted, older Stanton voter: “I don’t like Mitch and I don’t know how anyone could. He’s a weasel and we gotta get him out of there.”

The sentiment was shared by many that Matt interviewed, and Matt himself: “Whatever it is that you hate about politics the most,” he writes, “chances are Mitch McConnell is largely responsible for its existence.” He continually makes promises to voters that he rarely keeps. He doesn’t even try to hide the fact that his chief concern is retaining power. He maintains that power by enhancing the lives, not of ordinary Kentuckians, but by securing tax breaks for wealthy supporters and removing regulations for mega-corporations. Unlike most politicians, he rarely condescends to actually talk with any Kentuckians. (Fine with most of us.) “To call Mitch a ‘people person,” Matt remarks, would be like calling Jared Kushner a ‘self-made man.’”

So why do we keep electing him?

We might blame the DNC for supporting the wrong candidates (For two elections now, they ran middle-class white women who grew up in a suburban neighborhood to run against him, apparently oblivious to the fact that rural Kentuckians might not identify with. (But then, they don’t identify with Mitch, either.) We could point to the passivity that comes from decades of neglect and depression. We could blame “cultural” issues, like guns and—for many decades—abortion.

But perhaps what is most notable about Mitch’s long, successful career is his unscrupulous dedication to act as a shield against those nose-in-the-air liberals in Washington who rural Kentuckians are convinced look down on them (true) and won’t do right by them (false; probably the single greatest benefit to the rural and urban poor of Kentucky has been the ACA, which Mitch has tried, without success, to get rid of.) Mitch has done nothing for Kentucky but block every vote that could help with our legion problems of poverty, poor health and failing small industry. Yet he’s managed to convince rural Kentucky that as dour and slimy as he is he has Kentucky’s best interests at heart.

How does he do that? The answer to the mystery of why Kentuckians vote for a man they hate is his skill employing the Roger Ailes/Fox TV playbook. Ailes, who was an early mentor to Mitch (as well as to Donald Trump) believed that the best way to develop a devoted following among those who felt excluded from the “American Dream” was to construct an elitist cultural enemy who looked down on working-class and rural people. So we were barraged in the last Senatorial race in Kentucky with ads describing Amy McGrath as an extremist socialist who would “defund the police” (Democrats spoon-fed that one to the GOP, then twisted themselves in knots trying to explain) and who favored abortion “up until the moment of birth” (that one has hung on, despite numerous attempts on the part of reproductive rights advocates to correct.) “TOO LIBERAL FOR KENTUCKY” the ads screamed, picturing McGrath alongside those two other flaming lefty radicals, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.

It doesn’t matter that the “coastal elite” who wants to take your grandpa’s guns away, abolish Christmas, and change your son into a daughter during recess at school is a mythical creation. It doesn’t matter if lies are required. If you can make yourself appealing, so much the better. But even if you can’t—e.g. Mitch—you can get people’s votes if you convince them that the opposition thinks they are trash.

Roger Ailes, the founder and guiding light of Fox News, was the brains behind this playbook, which at first was mainly a strategy to appeal to an audience who felt alienated by the likes of MSNBC. Viewers, Ailes argued, don’t want to be talked down to by newscasters. Rather, they want “to be made comfortable in every communications situation…So when you and I communicate, we are unconsciously judged by our audience against the standards set by Johnny Carson and Dan Rather…relaxed, informal, crisp, and entertaining.”^[i]

Initially, then, the secret of Fox News was not ideology, but the creation of comfort and warm, listened-to feelings among those huge audiences feeling alienated by what Ailes saw as the intellectual snobbery of stations like MSNBC, which as he argued, “left a lot of America on the outside.” ^[ii] This, of course, also became Ronald Reagan’s signature style, and it had nothing to do with expertise, experience, intelligence, or ability to solve problems. He was our first television-trained POTUS, who knew how to make viewers feel comfortable and “accepted” for just who they were, “politically correct” or not.

Would you be surprised to know that Fox’s earliest slogan was “fair and balanced”? Whether honestly or not, Ailes argued that achieving “balance” meant opposing the liberal world-view that he viewed as dominant in broadcasting. And if that meant fudging on the facts, it was fair game. In 1975, Bruce Herschensohn, former Nixon aide, had impressed Ailes enormously with a memo of a “tactical programming proposal” to TVN, the forerunner to Fox News. It highlights, without shame or qualm, techniques of manipulating an audience; they include: “Catch phrases . . . which seem to be factual though they are, in fact, editorializations” and “repetition,”—“the oldest and most effective propaganda technique”—which “creates a news event through repeated assertion.”

Herschensohn also encouraged using the technique of repetition to create stories that would construct arch-enemies to play to their audience’s resentments—advice Ailes eventually employed in stories such as “The War on Christmas,” “Obama’s Csars” and “Benghazi.” Many of these stories—for example, those that focused on the Clinton’s “corruption”—made their way into more “liberal” news outlets, where they arguably influenced a far bigger audience than Fox-

It was a marriage made in heaven (hell) when Trump and Roger Ailes got together. However, Trump, as a salesman and self-promoter, didn’t need Ailes to teach him how to make a lie pass itself off as fact. His version—called “truthful hyperbole”—was drawn from the world of the ad rather than the news. Advertisements, unlike journalism, have always fudged the line between fact and consumer seduction—and in The Art of the Deal, Trump conceptualizes it:

. . I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.

The example Trump gives in the book is referring to himself as “Brooklyn’s Largest Builder.” And it may be possible that at the beginning, he truly saw no difference between the “innocence” of pumping up one’s image to sell a construction job and doctoring photos of his inaugural crowds. Perhaps he hasn’t always been a bald-faced liar but truly imagined that becoming POTUS was only different in degree from being a salesman. Maybe from “Brooklyn’s Largest Builder” to “The Greatest President the US Has Ever Known” was a slippery slope that he tumbled down without full awareness. Maybe lying is a habit so ingrained in Trump—inhaled and ingested from his father, Roy Cohn, and others—that he truly stopped recognizing the difference between fact and fiction.

Whatever Trump believed, Fox viewers were encouraged to exchange the contrast between “fact” and “lie” for the more slippery, multiple (and—academics, beware of what you introduce into the culture!—“postmodern”) spectrum of “interpretations” or “perspectives.” He owed a lot there to KellyAnne Conway, Counselor to the President, when she introduced the concept of the “alternative fact.” In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” She defended Trump’s gross exaggeration of the size of the crowds at his inauguration:

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving – Sean Spicer, our press secretary – gave alternative facts.”

At the time, MSNBC, CNN et al fixated on disputing Trump’s claims about the size of his crowds, producing photographs, etc. They merely mocked Conway’s notion of the “alternative fact”—as they did with Trump himself, they failed to take it seriously, and in that way allowed it to slither into the consciousness of Fox viewers, where it reshaped their epistemology. Lies? That’s just according to your “version” of things.

Lies are good!! The key thing is not to submit to some boring fact but to discern the sweet spot of attack, exploiting the crisp potency of catch-phrases, and repetition, repetition, repetition. Mitch has been employing that technique for years, just with a blank stare and a Southern drawl. And a total disregard for everything except power. As such, he’s been an undisputed leader in what we now can see has indeed been “a vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Hillary Clinton called it, way back in January of 1998.  She was scheduled to appear on the “Today” show, and with the Monica Lewinsky affair just breaking in the papers, she “would rather have had a root canal,” but she kept the commitment.  “Bill had been accused of everything from drug-running to fathering a child with a Little Rock prostitute, and I had been called a thief and a murderer. I expected that, ultimately, the intern story would be a footnote in tabloid history,” she recalls in Living History. She was wrong about that, but not about what she told Matt Lauer when he asked her whether she agreed with James Carville that the situation was a war between Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr:

“Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic…But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this.  They have popped up in other settings.  This is—a great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President. A few journalists have kind of caught on to it and explained it. But it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public.”

When Hillary spoke of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” she was denounced as being paranoid. If she had been an academic, she might have gone on to explain that conspiracies don’t always consist of a band of schemers, sitting around a table, plotting. Sometimes, conspiracies take that form—as, for example, when in 1994, “The Spectator” magazine launched the “Arkansas Project,” assigning its reporters stories designed specifically to take Bill Clinton down, or when Mitch McConnell met with a group of leading Republicans the night of Obama’s inauguration. Robert Draper, in Do Not Ask What Good We Do, describes how during the dinner discussion, they “plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.” The plan was to “challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign,” applying “unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies” and also employing attacks on “vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves.“

McConnell’s scheme—which we now recognize has been phenomenally successful, particularly in blocking Obama’s appointment to the Supreme Court—is something we can recognize as a “conspiracy.” And he was still at it after Obama, solidifying Republican control in a myriad of satanic ways, even at the expense of keeping Trump—and then re-installing Trump—in power.

But: as French philosopher Michel Foucault argued, you don’t need a worked-out blueprint or a central board of directors to systematically empower or disempower parties, programs, or individuals.  With enough localized like-mindedness spread out over enough territory, with the most productive opportunities seized, and with an effective dissemination of ideas and images, power can be consolidated without any secret meetings or agreements, particularly if it exploits existing resentments, fears, and vulnerabilities. ¹

Such as:

Young, uneducated, unemployed or economically struggling men’s anger at what they view as a liberal feminist agenda to empower better-educated, confident, accomplished women at the expense of their “manhood” (and this one running for POTUS has the nerve to have nice legs too…)

Such as the inability to accept the idea of a woman president (“serving” ones country is fine; leading it is another. Women can think this too. And both men and women can deny it, insisting that it’s “just this woman” that’s unacceptable.)

Such as being ready to believe that racial and/or ethnic groups other than your own are taking your jobs and/or taking over the country.

Such as the pleasure of having ones own intellectual limitations, fury at being told what’s correct behavior, and “fuck you” impulses mirrored by the man who would be president. (He never looks down on you; he’s right there with you—even if he didn’t walk to the capitol with you.)

Such as how entertaining he is (even when—or especially when—he’s making no sense at all) and how infuriatingly smart she obviously thinks she is (and doesn’t realize she’s actually “dumb as rocks.”)

Such as confusing actual economic expertise with a role played on a television show.

Such as believing, on some level, that it’s still just a television show.

Such as not knowing anything about whose policies are whose, how inflation happens, or what tariffs actually do.

Such as thinking the one who happened to be in the big chair when the relief checks required a signature is the one who proposed and passed the bill that got that check to you.

Such as not knowing what’s a fact and what isn’t, and worse, not caring.

Such as the persuasions of that “one voice” as Michael Tomasky calls it, amplified in myriad ways by ads and podcasts paid for by the likes of Elon Musk, that “says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

1. This, according to David Brock—who ought to know, as a reformed right-wing hit-man—was how the “culture war” against the Clintons was waged, by a GOP used to holding the reins of power and who used every means available—especially the right-wing press--to turn the usurper Clintons into “metaphors for all of the social changes of the past thirty years that the right-wing base in the country hated.”: gay and women’s liberation, draft-dodging, sexual promiscuity, communism, and “diversity, multiculturalism, and political correctness.”

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^[i] Roger Ailes, You Are the Message (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 15

[ii]^{Gabriel Sherman,} The Loudest Voice in the Room, (New York: Random House)