A House One-Sided
My experience at CPAC 2024.
In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, drunken Scotsman Mike Campbell is asked why he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Campbell tells the reader. “Gradually and then suddenly.” The message’s a simple one—great falls from wealth begin as small missteps that compound upon each other. Yet the answer Campbell gives is as relevant to political and moral bankruptcy as much as it is to the financial kind. A descent into wrong thinking and extremism never starts as a desire to truly be extreme, but begins with repeated acquiescence to premises that become more and more radical. This is how people buy into conspiracy theories: piece by piece, until one day you’re surrounded by people who all believe the same nutty things that you do. Belief, at this point, is no longer irrational but the only logical option.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Several days ago, I returned from a trip to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington D.C., and the message about groupthink is eerily relevant. CPAC was formed in 1974 as a mobilization device for the then-fledgling conservative activist movement. Ronald Reagan delivered the keynote speech at the event, and in the following years the conference would host prominent (and in many cases controversial) conservative voices, including Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, George H.W. Bush, and many, many more. Half a century later, CPAC has become the epitome of the political bankruptcy represented by a swath of the American political right—and an example of the kind of damage that loyalty to celebrity over principle can do to once-serious institutions. Here’s the full breakdown.
Observation 1. It’s a ridiculously small event. Even a decade ago, I’m told, CPAC was a major force in conservatism, featuring appearances from the biggest conservative orgs in the business, including the Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute. Long story short—none of them remain in CPAC’s 2024 iteration. The first floor of the Gaylord Hotel in Washington D.C. looked more like a run-down, once-fun county fair (and trust me, whatever county fair you’re thinking of is probably bigger). The second floor, featuring media row and CPAC’s main speaker stage, wasn’t much better—the vast majority of seats in the main auditorium remained empty for basically the entire conference (except for the Trump speech and OH WE’LL GET TO THAT).
The numbers don’t lie—CPAC’s simply not a big deal anymore. Part of it’s the scheduling, part of it’s the prices, part of it’s the fact that the conference represents the Republican Party’s increasingly detached hardcore base. That last one is especially obvious when you look at the people who’re still showing up, which takes us to…
Observation 2: CPAC’s for old people. As a voter under 25, I was in the distinct minority (and not just in the way I usually am). Most attendees appeared to be over 50, which is all well and good until you realize that CPAC mirrors the interests of the majority of its attendees.
Observation 3: It’s not all a scam, but it’s wearing a scam’s outfit. This matters—I am not kidding you when I tell you that the conference has a lot of the elements of a Facebook scam. What organizations were left at CPAC?
The John Birch Society, conspiracy theorists from a bygone age.
Strive, Vivek Ramaswamy’s anti-woke capitalism business that’s just doing so well since its founder decided to run for president.
Those are the more normal ones.
Woke Tears Water, the super anti-woke water that you can buy at $19 for a 6-pack and definitely doesn’t just look like Dasani with a sticker over it (the vendor offered to give me a sample and was promptly reprimanded by a CPAC staffer because, and I am not making this up, they’re not allowed to sell it).
The VibraPlate, a vibrating plate you stand on that allegedly fixes everything from sexual performance to weight gain and also conveniently costs $4,000.
A Trump hammock that costs $1500. As per one of my brilliant Instagram followers, it remains to be seen whether or not Trump could actually get in the thing.
Notice a trend here? None of these things are mainstream or the kind of things that successful people are trying to sell. They’re commodities, conspiracies, gag gifts, scams, and the sort of thing that offers the buyer nothing of consequence. Aka Facebook scam material.
And that’s the deeper message of CPAC—its primary marketing angle is its unbreakable Trump focus, the implicit premise being attend this conference, buy this thing, and you’re giving the middle finger to the establishment.
The true believers who attend CPAC are, wittingly or otherwise, being sold a lie: that buying into Trumpism (and the ‘ism’ there is very deliberate) is the virtuous path, compared with the godless, communist, woke, RINO ways of the sheeple who aren’t nearly awake enough to realize the wisdom being spewed off the CPAC stage.
Observation 4: This is the organizers’ fault. Don’t mistake my criticism of CPAC with contempt for many of the perfectly normal people who simply believe that Trump’s the lesser of two evils. I’ve been guilty of such contempt in the past, and there’s no excuse for thinking this way about my fellow Americans (and Christians, in many cases to boot). I truly believe that many of the people I talked to, who paid good money and traveled from all around the world to be at CPAC, have no animus and maybe just believe in Trumpism a bit more than is healthy.
The same can’t be said about the loudest voices from the CPAC stage. Mike Lindell knows exactly what he’s doing. Kari Lake knows exactly what she’s doing. CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp knows exactly what he’s doing (although given his sexual assault allegations, he really didn’t need to call CPAC a “wonderful and intimate” place from the stage). Lou Dobbs knows exactly what he’s doing when he parrots Trump’s narrative about the 2020 election.
^^ This man, more than any of his followers, knows exactly what he’s doing.
Those people, along with their strange orange master, will be held to account—only time will tell how harshly.
CPAC isn’t a healthy place. This level of devotion to a single man and the narrative he preaches about the world (always with himself in the center) is not the mark of a healthy country or body politick.
We’re fast becoming a politically bankrupt country—and we have moments where it happens quickly. Perhaps more damningly, however, we have a thousand little gradual moments where we slip closer to dysfunction, and those matter more. It’s just always interesting, albeit heartbreaking, to get a front-row seat to moments like these. Trying men’s souls and whatnot.