5.01 The Great Unraveling

We interrupt season 4 to bring you a special mini series (never fear I already have several WWII episodes written and one is already recorded). This series is based on the events of September 10, 2025, and the aftermath of that day. The purpose is to look into how the US got to this point and hopefully find a way for us to get out of it. I hope you all find it informative. 

Transcript

The Great Unraveling

Episode 1: "The Civility Myth"

Before Trump broke politics, politics was already broken.

It's September 15th, 1987. Americans are gathered around their television sets, watching what many would later call the beginning of the end of civilized political discourse in America.

SENATOR BIDEN: The committee will come to order. The nomination of Judge Robert Bork...

NARRATOR: But this isn't really the beginning. This is just when we started paying attention.

[Music: Dramatic orchestral sting, then fade to theme]

INTRODUCTION

I'm Shawn, and this is season 5 “The Great Unraveling”—a journey through the decades-long collapse of American political civility, institutional trust, and the radical center that once held this country together.

We're told constantly that Donald Trump broke American politics. That 2016 was the year civility died. That social media poisoned our discourse and turned neighbors into enemies. The story goes like this: Once upon a time, politicians disagreed respectfully, compromised regularly, and put country before party. Then Trump came along and ruined everything.

This is a fairy tale.

The truth is messier, more uncomfortable, and ultimately more important. American political discourse has been vicious, personal, and tribal for decades. Our institutions have been losing credibility since long before anyone tweeted. And the mythical "center" that supposedly held everything together? It was already bleeding out by the time most millennials were born.

Over the next ten episodes, we're going to trace the real story of how we got here. Not the comforting myth of sudden collapse, but the uncomfortable reality of slow-motion institutional suicide. We'll examine how both parties have systematically destroyed faith in elections, normalized political violence, and turned governance into performance art. We'll explore how the cultural revolutions of the 1960s created parallel power structures that still govern us today.[1] And we'll ask the hardest question of all: Is there any way back?

Before we continue, let me address something that you are probably wondering about. What happened to season 4? We will continue that. As a matter of fact, I have about 10 episodes already written and ready to go. However, the events of the last week or so, I’m recording this episode on September 16, have made THIS season particularly important and timely, so I thought I’d release it now. In truth, this is one of two seasons that have been percolating in my brain for years and I started writing this and the other one in the summer. I wasn’t sure if I should restart the Patreon and put these behind a paywall or if I should just release these to the general public and I figured, I’d release this for free to everyone. So here you go. 

Ok so with that said it is time to kill the civility myth once and for all. However, of course, we have our song of the week. This week the song is "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan. I'll see you on the other side.

ACT I: THE GOLDEN AGE THAT NEVER WAS

Let's start with the story we tell ourselves. Picture it: It's 1985. Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill, the Republican president and the Democratic House Speaker, are the best of friends. They disagree during the day, then share drinks and jokes in the evening. Politics stops at the water's edge. Senators from opposing parties vacation together. Washington is a functioning city where good people disagree in good faith.[2]

This is the origin myth of American civility. It's repeated constantly by politicians, pundits, and nostalgic Americans who yearn for the days when politics was "normal." There's just one problem: It's largely bullshit.

Let me read you something. This is from a Democratic Party fundraising letter from 1964—not 2016, not 2020, but 1964, supposedly the heart of the civil era:

"The Republican nominee advocates a return to the dark days when Americans were set against Americans, when fear ruled our land, when the Federal Government was the enemy of the people instead of the servant of the people."[3]

Sound familiar? This is about Barry Goldwater, a man who's now remembered as a principled conservative, being described as a proto-fascist by the Democrats of 1964.

Or try this, from a Republican attack ad in 1988:

["As governor, Michael Dukakis vetoed mandatory sentences for drug dealers. He vetoed the death penalty. His revolving door prison policy gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole..."[4]

The Willie Horton ad. Forty-seven seconds that destroyed a presidential campaign and pioneered the politics of racial fear that would define American elections for the next three decades.

The idea that negative campaigning is somehow new ignores centuries of American political history. The 1800 election between Jefferson and Adams featured claims that Jefferson was a French radical whose sympathy for the French Revolution would bring similar bloodshed to America, while Adams was attacked as a monarchist secretly bent on establishing a family dynasty.[5]

But let's focus on the modern era, because that's where the civility myth really lives. The supposed golden age of American politics—roughly 1945 to 1990—when giants walked the earth and statesmanship ruled the day.

Here's what actually happened during those supposedly civil decades:

1950: Nixon runs one of the nastiest Senate campaigns in American history against Helen Gahagan Douglas, distributing 500,000 flyers on pink paper calling her "pink right down to her underwear" and using anti-Semitic appeals. Douglas responds by coining the nickname "Tricky Dick."

The irony? Two decades later, as president, Nixon would create the Environmental Protection Agency, sign the Clean Air Act, impose wage and price controls, and enact what one historian called "probably more new regulation than in any other presidency since the New Deal." Yet the left never forgave him for that 1950 campaign—proof that political hatred, once established, persists regardless of later policy positions.[6]

1954: Senator Joseph McCarthy is finally censured by the Senate after years of destroying careers with accusations of Communist infiltration.

1964: The Goldwater campaign is painted as extremist and dangerous. Lyndon Johnson runs the "Daisy" ad, suggesting that electing Goldwater will lead to nuclear war.

1968: The Democratic National Convention in Chicago turns into a violent spectacle. Anti-war protesters clash with police while Democrats tear each other apart on national television.

1972: The Watergate break-in begins a constitutional crisis that will consume American politics for two years and end a presidency.

1973: Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns in disgrace over corruption charges.

1974: President Nixon resigns to avoid impeachment.

1980: The Iranian hostage crisis dominates the presidential election. Republicans hammer Jimmy Carter as weak and ineffective.

1987: The Bork hearings begin the modern era of confirmation warfare.

1988: The Willie Horton ad redefines racial politics in America.

1991: The Clarence Thomas hearings turn the Supreme Court confirmation process into a televised trial about sexual harassment and race.

This is the "civil" era we're supposed to miss?

ACT II: THE BORK PRECEDENT

If you want to understand when modern political warfare really began, don't look at Twitter or Trump rallies. Look at Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building, September 15th, 1987. That's when the Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings on President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

SENATOR BIDEN: Judge Bork, do you think that there is a right of privacy in the Constitution?

JUDGE BORK: I do not think the Constitution has embedded in it any general right of privacy.

It sounds academic, doesn't it? Boring, even. Two lawyers discussing constitutional interpretation. But this exchange would fundamentally change how Americans confirm Supreme Court justices, and more broadly, how they conduct political warfare.

Robert Bork was a legal giant—a former Yale Law professor, federal judge, and Acting Attorney General who had fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. He was also a judicial conservative with a paper trail of controversial positions on civil rights, privacy, and the role of government.

Within hours of Reagan announcing the nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor with a speech that would become infamous:

SENATOR KENNEDY: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids..."

This wasn't constitutional analysis. This was political warfare dressed up as legal argument. Kennedy was painting Bork not as a conservative judge, but as a threat to basic civil rights.

The strategy worked. Liberal groups mobilized with unprecedented intensity. They ran television ads, organized grassroots campaigns, and turned the confirmation process into a political campaign. The word "Borking"—meaning to destroy a nominee through character assassination and ideological attacks—entered the American lexicon.

The Bork hearings established several precedents that now define American politics:

First, that any political battle is worth winning by any means necessary. The old norms of senatorial courtesy and deference to presidential nominations were dead.

Second, that complex policy disagreements should be framed in apocalyptic terms. Bork wasn't just wrong about constitutional law—he was a threat to American democracy itself.

Third, that outside groups could mobilize public pressure to influence supposedly deliberative processes. The confirmation became a campaign, complete with advertising, polling, and grassroots organizing.

And fourth, that the mainstream media would largely accept this new framework. The hearings were covered more like a political campaign than a constitutional process.

When Bork was rejected by a vote of 58-42, both parties learned the lesson. Republicans vowed revenge. Democrats celebrated a new model of political resistance. Anthony Kennedy, Reagan's replacement nominee, sailed through confirmation because he was more moderate and had less of a paper trail. The message was clear: controversial nominees would face total war, while bland nominees would pass easily. This incentive structure would shape American politics for the next forty years.

ACT III: THE GINGRICH REVOLUTION

NARRATOR: While the Bork hearings were playing out in the Senate, a backbench congressman from Georgia was planning a revolution. His name was Newton Leroy Gingrich, and he understood something that most politicians in 1987 didn't: that American political discourse was about to be transformed by technology, media, and a new kind of strategic thinking.

Gingrich had been studying the Democrats' tactics for years. He watched how they used committee hearings to embarrass Republicans. He saw how they coordinated with interest groups and media allies. He observed how they framed conservative positions as extreme and dangerous.

And he decided to beat them at their own game.

Gingrich was the first Republican to really understand that politics was becoming a permanent campaign. The idea that you could govern during the day and be collegial at night was already dying when he got to Congress.

In the early 1990s, Gingrich's political action committee, GOPAC, began distributing a memo to Republican candidates and activists. It was titled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control," and it would change American political discourse forever.

The memo included two lists. The first contained positive words Republicans should use to describe themselves and their policies: "opportunity," "common sense," "prosperity," "family," "children," "freedom."

The second list contained negative words to use against Democrats: "decay," "sick," "pathetic," "liberal," "radical," "corrupt," "waste," "welfare," "taxes."

"Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party. These words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible."

Coordinated messaging wasn't entirely new—radical left groups like the Weather Underground and Black Panthers had used manifestos and coordinated ideological language throughout the 1960s and 70s. But their dense, revolutionary rhetoric was aimed at underground cells and true believers, not winning elections. Gingrich's innovation was taking these fringe tactics and making them systematic, focus-group-tested, and mainstream. He turned what had been the province of bomb-throwing radicals into standard Republican Party training for suburban candidates running for city council.

This wasn't just about messaging. It was about reframing political conflict as moral warfare. Democrats weren't just wrong—they were "sick" and "pathetic." Republicans weren't just different—they represented "opportunity" and "common sense."

The strategy worked. In 1994, Republicans gained 54 seats in the House and won control for the first time in 40 years. Gingrich became Speaker, and his approach to politics became the Republican template.

But the Democrats were watching too. They learned to play the same game, using similar tactics to demonize Republican positions. By the late 1990s, both parties were using Gingrich's playbook.

The Clinton impeachment hearings were the culmination of this new approach to politics. Republicans portrayed Clinton as a criminal who had violated his oath of office. Democrats portrayed the impeachment as a partisan coup attempt. Both sides mobilized their bases, raised money, and treated a constitutional process as a political campaign.

On the one hand you had republicans who argued the president of the United States committed perjury before a federal grand jury while the democrats insisted this was simply a partisan railroad job designed to overturn the results of two elections.

Sound familiar? By 1998, the template was set: Every major political conflict would be treated as an existential battle between good and evil, with no room for nuance or compromise.

ACT IV: THE TALK RADIO REVOLUTION

While politicians were learning the art of total warfare, a new medium was changing how Americans consumed political information. Talk radio, liberated by the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, became the laboratory for a new kind of political discourse.

Rush Limbaugh launched his national show in 1988, the same year as the Willie Horton ad and just one year after the Bork hearings. The timing wasn't coincidental. American political discourse was ready for something angrier, more partisan, and more entertaining than the traditional media were providing.

Limbaugh pioneered a style that would define conservative media for the next thirty years. He wasn't just discussing policy—he was diagnosing the moral pathology of liberalism. Democrats weren't political opponents; they were enemies of American values.

This approach didn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier, we saw how Ted Kennedy’s infamous “Robert Bork’s America” speech framed judicial disagreement as a fight over the survival of civil rights and democracy. Limbaugh translated that same apocalyptic style into mass media—but with the polarity reversed. If Kennedy could paint Bork as a threat to civilization, Limbaugh could paint liberals as a threat to civilization.

The format was perfect for the new political moment. Three hours a day, five days a week, of pure ideological content. No pretense of balance or objectivity. No boring policy details or constitutional nuances. Just pure, distilled political warfare.

What Limbaugh understood was that politics could be entertainment. You didn't need to educate your audience about the complexities of governance—you needed to make them feel good about their existing beliefs and angry about their political opponents.

The model was so successful that it spawned dozens of imitators. By the mid-1990s, talk radio was dominated by conservative hosts who treated politics as a form of tribal warfare. Liberals tried to compete but largely failed—not because their ideas were worse, but because outrage and grievance translate better to talk radio than policy analysis and institutional reform.

This created an asymmetric media environment that would define American politics for decades. Conservative voters were consuming three hours a day of content that portrayed liberals as enemies of America. Liberal voters were still getting their political information from mainstream sources that maintained the fiction of objectivity and balance.

The result was predictable: Conservative voters became more ideologically mobilized and more hostile to political compromise. They didn't see Democrats as fellow Americans with different ideas about governance—they saw them as threats to everything good and decent about America. 

By 2000, this dynamic was already reshaping American elections.

ACT V: THE 2000 PRECEDENT

December 12, 2000. The Supreme Court issues its decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively ending the presidential election recount in Florida and making George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United States.

"In a 5-4 decision that split along ideological lines, the Court has ruled that the recount cannot continue..."

Democrats were outraged. For the first time since 1876, a presidential candidate who lost the popular vote would become president. And unlike 1876, this wasn't the result of political compromise—it was the result of a Supreme Court decision that many Democrats saw as partisan and illegitimate.  The language they used to describe the decision would become familiar over the next twenty years:

"Selected, not elected." "Stolen election." "Constitutional crisis." "Illegitimate president."

Many Democrats argued that Bush was never really president—that he was installed by a right-wing Supreme Court that stopped counting votes. That's not democracy—that's a coup.

Republicans dismissed these complaints as sour grapes. Bush had won Florida fair and square, they argued. The Supreme Court had simply prevented Democrats from changing the rules after the election.

But something important had happened: A major American political party had essentially argued that a presidential election was illegitimate. Not because of fraud or foreign interference, but because they disagreed with the outcome.

This established a precedent that would echo through the next two decades. In 2004, some Democrats claimed that Republican voter suppression and electronic voting machine manipulation had stolen Ohio. In 2016, Democrats and many mainstream media outlets spent years promoting the theory that Russian interference had illegitimately installed Donald Trump. In 2020, Republicans claimed that massive voter fraud had stolen the election from Trump.

What 2000 taught both parties was that questioning the legitimacy of election results is a viable political strategy. It energizes your base, fundraises effectively, and creates a permission structure for resistance to the winner's agenda.

The media played along with each iteration of election denial, largely because it generated ratings and confirmed their audiences' existing beliefs. Conservative media promoted Republican election denial, while liberal media promoted Democratic election denial. By 2020, faith in American election integrity was at historic lows—not because elections had become less secure, but because both parties had spent twenty years teaching their voters to distrust any outcome they didn't like.

ACT VI: THE CONFIRMATION WARS

The Bork precedent didn't end with Bork. It created a template that both parties would use to weaponize the Supreme Court confirmation process.

1991: Clarence Thomas faces accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill. The hearings become a national spectacle about race, gender, and power. Thomas is confirmed, but the process further politicizes the Court.

2005: Democrats threaten to filibuster several of Bush's judicial nominees. Republicans threaten to eliminate the filibuster for judicial confirmations—the "nuclear option."

2013: Democrats, led by Harry Reid, eliminate the filibuster for most judicial nominations after Republicans block Obama's nominees.

2016: Republicans refuse to hold hearings for Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, arguing that the next president should fill the vacancy.

2017: Democrats try to filibuster Trump's nominee Neil Gorsuch. Republicans eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations.

2018: Brett Kavanaugh faces accusations of sexual assault from Christine Blasey Ford. The hearings become another national spectacle, with Republicans calling it a "sham" and Democrats calling it a "cover-up."

2020: Republicans confirm Amy Coney Barrett eight days before the presidential election, reversing their 2016 position about election-year nominations.

Each escalation was justified as a response to the other party's previous escalation. Republicans blocked Garland because Democrats had threatened to filibuster Bush nominees. Democrats eliminated the filibuster because Republicans were blocking Obama nominees. Republicans eliminated the Supreme Court filibuster because Democrats were blocking Trump nominees.

The thing about escalation is that it always feels justified in the moment. The other side started it, so you're just responding. But each response becomes the new baseline for the next conflict.

By 2020, Supreme Court confirmations had become purely partisan exercises. The last Justice to receive more than 70 votes was Stephen Breyer in 1994. The last Justice to receive any votes from the opposing party was Elena Kagan in 2010, who received five Republican votes.

The Court itself became a partisan symbol rather than a legal institution. Democrats talked about "packing" the Court with additional justices. Republicans talked about "defending" the Court from liberal activists.

This was the logical endpoint of the process that began with Robert Bork in 1987: the complete politicization of what was supposed to be the least political branch of government.

CONCLUSION: THE MYTH DIES HARD

So here we are, at the end of our journey through the "civil" era of American politics. What have we learned?

We've learned that the Bork hearings established the template for total political warfare that still governs American politics today. We've learned that both parties spent the 1990s weaponizing political discourse, with Republicans leading on strategy and Democrats quickly catching up. We've learned that talk radio created an asymmetric media environment that primed conservative voters for permanent political conflict. We've learned that the 2000 election established election denial as a legitimate political tactic. And we've learned that the Supreme Court confirmation process became completely partisan decades before Donald Trump was elected president.

None of this is to say that Trump didn't change American politics—he clearly did. But he didn't break a functioning system. He inherited a system that was already broken and turned the dysfunction up to eleven.

The civility myth persists because it's more comfortable than the truth. It allows us to believe that our problems are recent and therefore easily fixed. It suggests that if we just got rid of Trump, or social media, or partisan gerrymandering, we could return to some golden age of American governance.

But there was no golden age. There was only a different set of problems, covered up by a different media environment, and constrained by different technological and cultural limitations.

Nostalgia is always about selective memory. We remember the parts of the past that make us feel good and forget the parts that make us uncomfortable. But history is about seeing the past clearly, not feeling good about it.

The question isn't how we return to a civil past that never existed. The question is how we build something better than what we have now.

Over the next nine episodes, we're going to explore that question. We'll examine how both parties have systematically undermined democratic institutions. We'll trace the cultural and intellectual currents that created our current moment. We'll analyze how technology has amplified existing problems rather than creating new ones. And we'll ask whether there's any path forward that doesn't lead to further polarization and institutional collapse.

But first, we had to kill the civility myth. Because you can't solve a problem if you don't understand how it started.

Next time on The Great Unraveling: "Selected, Not Elected"—how both parties learned to delegitimize elections they don't win, and why nobody trusts the refs anymore.

If you have questions or comments, email me at shawnwarswick at Mac dot com. That's S-H-A-W-N-W-A-R-S-W-I-C-K at Mac dot com.

I'm Shawn. Thanks for listening.

Primary Sources

Didion, Joan. “Insider Baseball.” In Political Fictions, 29–52. New York: Vintage, 2001.

Secondary Sources

Burgin, Angus. The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression.    Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Caldwell, Christopher. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. New York: Simon &                    Schuster, 2020.
Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Mitchell, Greg. Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas—      Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950. New York: Random House, 1998.

Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York:     Scribner, 2008.           
Rothbard, Murray N. “Education: Free and Compulsory.” In Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against               Nature and Other Essays, 127–148. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000.
Russell, Thaddeus. A Renegade History of the United States. New York: Free Press, 2010.

Taibbi, Matt. The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008.
Woods, Tom. The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Washington, DC: Regnery      Publishing, 2004.

----- Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2011.

Zelizer, Julian E., ed. The Presidency of Richard Nixon: A New Historical Perspective. Princeton,            NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

[1] Numerous scholars support the idea that the supposed liberation of the 1960s produced not merely a cultural shift but new managerial and ideological regimes, particularly within academia, media, corporate HR, and public education. Each of the following works contributes a distinct layer to this interpretation, viewed through a Jeffersonian and libertarian lens: Caldwell, Christopher. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.; Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Murray N. Rothbard, “Education: Free and Compulsory,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000); Thaddeus Russell, A Renegade History of the United States (New York: Free Press, 2010); Thaddeus Russell, “The Age of Conformity,” Renegade University, accessed September 2025, https://renegadeuniversity.com; Tom Woods, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2004).
[2] Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020); Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball,” in Political Fictions (New York: Vintage, 2001); Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008); Tom Woods, Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2011); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[3] Democratic National Committee, Fundraising Letter, 1964, quoted in Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Nation Books, 2001), 413.
[4] “Weekend Passes (Willie Horton Ad),” Americans for Bush (PAC), 1988. Television ad. Transcript and video available via The Living Room Candidate, Museum of the Moving Image, https://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1988/Weekend-Passes.
[5] Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage Books, 2002); see also “Founders Online,” National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/; Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign (ew York: Free Press, 2007);
[6] Greg Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas—Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 (New York: Random House, 1998); Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008); Bruce J. Schulman, quoted in Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of Richard Nixon: A New Historical Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).