Seeing The Light -- Tom Sullivan

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/10/20/seeing-the-light/

A career GOP operative steps into it

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair

Miles Bruner has left the Republican Party after more than a decade in the pay of the campaign industrial complex. That system exists on both sides of our political duopoly.

Bruner, a minor cog in the Republican fundraising team, is particularly tardy in taking his leave. He exits far behind the Never Trumpers, behind former GOP consultant Tim Miller, author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell,” and behind former right-wing journalist Tina Nguyen, author of “The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (and How I Got Out).” Bruner nonetheless charts his path to the exit this morning for The Bulwark. If the link works for you, do yourself a favor and study it.

Bruner summarizes why he’s leaving up front:

For ten years, the GOP has waged an unrelenting war on our civic institutions, the separation of powers, the foundation of the rule of law, and the very nature of truth itself. While Trump and his supporters in Congress have been the driving force behind the right’s descent into despotism, it would not have been possible without the thousands of consultants, aides, and politicos working behind the scenes to fully execute their systematic dismantling of American democratic norms.

I’ve written before about how seductive it can be (on the Democratic side too) to be paid to do what you love:

However idealistic they may have started, many — and by no means all — whose ambitions tempt them to acclimate, to learn the swamp’s rhythms, to be seduced by power’s soothing burble, slowly become the kind of politicians people love to hate.

The process of learning to compartmentalize what you do from where your paycheck comes from Upton Sinclair described rather memorably in 1934. It is a caution people have still to heed.

. . .