The Lincoln Project (Showtime Version)

The Lincoln Project is a five-part Showtime docu-series, focusing on an assortment of fairly well known Republican consultants, strategists, and operatives who famously bolted the elite Republican club that they had been charter members of to oppose Donald Trump's takeover of the GOP and defeat him for reelection in 2020. For this they founded the Lincoln Project. For whatever reason, they permitted cameras to record the group's frenzied efforts to defeat Trump, thus providing an unusual and interesting insight into the activities of a successful contemporary super-PAC.

For avid politics watchers, this show is irresistible. (I found it riveting enough to watch it twice in its entirety in the run up to the midterms.) The principal characters, however, are somewhat less so. They are, after all, all former Republican operatives in various stages of repentance for having helped elect Republicans in the past and thus having helped bring about the party's and the country's current condition. Somewhat more sympathetic are the younger staffers - most (although not all) of them also Republicans of some sort or other - who seem likewise to love the game of politics but also are determined to put their valued skills to work to defeat Trump.

The series opens a window on the extensive media effort which was the group's main form of direct involvement in the campaign and how the different participants - principals and staff alike - coped with the stress of the effort. Towards the end of the campaign as election day nears, we begin to sense that the stresses may go deeper than initially expected.

Just as the election didn't quite end the campaign, it likewise ended neither the Lincoln Project nor the filmed account of it. Very quickly, however, even as the country was coping with election denialism and January 6, the Lincoln Project itself began to unravel from its own internal stresses. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise that high-powered, successful political operatives should end up competing against each other. Perhaps it was an inevitable power thing, Perhaps a money thing. Perhaps both. But the camera recorded it all.

No sooner had the election been called than the somewhat self-righteous rhetoric of the Lincoln Project appeared to be exposed as possibly something else. An Axios story said some of the Lincoln Project's founders were planning to turn it into a lucrative media company after the campaign - dividing the group's factions against each other and opening the Lincoln Project up to the charge that they were just Republican grifters. Meanwhile the camera kept filming.

Then, as if that weren't enough to undermine the organization and its cultivated righteous self-image, the NY Times revealed what, as it turned out, at least some of the leaders apparently already knew that one of the founders had long been promising young men career advancement in exchange for sex. Not for nothing is the final episode int he series entitle "Icarus"!

The Lincoln Project is a study in successful political media operations and offers insight into the kinds of people who are attracted to this work and are good at it. It identifies the trajectory in political consulting in general and in the Republican party in particular which have led our country to its current sad state of affairs. It also illustrates the very same patterns of unaccountable abuse of power, which the Lincoln Project members decried in Trump, but which seem to be so broadly characteristic of so many institutions and structures in our society.