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John Podhoretz
Based on years of listening to him, and on everything I’ve heard about him, John Podhoretz is a gentle, humane, and thoroughly decent man. I envy him his ability to pluck precisely the right word from his obviously vast vocabulary, and to speak, when he chooses, with extraordinary nuance and precision.
Sure, he’s prone to outrageous hyperbole (a quality hardly unique to him in this, the Age of Trump), is unduly proud of his Judaic morosity, and has a sense of humor that resonates with 12-year-old boys and Jonah Goldberg (but I repeat myself). But still, I enjoy listening to him.
But he often lands a clinker, as he did in the June 6 podcast (here) when he averred, at about 1:10:00, that, should the Democrats win in 2020, the right is “certainly going to turn anti-patriotic in the event of his defeat. … So you’re going to have the right hating America and the left hating America.”
I’ve mentioned this before about our own Rob Long, and I’ll say it now about John: I think too many conservative intellectuals have a poor idea of what actual conservatives are like, and of who makes up “the right” out in that vast unexplored and boring portion of America that people who don’t live in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles call home.
Thank G-d we still have VDH.
Published in Culture
No Asian blood have I. Born in America as a hetero white guy.
It’s a painful thing to feel like an outsider in your home country. To be an outsider in another country is normal and accepted. This is why we should have genetic engineering. Many of us are born as mistakes of nature.
Well at least you know that feelings of alienation are intentional, from the left.
So, I’ll take that as a yes.
And I wasn’t born as a mistake of nature. I had to work at it.
I end up wondering what genetic engineering is supposed to fix about that.
Don’t you just love these drive- by comments asking a snarky 6 word question?
My answer is; elitism is like pornography, hard to define but most people know it when they see it.
My alienation comes from my personality type. I can’t blame it at all on the left. I can’t speak as to what it’s like to be black in America but I do know that it feels unpleasant to feel like an outsider in one’s own country.
Isn’t everybody biased against people who are different from them?
Genetic engineering increases the probability that you can overcome what you are. I suspect, as unpleasant as this opinion is, that many folks are born with such terrible genetic deficiencies that they can never recover from them.
Hmm.
If we use “Antifa” as a catch-all for the black-masked mobs, their ideology is the abolition of capitalism by Whatever Means Necessary, and the institution of some post-Constitutional order based on a bunch of Noble Ideals that are both gloriously democratic and also anarchic! but require the hand of the state to remold everyone. Before the state withers away, of course.
The institutional left today does not share their zeal for destroying the current society, but have been seized by one of their occasional fevers for “transforming” America. This means “listening to all the voices,” which includes the calls for rethinking the economy, the nuclear family, the Electoral college, patriarchal architecture, gender, math, equality, and so on. Everything’s up for review and it’s thrilling!
It’s also destructive and poisonous to consensus, since it cedes the megaphone to the people with the most extreme positions. Push back against the extreme idea, and you’re delegitimizing the need for progress. You’re silencing marginalized voices. Stay in your lane, sit down, check your privilege, do better.
Imagine a Democratic candidate saying “I love this country. It doesn’t need transforming. Air leaks out of two tires on your car, do you insist it has to be transformed into a bike? You fill up the tires. I’m open to suggestions about where we go from here, but if you’re telling me that objectivity and math are relics of colonialism, I’m thinking you got a lot of student debt and you can’t figure out a 20% tip on the restaurant bill without looking at your damn phone. If you’re telling me the nuclear family has to go, I’m thinking you haven’t seen the stats on how that plays out, and you just got a problem with dad. If you’re telling me skyscrapers are examples of male supremacy, you’d best scrub that Instagram picture of the Eiffel Tower before you make someone feel unsafe. If you’re saying a man is a woman because he says he is, you can believe that, but it doesn’t mean anyone else has to. You want separate spaces for people based on skin color? Really? You think a Memphis lunch counter in 1952 was the high point of American civilization?”
I think a lot of modern liberals would love for someone to come out swinging against the wokification of their side, and I also think the under-40 media mavens would eat his or her liver like Prometheus on the rock.
Qanon is unhinged craziness unmoored from fundamental conservative beliefs.
Maybe so, but these days the left is definitely against hetero white males. Even if that might actually describe a majority of themselves too.
Maybe not. But we still oughta check ourselves for it just in case.
Q-anon has several candidates in the general election this time around.
When David Duke was the Republican Candidate for Governor of Louisiana in 1991, President George H.W. Bush disowned him.
When Roy Moore was the Republican Candidate for Senator in 2017, President Trump endorsed him.
Would you vote for the Q-anon candidates in the general election, or for the Democratic candidate, or leave the choice blank?
So Trump had no plans of his own? I don’t remember him saying on the campaign trail he would raise taxes or keep them the same, so I guess the “rinos” talked him into it? Bravo for them, finally doing something for ordinary Americans! How unlike them.
And I must have been hallucinating when he came out with a list pre-electionof 20 judges.
McConnell is good with judges not so good with other things. I take it you think he’s a swell guy?
Trump has questionable hiring skills. Although it’s not all his fault, he had no pre-existing political network and he had to use players from other teams. Inheriting Obama holdovers, and staffing experienced people had to rely on Bushies, who marinated in the GOP for decades. Note: the only Republicans in the high office of the Presidency since 1988 were named Bush, and a Bush Vice Presidency going back to 1980 , oh and before that head of the CIA!
But he also has great firing skills. Now he has a pretty good team. Although most of his cabinet were there from day one. He didn’t hire Christie or Romney 👍
As though any of them would have targeted the tax cuts to the middle and working class. Tax cuts are a Republican trope, but they always tended to go to the upper middle class (who are largely Democrats BTW) until Trump. They would not have had the cahones to cut as many regulations. You neglected to mention his reworking our trade deals with Mexico, Canada, China, the EU and S. Korea. Is this deliberate or just not on your radar?
Nobody home? Where are you getting your news? Consider that you’re being lied to.
This is an inapt analogy. (Not as bad as “tripping on his genitals” lol) We all always saw Trump’s gamesmanship, only JPod? Hilarious. The difference is we Trump supporters wanted our Wizard in the land of Oz , not theirs. Hillary. (The wicked witch should never have control of Oz) Because they all are frauds. Trump at least owns it. But the real Wizard is the media. But maybe you don’t see that since you clearly are enthralled by their reportage.
Leaving aside that genetic engineering at least so far is more about making YOUR CHILDREN different, not YOU, that still leaves out what you think you need to change. Do you think changing your genetics would make you less libertarian, and hence feel more at home? Or do you think you need to be blonde, or have smaller feet, or… what?
Case-by-case basis. Maybe blanks, maybe write in “Aragorn” if I could do that on an absentee ballot.
Maybe vote for the Republican. I’m not at all sure a somewhat more conspiracy-focused interpretation of the fact that the federal bureaucracy hates Trump is disqualifying.
Even if it is, the Democrat candidate almost certainly has at least several disqualifiers–federal money for abortions, no rule of written law, no religious liberty for groups who don’t go all-in on the sexual revolution, etc. Sheesh, “Bush lied us into war” and “Trump works for Putin” are themselves ridiculous conspiracy theories.
This sounds like a problem to worry about in the primary.
“But Roy Moore.” etc.
I seem to recall that situation was already in hand, if Moore had been elected, he would have been removed and replaced by another Republican. That seems to still count as a win.
A respectable position–one of several.
(I do think it’s possible to reasonably and morally abstain from a vote when both candidates are dreadful and one thinks that even the lesser evil is so bad it can’t be voted for. I couldn’t vote for Trump last time. But I was wrong about how bad he was; he turned out a lot better than I expected, and I’m voting for him this time.)
That was one of my earlier points too. I have a hard time imagining how anyone who was pro-Trump in 2016, could be so turned off by nonsense like Twitter, to either not vote at all, or actually vote for Biden. Meanwhile, those who abstained from voting for Trump in 2016 because he seemed too much of an unknown quantity or risk, have had 4 years to get over that. So to the extent that anyone who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 will do the same this time, versus those who didn’t but will, a bigger margin this time seems at least possible, if not likely. Although Democrat voter fraud – cheating – could still make it go the other way. They didn’t think they needed to cheat for Hillary, but they were wrong.
Jolly good. Well said.
I think there’s other bad news though. A bit of Twitter barbarism from Trump–and a LOT of leftist deception–may sway some well-meaning, overall decent people from a no-vote to a Dem vote. I probably know several such in Texas.
I expect – and hope – there’s a larger number of those who abstained in 2016 but now know better.
That still doesn’t stop the cheating, though. Especially if they’re able to push through a switch to voting by mail.
Remember how well he handled the Stormy Daniels thing. Everyone who voted for him and even those who were on the fence responded by shrugging their shoulders. “Yeah that’s him. So what,” was the common reply. Trump can handle the media going into absolutely everything he’s ever said or done in a way no other politician can.
Hillary and Biden are deeply corrupt and cynical but the media will continue to pretend that they are the Wizard even if the curtain is on ripped from the ceiling. In a similar fashion, the media pretend Trump is the right hand of the Hindu devil Mara (who is way more evil than Satan by the way). This is were Trump’s insults are great. He is so big and loud that he can break through the media conformity. I wish he said somethings better when he breaks through but he’s about the only one who can break through.
I wish Dan Crenshaw and Ben Sasse would take note at Trump’s media manipulation.
Q-anon to me still sounds like a generic brand of cotton swab.
I don’t think there is conservative case for a Democrat win serving America’s interest, at least not in a direct way.
Back in 1976 voters faced a choice between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Many conservatives supported Reagan in the GOP primary against Ford and believed that Ford was insufficiently conservative.
Was there a conservative case for electing Jimmy Carter? Not in a direct way. No.
But once Jimmy Carter was elected, the Democrats held all of the power, controlling the US Senate, the US House and the Presidency. The Democrats also held all of the responsibility for how the nation fared.
The result was that in 1980 Reagan and the Republicans won huge victories. In 1980 Republicans gained 12 US Senate sets, winning a majority for the first time since the 1950s, and 33 US House seats, still short of a majority.
So, this might be construed as an indirect conservative case, retrospectively, for a Democrat victory in 1976.
I can anticipate the counter-argument that the Democrat party of 2020 is much further Left than the Democrat party of 1976. That is certainly true. The fact is no one has a crystal ball and therefore no one knows who bad a Biden-Harris administration will be if they win in November. We know that judicial nominees will be terrible. We know that Biden will reverse many of Trump’s executive orders (which were themselves reversals of Obama’s executive orders).
So, I will not even make a conservative case for a Democrat victory this November, direct or indirect, simply because no one has a crystal ball, no one knows the future. We can only speculate as to what the consequences of a Trump victory will be and what the consequences of a Biden victory will be. On policy grounds, Trump is going to pursue mostly conservative policies. Biden will pursue leftist policies.
But this gets to Henry’s next point.
From my perspective, the issue is not whether I will vote for Trump or cast a “none of the above” vote as I did in 2016. It’s not much of an issue because I live in Indiana where Trump won in 2016 by 19 points. So, Trump is the prohibited favorite to win Indiana with or without my vote.
So, Trump is the prohibitive favorite in my state of Indiana, having defeated Clinton in 2016 by 19 points. So, the issue, as I see it, is not should I vote for Trump or cast a “none of the above” vote. Either way, the result is likely the same: Trump wins Indiana’s electoral votes in November and Biden does not.
The issue is this: If Trump loses to Biden, which is looking highly likely at this point (though no one knows with certainty), what lessons can conservatives and Republicans draw from Trump’s defeat?
I think the appropriate lesson is to avoid nominating someone for President who is incapable of running a disciplined campaign. During a time when America faces important issues regarding race, policy tactics, the economy, immigration, Trump spends time accusing Joe Scarborough of having one of his aides killed in the 1990s and getting into fights with NASCAR over NASCAR’s ban of the Confederate flag.
Basically, by nominating Trump the GOP has provided Americans pretty solid evidence that Republicans have lost their minds and are therefore not qualified to set policy for the country. That might be an unfair conclusion for people to draw. But this is the reality.
So, to respond more directly to @henryracette, we are asking different questions and getting different answers. Henry is asking, “Should conservatives vote for Trump?” I am asking, “Given a likely Trump defeat, what lessons can conservatives learn?”
The price of not being James Lileks, who gets a form of an answer, while my request remains on the shelf.
You have a very narrow definition of “represented,” along with an unfortunate lack of specifics.
The idea we had to get Carter to get Reagan is nonsense. The same sorts of establishment anti Trump forces were anti Reagan. Had the rallied to him in 76, we might have had Reagan sooner.
I think this is an interesting question.
I do not equate Donald Trump with David Duke. But in a discussion featuring Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager in 2016, Shapiro explained by he would not vote for Trump. Shapiro has since decided that he will support Trump in 2020.
But in 2016 Shapiro offered the thought experiment: If David Duke were the nominee, would you vote for him?
Let’s stipulate that the Democrat nominee for President holds views typical for the modern Democrat party. So, a conservative honestly fears a Democrat victory. Yet the conservative would prefer to not vote for David Duke, someone who has been associated with the KKK.
So, does one view David Duke as the lessor of two evils and vote for David Duke to keep the Democrat out of the White House? Or does one cast a “none of the above” vote?
As Shapiro mentioned in his discussion with Dennis Prager back in 2016, the question is where do you draw the line. Shapiro also was not implying that he believed that Donald Trump was as morally repugnant as David Duke, only that, at the time, Shapiro viewed Trump as sufficiently repugnant to where he could not vote for Trump.
I did not say that we had to get Carter to get Reagan.
The choice was between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Democrats, fresh from the Watergate landslide in the mid-term elections of 1974, held huge majorities in both the US Senate and the US House.
I doubt there were many conservatives who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 thinking, “Hey, if we elect Carter this year, Reagan will get elected in 1980.” Still, retrospectively, given that the Democrats held all of the power and responsibility for governing from January 1977 through January 1981 and given the high inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the gasoline shortages, by November 1980 American voters were much more ripe for a turn to the right.
But no one had a crystal ball in 1976. So, that’s why few people would have thought that Carter’s victory was pyrrhic for the Democrats even though it turned out to be.
Love you more Lileks. You make the beer less salty and life less horrendous with your wink and a smile.