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The Sad Saga of Max Boot
I worked with Max Boot at Commentary Magazine for a few years, not in the office and not directly, but I would promote his work when it appeared on our blog. I would always joke (but not really joke) that there was never a war that Max Boot didn’t want to start. Boot’s work was the only material on the blog I consistently disagreed with and disliked, in large part because it was so trigger-happy.
It’s been strange watching Boot’s evolution into just another “woke” newspaper columnist; his shtick is so tired by now, what exactly does he offer?
The cadre of “woke” former “conservatives” is growing larger, and each has less and less intellectual honesty than the last.
.@MaxBoot: "With its long-standing opposition to immigration…National Review has found common ground with the far right. Like many conservative media outlets, it has flirted with the “great replacement” theory espoused by the El Paso gunman." https://t.co/tmnJnPv8Oz
— Evan McMullin (@EvanMcMullin) August 14, 2019
It’s so profoundly dishonest, it’s still somewhat surprising to see a newspaper as large and as storied as the Washington Post would run such a screed by a man who clearly didn’t read the entire column he’s responding to,
I grew up reading National Review in the 1980s, @MaxBoot writes. Its founder, William F. Buckley Jr., was a childhood hero.
"So it was a shock on Monday afternoon to see myself attacked in National Review as, essentially, a traitor to the white race." https://t.co/jq9tIDJXxO
— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) August 14, 2019
And not only did the Post run Boot’s piece, but CNN’s Anderson Cooper even had him on his show to whine about it too,
.@MaxBoot responds to the National Review article attacking him, saying "it's incredibly shocking and offensive to me."
"Sadly, I think it's a reflection of how even mainstream conservative publications are being Trumpified and are going down the same road [of] Fox News." pic.twitter.com/ZRdWUbR9QW
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) August 14, 2019
National Review’s editor Rich Lowry responded,
One sentence from the piece: “We see that in the tone of hysteria that creeps into immigration conversations: not just traditional fears of crime and ghettos or clashes of language or culture, but screeds about ‘invasion’ or, worse, ‘white genocide.’”
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) August 14, 2019
My husband commented:
Btw the response from those at NR has been admirably restrained in the face of lunatic attacks.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) August 14, 2019
And on this, I’m going to have to disagree.
Proof that National Review hasn’t been “Trumpified” is evidenced by NR’s response to what amounts to Boot’s slander; if it had been truly “Trumpified” NR would be hitting back. Hard. And they should. Trump’s election for many on the Right was proof that the base is sick of being abused by those in the mainstream media and left (but I repeat myself). And we should be sick of it. Being polite in the face of being called white supremacists is how we got Trump, and on this front, maybe we needed him. It’s time to stop being polite.
The left calls the President a white supremacist until they’re blue in the face, and they are astounded that the accusations don’t resonate with a majority of Americans. If they had learned any lessons from Trump’s election, Boot wouldn’t be smearing National Review and John Hirschauer and Dan McLaughlin (the authors of the pieces Boot is criticizing).
Published in General
Since
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
I’m not sure Trump’s “issues” are that that big of a deal.
JFK is Manson in this comparison, right? Because what JFK did with interns in the White House seems worse than anything Trump has done while President.
I wasn’t referring to adult children – I was referring to the very common question children ask their parents: what did you do during the war daddy? what did you do during the depression? etc. I think the Trump era is going to be regarded as something similar to The McCarthy Era. He will be portrayed as a demagogue that appealed to racist tropes to hijack the nomination and the election. Children will ask why didn’t you stand up for what you believed when he was doing this.
Why do you think that worked, if that’s what happened? Is racial harmony any worse than under Obama?
No one in the GOP was doing anything to get a lid on populism and socialism anyway.
What JFK did with interns seems to be worse than anything that Trump has ever done. With Trump, every floozy knew what the score was and knew that there would be a big pay day at the end of it. It was a money thing rather than a power thing.
Boot wasn’t merely “trashing the GOP,” okay? He wasn’t like Jonah Goldberg or Kevin Williamson. You are being much too general here. Rather, Boot was explicitly perpetuating the idea that the GOP is racist …. is chock full of racists … was created by and for racists … is The House That Racism Built … and basically is just plain racist, racist, racist, racist.
And this expressly tribalistic, identity-based (not to mention lunatic) characterization is what “wokeness” is all about.
I think that’s the way those that write and teach history will portray it, I don’t think that it’s an accurate portrayal of what happened. But I do think Trump’s other baggage will make it seem much more plausible.
I do not think racism was important to Trump’s success, but I do think admiration of his willingness to dispense with the standard PC objections to talking about immigration without tiptoeing around the racial aspects of the arguments was very important. Americans have been craving someone to come in as a man on horseback for a long time – Lee Iaccocca, Ross Perot, Colin Powell – I just think Trump is such an unworthy recipient of that longing.
He WILL be?
Fair enough.
I’m not going into the details, but when you look at what David Horwitz, Angelo Codevilla, and David Stockman say about the current nature of the system it’s pretty understandable how we got Trump. No one else in the GOP had better plans when it mattered.
Not sure how you got from “coded racial appeals” to that stuff you wrote. All he said was that that was the bigger vote getter than balanced budgets. He’s likely right…for Trump at least. But I’d like to hear all these “coded racial appeals” that Reagan/George W/McCain/Romney were supposedly making. He just doesn’t add any meat to that argument. Smearing the entire GOP for 50 years with Trump stink without some evidence is pretty low grade stuff.
Its the other way around, and has been so for quite some time: “Are you now, or have you ever been racist, sexist, etc.” With every accusation made against Trump, people remember the same false accusations made toward themselves.
This Tom Nichols guy is having quite the Twitter meltdown. Hopefully CNN notices and replaces the obviously not conservative Max Boot with him.
The two of them could interview Rick Wilson and that conservative firebrand Edgar McMuffin.
You adroitly cut the quote short, well before the end. But here’s the rest of it:
“As I now look back with the clarity of hindsight, I am convinced that coded racial appeals had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Republican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-intentioned analysts like me.”
Did you see the part about “at least as much, if not more”? It’s pretty significant.
Ergo, according to Max Boot, racism was the single most important factor in the growth of the modern Republican Party.
You are dishonest and fundamentally incapable of rightly representing anything that you hate. And you hate us. That is obvious in every post you write.
Max Boot isn’t “criticizing the GOP” he is accepting the left’s frame of reference.
The Trumpers criticized the GOP because the GOP ALSO accepted the left’s frame of reference.
Boot goes a lot further than the general GOP does, but the GOP is still pretty bad.
If you don’t know what that means, then you should educate yourself. You are college educated, surely you can navigate your way to understanding what a “frame of reference” or “moral reference” is.
That’s even worse. As a child, had I the audacity to question one moment of how my father spent his life or the choices he made I would have gotten, at a minimum, a verbal back hand.
And rightly so.
If dog whistles are whistles that only dogs can hear, why is it that progressives are so adept at hearing racist dog whistles?
Really? This surprises you?
Not really. Just because people peddle code words to get elected, doesn’t mean they won’t just be average conservatives once elected. Not close to what you wrote. But Boot doesn’t even show his work on the code words. To make such a huge accusation and insult so many…..you would think he’d show some proof. Didn’t the guy work for George W? The guy that won 44% of the Hispanic vote and 40% of the Asian vote. How was Bush duping those minorities while doling out racist code for the whites? Were the Russians involved?
Wait, what?? You are now reframing the terms of the discussion and trying to make it about the logic of what Boot wrote, not about what Boot believes — and that’s disingenuous. Of course Boot’s ideas don’t stand up to scrutiny, but this conversation began with you and I debating one thing and one thing only: Is Boot “woke” or not?
You maintain he’s not, and I maintain that when one asserts, as Boot did, that the Republican Party has for 50 years been promoting racism as its dominant ethos and only truly grown because of that ethos, one is the walking/talking definition of “woke.”
Yeah, and I said you had to do more than trash the GOP to be woke….else, a whole lot of Trumpers are woke. Seriously, do you read the negative comments people have about the GOP? Do you see any positive ones about anyone not named Trump?
He didn’t say the GOP promoted racism as its dominant ethos. All he said was a bunch of conservatives cobbled together a bunch of conservative ideas, that most voters weren’t all that interested in. So, they threw in some “coded racist appeals” to win those voters. And then they could elect conservatives to cut taxes and appoint judges.
Good lord. Did you read what you wrote just now? You said that voters on the right, on balance, weren’t “all that interested” in the GOP when it was merely peddling Conservative ideas. Only when it started throwing in “coded racist appeals” did it finally win over the right.
Thus “coded racism” = GOP votes.
And that’s a very “woke” idea, wouldn’t you say?
http://ricochet.com/662235/the-sad-saga-of-max-boot/comment-page-2/#comment-4553277
How could the huge numbers of Reagan voters that allegedly left the GOP because of Trump be “young, college educated”? Heck, I’d wager that a huge percentage of Reagan voters are dead (and voting the straight D ticket).
And, if in your confusing way, you are talking about former young voters, do you really believe a “huge number” of those that voted for Reagan would vote for a leftist Democat now?
I was young and college-educated and almost everyone I came in contact with was still voting for old style, liberal Dems (including me). The GOP was still seen as the rich people’s and/or your parent’s party. Most importantly, remember that back in the day, most of the nation paid NO attention to national politics. It was a sport reserved for hard-core political junkies.
Do you ever think about arithmetic? The youngest Reagan voter who could have left the GOP because of Trump was 50.
I’ve had a few hours to ruminate … How we answer to our children? Ridiculous on its face. Big dif between “what did you do in the war daddy” and … good Lord. You voted for Trump??
So I would never in a million years entertain such a ridiculous query from any of my children. Nor would any of them be stupid enough to ask. For they were there.
But … I’ve got four grandkids (and I’m nice to them). Say … 10 years from now, one of them inquires as to my thinking. You know, along the lines of “what were you doing during the war daddy”, becomes: “Why in the name of God did you vote for Trump?”
My answer will be simple. And because they are my grand children they would not get the back of my (verbal) hand.
Because your two uncles were in the military and Trump’s opponent had long proved a disdain for such people. I had no assurances that they wouldn’t die, but I felt their chances of dying abandoned were less.
Your grandad and I are business owners and long suffered over regulation. We didn’t know Trump would make it better, but we had hope.
We witnessed beloved relatives leaving California due to high crime related to foolish leftist policies, and believed a wall would be a very good thing for the people we loved.
Because we have always believed in America, and, no matter his faults, we believed Trump did too.
And then … depending on their age, I’d treat them as I would any other. They’d be told to piss off and mind their own business.
Classic