The Problem of Max Boot

As your piece alludes to but does not say outright, Boot was a right-wing intellectual because he said he was a right-wing intellectual. He celebrated, but hadn’t actually read, Goldwater and Buckley; his grasp of his other icons was equally weak. I remember reading his stuff in UC Berkeley’s The Daily Californian back in the middle 1980s and getting the impression that Boot was another dope-with-a-thesaurus like George F. Will, with added militarist bloodthirst.

The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low, and in the present day we see examples like Jonah Goldberg and Megan McArdle putting out high school current-events assignments and being lauded as original thinkers. It’s probably a reflection of the preferences of the people who own the presses.

Personally, I rather doubt Boot is truly repenting, but is rather merely taking advantage of the zeitgeist.

“Anti-Trump Repentant Right” sells books, gets him on teevee, etc. The proof of the pudding will be what he does when the neocons are ascendant again.

The likes of Michael Gerson and David Frum sliding from the Bush II White House to “George Boosh?? Never heard of him!” critics of the right always seemed awfully convenient for their post-WH careers.

As DocAmazing says, it’s a reflection of the people who own the presses, of which there has always been an orders of magnitude greater number, prominence and paychecks on the right rather than the left.

The vast ( hugely interconnected, almost incestuously so) network of RW “Think Tanks” and publishing houses funded by wealthy oligarchs pretty much guarantees a safe haven for Left->Right apostates.

There really isn’t such a network for the reverse. The L->R crownd don’t have to spend the long years in the wilderness atoning for their sins, like the R->L side does. (And given the damage the Right has done over recent decades, there is much atonement needed…)

I wonder if Max Boot is familiar with alternate uses of the word, “cracker”.

Anyone who has spent time with Pentecostal/Evangelical Christians is familiar with public confessions of pre-Salvation sin. The greater the sinning, the more impressive and prized the conversion. If the sinner was a notable atheist, Satanist, evolutionist or communist, the story of his or her conversion can become a lucrative career on the church lecture circuit. (Pity the poor convert trying to attract attention with nothing more than a battle with youthful lust.)

This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the course of history and stay “stop”. The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about “small government” in an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.’

Nowadays, they’re mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.

Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers.

Robert Conquest once wrote, “Often at the age of 18 or 20, a student meets some glittering general idea and, far from feeling any responsibility to submit it to serious questioning, henceforward follows it like a duckling imprinted with its mother.” The glittering general ideas that appeal to people of that age are more often leftist than rightist, I think, so the later movement of people who submit those ideas to serious questioning is more often from left to right than from right to left. But Jeff R. (#8) notes an influential group of movers from right to left.

@
”A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional experience”.

Perhaps ”Not In America”? –
As having witnessed the sharpest (political??) break of some utmost stereotypical Reaganite’s just because Baron von Clownstick was –
for one of them –
”far too German” -(whatever that means?)
for the other one a ”socially completely unacceptable a… hole” –
and for the last – and most beloved one -(by relatives on all ”political” sides) –
just:
”The enemy of every Californian Surfer” – ”Bohemian” or ”Member of the Sierra Club”.

And I don’t know – If turning one of Americas once ”strongest Bastions of arch-conservatives” around (Orange County south of LA) – isn’t far more – ”political” consequential then ”the problem of Max Boot”?

DocAmazing #1: “The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low…”

Excepting for the brilliance of Corey Robin and a few others, it is no lower than the bar on the left, but I think you correctly point to the asymmetry in the general acceptance of the two piles of bosh that are usually produced. But going beyond BruceJ’s fingering (at #3) of the presses and thinktanks for embracing the right bosh, there is a cause in the basic asymmetry of their political preferences, because the right justifies and praises the system, while the left does not. This makes it easier for the productions of the right to slide by, without critical inspection by the large mass of people who just want to get on with their lives.

More complicated still: in our era the left (or most of it) doesn’t want to tear down the system; it would prefer a mixed economy with more redistribution than we have at present, but not the destruction of private capitalism. This more nuanced preference can only explain itself by wading into the deeper ends of economic explanation, while it’s still much easier for the moneyed right to demonize the left using the psychological critique of mere laziness or lack of initiative. This leaves the left with a more complex rhetorical problem in dealing with voter preferences than the right has, which, again, is another asymmetry.

I think the winds are not merely shifting, but we are approaching a different and less stable era. The industrial economy is so successful that its winner-take-all mechanics is increasing inequality. In the US, the intellectual disaster of the right fabricated its bad policy of tax cuts and “smaller” government under Reagan, and the contradictions Reagan engineered took 30 years to crack up the Republican Party until a grifter named Trump could drive a plough through it. And he of course has come a cropper. At the same juncture, the presses and thinktanks have fallen in influence due to the internet where everyone is drowned out regardless of the viability of their ideas. In such a new, unstable, untested environment perhaps the best approach is the one taken by Warren, AOC, etc. — hammer on a few big ideas with broad appeal.

nastywoman @4
“Perhaps A.T. -(”After Trump”) it will?”
Doubtful. Their hands hold umbrellas, not offerings.

@3 re neocons, this quote of Boot from Corey Robin’s article:

“That my parents and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet Jews were finally able to leave was due largely to neoconservative foreign policy,” Boot writes. “In later life I would support giving moral concerns a prominent place in US foreign policy, a stance that has been associated with neoconservatism.”

reminded me of an answer that E.L. Doctorow gave to following question from Bill Moyers in 1988:

How do you explain that so many intellectuals today are in service to orthodoxy?

…The third element is very interesting, and I think it’s been under-reported–and that is the immense influence of the émigré, Eastern European intellectuals who’ve come over here in the past fifteen or twenty years. Many of them are quite brilliant writers and professors of different disciplines. They have tended to see American life in terms of their own background and suffering, which has been considerable, as people in exile from regimes that have done terrible things to them and their families. They come of the terrible European legacy of monarchism and the reaction to it. So every attempt we make to legislate some advance in our American society, some social enlightenment, they see as a dangerous left-wing weakness leading toward totalitarianism. They’ve had enormous influence in the American intellectual community. They tend to see things as either/or and feel that you must be rigidly against any idea of improvement because the idea of perfection is what kills society and creates totalitarianism. The Utopian ideal leads to revolution. They seem to forget we had our revolution two hundred years ago. Our history is not theirs.

We’ve always gone out into the barn of the Constitution and tinkered. That’s our very pragmatic history. I don’t think these people understand that. So any time we tune something up and fix something and make it more just, make it work a little better, they become alarmed.

Glen has it right. Trump is nasty and ignorant and a stunningly incompetent President (as he was an incompetent businessman) but his very disdain for high-falutin’ principle is what makes him, in foreign policy, an old-fashioned Republican isolationist. And the imperialists in the GOP cannot stomach that, though they’re happy to stomach his general nastiness and ignorance.

Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn’t know about Boot, namely, that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre community. Well, that explains so much, really: you’d be hard-pressed to find a more reactionary bloc in all of American politics. It’s “funny” because many of them are plainly anti-religious but they make (wittingly or un-) common cause with evangelicals because they’re virulently opposed to the very concept of a public good or an active state attempting to mitigate social ills. I need to finish the article before having further reactions, but this was a revelation to me.

Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community, including US born descendants of emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of individuals make up a more reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?

It’s hard for me to say because I don’t really have much exposure this culture’s Cuban counterparts. My impression with regard to a lot of the Cuban emigres is that they’re substantially more socially conservative than those who came from the former USSR. Not that the latter group is any kind of bastion of wokeness, but for them most of the culture war stuff isn’t a huge motivator. I can’t think of anyone from this group who, for example, ever stated that abortion or opposition to gay marriage was the main motivator for any kind of vote or other political activity. They may not care much for it and I’m sure being e.g. LGBT in this community is no picnic, but it’s not a driver for them that, say, anti-tax mania is. I can’t possibly count how many conversations I’ve had with relatives complaining about this or that “onerous” regulation or tax or whatever that they have to pay and listen to the same “why are they wasting our money” and “I don’t want to pay for this” tirade. Needless to say the vast majority of them, like most American in general, have only the foggiest notion of how American governments (federal, state, local, etc.) operate, but that doesn’t stop them from hating it and knowing deep in their heart that whatever it’s doing, it’s doing it wrong.