Well that didn’t take long. [1]
Roger Kimball’s tightly constructed piece doesn’t exerpt well. I would simply urge you to go and read it. But here’s a taste…
And they’re off! Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, has said admiring things about certain of Donald Trump’s policies — his judicial appointments, for example, his handling of the economy and attention to modernizing our military — ergo he is an intellectual in the service of evil.Hanson treats this calumny with some portion of the contempt that it deserves.
“Schoenfeld,” he writes:
… insinuates that I am a racist for not calling out Donald Trump’s alleged bigotry. For a supposed Which is precisely the reason the Weekly Standard fell over.racist enabler, I have an odd way of living — in the house where I was raised in an impoverished multiracial rural community, part of an extended family that is far from exclusively “white,” and teaching for over 20 years at a state university attended mostly by minority students, many from communities near my home. If advocating melting-pot policies of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage — and living in minority neighborhoods and putting one’s children in underperforming but diverse public schools — is also proof of past “service to a genuine evil,” I plead guilty.
That answers the ad hominem part of Schoenfeld’s effusion. What about his estimation of the president’s supposed “evil”? “Trump’s economic agenda.” Hanson points out:
… has done far more for minority job seekers than have the policies of past Republican or Democratic presidents. Unlike many of his opponents in the Democratic party, Trump does not deprecate Catholicism. He has been on the forefront in calling out the new generation of progressive anti-Semites in Congress. No president has been more adamantly opposed to abortion on demand, which has devastated the African-American community, and which a number of black leaders have called black “genocide,” and whose effects in the past have earned either at best liberal assent or at worst outright progressive support for eugenics. In 2020, for all those reasons and others, Trump may well receive a higher percentage of the black, Hispanic, and Jewish vote than, for example, Mitt Romney in 2012.
The point is, these policies have had a palpable and beneficent effect on millions of people, helping to lift them out of poverty, to secure them against the depredations of criminals and dependency-inducing government intervention. They are, in a word, morally positive policies.
And in reality, that’s where the rubber meets the road. Policy.
I ask again, in what way are Billy Kristol and his wandering band of idiots serving the purpose of conservatism?
The answer is they are not…
The election of Donald Trump was a wake-up call to The Establishment GOP as was the popularity of Ted Cruz during that election. It was actually the second such wake-up call, the first being Ronald Reagan. Remember… The Establishment was never too pleased with Reagan, either, and yet he was and remains wildly popular among the GOP rank-and-file… and for that matter independent voters everywhere. It’s a wake-up call that to a large degree has gone unheeded, particularly in the mindlessness of such as Bill Kristol, Charles Sykes, and in this case particularly Gabriel Schoenfeld.
Which is precisely the reason the Weekly Standard fell over. Nobody was buying this crap under that banner, either.
You would think that a group of people who was actually a smart as these present themselves as being, would have been able to learn something from that simple and yet earth-shaking message.
Clearly they aren’t as smart as they believe they are.
However that may be, they are most certainly not conservative.