Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Norman Podhoretz, the Anti-Anti-Trump (!!)

What is surprising is that he's frank and clear about his position, despite being one of the original NeoCons.

...for a while I was supporting Marco Rubio and I was enthusiastic about him. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump ...You could think that he was unfit for office--I could understand that--but my ex-friends' revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. 

They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards--and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on....

Norm Podhoretz is an old man and usually old men are somewhat passive; they are inclined to find reconciliation in 'family squabbles', or at least not throw bombs.  (See, e.g., the letter of B-16 on the current crisis in the Church.)

But that's not what Podhoretz does.  That's because he thinks this is existential.

...I think we're all in a state of confusion as to what's going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms--love of America versus hatred of America. But it's the same idea. We find ourselves in a domestic, or civil, war almost...
By the way, this has a corollary:  in the post below, we see the same deranged hatred in action, threatening a very, very significant economic development because it was assembled by Republicans:  Walker and Trump.

Maybe civil war is what the Democrats actually want.  Fine.  They didn't do very well in the last Civil War in this country, did they?  Maybe they want their slaves back.

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