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“Shultz, the Republican elder statesman and veteran of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, had spent the preceding months assembling a far-reaching book of policy recommendations on matters domestic and foreign on behalf of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He commissioned a decorated group of experts—men and women with gaudy constellations of letters after their names, generals and ambassadors and national-security experts—to pen chapters outlining their vision for such topics as health-care reform, banking legislation, counterterrorism strategy, and the U.S. posture toward Asia. On Monday, the group summoned a group of reporters here for a special summit to unveil these policy ideas—grandly titled Blueprint for America—to the world.
“Hopefully,” said John Cogan, a Hoover economist who wrote the Blueprint chapter on entitlements, “these ideas will be picked up by some enterprising politician.”
Hope springs eternal for the Republican Party-in-exile. The vast apparatus of right-wing policy, built up over decades and seeded with millions of dollars to promote a conservative vision, has never seemed more quaintly irrelevant than it does today. Despite various attempts to allude to the world beyond this leafy campus, an air of unreality hung over the proceedings. …
The Blueprint calls for international free-trade agreements and a more liberal immigration system; it recommends reducing spending on Social Security and Medicare and promoting democracy and human rights abroad. Even as the Hoover scholars spoke, Trump was in Youngstown, Ohio, delivering an address on an altogether different vision of foreign policy—one in which America’s interests are paramount and relations with allies are transactional, in which immigrants and their children are subject to what he termed “extreme vetting.” …
And yet the intellectuals persist; what else can they do? Having formulated the Blueprint, there was nothing to do but release it, orphaned, into the world. …
Chief among the many disturbances to the Republican psyche prompted by Trump is the realization on the part of many of the party’s erstwhile mavens that their voters were not nearly as interested in their agenda as they previously believed. …
But in other quarters, there are heretical whispers. What if Trump has exposed something fundamental—the hollowness of the party’s old agenda, the troubling priorities of its most reliable voters? What if nobody wants the old-time religion of supply-side economics, or the neoconservatism that produced the Iraq war? Can there be any going back once that realization sets in? …”
For this, I am grateful.
Trump has made all of these old fogies and their ideas irrelevant. What must it feel like? The moment when you realize you don’t know shit? Of all of Trump’s accomplishments in this campaign, flushing the neocon parasites and polarizing the “base” against their disastrous foreign policy – to the point where they are now discrediting themselves by openly backing Hillary – has earned a spot near the top of my list.
According to (((Ben Shapiro))), the Alt-Right has literally taken over the Republican Party! That’s a wild exaggeration of course, but it is true that Trump has brought us into a Mirror Universe where everything is the opposite of what it used to be.
“The alt-right, the online mini-movement that backs Trump while hurling anti-Semitic imprecations at everyone who might doubt his greatness, is characterized by a reverse nationalism, in which sometimes Russia, sometimes Hungary, sometimes the Hohenzollern monarchy becomes the object of perverted patriotism. Their own mongrel country and its flaccid Constitution receive only disdain. While the content of this ideology remains marginal in American life, its alienation from its own country comes ever closer to the center of politics. …
What to do?
In the years after 1968, many of those who had started in political life as liberals discovered that they had inherited an unexpected new political mission: to defend the institutions of American life against a radical critique of the country and its institutions. Not necessarily conservative in any ideological sense, they undertook a conservative role in politics: to defend an admittedly imperfect but still precious national experiment against the utopian fantasies of the left. That work helped establish conservatism in the broadest sense of that word as the dominant politics of the next generation.
We have entered another revolutionary moment. But this time, the attack on institutions that have served the country well and kept the peace of the democratic world is coming from a resentful right as well as a radical left. The unexpected origin of this new attack caught many Republican political leaders by surprise and left them soiled and humiliated as they tried to cope, accommodate, and ultimately survive a political insurrection few of them understand even now.
The work that preoccupied people of conservative temperament after 1968 is work that calls again after 2016: To defend this country’s institutions, alliances, conventions, and Constitution against all challengers—whether they base their challenge on a demand for economic equality or racial hierarchy. It’s possible that a Trump collapse will be so total as to discredit Trump’s candidacy entirely. Possible—but unlikely. George McGovern lost very badly in 1972, but his ideas shaped his party for decades after. So it may be for Trump and Trumpism.
When the verdict is delivered in November, the work does not stop. If anything, that work becomes more demanding and urgent. We of the center-right have learned something alarming about the susceptibility to extremism, not only of American democracy in general, but of our political coalition in particular. We’ve learned something painful about the dwindling relevance of the conservative doctrines of the past generation to the political needs of the present generation. We’ve learned something humbling about the character of many of our own friends and allies in submitting to a charlatan who never even bothered to pretend to be anything else. We’ve learned something ominous about the gathering power of tribalism in a society riven by rapid migration and slowing economic growth.
It’s our test now whether we can put this learning to timely and wise use to defend the American experiment against a dangerous and depressing insurgency by those people—and that party—who so long presented themselves as its most faithful champions. It’s time to take upon ourselves the mission of half a century ago: to mobilize the great conservative-minded American center to rescue the country from its ideological extremes.”
Wow.
We’ve risen so far over the past year that (((David Frum))) is now writing in the pages of Commentary that fighting the Alt-Right has become the mission of international neoconnery moving forward! Feeling threatened much?
The worst, most notorious cabal of Jews out there are feeling pretty bummed out over Donald Trump. They are so desperate to defeat him that they are running Evan McMullin as the #NeverTrump candidate to sabotage him. That tells me that this is something I would like to see continue beyond November.
All these neocons are in the tank for Hillary:
“The Hillary Clinton campaign has recently been trumpeting endorsements from neoconservatives. The candidate’s embrace of figures such as Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Eliot Cohen—all once regarded as anathema to the contemporary left—has engendered a wave of pushback from progressive critics. …
By building what Beutler calls a “permission structure” prominently featuring neoconservatives, Hillary need not make any explicit “offer” to confer upon them tangible benefit. (By the way, what form would an explicit “offer” even take? A press release announcing formal cooperation?) Rather, she provides neoconservatives with an opening to ingratiate themselves into power merely by welcoming them into her prospective governing coalition. Evidence that their catastrophic failures have been forgiven can be seen in the uncritical adulation showered on Kagan, Boot, Cohen, and similar operators by the liberal media, suggesting that their blemished reputations are undergoing undeserved rehabilitation.”
She’s even cut an ad that features a snake like (((Max Boot))) vouching for her on national security! That’s a clear choice. It’s also a clear accomplishment that the Left now owns such an albatross.