I sympathize with Jonah’s sympathy for Max Boot, though I do not empathize with his empathy for him.
Boot is a valuable thinker and an interesting writer, most of the time, and I think what we are seeing here is a case of the convert’s zeal: Boot is determined to leave the old man behind and live in the light of the new. Fair enough. It’s a mistake lots of converts make: I used to think that the irreverent character of the Christian worship that I grew up with — which had more than a whiff of the PTA meeting about it, all that cheerful glad-handing and the slightly-too-personal questions and the revolting sentimentality of it — had to do with being raised in Protestant churches. It turns out that it had to do with being raised in America, something that took me a few years of Catholicism to really understand. It is easy, and probably natural, to see the worst of what we’ve left behind. It’s a variation on the jilted-lover scenario.
I’ll re-quote Jonah’s quotation:
Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!
He’s right about much of that, particularly the conspiracy-mongering, though I’m not sure in what sense it is that he is using know-nothingism: Catholics seem pretty welcome in the Republican party these days. Perhaps he’s taking a little literary license with “willful ignorance.”
Max Boot’s beef isn’t with Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley, Jr.or Jonah Goldberg — it’s with the contrepreneurs, that weird little parasitic class of people who got into conservative activism because it is a relatively easy route to a media career, a good option for people who aren’t clever enough to thrive as lawyers or in possession of hustle enough to sell real estate. They are more prominent in the conservative movement today than they were in, say, 1988 or 1994, partly because of the new populist tenor of the movement and partly because there’s just a lot more media in our faces and it looms larger in the national mind than it once did. For example, Hugh Hewitt was (according to Talkers magazine) the eighth most-listened-to conservative talk-radio host in 2017. Everybody knows who Hugh Hewitt is. Hugh Hewitt is famous. Nobody knew the eighth most-listened-to conservative talk-radio host in 1994.
Every movement has its careers, its charlatans, its scam artists, its kooks, and its dimwits. (I know. I used to be a member of the Libertarian party.) On the right it’s the Obama-is-a-Muslim-from-Kenya gang, on the left it’s . . . do we really need to make that list? Louis Farrakhan. Jen Psaki. Thom Hartmann. The knuckleheads in the black bandanas. Al Sharpton. Melissa Click. A fair number of America’s mayors and Illinois’s governors. Several people named Clinton. That guy who worried that Guam was going to tip over.
Of course there’s a “dark underside” to conservative activism. Normal people don’t get into political activism as a full-time thing or a life-consuming hobby. There is something wrong with most of those of us who do. It’s a surprise that there aren’t more scandals and general weirdness in politics and political media than there already are.
I don’t think Max Boot is exactly covering himself with glory with his renunciation tour. I also think that the conservative movement needs friendly but scrupulous in-house critics, which, as Jonah points out, is part of what the Corner is here to do: to give conservatives a place to argue with one another. Boot was, and might have remained, valuable in that respect. But some differences are irreconcilable, and Boot is moving on — slowly. Perhaps the break will find him feeling liberated, though I suspect it will not, for reasons that are obvious to those with eyes to see.