Max Boot was a neo-conservative cheerleader of the Iraq War. Recently, he announced that he was switching parties as one of the few meaningful Never Trump conservatives. If you read his column today, you might be struck by how much he sounds like some leftists college professor. His basic criticism - that economic dislocations have led to anti-democratic Populism - is hardly a controversial one in some circles, but I doubt that Boot held these positions five years ago.
He does bring a certain narrow lens to his argument. He neglects to mention the climate when he talks about the refugee crises that have led to racist demogoguery in Europe and the US, but he's right about the political destabilization in the border between the developed and underdeveloped world leading to massive immigration that seems to have no amiable solution.
What was interesting to me was not his argument (I could have made a similar one myself if the WaPo wants to give me a job), but rather that Boot was the one making it. As I said, I doubt he would be making those arguments about wealth inequality five to ten years ago.
It's almost like leaving the Republican Party has lead to him opening himself up to a world of evidence that he was blind to before.
I've seen repeated arguments that white people, but especially white women, are being terrible racists for voting against Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum. I think there's a great deal of truth to that, but I also don't think that calling them racists is going to change one freaking person's mind.
Instead, if my observations of people like Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Joe Walsh is correct, the reason all these white people voted against Abrams and Gillum (and Bill Nelson and Beto O'Rourke) is because they are Republicans. And Republicans are heavily invested - as a matter of their core political beliefs - that racism barely exists anymore. It's just a made up weapon to use against Republicans. I mean, what else is Cindy Hyde-Smith going to say?
However, if I'm right (and there's a first time for everything), I think that once you strip people away from the GOP, they open themselves up to a bigger range of opinions. Not all of them. Joe Walsh is still a gun-humping ammosexual, for instance. But being a Republican is about being angry and defensive about everything. The changes in the country, brown people not knowing their place, factory jobs disappearing, gay people being all gay and stuff... To be a Republican in 2018 is be engaged in a long and vocifreous tantrum against the 21st century.
Once you get them out of that mindset...who knows where that might lead us? What happens if those college educated suburban women never return to the GOP? What happens if the GOP loses half of college educated white men? Or more?
Once you're out of the Fox News hermetically sealed bubble, suddenly there is a world of compelling information you can assimilate. Global climate change isn't just about hotter summers, it's about natural disasters and refugee crisis, but it has a policy solution. Critical levels of economic inequality is incompatible with a functioning democracy and expanding the welfare state, especially education opportunities and health care availability, can reduce those strains on society.
The essential glue that (barely) holds progressives together is the idea that we can make a better world through collective action. The essential glue of conservativism is that this is wrong, and therefore we just need to hunker down amidst the old ways. When the world convulses - as it is doing now - we can expect a last, desperate surge of conservatism like we saw at the end of the 19th century. But in the end, we will need to embrace options to manage change.
If we can flip enough of the population to see this, we can usher in a generation of progressive change in this country and perhaps around the world.
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