Bullshit All The Way Done

I suffered through this discussion between Ezra Klein and George Will so you don't have to.  Will has been a fairly steadfast Never Trump voice, but like people like Joe Walsh, Bill Kristol or David French, I can recognize that while we are temporary allies, we will never be truly aligned.

Will's argument is so preposterously hide-bound, so divorced from 250 years of history that reading it is like sitting in an airless room.  It's a typical pedant's argument that the Founders are whoever I want them to be.  Take Jefferson, whom Will holds up as a sort of paragon of small government classical liberalism.  If you were to go back to 1800 and grab Jefferson in a time machine, educate him about the intervening 220 years, I have no doubt that Jefferson's basic impulses about human nature would lead him to embrace a more activist government.  Jefferson the philosopher was one guy, but Jefferson the politician was very much practical. He would likely see - as people like Teddy Roosevelt came to see - that wealth replaced government as the primary restrictor of human liberty.  In fact, this is why Jefferson resisted America become an industrial, commercial power.  Jefferson wanted Americans to be "independent" in the sense that they were not dependent on another person.  He wanted them to farm, not be an employee.

Yet, Will wants Jefferson to stand simply for limited government, as if he were frozen in amber in 1789.  Why?  Because Will begins and ends with his suppositions about how government is bad.  He dedicated his book to Barry Fucking Goldwater.  Among his more preposterous claims is that conservatives revel in the confusion and chaos of the market.  In reality, conservatives have always sought to tease the confusion out of the market through consolidation and monopoly.  Again, it's like he's unaware of the country's history since 1820.

So, when we emerge from Trumpistan - whenever that day comes - let us remember that the "conservative movement" is really just about whatever some old white dudes want it to be about in any given moment. 

Will or Trump, it doesn't matter. Shut up plebes/brown people.  Your betters are talking.