San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Left turn
There’s no shortage of autobiographies by thinkers who underwent political conversions. Neocons Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, and before them Whitaker Chambers, each wrote works explaining their journey from left to right, while Michael Lind and David Brock wrote books detailing their journeys in the opposite direction.
To this genre may now be added Max Boot’s “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.” Boot, longtime fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and now a columnist at the Washington Post, is best known as a military historian and (until recently) unrepentant advocate of the Iraq War. He served as a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney, and as 2016 opened he found himself in a similar role in the campaign of Marco Rubio.
The day after President Trump’s election, Boot renounced his lifelong Republican Party registration. During the campaign, he publicly and frequently rebuked Trumpism, believing its rise devastating for the “optimistic and inclusive” conservativism he claims to have long espoused. Boot never imagined Trump would win a single Republican primary, let alone the presidency, and after the nomination was secured he wrote that anti-Trump holdouts “are the real Republican Party in exile. I only hope that they — and I — can return from the wilderness after November.” The short answer to the title’s query “Why I Left the Right” is thus not particularly nuanced: Trump and Trumpism.
Boot writes that Trump does not understand or believe in a single one of the principles he
The Corrosion of Conservatism
thought long defined conservatism, among them limited government and fiscal prudence, support for American global leadership, immigration, colorblindness and integration. He notes that as 2016 began he “could hardly find a Republican who had anything positive to say about Trump” but that two years later it was near impossible to find to a Republican who would dare to criticize the “malevolent clown” who has come to define American conservatism. Boot asks repeatedly — but never really answers — “how can this be?” and wonders whether all along he was wrong about conservatism and managed to miss its “essential features.” He hopes that study of his personal history will help readers appreciate late-20th century conservatism and how it has morphed into something practically unrecognizable.
Born to a Jewish family in Moscow in 1969, Boot moved to Southern California from the Soviet Union at age 7. He has never returned to Russia and feels entirely American. “Or rather I felt that way before the rise of Trump and his demonization of immigrants.” He became a high school journalist with a contrarian bent who “reveled in dissenting,” and he describes teenage fanboy trips to hear William F. Buckley lecture and attend Ronald Reagan’s final campaign rally in 1984. (“How I loved that man!”)
Boot went to college at UC Berkeley, where he gained notoriety as a columnist for the Daily Californian intent on “making a bonfire of Berkeley’s liberal pieties.” He quotes little of his early work in the book. His collegiate oeuvre, however, is available in the University Library and shows us the young writer hard at work as a selfstyled “conservative troublemaker” equally strident on matters political and cultural. In a typical column from 1991 he opined that failure to rally around the flag and support the Gulf War “amounts, in my view, to treason.” In another he wrote of his college town: “Berkeley is a sick, stupid city populated by shallow, insincere people” teeming with “discontented gluttons” and “fat, indolent hypocrites.”
Boot left Berkeley for Yale, where he earned a master’s degree in history. Soon he landed at the Wall Street Journal, where he rose to be the editor of the op-ed page at age 28. While at the Journal, Boot wrote two books. The first, “Out of Order,” he now views (quite correctly) as a “shallow” jeremiad against allegedly greedy plaintiffs’ lawyers and activist judges. The second, “The Savage Wars of Peace,” argued that smaller wars played an outsize, if unrecognized, role in shaping American power and would likely remain as influential in the future. This book got the attention of the Council for Foreign Relations, the establishment think tank that has employed Boot ever since. There he emerged as an enthusiastic advocate for the Iraq War. It has taken Boot 15 years to recant his support for that war, “but I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it was all a big mistake.”
Boot’s chapter on the surrender of the Republican Party to Trump is an incisive account of recent events. Party regulars ignored Trump’s nativism and had no idea of the toxic history of the phrase “America First.” “The parallels with fascist rallies in the 1930s were inescapable and alarming — even if ‘see no evil’ Republicans purported not to notice them.” During the campaign, Boot called out the president as “a liar, an ignoramus, a moral abomination.” Meanwhile nearly all Republicans (including some he admired like Rubio and Paul Ryan) “genuflected before their new master.”
Boot provides an admirably succinct and trenchant catalogue of “Trump’s transgressions against common decency and good sense — and quite possibly the law itself.” He writes compellingly of Trump’s nativism and makes the case that collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is likely. Trump’s attack on the news media is “discrediting the truth, destroying transparency, and undermining democracy” and the administration is corrupt to a degree “unprecedented in US history.” Boot is particularly exercised by Trump’s rejection of America’s role as leader of the post-World War II international order and the seemingly irreversible loss of its “soft power.” In each of these matters and more, Boot notes that Trump is acting without protest from and more often with the full support of the Republican Party: “It is hard to know who is worse: Trump or his enablers?”
Boot is most convincing when he describes the disaster that is the Trump presidency and the abject complicity of the Republican Party he now ardently wishes will be soundly defeated in all elections to come “as long as Trump remains such a dire threat to our republic.” The author struggles — like many others — to explain how Trump was elected, falling back on familiar notions of economic displacement, income inequality and a lack of confidence in Washington brought on by “epic blunders” like the Iraq War and the Great Recession.
Boot was one of those rare Never Trumpers who endorsed Hillary Clinton. Even so, he has not registered as a Democrat because he sees the party as insufficiently committed to a strong defense and worries that it is drifting uncomfortably leftward. And having spent most of his life “as part of a political movement that has revealed itself to be morally and intellectually bankrupt,” he “will not eagerly or quickly embrace any party or movement in the future.” Even in his Daily Californian days he railed against groupthink, decrying populist protests against the Gulf War: “They are a form of fascism, pure and simple.” So it is unsurprising that he is repulsed by Trump’s rallies of rabid followers. But Boot is not yet able to explain satisfactorily how one allegedly committed to independent thought was so eager for so long to find his place in movement conservatism, and why so many others like him did the same.
Charles Reichmann is a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Email: books@sfchronicle.com