Who Was Fooling Whom?
Aug. 13th, 2018 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osewalrusDavid Frum argues that Trump hijacked the Conservative movement.
Seth Cotlar, professor of American history, argues that the basic roots of Trumpism were fully present in the 1990s and that it is the "never Trumpers" who changed.
My own experience is that life is a lot more complicated than that. This is in part because at any given moment, people go around with a lot of stuff in their heads, including stuff that contradicts the other stuff.
I know many intellectual conservatives, and have since the 1990s. Some deceive themselves into thinking they are intellectual when their supposed intellectual foundation is very shaky. But others have well thought out political philosophies and can recognize when they are expressing a preference based on philosophy rather than an ironclad truth. And some folks are a mix of these approaches depending on the subject.
Cotlar's argument is that many of today's Trumpists, such as Gingrinch and D'Souza, were hailed as intellectual stars in the 1990s when in reality they were pretty consistent with their Trumpist selves. This is true, but not complete. Sure, Gingrinch said a lot of reactionary things. But the intellectual framework of the "Contract with America," whether you agreed with it or not, was a fairly self-consistent and rational framework ("rational" in that its outcomes flowed from its assumptions). It is also the case that much of what was assumed in the 1990s wrt economics and political theory -- from Democrats and Republicans -- turned out to be wrong. We did not need "tough love" or "broken glass policing" or a bunch of other policies that proved to be quite horrible in their outcome. But these outcomes were not proven at the time. Oh sure, many of us who opposed these polices had plenty of reasons to oppose them. But all the history we accumulated hadn't happened yet.
So the real question that neither Frum nor Cotlar answer is "who was fooling whom?" I think the answer was "lots of people fooled themselves."
Seth Cotlar, professor of American history, argues that the basic roots of Trumpism were fully present in the 1990s and that it is the "never Trumpers" who changed.
My own experience is that life is a lot more complicated than that. This is in part because at any given moment, people go around with a lot of stuff in their heads, including stuff that contradicts the other stuff.
I know many intellectual conservatives, and have since the 1990s. Some deceive themselves into thinking they are intellectual when their supposed intellectual foundation is very shaky. But others have well thought out political philosophies and can recognize when they are expressing a preference based on philosophy rather than an ironclad truth. And some folks are a mix of these approaches depending on the subject.
Cotlar's argument is that many of today's Trumpists, such as Gingrinch and D'Souza, were hailed as intellectual stars in the 1990s when in reality they were pretty consistent with their Trumpist selves. This is true, but not complete. Sure, Gingrinch said a lot of reactionary things. But the intellectual framework of the "Contract with America," whether you agreed with it or not, was a fairly self-consistent and rational framework ("rational" in that its outcomes flowed from its assumptions). It is also the case that much of what was assumed in the 1990s wrt economics and political theory -- from Democrats and Republicans -- turned out to be wrong. We did not need "tough love" or "broken glass policing" or a bunch of other policies that proved to be quite horrible in their outcome. But these outcomes were not proven at the time. Oh sure, many of us who opposed these polices had plenty of reasons to oppose them. But all the history we accumulated hadn't happened yet.
So the real question that neither Frum nor Cotlar answer is "who was fooling whom?" I think the answer was "lots of people fooled themselves."
