https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/19/trump-slapped-the-country-awake-but-his-opponents-still-sleep/
Our new political landscape is exposing the limitations and biases of those whose well-being is dependent upon our old political landscape.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will introduced me to conservatism. As an energetic journalism major in the post-Watergate ’70s intent on changing the world, I subscribed to Mother Jones, The Progressive, and Newsweek magazines for guidance and soaked up everything those proud left-leaning journals dispensed. And then, on the inside back page of Newsweek, I’d come across Will’s biweekly counter to virtually everything else I had read.
What a wordsmith! What a brilliant, encyclopedic mind. How could someone advocating for those awful non-progressive things he championed make so much sense? In the tug-o-war for hearts and minds, I was the tape on the rope. Mother Jones fought spiritedly. But Will, in time, pulled me across the line. Which makes it doubly hard to watch him repeat the errors so many others make when considering Donald Trump.
Those errors include—let’s use some worn but applicable clichés—emphasizing style over substance, missing the forest for the trees, getting caught up in the times (something you wouldn’t expect a history buff like Will to do) and indulging a detestable Beltway culture.
The errors were on display earlier this summer when Will appeared at the 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival to promote his new book, The Conservative Sensibility.
Will told his interviewer, PBS’s Judy Woodruff, that Trump’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in its pages “because it’s a book about ideas.” (Audience gets the joke and chuckles knowingly.) He said Trump isn’t a conservative, a charge he also levied against the Republican Party he quit four years ago. (Actually, Trump governs more conservatively than most Republicans in Congress.)
