Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign is remembered for several things—none of them good. The highlights include failing to campaign in the “Blue Wall” states of the upper Midwest, commissioning fictional opposition research from FusionGPS that failed to move the needle with voters but forms the basis of Robert Mueller’s anti-Trump crusade, and describing Trump supporters as deplorable and irredeemable. It’s part of what Charles Kesler calls “the Left’s growing alienation from middle America.” But that self-alienation isn’t the exclusive province of the political and cultural Left.
Elite opinion makers on the Right are often no better, and sometimes worse. Witness the descent into Lear-like madness of Bill Kristol, founder and former editor of the recently deceased neoconservative journal The Weekly Standard. His peculiar obsession with the person of Donald Trump destroyed the magazine he founded and possibly the careers of the people led astray by his siren song. It also exposed the fact that while Kristol has occasionally had policy goals in common with conservatives, he never shared our devotion to the principles and institutions of the American founding that made possible more than two centuries of peace and prosperity. And to add insult to injury, it was discovered in 2018 that he’s taking money from Left wing billionaires to finance his jihad.
Read the rest in The American Mind.