In the case of Max Boot’s latest book, the subtitle, Why I Left the Right, serves its contents more accurately than its main title, The Corrosion of Conservatism. The work is essentially and emphatically a personal narrative, not a robust, philosophical analysis of modern American conservatism. The book is a hurried overview of Boot’s intellectual roots as a contrarian teenager and charts his course amidst the conservative intelligentsia through the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and into the first year or so of the Trump administration.
Boot, the noted military historian (Savage Wars of Peace, 2002) and professional journalist, writes fluidly and engagingly. Though I occasionally found myself groaning under the weight of heavy-handed diction — Ted Cruz’s “oleaginous manner,” for instance — I did not lose interest. This sense of captivation is to his credit because I found his intellectual dishonesty and causticity genuinely abhorrent.
Boot, once at the literary heart of the hawkish Republican Party in the early 2000s, now finds himself a man without a party. His story begins with a prologue that reads like a lengthy Facebook post from the morning of November 9, 2016 and details his mixing of wine and sleeping pills on the night of the election to get to bed. His cavalier attitude toward potential mixed-drug toxicity foreshadows other poor decisions on his part to follow.
After that not-exactly-propitious beginning, Boot manages to salvage something of the reader’s interest in his first titled chapter, “The Education of a Conservative.” He comes off as most sympathetic and relatable in this chapter, in which he details his provocative, literary youth and admiration for President Reagan. After the following chapter, which charts his integration within the conservative journalistic establishment, the rest of the book devolves into tired and emotional vitriol, splashed at President Trump and every one of his “willing accomplices,” as well as those who are merely complacent with the present regime.
Boot descends over the span of the next few brief yet exhausting chapters into a dizzying display of bemusement and ill-articulated anger.
In one chapter, entitled “The Cost of Capitulation,” he enumerates the particular sins of President Trump and his “accomplices.” In one of this chapter’s sections, he levels a charge of racism against Trump. Among his other spurious evidence is the questionable assertion that Trump’s public mistreatment of “rich African American athletes” protesting the national anthem at football games constitutes racism. This nonsensical claim (See “fallacy of composition”) makes use of the most common smear tactics, which is to say that criticizing an individual is equivalent to criticizing their much broader identity.
In another chapter, Boot makes some common yet convincing arguments that some of Trump’s boasts about his presidency’s success are embellishments. He points out that the President has had little impact on the economy’s recent success, that the mounting deficits are a serious issue, and that the nation’s trade policy is dangerous. These are all points that I will readily concede, and if Boot had stuck to the facts, he could’ve laid out a more compelling argument in the rest of the book. But instead, he falls backs on ideology and anger.
Thusly, Boot attacks Trump’s track record on foreign policy, pretending superiority with his supposed “national security expert” status. He condemns Trump for supposedly acquiescing to North Korea and Russia, showing his hawkish preference for war instead of peace. In the rest of the text, he self-consciously distances himself from his former and ardent support for the U.S.-led coalition invasion of Iraq. He states that the majority of Americans, including Trump and many pro-Trump Republicans, also supported the invasion of Iraq.
Sadly, Mr. Boot, millions of people being wrong still doesn’t make you right.
In the book’s closing chapter, “The Origins of Trumpism,” Boot laments that conservatism has not always meant the classical liberalism he thought it meant. Angrily he declaims the inquisitorial anti-communism of the 1950s and its patron, Senator Joe McCarthy. He blames Republican media and dubious political figures like Sarah Palin for stoking the anger that he feels drives conservatism in this country. Anger, or perhaps even hatred, is the basis for modern American conservatism in his view. The only anger that emanates from the pages is his own.
Boot’s epilogue, unnecessarily designated as such, offers some of his harshest—and strangest—words. In the case that anyone thought that Boot could end such a jumbled work with some cogent writing, I’m sorry to say he does not. He confesses, “I now ardently wish harm upon my former party because it has become an enabler of Trump….” For a writer supposedly trying to restore decency to politics, these are hardly conciliatory words.
In potentially the most grandiose final paragraph conceivable, Boot calls himself a “political Ronin,” a samurai without a liege, and says “I will fight for my principles wherever they may lead me.” This kind of speechifying might play in one of the young Ronald Reagan’s less-acclaimed pictures, but it does not an effective argument make.
And thus ends Boot’s 214-page screed.
Formally, the narrative style fluctuates between autobiographical and conversational, reflective and prescriptive. The book and its arguments remain most agreeable when he restrains himself to a light touch. Boot digresses constantly in his recollections; for example, we learn of his affinity for bagels with smoked salmon. Remarkably, these momentary lapses in his otherwise pained severity are among the book’s most redeeming qualities.
At other points, Boot’s facile anguish at his erstwhile party becomes so acrid that it left a lingering bad taste in this reader’s mouth. In the chapter spanning the 2016 Republican primaries and then the general election, he practically keeps a running tally of which #NeverTrumpers kowtowed to the Donald and who departed indignantly like himself. Sporadically, he launches into invectives against individuals, namely Tucker Carlson and Dinesh D’Souza ’83, and institutions, such as Fox News and The Dartmouth Review.
Throughout Corrosion, Boot’s hypocrisy is laughable. He pines for the “open and inclusive conservatism” of the Reagan years, which he believes stands diametrically opposed to “bigoted” Trumpian populist conservatism. Yet he idealizes William F. Buckley, Jr.’s role as a “gatekeeper” to the movement, expelling heterodox thinkers and purifying “movement conservatism.” He derides Trump supporters, a plurality of this nation politically, as “toadies.” Those with a firm belief in the integrity of national borders are “nativists,” a 19th-century pejorative recently reapplied to the President and his followers. Though hardly as extreme as labeling them “a basket of deplorables,” Boot’s choice of words belies his frustration with a Republican base that now favors the patriotic populism of the President, instead of Boot’s own aggressive internationalism.
Boot plays it fast and loose with his intellectual integrity and factual responsibility. He condemns conservative outlets for originating fake news, while liberal and left-wing sites like The Daily Kos and cable news channels like CNN have been as dishonest and nearly as long. He declares that if Obama had done the things that Trump is doing, Republicans who now laud Trump would’ve lambasted Obama. This is true, but he ignores the fact that it goes both ways: Trump is detested by the Democrats for things that they would’ve applauded in Obama’s presidency, such as withdrawing from Syria and Afghanistan.
Stretching logic and history to their breaking point, Boot likens Trump’s participation in WWE events to Caligula’s blood-drenched Colosseum gladiatorial antics. He states that Nero’s killing of Christians after the Roman fire of 64 A.D. was a “precursor of the kind of scapegoating of minorities that Trump specializes in.” It is a shame to see an accomplished, popular military historian sink so low in his sophistry.
Most egregiously, he compares Trump’s rise among the American conservative elite to that of Adolf Hitler in the Weimar Republic. This common comparison is particularly vexing because one would hope a refugee from religious persecution in the Soviet Union like Max Boot would understand the distinction. Instead, he uses his lived experience to justify his animus against the former real estate developer, who is allegedly quite like the Soviet apparatchiks from whom he fled. Boot wavers on these troubling comparisons later on, but his original intention is clear.
Max Boot himself is indicative of precisely what he’s trying to prove, “the corrosion of conservatism.” He has been intellectually corroded by political self-interest. I don’t believe that political self-interest is inherently bad, but when it becomes spiteful and tenacious, it is simply tasteless. In Corrosion, he recalls with relish his advisory roles for the McCain, Romney, and Rubio campaigns. One cannot but think that his resentment for the President and the current GOP stems from his track record, all the way back to the invasion of Iraq, of picking the wrong horse.
Unlike Boot’s dense, detail-oriented military histories, this book is hardly worth reading. At best, he doesn’t add anything to the conversation that hasn’t been said more succinctly by George Will, Bill Kristol, and other conservative opponents from the Right. At worst, he indulges in the rhetoric and talking points of the likes of Rachel Maddow and NowThis. Furthermore, his scornful memoir doesn’t contribute to the civil discourse for which he so longs.
Max Boot still stands to learn from the Iraq War: ardently wishing harm on your adversaries does little to produce meaningful change.
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