Kristol a "fake thug"?
Jon Chait takes down Bill Kristol with admirable restraint.
One gripe: "Kristol's good standing in the Washington establishment depends on the wink-and-nod awareness that he's too smart to believe his own agitprop. Perhaps so. But, in the end, a fake thug is not much better than the real thing."
To me, thugishness is sort of in the eye of the beholder. Kristol may not believe what he says when he's being a thug, but to the victims of his broadsides, this hardly matters. And insofar as it's true that he doesn't believe his own agitprop, I'd say that makes his "fake" thuggery worse in almost every way than it would be if he was a true believer. It is, after all (as you can infer from the above quote) the main reason he's taken seriously by anybody.
More gripes from Yglesias. I agree with his critique, but at this point, I'm an anti-Kristol activist--more concerned with welcoming allies into the anti-Kristol movement than with questioning peoples' justifications for being anti-Kristol to begin with.
Comments
Insincerity is a character flaw, and Kristol is disgusting. But would you have him on your team if he were a thug for "us"? Ask Matt.
I can't think of a single liberal analogy to Kristol--somebody as despicable and with as much clout within the Democratic party.
I'd like to think that's because of a structural difference between the modern American right and the modern American left.
If by 'structural difference' you mean the difference between 'mostly lies' versus 'mostly tells truth', then I'd agree their is a right/left difference of substance.
Kristol, on TV, comes across as this smiling, personable guy who just happens to be selling war, disease and famine.
Everytime I see him 'at work', I wonder if he really believes the things he says, or goes home and laughs that he sold more buckets of crap that day and no one called him on the odor, or the lack of utility of the product.
Mitch McConnell is another guy with the same characteristic upbeatness in aura but black-heart disengenuousness at his base.
Right, what a I mean is I hope there's a structural difference that results in the lies/truth dichotomy. It's nice to believe--as I do--that the relative honesty of the left in this country is the result of a characterelogical difference between liberals and conservatives rather than some sort of weird coincidence.
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