Back in the wake of 9/11, it was harder to find a more pro-war member of the conservative establishment than Max Boot. Boot has now spent abour two decades advocating for non-stop global war in pursuit of an American empire than he he wholeheartedly endorses.
Nor am I putting words in his mouth. Boot, after all, wrote an article in 2001 called “The Case for American Empire.” He has been an unabashed proponent of bombing and starving foreigners in pursuit of nation-building and “spreading democracy.” He’s a vociferous defender of torture. American taxpayers, of course, get to pay for it all, both in terms of tax dollars, and in the ongoing shredding of the Bill of Rights which Boot supports. Most of the interventions Boot supports have done little more than make the world safe of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups that have sprung up in the wake of Boot’s favored regime changes. And don’t expect a mea culpa on any of that any time soon.
Those who have paid with their lives, however, have been mostly foreigners, most of them with brown skin.
But now Max Boot has miraculously discovered his “white privilege” as he reveals in a recent article for Foreign Policy.
Anyone who knows Boot’s history of lusting for the blood of non-white innocents in foreign lands will have a hard time reading his tweet on the matter in a non-sarcastic voice. And yet, he is apparently trying to be serious when he says “my consciousness has been raised”:
But why the sudden change of heart?
Well according to hard-left journalist Cailtin Johnstone (who is currently one of the most interesting leftists writing right now), Boot is cozying up the left because he needs the left as an ally against Trump.
It turns out that in spite of Trump’s posturing, people who actually voted for Trump — and possibly Trump himself — are not nearly are pro-war as Boot would like. The answer? Pander to the left.
Johnstone writes:
This spectacularly evil man [i.e., Boot], who wrote an essay titled “The Case for American Empire” just weeks after 9/11 in which he called in plain English for America to “unambiguously to embrace its imperial role,” is now seeing his latest essay shared eagerly by Democrats everywhere enthusiastically exclaiming “Look! See? This conservative gets it!”
I’m seeing some progressives arguing that Boot’s sudden public recognition of his white male privilege is intrinsically worthy of praise and acceptance, and that the proper response is to applaud him for it, not spit in his face. These people are wrong. Max Boot did not have some personal epiphany about race and gender dynamics which he felt like sharing in Foreign Policy magazine (the obvious place everyone goes for publication of their enlightening insights into privilege and inequality); Max Boot is courting Democrats because his war-hungry ideology is being increasingly rejected by Republicans.
If you want to see why neocons are courting Democrats with increasing desperation, check out the response to Boot’s latest essay by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who has come to align with the popular anti-interventionist sentiments of Trump’s base, or Carlson’s debate with Boot on his show back in July...
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Meanwhile what have Democrats been doing? Supporting escalations with Russia based on accusations with no evidence that are reported as fact by the mainstream media in the exact sort of manic, violent, fact-free climate we saw in the lead up to the Iraq invasion (an invasion that Max Boot says nobody needs to repent for). Resistance hero Keith Olbermann says he owes George W Bush and John McCain an apology for the times he disagreed with them, and MSNBC’s Joy Reid openly admitted that she prefers people like Boot as allies instead of actual leftists and progressives...
Reid’s comments are typical of the way the cult of anti-Trumpism has mainstream Democrats swooning over Bush-era neocons like they’re the Kennedys reincarnated instead of a bunch of child-butchering war profiteers. Just check out the top comments under this “Gosh I’m so woke all of a sudden!” tweet by neocon psychopath Bill Kristol:
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In reality, nothing Trump has done in his administration so far is anywhere remotely close to as evil as the invasion of Iraq. The fact that hatred of the sitting president has Democrats so desperate they’re not only forgiving the crimes of vestigial Bush neocons but also helping them in their agenda to sabotage any movements toward detente with Russia shows just how brutally efficient the psychological manipulations of the establishment propaganda machine have become.
If Johnstone is right, this is actually good news. Yes, it’s true that leftists have a habit of overstating things the right wing does. The left is often claiming that conservatives are about to slash tax rates to near-zero levels, or “de-regulate” the economy, or mandate prayer in schools, and so on. None of these things ever come even close to happening, of course. So, this may be yet another case of a leftist misreading the magnitude of a movement on the right.
On the other hand, Johnstone is right that its the Hillary Clinton wing of the DC establishment that seems most bent on world war with the Russians who have about 7,000 nuclear warheads. It’s the left which has launched the new McCarthyism in which anyone who disagrees with the media narrative on Russia is “Putin’s agent.” Foreign policy hysteria, is at least as much a thing of the left right now, as of the right.
So, maybe Johnstone is onto something. She does miss that domestic policy has always taken a backseat to aggressive foreign policy for people like Kristol and Boot. She misses that neo-conservatives have long actually leaned left in their views on social policy. So, the sudden embrace of the “white privilege” narrative by Boot isn’t as hard to believe as Johnstone might think. It is hard, however, to read the comments of Boot and Kristol as anything other than pandering in an era when Kristol, et al, fear that maybe, just maybe, Trump won’t give them all the wars they want. Trump is obviously good for lots of “tough talk,” but then again that was also true for Ronald Reagan who never perpetrated anything like the bloodbaths caused by his successors Bush I and Bush II. Maybe that’s what Boot is most afraid of.
