BILL KRISTOL SERIES

After all, didn’t he oppose this Republican tax bill? For that matter, didn’t he oppose Trump’s drive to repeal Obamacare? Yes, and Tomasky celebrates this leftward drift of Kristol and some other neoconservatives: “They’ve changed. Tomasky - who is one of our sharpest and most sincere liberal voices, and whom I disagree with only respectfully - might argue that, actually, Kristol is no longer a leading contributor to things like income inequality. Kristol has been on board for most of them.

BILL KRISTOL SERIES

And it is only the latest in a series of conservative tax initiatives that have had that effect, and thus reinforced this sense of grievance. The Senate tax bill that passed this month will exacerbate income inequality. A big asset for Trump in 2016 was the sense among many low-income whites that there are two Americas: an America of affluent metropolitan elites and a low-income stratum of middle America that those elites don’t care about.

And Kristol was - from the Clinton presidency through the Obama presidency - an influential opponent of such reform.ģ) Economic policy. But he got a big assist from genuine deficiencies in Obamacare - deficiencies that resulted from concessions made in the face of strong and longstanding opposition to more encompassing and coherent health care reform. How was Donald Trump able to make the repeal of Obamacare a powerful issue? Partly, of course, by distorting the public’s perception of Obamacare. And Kristol didn’t just favor the Iraq War - he crusaded for it, and built a whole institutional edifice that helped bring it about.Ģ) Health care. More generally, the Iraq War, by nourishing the America-versus-Islam narrative that jihadist recruiters love, and by creating the kind of chaos in which they do their best work, was a big boost for anti-American terrorism.Īnd if you imagine a 2016 election with no ISIS, and little in the way of recent anti-American terrorism, you’re imagining an election in which Trump’s Islamophobia doesn’t have nearly the appeal it had - an election Trump probably loses.

Had it not been for the Iraq War, ISIS as we know it would almost certainly not exist. Well, (IMHO) there are few people who have more influentially abetted those forces than Bill Kristol.Ĭonsider a few areas of Kristol’s influence.ġ) Foreign policy. I’ve advocated something called “mindful resistance,” and one thing it entails is figuring out what array of forces created Trumpism so we can attack the problem at its roots. … But I’m ready even to forget Iraq.”Īgain, I say: I’m not. And I’ve probably done a lot of things he didn’t like. Tomasky writes, “Well, Bill Kristol’s done a lot of things I don’t like. Kristol, after all, is famous for, among other things, working hard to get us into the Iraq War and working hard to defeat Bill and Hillary Clinton’s 1993 plan to expand health care coverage. Tomasky correctly anticipates that one source of liberal resistance to Wittes’s proposal will be the disturbing prospect of making nice to people like Kristol. And the best way to explain why is to look at someone else Tomasky says he’s now with: Bill Kristol, the neoconservative writer and political operator. Michael Tomasky, editor of the journal Democracy and former editor of the American Prospect, then wrote a Daily Beast piece about the proposal floated by Wittes, declaring: “I’m with him.” He wrote, “We have grave disagreements about social issues, about important foreign policy questions, about tax policy, about whether entitlements should be reformed or expanded, about what sort of judges should serve on our courts.” He added: “I believe in putting them all aside.” It all started when Ben Wittes, a national security specialist at the Brookings Institution, recommended in an 18-tweet manifesto that Americans who oppose Trumpism suspend discussion of what divides them so they can together confront this “national emergency.” Here’s a sentence I never expected to find myself writing: Recently, influential liberal commentators recommended that liberals quit arguing with conservatives about public policy.

Bill kristol