This morning in the National Review, Stanley Kurtz suggests that President Obama privately supports the violent protesters. Here’s how Kurtz makes his case:

The London riots have already kicked off the latest version of the seemingly never-ending debate over whether such events should be seen primarily as political protests by the powerless, or as out-and-out lawbreaking and vandalism. Back in 1992, Obama clearly leaned toward the former.

I found the press release Obama issued to get Project Vote rolling, in the ACORN archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society… Said Obama in 1992: “The Los Angeles riots reflect a deep distrust and disaffection with the existing power pattern in our society.” That’s Alinsky-speak for “We’ve got to use the power of the angry underclass to put capitalism in check.” [...]

I certainly don’t think President Obama would openly speak about events in London the way he spoke about the L.A. riots nineteen years ago. What he thinks to himself is another matter.

What better way to figure out what Obama thinks about the riots in London than sifting through 20-year-old press releases in the ACORN archive?

Kurtz didn’t let the fact that nothing in the ACORN archive even begins to support the conclusion that Obama supports people who are burning down buildings and smashing store windows in London. He simply translates the press release into “Alinsky-speak” and the logic of his conspiracy theory is complete. The National Review antipathy toward Obama apparently runs so deep that no leap of logic is too great to support their contention that he is a secret “radical.”

The National Review reacted to last Friday’s New York legislation granting gay couples the right to marry in a manner that can charitably be described as petulant. The Review’s output over the last few days has been overwhelmingly cruel, hateful, and, in light of its history, surprising.

To put it mildly, it’s rather unwise for the National Review — with its long paper trail of bigotry famously aimed at African-Americans (William Buckley, the magazine’s founder, pondered the “cultural superiority of white over Negro”) and less famously at gays (he wrote that how one feels about AIDS sufferers is “only uncomplicated…if one accepts the moral injunction that all sinners should be forgiven”) — to so eagerly claim that the adoption of gay marriage is a slippery slope that ends with a United States transformed into a totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship. And yet that’s exactly what they’ve done, with a few courageous exceptions.

Given that the National Review is still the flagship publication of the conservative movement — e.g., the Republican front-runner for president, Mitt Romney, has more than a half-dozen bylines this year alone — the magazine’s behavior is all the more disturbing.

When the New York Senate passed a marriage equality bill on June 24 at roughly 10:48 p.m., this is how the National Review handled the news:

● At 11:49, Maggie Gallagher, whose organization the National Organization for Marriage tried and failed to derail the vote, warned that the Republican Party will “pay a grave price” for allowing four of its members to vote for the bill.

● Two days later, editor Kathryn Lopez, in response to criticism of Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s contention that by allowing gay marriage the United States was no better than the Hermit Kingdom, told her colleague, “Do not be so quick to dismiss the North Korea comparison.”

● On Monday, George Weigel compared gay rights activists to Bull Connor, the Klan-sympathizing segregationist public saftey commissioner famous for turning a fire hose on blacks in Birmingham, Alabama.

● That same day, Rick Santorum was given space to accuse New York of “wreaking havoc not only with the definitions of the federal law and the majority of states, but…with the single most important and time-tested institution of every successful society.”

● A few hours later, Glenn Stanton, the director of Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family, complained that a woman he saw on the subway — presumed to be a lesbian — was “playing make-believe daddy” with her child.

● Maggie Gallagher, in a separate piece, wrote that the vote is indicative of a civil rights movement that simply wants to “redefin[e] the Book of Genesis as bigotry.”

● Yesterday, David French, senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, wrote that gay marriage is a “blow for self-indulgence and for adult-focused self-actualization.”

● Shortly thereafter, in an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez, Princeton University’s Robert George said the equality vote promotes “forms of sexual conduct that were traditionally regarded in the West and many other places as beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures.”

It’s worth noting two exceptions. The first is longtime Deputy Managing Editor Michael Potemra; in the early morning of June 25, he wrote, “[T]onight, I see neither the face of anarchy, nor that of a nascent ‘North Korea.’ I see smiles on young people — and also, on some quiet senior citizens who are actually old enough to remember Stonewall 1969.” The second is editor Jason Lee Steorts, who wrote, “I would like to see the reaction of a North Korean refugee to your claim. […] It would also be nice if you troubled yourself to make an argument.”

A National Review staffer who hasn’t commented on the vote itself or the backlash by his employer is Jonah Goldberg, the magazine’s editor-at-large. As it happens, it was Goldberg who in 2002 wrote:

Conservatives should feel some embarrassment and shame that we are outraged at instances of racism now that it is easy to be. Conservatives…were often at best MIA on the issue of civil rights in the 1960s. Liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race.

Nearly a decade later, it appears that conservatives — certainly Mr. Goldberg’s own publication — have once again come down on the wrong side of history. I hope it doesn’t take 40 years for the next apology.

But what about another paid Fox contributor, former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N., AEI fellow, and über-hawk John Bolton? Bolton has indeed been flirting with a run since last September, and seems to be taking serious steps toward it that closely resemble those taken by Santorum and Gingrich.

Bolton, who said on Tuesday — on Fox’s air — that he will decide “by Labor Day,” gave a lengthy interview to National Review online, where he revealed some of the initial steps he has taken to explore a run at the nation’s highest office:

As George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, he gleefully tangled with fussy Europeans, Third World despots, and international bureaucrats. That experience, he reckons, is more than enough to make GOP primary voters, at the very least, curious.

It is also why, even in mid-June, Bolton continues to make calls to close friends, pollsters, and political consultants, mulling his options.

Bolton — in the article, titled “Bolton 2012? The former U.N. ambassador weighs a presidential run” — goes on to explain that, if he does enter the race late, he’s already worked out a strategy of which states he needs to hit the hardest:

He will decide by Labor Day, a self-imposed deadline. Until then, Bolton is drafting a multifaceted strategy, one that would enable him to enter late. [...]

“I would focus first on New Hampshire, followed by South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada,” he says. “I think that is a very understandable path to the nomination.” Iowa, however, is probably out of the equation. He is against ethanol subsidies, for one, and it may be a bit too late to build a base there, “where the 99 counties are like the 99 names of God.”

Fox News did not reply to ThinkProgress’s inquiries to its media relations department, but compare Bolton’s activities to those portrayed in an LA Times description of what Gingrich was up to in March when his $1 million-a-year contract with Fox was suspended:

While Gingrich is not expected to announce that he is forming a federal exploratory committee this week, he is expected to say in Georgia on Thursday that he is meeting with advisors to explore seeking the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, a Gingrich aide said.

It’s pretty tough to see a distinction between these meetings and discussions with advisers and campaign experts Bolton is holding. The trigger for suspension, a Fox lawyer told the Times, was “serious intention to form an exploratory committee.” That’s pretty vague, but Bolton’s phone calls would seem to fit into nearly any understanding of the phrase.

The situation leaves one wondering how long Bolton can keep up his gig on Fox, raising his profile (he’s appeared twice in the last two days) and cashing his paychecks while taking serious steps — right down to speaking to advisers and devising a state-by-state strategy — toward running for the presidency.

It’s worth noting that not everyone who writes for National Review is as dumb as Jonah Goldberg. For example, today Ross Douthat links to a pretty good NR article by Kevin Williamson dedicated to debunking some supply-side myths. It’s a good piece, and I hope conservatives read it.

What I hope doesn’t happen—but fear will—is that conservatives generally won’t read it, conservatives generally will keep peddling the same nonsense they’ve been selling for 30 years, and then when some liberal complains that American conservatism is dominated by cranks and morons someone from the smart set will point to Williamson’s article as an example of how that’s not true. So it’s worth noting that supply side mythology didn’t just come from nowhere. Here’s Larry Kudlow pimping it in NRO. And here’s Thomas Nugent in NRO. And Donald Luskin. One could go on.

At any rate, Williamson deserves credit for his piece. But the piece downplays the extent to which the myths he debunks are utterly central to conservative politics. He argues, for example, that there’s a real sense in which the Reagan tax cuts “didn’t happen” since there were no spending reductions. There’s something to be said for that point of view, but it makes utterly nonsense of the mainstream conservative story about the past 30 years’ worth of US domestic policy. Maybe Williamson is downplaying the bite of his argument on a “you catch more flies with honey” but realistically I think it’s just a sign that intelligent conservatives have little intention of doing battle with the charlatans who dominate their movement.

Whenever liberals point out that the entire conservative case against climate change legislation consists of the ravings of cranks, liars, and know-nothings someone eventually trots out Jim Manzi. Indeed, National Review tapped Manzi to write its big feature-length denunciation of the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Manzi, you see, isn’t a crank, a liar, or a know-nothing—he’s cooked up some wonky reason for agreeing with the cranks, liars, and know-nothings on the question of climate legislation.

Then Jim Manzi read Mark Levin’s book, focused his attention on its climate section, and discovered that Levin is a crank, liar, and/or know-nothing. The result? Manzi is savagely and hypocritically attacked by the staff of National Review. Because, after all, the crankery and the know-nothingness is the essence of conservative politics. The wonks are useful just insofar as they can be used to support the crank agenda—when they take the cranks on, they get trashed, even by publications that were happy to cite them as experts on the very issue at hand just a few months ago.

Beware? (cc photo by jondoeforty1)

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Radley Balko, National Review offers us the appalling views of one LAPD officer:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

The fact that African-American men are disproportionately likely to be put in this position, and that some police officers have this mentality, does a lot to explain the generalized distrust of cops by many people in that demographic.

Meanwhile: This is insane. Most people like and respect cops, and honor the work they do. But it’s a profession that’s honored precisely because the people doing the job correctly don’t do the job this way. Police officers, in the course of duty, subject themselves to extra-normal risk of harm for the sake of the welfare of others. This is the mentality of a foreign occupying army, not a well-functioning police force.

Victor Davis Hanson argues that Sonia Sotomayor is “race obsessed”:

In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

Jason Zengerle observes that the speech probably used the terms in question a lot because she was attending a symposium on “”=Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.”

In the real world, the only “race obsessed” people in this debate are the Victor Davis Hanson’s of the world who’ve consistently refused to see the Sotomayor nomination through anything other than the lens of her ethnicity. Zengerle alludes to the fact that nobody on the right seems to be upset about Justice Alito’s speech “Reflections on growing up as an Italian-American in New Jersey”. It’s just a broad fact of American life that the majority of people define themselves, in part, as members of an ethnic community of some sort (those who don’t appear to be predominantly of Scotch-Irish ancestry). The fact that Sotomayor has referenced this on some occasions is not an “obsession.” What would be truly bizarre would be a Latina judge who for some reason went around refusing to ever speak on this topic.

Meanwhile, in the Sotomayor debate it’s the opposition who are unequivocally presenting themselves as the defenders of racial (white) interests and the voices of racial (white) grievance. Which makes sense. After all, whites are a numerical majority in this country, so it stands to reason that white identity politics is and always has been a more viable political strategy than black or Latino identity politics. But we should all be clear on who’s doing what here.

And ’twas ever thus. Here’s Victory Davis Hanson’s National Review on the Civil Rights Act of 1957:

The central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by meerely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal–is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced ace. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own.

Same as it ever was.

Neil Sinhababu has a smart take on the NR Sotomayor cover:

[T]he way I see the joke actually depends on incongruities between the stereotypes of the nonwhite ethnicities involved. The Buddha-like pose and Asian features are tied to lofty pretensions of sagelike wisdom. And what sort of person is it who’s pretending to be some kind of sage? A Hispanic woman! As if.

The in-joke in this cover is for people who have already internalized a stereotype of Hispanic women as hotheaded and not that bright. Put one of them in the Buddha suit, and if you’ve absorbed the right racist stereotypes, the incongruity is hilarious.

I think that definitely captures some of what’s happening here. It should also be said that some of the ugliness of this whole thing clearly stems from the whole dysfunctional relationship our political system has to Supreme Court appointments. I remember from the Alito nomination that it’s somehow very difficult to articulate the view that “the president is someone whose ideas I think are wrong so I’m convinced that his SCOTUS pick also has bad ideas, but those who like the president are bound to see this differently.” Instead, there’s incredible pressure to “unearth” the “truth” about the nominee and how deep down he or she is history’s greatest monster.

It seems that what happened was that, as conservatives are wont to do, they tried to do something that would be racist, but also arguably not racist. Hence, instead of depicting a Latina with a racist stereotyped image of a Latina, they depicted her with a racist stereotyped image of an Asian. It’s hard to know exactly what to make of that. But National Review editor Rich Lowry seems to have known exactly what to make of it since as this post makes clear he was anticipating people criticizing the imagery.

At any rate, then he waited around a bit, got the accusations of racism he was waiting for, and then got to engage in every white conservative’s favorite passtime of wallowing in self-pity and calling his accusers humorless.

Unfortunately, there’s not a good shorthand term for the psychology behind this kind of behavior. “Racism” doesn’t, I think, capture it. But there’s this deranged fascination with walking up to the line and dancing around there in hopes of getting called on it. Then you get to become indignant. Because, again, the contemporary right’s main view on race is that actual racism against non-white people is only a tiny problem compared with the vast social crisis that allegedly exists around people being vigilant against racism.

Hat tip on this to Brian Beutler who adds a funny unrelated joke “Also featured on the cover in the current issue: ‘Jonah Goldberg On His Critics.’ That better be a long article.”

Julie Gunlock complains at NRO that “food snobs” are ruining America by serving unduly fancy food at soup kitchens. It’s actually rare that conservatives get to combined their hatred of poor people with their hatred of “cultural elites” in a single argument, so Gunlock gets so busy dishing out the sarcasm that she can’t quite seem to deliver the “so what?” point where we see who is being harmed by this alleged trend.

But more perniciously, throughout the piece she runs together the idea of soup kitchens being too “snobbish” about what food they serve with the idea of soup kitchens being health-conscious about the food they serve. This is an important distinction to make, however. When people can’t get enough to eat, they become malnourished. The point of charitable food assistance is to help people avoid that fate. That means, however, that it’s foolish to ignore the nutritional content of what you’re serving. Oftentimes, the situation is so dire that you can’t afford to fuss too much about this. People in Somalia and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa are teetering on the brink of starvation and need food by any means necessary. But fortunately for us, even in this economy the United States is not a drought-ravaged, famine-stricken, war-torn, malgoverned third world state. We’re not facing imminent mass starvation. So it’s eminently sensible for people trying to bring food to those in need to be paying attention to the differential health impact of different meals.

Reader F.W. writes to draw my attention to Rich Lowry’s spy thriller Banquo’s Ghosts commenting “apparently he managed to pack every imaginable vapid right-wing cliché into his “forthcoming literary masterpiece”:

Lowry: Here’s the basic plot: Peter Johnson is a left-wing journalist who writes for a New York-based publication called The Crusader. He’s a lush, a cynic, and a little corrupt. But watching the 9/11 attacks from his Brooklyn Heights apartment changes something in him. He begins to have doubts about the “hate America” pieces his editrix, Josephine von Hildebrand, constantly assigns him. Meanwhile, an old forgotten CIA spymaster, Stewart Bancroft (he works under cover of the name Banquo), has an eye on him. Banquo is old school. He’s been marginalized in the new overly bureaucratic, politically correct CIA, as an anachronism who believes in aggressively and imaginatively taking the fight to the enemy. He concludes that the best possible man to send to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist is the one no one would suspect–the unreliable, famously America-hating Peter Johnson. And then, as they say, mayhem ensues.

In Lowry’s defense, the idea of Christopher Hitchens reacting to 9/11 not by abandoning his Nation column in favor of a Slate column, but instead by becoming an assassin is pretty amusing.

Also there are tons and tons of vapid right-wing clichés that aren’t involved in this plot sketch. My recollection of the Tom Clancy book in which Jack Ryan becomes President is that not only does he do a bunch of right-wing national security stuff, but he also implements common sense domestic policy solutions like a flat tax.

Andy McCarthy writes, in what I understand is not an April Fool’s Day post, that:

We know that lowering marginal tax rates can increase federal revenue, but it’s clear that the President won’t cut taxes (not even for “95 percent of Americans”). So we need a Plan B.

Every time I read this kind of thing I wonder: Why on earth does McCarthy think that Obama is stubbornly refusing to cut taxes when doing so would raise revenues? Tax cuts are broadly popular, and with the increased revenue Obama could reward his supporters in the public employees’ unions. Shouldn’t AFSCME, NEA, and AFT be constantly clamoring for lower taxes and higher revenues? I mean, how stupid are we supposed to believe Democrats to be? They’re just all in the pocket of big accountant, I guess.

David Frum’s essay on Rush Limbaugh winds up making the excellent point that there’s an issue these days in which the conservative movement is hard-wired to offer solutions to the problems of the 1970s when, whatever you think about the solutions they offered at that time, today’s problems are totally different. Exhibit A for that trend could be this Larry Kudlow post at the Corner warning that current policy is going to produce inflation. This is like worrying that Barack Obama’s defense budget is showing weakness and likely to leave us open to aggression from Martians.

We have actual statistics about inflation, which show the core CPI increasing by just 0.2 percent in February. Inflation is very low. Very recently there was a very real threat of deflation, and expansionary policy has been aimed at preventing that from happening. Meanwhile, we have very good policy tools at our disposal for curbing inflation should it start to reach problematic levels.

At the moment, however, not only is deflation a bigger worry than inflation, but a modest (albeit non-accelerating) amount of inflation would probably be beneficial as it would help firms and households get out from under the load of debts they’re currently dealing with.

The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and, as Tigerhawk points out, in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife’s former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.

First off, as Schiffren notes Barack and Michelle Obama are both high-achieving meritocrats in their own right. Indeed, his entire administration is staffed with such people. She should, perhaps, consider the hypothesis that nobody is being “demonized.” Rather, a judgment is being made that a return to Clinton-era income tax policies in order to finance comprehensive health care reform would serve the national interest.

But beyond that, there’s the obscene implication that if people are poor, it’s because they don’t work hard and certainly not as hard as those long-toiling business executive. As I wrote back in October 2008:

I’m a veteran of several moves of a “let’s get a bunch of friends together and all move a bunch of stuff” variety. Today, I hired a moving company. It was a good choice. It’s also the kind of thing that, on a more political note, really dramatizes how bizarre it is that people often characterize current levels of inequality in the United States as reflecting a desire to reward hard work or say that in the United States you can get ahead by working hard. I’m sure the partners at Jones Day and the wizards at Goldman Sachs work hard, but I don’t think you can seriously deny that moving furniture for a living is hard work.

Indeed, one of the main advantages that professional career offer is precisely that, money aside, they don’t involve the sort of taxing physical labor associated with many low-skill jobs. Guys who move furniture are, of course, working extremely hard. And even your basic retail employee needs to be on her feet for hours and hours at a time while “executives” comfy chairs. And, again, I don’t think the Salvadoran guys who moved my bed found themselves in that line of work because they were too busy partying in college.

Via Tyler Cowen, Daniel Klein offers up a study that proves the obvious:

Conservatives say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs. Besides many anti-liberty commissions, the magazines may be criticized for anti-liberty omission—that is, failing to oppose anti-liberty policies. Magazines investigated include National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Enterprise, and The American Spectator. We find that National Review has had the strongest record on liberty on the issues treated, while the others have preponderantly failed to be pro-liberty or have even been anti-liberty.

I sort of doubt that anyone was genuinely confused about this, but now we have a real study to prove it. On the other hand, conservative do take the freedom of business enterprises to have a negative impact on the quality of the air you breath, the quality of the water you drink, and the stability of the climate you live in very seriously. They’re also pretty keen on the freedom of employers to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. These are important freedoms to many Americans.

But therein lies the rub. Conservatives are suddenly rediscovering this topic and reaching out to the Taylors of the world. It’s funny.

For example, as Isaac Chotiner observes, Andrew Breitbart doesn’t seem to have actually seen the end of Gran Torino. Isaac, meanwhile, likes any list that encourages people to go see The Lives of Others. And I agree, but we’re really defining conservatism down if we take “the pervasive intelligence state of Communist East Germany” to be a distinctly conservative notion. Perhaps more truly typical of the conservative worldview is that after Lives of Others comes in at the number one slot, The Dark Knight takes position number twelve specifically because of its alleged advocacy of pervasive surveillance. Many movies on the list, (Pursuit of Happyness e.g.), aren’t even remotely good.

At the time of the invasion back around Christmas 2006, right-wing commentators were busy offering unusually stupid opinions. Robert Farley reminds me of a classic Corner post in which Deborah Glick and Cliff May teamed up to explain the “real” (i.e., fake) roots of European skepticism about the operation:

Israelis routinely assume that Europe’s pro-jihadist policy towards the Palestinians is a result of anti-Semitism or anger over Israel’s military victory in 1967. But the EU’s treatment of Ethiopia and the TFG [the secular Transitional Federal Government] indicates that Brussels’ hostility towards the Jewish state is part of a much further-reaching policy. Europe’s pro-jihad position toward the war in Somalia indicates that its support for jihad is over-arching rather than limited to specific battlegrounds.

According to Glick, European governments have adopt a wide-ranging pro-jihad stance “in the hope that their support will deflect jihadist violence away from them.” Also, the people who write for The Corner are idiots.

Ever since Barack Obama’s election, the very same conservative movement that had been castigating him for months as a harbinger of sharia socialism has spent an awful lot of time crowing about weird nonsense concepts like Obama’s cabinet coming from the “center-right” of the Democratic Party. It’s a bit annoying, I miss the classics. Fortunately, Victor Davis Hanson is willing to kick it old-school and explain that in 2008 “50 years’ worth of careful thinking and hard-won wisdom were erased, as the Reagan Revolution, the work of Milton Freidman, and the classical free-market ethos were suddenly Trotskyized.”

Trotsky! I like it. I wonder which kind of Friedman-style, free market thinking Hanson thinks was prevalent back in 1958. As I recall it, the 50s were a time of high taxes, high levels of unionization, and strict regulation in the economic sphere with conservatism generally prevailing on matters related to sex and gender relations.