I was surprised this morning to receive on Twitter from @EVKontorovich and on email from @jacklgoldsmith responses to my Twitter thread of yesterday that reflect a real misinterpreting of what I was trying to say. Here's the original thread:
I don't back off what I said yesterday but my regard for both Jack and Eugene is such that I assume that if they could misread me so completely, others no doubt did as well. So please indulge me a few words of clarification.
First, the tweet thread was not ever meant to be about millions of my fellow citizens or about the general Trump-supporting voter. I wrote it specifically in response to @Kasparov63's tweet of an article about Lindsey Graham. It was about leadership cadres figures.
Graham is someone I have long admired (and even worked with) who is now very actively covering for Trump on a number of matters close to my heart. The thread was not meant to be about the average Trump supporter, but about political and to a lesser extent intellectual leadership.
I took Kasparov to be saying that he would have trouble forgetting Graham's current posture. I was fleshing out my agreement and lumping in the class of politicians and operatives and public intellectuals who have behaved in a fashion that seems to me democratically toxic.
I also wasn't suggesting any kind of blacklist or lustration or anything of the kind—simply being candid that my personal understanding of people like Graham has been changed and that I think it will be hard for me to go back to seeing them as I once did.
I don't apologize for this judgment but it is a decidedly limited judgment than at least some readers I respect seemed to take from what I wrote.
I watched a wonderful debate once between a Baptist minister and an Orthodox rabbi about the propriety of Baptists evangelizing Jews. The minister made a comment I think about often.
He began by saying, "the thing you [Jews] have to understand about us is that we have a very dire understanding of the human condition—and that creates urgency for us." I had a lot of sympathy for his presentation then. And I identify with it now in a secular democratic context.
Like that minister, I think the current situation is very dangerous, and when I see someone like Graham--who I know knows better because a year ago I was cheering him on as he said all the right things--behaving as he is, I feel a certain urgency about it.
Perhaps that's arrogant and overconfident about my own reading of the situation. And maybe it's too judgmental. But it is what I think and how I feel. And if I come to owe Graham or Glenn Greenwald or Tucker Carlson an apology for it, it will be with great relief that I offer it.
That's all I got.
