,
8 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
I just started reading this 500+ page book. I had promised myself I'd refrain from tweeting until I'd finished it...but I'm gonna break this rule because two egregious paragraphs in the intro brought me up short. 
Imagine writing, in the year of our lord 2019, a paragraph wrapping up your intro in which you identify the movement that put Trump in office as the inheritor of America's authentic Constitutional tradition, and identify his progressive opponents as repudiators of that tradition.
Granted, Will's argument re. Progressivism is long & complicated & stretches back to Pres. Wilson...but still, the idea that the true guardians of the Constitution can be found in the mvmt that took off w/ Goldwater (to whom the book is dedicated) & has culminated in Trump is 🤔
The next paragraph that took me up short was this one on Goldwater in '64. The 6 states he won were not randomly distributed...and those 6 victories had nothing to do with the libertarianism born of the open spaces of the west.
Here's an observer (granted, a hostile one) from 1964 who had a pretty different take than Will's on the animating politics of the Goldwater movement.
There are many ways to interpret the place of Goldwater in the history of American politics. But to not even mention that he drove black people screaming from the GOP & actively courted segregationists is a pretty glaring omission.
Regardless of what one thinks of Will's politics, it's fair to say that the history he tells here is quite disconnected from the interpretations offered by most historians of conservatism for the past few decades.
I was struck by a similar dimension of Max Boot's book, where he offered what struck me as a fairly romanticized account of Reagan's "open and inclusive" GOP.
