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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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1 Mar, 4 tweets, 1 min read
1. I have some good news and bad news about Trump's CPAC speech.
2. The good news is that although Trump gestured at running again it was a low energy performance and his heart didn't seem in it. That could change but right now he doesn't seem in campaign mode.
3. The bad news is that Trump even if Trump doesn't run again he's very intent on maintaining his stranglehold on the GOP. Many gestures about punishing his Republican enemies.
4. In other ways beyond Trump's speech, CPAC showed a Trumpized GOP. Trump may or may not run again but the Trumpization of GOP is continuing. The Civil War in party is over & Trump has won. More here: thenation.com/article/politi…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
26 Feb
1. We've had roughly a year more or less, depending on where you live, of isolation and social distancing. Good time for a reckoning of how it's changing us.
2. In the latest New Left Review, the sociologist Dylan Riley has some suggestive thoughts on how the isolation is a paradoxically collective act: maintained by a social infrastructure and also a shared global experience of a type never seen before.
3. The collective nature of the isolation has also, paradoxically again, energized a new wave of activism, both in terms of the global BLM movement (the biggest protests in American history happened last year) & the anti-masking/QAnon/MAGA agitation.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
25 Feb
1. Counter-point: the "elite overproduction" framework is a blaming the victim narrative that obfuscates the larger context of declining social mobility, failure of circulation of elites, rise of the Failsons & failed attempt to diversify historically exclusionary institutions.
2. To my mind, the best conservative apologia for our shitty society has always been the idea of "a circulation of elites" developed by Vilfredo Pareto & expanded on by James Burnham: "sure, we're not a real democracy but talented outsiders & opposition factions can rise"
3. I'd say from late 18th century till about end of Golden Age of capitalism in early 1970s, the "circulation of elites" held true in Anglo-American society, with successful (although always bumpy) absorption of new money, educated professionals, and eventually white ethnics.
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
23 Feb
For my Buckley/Bozell piece I didn't go enough into how off the rail (sometimes in good ways) Bozell was in 1960s/1970s when he rejected standard Republicanism for open revolt. Started praising Black Power, Irish republicanism & spelling America as Amerika.
Bozell in 1970s as described by his biographer: "As enemies of the American civil order, Catholics should make their hostility plain to see. For example, they -- and especially the bishops -- should boycott patriotic and civic celebrations."
Bozell: "The Constitution has not only failed, it was bound to fail. The architects of our constitutional order built a house in which secular liberalism could live, and given the dominant urges of the age, would live. The time has come to leave that house and head for home."
Read 8 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
23 Feb
1. I have an idea for a Netflix series but don't know anyone in Hollywood. So the pitch: Yelling Stop: The Buckleys, the Bozells, & the American Century. Starring William F. Buckley, L. Brent Bozell, Franco, Goldwater, Kissinger, Thatcher, Reagan, the Bushes etc.
2. Season One: Paterfamilias. William F. Buckley Sr. chased out of Mexico by revolution, because a reactionary. Raises 10 kids, feuds with FDR, celebrates Franco. 4 of the kids burn a cross in Jewish household. L. Brent Bozell Sr. breaks strike.
3. Season 2. Sons: 1940-1960s. Bozell Sr. is on verge of converting to Catholicism with son but dies. Bozell Jr. goes to Yale, meets William F. Buckley Jr., bond as anti-communists. WFB joins CIA & works with E. Howard Hunt (a recurring minor character).
Read 11 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
22 Feb
1. When L. Brent Bozell, Jr. died in 1997, he was often treated as a once brilliant mind who had become a fringe crank, over shadowed by his brother-in-law William F. Buckley. Buckley was the conservative mainstream, Bozell the discarded extremist. But that's not true.
2. Buckley and Bozell had the kind of lives that make a perfect novel: both scions of wealthy families, best buds at Yale, brothers by Bozell's marriage to Buckley's favorite sister, collaborators in McCarthyism & conservatism, and then a falling out over jealousy & politics
3. In 1960s Buckley became the ultimate establishment insider, the pal of Kissinger, the palatable face of the right for PBS & mainstream media, while Bozell took up seeming lost causes (Carlist monarchism, anti-abortion violence). Yet in 2021 Bozell legacy looms maybe larger
Read 7 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
19 Feb
1. Ted Cruz's current travails are a good occasion to revisit the single best piece of writing on the Texas Senator: @DouthatNYT description of Cruz as the Kenneth Widmerpool of American conservatism.
2. Widmerpool (pictured below) is the anti-hero of Anthony Powell 12-volume roman fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time. A delightfully detestable character, Widmerpool is graceless and awkward, a social climber without a moral code, an unloved go-getter.
3. Hitchens on Widmerpool: "A monster of arrogance & conceit, but entirely wanting in pride. Bullying to those below him, servile & fawning to those set in authority, entirely without wit or introspection, he is that type of tirelessly ambitious, sexless, & charmless mediocrity"
Read 4 tweets

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