Kristol Joins Forces With the Left in Nazi Smear of Trump Aide

[Draggingtree]

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Kristol Joins Forces With the Left in Nazi Smear of Trump Aide

February 4, 2017 by Chris Buskirk 80 Comments

 

The Weekly Standard last week revealed the name of the anonymous author of the highly influential “Flight 93 Election” essay as Michael Anton. He was a senior editor of American Greatness until he left to join the White House as communications director of the National Security Council. The progressive Left wasted no time in turning its fire on Anton. Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine, called Anton “America’s leading authoritarian intellectual.” In Salon he was called a “dystopian prophet.” And mic.com described him as a “shadowy, far right figure.”

 

But leave it to Trump critics on the Right to go where even Leftist commentators wouldn’t. It was The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol who insinuated Anton was akin to a Nazi in a tweet analogizing him with Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who wrote a defense of Hitler’s political assassinations after the Night of the Long Knives. None of Kristol’s colleagues at The Weekly Standard registered any dissent from Kristol’s descent into the reductio ad Hitlerum—the tendency to call your political opponents Nazis to undermine their legitimacy and shame them into silence. In this, Kristol has taken up the vile tactics of the Left with the reactionary zeal of the scorned.

 

[Valin]

As We All Know Anyone Who Does Not Think Donald Trump Is The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread is A Bad Terrible Evil Wicked Person.

 

Two Examples

 

 

It is articles like this And The Tweet That bring a smile to the face of Chuck Schumer & Nancy Pelosi. A Pox On Both.

 

 

Addendum I Bill.

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

Move Over, Bannon: New Target Acquired
Steven Hayward
February 6, 2017

(Snip)

Now that Michael is suited up at the National Security Council and working 18 hour days, he’s not going to be able to defend himself against such calumnies. Chris Buskirk over at American Greatness has offered a rousing defense (including a sharp jab at Bill Kristol’s critical tweets—to paraphrase Orwell, it could appear that West Coast Straussians have always been at war with East Coast Straussians, even though a certain new book brokers a peace between them), but I’ll add a few observations of my own.

Starting with: Seriously? Authoritarian? Puh-leese. It is curious that Anton’s leftist detractors pass over entirely how Anton has come around to so many of their arguments, i.e., that the Iraq War was a blunder, that trade deals haven’t worked out for the working class, and that “Davoisie,” as Anton calls them, are out for themselves, etc. Maybe they’re scared that Anton is on to something that will put them out of business?

(Snip)

Trump may or may not be the ideal president to take on this challenge (I’ll have more to say on this point in a separate post later), but he represents the most serious challenge to the administrative state since Reagan and he’s the only president we’ve got right now. And even Trump skeptics ought to be glad that Anton has a senior post in the administration. Thus I was also dismayed at this Bill Kristol tweet that references the Chait article:


(Snip)

In fairness to Bill, Anton did throw down some heavy blows on the conservative establishment, including its magazines, in several of his “Decius” posts, and while his authorship was widely known to most of his targets, they decently refrained from fully outing him at the time because they knew he’d be the next Brendan Eich at his Wall Street job if they did. (There were a few leaks, but the mainstream media never picked them up.) I was amazed his cover held as long as it did, and it is to be expected that he’d now get some overdo smacking around over this previous business.

In any case, I’m not sure whether this particular tweet shouldn’t be read in an ironic way, or with a double meaning. Surely Bill Kristol doesn’t think much of Chait’s analytical powers, and while the reference to Carl Schmitt is certainly inflammatory on the surface, is this possibly a subtle (too subtle) dig at the left’s infantile hysteria while cautioning Anton to take cognizance of how the style of his political argument can ignite the left’s calumnies? Chait and the other leftists attacking Anton are a farce, just as the simplistic leftist renderings of Schmitt are a farce. This is not the place to sort out Carl Schmitt, who is simple-mindedly described as a Nazi legal theorist, in part because the question is very dense. His criticism of the defects of modern liberalism and democratic institutions are in places profound. I’ve long thought his 1923 book The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy could be compared in some respects to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, because both foresaw how democratic government might crumple before socialist challenges. But like Heidegger, Schmitt is hard to make out clearly because he wrote in German. ‘Nuff said. I haven’t asked Bill about this, but he does like to be mischievous, making friends think harder while spreading chaos among his enemies. Sort of like Trump.