{"id":73649,"date":"2022-05-15T05:00:44","date_gmt":"2022-05-15T09:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=73649"},"modified":"2022-05-14T18:30:19","modified_gmt":"2022-05-14T22:30:19","slug":"bill-kristols-as-yet-unexplained-defection-from-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/05\/15\/bill-kristols-as-yet-unexplained-defection-from-conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Kristol’s as-yet-unexplained defection from conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from the latest Weekly Dish<\/em>, Andrew Sullivan<\/a> charts the political pilgrimage of a former right-wing stalwart to being “hugely popular among MSNBC Democrats”:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Bill Kristol at a political conference in Orlando, Florida, 23 September, 2011.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

If you live long enough, and haven’t been lobotomized, you’ll change a lot of your views and opinions. Life does that. The world changes; you change; and for most people, who don’t air their views publicly for a living, the process is murky.<\/p>\n

For the rest of us, the hacks\/public intellectuals, I think there’s another standard: if you change your mind on an issue, at some point, explain why<\/a>. What principles or ideas have you now abandoned? Which have you now embraced? What new facts have you learned? It’s a basic form of intellectual hygiene.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to Bill Kristol. You may recall him as the former gatekeeper of Republican orthodoxy and much of its intelligentsia; architect of neoconservative foreign policy; adviser to US presidents; pundit; smooth-talker; operator. Now hugely popular among MSNBC Democrats, alert to racism and sexism and homophobia, Kristol has, these last few years, performed a spectacular ideological self-reinvention that makes J.D. Vance look like a man of unflinching consistency. And he has never even attempted to explain why.<\/p>\n

Take for a moment the issue du jour<\/em>: abortion. Very few people have spent years and years, as Kristol has, campaigning with a singular determination to overturn Roe v Wade<\/em>. Here he is in 1998<\/a>:<\/p>\n