About-faces of Consequence

I think there’s still something to the argument that there remains a great centrist swath in our country that still values stability, neighborliness and and an optimism adequate to maneuvering through an always-difficult world. Our personal-life interactions are generally pleasant, or at least manageable with a bit of tact. This can be true of social media as well, at least in my experience. I mutually follow a number of people whose, say, culinary prowess, or love of language for its own sake impel me to respond to occasional opinions that smack, in my book, of knucklehead-ism, by entitling us all to a few of those.

“Remains” is the operative term in that first paragraph. It’s the case for the time being, but the divisions between us encroach further every day on every last aspect of our lives.

The demonstrably indignant among us increase in number every day. For the most part, there’s not much that’s intriguing about them. Most of the yay-hoos with veins popping out of their foreheads, on either the Left or the Right, have always been who they are and are responding to the fever-pitch moment in predictable ways.

What fascinates me are the about-faces of people from various points on the ideological spectrum – where they began, and where they landed.

Roger Kimball‘s headlong plunge into Trumpsim may intrigue me the most of any about-face, from any point of origin to any point of arrival. For years, he was pretty universally admired for the erudition he brought to the basic conservative argument. He upheld the notion of a transcendent order and venerated the human ability to create beauty in art ringingly.

How did someone who had set such store by refinement, beauty and order fall for the embodiment of the opposite of those values?

And he fell to the point of formulating a definition of good character as codifying some conservative policy positions into legislation and judicial appointments, even if the one so codifying has no understanding of what he’s doing, beyond bringing him glorification. Kimball basically says that a scumbag who drags certain sought-after initiatives across the finish line is a solid guy.

Gone are the arguments Kimball used to make in defense of large, noble things. To burnish the Trumpist brand, he’s reduced to relying on whataboutism and the framing of Trump as a victim of completely unwarranted legal harassment.  

Conservative frustration about the movement’s inability to thwart progressive advancement was arguably the overriding reason for the Trump phenomenon. It boiled over into desperation for a great many people. One would think someone like Kimball, equipped with a long-view understanding of the human condition, would be better able to resist grasping onto a figure who was the mirage of a panacea.

An about-face from right to left that interests me a great deal is that of Bill Kristol.

Maybe conversions per se are a thing in his family. His father, Irving Kristol, after all, traversed an arc from the Young People’s Socialist League to the American Enterprise Institute. (There have actually been a few waves of left-to-right transitions that have produced some of conservatism’s most important voices: the New York Intellectuals, the original editors at National Review, and former New Leftists such as Eugene Genovese.)

But Bill’s formative years came long after his father’s youthful Trotskyist fling. It’s true that Bill began his career as the issues director for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1976 presidential run, but Moynihan represented a breed of Democrat that’s been an endangered species for the last century. From there, he built his conservative creds. He was Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and, in 1994, cofounded The Weekly Standard.

Trump’s effect on Kristol seems to have been something close to a mirror opposite of the effect he had on Kimball. Now, a lot of people on the Right found Donald Trump loathsome, claims of their insignificance to the contrary, and some were even driven to vote for Joe Biden. But Kristol went the next step in a February 2020 tweet declaring “we’re all Democrats now.” (It’s worth noting that his Bulwark cofounder Charlie Sykes posted the first comment underneath, saying “Not me.”)

And he appears to have made the ideological pivot commensurate with his new political affiliation, making statements on race and sexuality clearly at odds with positions he’d previously staked out.

He’s done no favors to non-Trumpist conservatives who strive against daunting odds to distinguish themselves from the MAGA “worldview.” Then again, it’s not my day to watch him. At this point in my life and the life of our fractured society, I’m not inclined to lose sleep over one voice in the cacophony.

And then there’s yet another kind of about-face: from left-leaner to Trumpist-friendly independent.

Consider Naomi Wolf, who wrote The Beauty Myth, lauded by Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan as one of the most important feminist tracts of all time, and who served as a consultant to the 2016 Clinton campaign and the 2000 Gore campaign. In the 2001 book Misconceptions, she outlines a decisively collectivist agenda for 21st century motherhood.

Nowadays, at her Substack, she’s telling conservatives “I’m sorry I believed such nonsense” about what even Never-Trumper conservatives recognized as conspiracy theories (Steele dossier, pee tape) and framing the news media as “the liars who are our current gatekeepers” who “who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose.” In fact, her framing of Trump as a victim of “establishment” long knives echoes that of Kimball.

Sorry you were taken in by such throbbingly inflamed tales, Ms. Wolf, but that’s quite a swivel to a maybe-I-need-to-rethink-Trump-with-all-these-phony-stories-about-him-floating-around. Are you on the verge of overlooking what you’ve known about him all along?

More examples of each of these types of conversions exist, as do variations on them.

My overarching question is this: Can any of these figures articulate a set of principles that they’ve embraced throughout their processes?

Are there core convictions that you feel informed you all the way through?

Or, if no such convictions have been present, did we – or you – ever really know who the hell you were?