Posted on 12/16/2018 2:12:57 PM PST by Widget Jr
When it was announced on Friday that The Weekly Standard would print its last issue after nearly a quarter of a century, I was astonished. Who would ever have guessed that The American Conservative, the upstart anti-war magazine founded by Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell in 2002, would outlast Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes' neoconservative colossus? If you had asked me five years ago, I would have said it was about as likely as the star of Celebrity Apprentice winning the White House on a reactionary populist platform.
It's worth saying at the outset that I and millions of other Americans of all political tendencies disagreed with the editors of The Weekly Standard about the Iraq war. We were right and they were wrong. I will return later to this issue, which is more complicated than some critics of intervention have ever made it sound. But there are other points worth making first.
The most obvious one is that the Standard was, for more than two decades, the best right-of-center periodical published in the United States. This was true for the very simple reason that it hired the best writers and let them write about the topics that interested them...
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
Any non-pricks write for them? It's like being a prime a**hole was a job requirement.
The Weekly Srandard is like the 0bama Presidency, it’s finally over.
It's demise.
You beat me to it. GMTA
It was from the very beginning a chamber of amnesty open borders megaphone.
When Trump ran on border security the mask dissolved.
Kristol’s father Irving embraced the term “the Godfather of Neoconservatism”. He even included Neoconservative in the title of several of his books.
Neoconservative treachery against paleos and traditional conservatives began as early as the Reagan years. It was a mistake to trust them.
True to their origins on the Left they were all about power.
The Weakly Substandard? Oh yes, a crappy magazine for NeverTrumpers. Bye Kristol...don’t let the door hit you in the ass...
Oh for crying out loud.
I believe in my heart that Americans are waking up (as Lindsey Graham seems to have done). The 2016 election was our pep rally, but we still have a game to win.
It wasn't great.
This guy is building up the Standard to tear down the rest of the right.
Case in point:
In domestic politics the Standard always stood for a more humane, less libertarian vision of conservatism. It owed this to the intellectual legacy of neoconservatism: Daniel Patrick Moynihan's policy acumen, Irving Kristol's Two Cheers for Capitalism, and Christopher Lasch's more radical Tory Marxism. This did not always translate into the sort of open dissent from the atomizing consensus of the post-Goldwater GOP, but it did mean that the Standard's editorial pages stood for principles loftier than the almighty dollar.
For many years on the American right there has been an interest in shoring up the legacy of so-called "realists" in foreign policy. This has meant, among other things, the lionization of creeps, such as the openly eugenicist George F. Kennan, on the grounds that they pursued the national interests of the United States unblinded by such wimpy considerations as human rights.
Thanks for the summary.
The text you quoted revealed exactly why it was a publication to be avoided, denounced.
What is amusing is that their “radical Tory Marxism” (pul-eeze!) and even more so the “principles loftier than the almighty dollar” meant that in the end they didn’t have any.
Principles or dollars.
I used to read it sometimes 10-15 years ago. It was never that great.
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