John Bolton's appointment is a fitting coda to conservatism's failures - By Joe Scarborough
By Joe Scarborough March 23 at 12:19 AM
One hundred years ago this week, the founder of modern American conservatism was born into poverty in Plymouth, Mich. Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind,” published in 1953, laid the foundations of a modern conservative movement that dominated the second half of the American Century. But 65 years later, Kirk’s classic work reads instead as a damning indictment against the very movement he helped launch.
The central thesis of Kirk’s philosophy was that “the conservative abhors all forms of ideology” and subscribes to principles “arrived at by convention and compromise” instead of “fanatic ideological dogmata.” Six decades of Republican overreach and corrosive causes have instead led to the rise of Donald Trump and a foreign policy run by John Bolton, an economy guided by Larry Kudlow and a legal team led by conspiracy theorist Joseph DiGenova.
Bolton’s elevation to the position of national security adviser is a fitting coda for a movement whose adherents spent decades throwing themselves on an endless array of ideological barricades while vilifying opponents whose responses to Soviet Russia or Islamic fundamentalism were deemed insufficiently harsh. Bolton’s selection will not disappoint these same GOP militants whom Kirk battled until his death in 1994. Trump’s third national security adviser in 14 months has called for the preemptive bombing of North Korea and Iran, while defending his role in the worst U.S. foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. Of the United States’ military misadventure in Iraq, Bolton pleads innocence on all counts while shamelessly calling Barack Obama’s 2011 decision to bring U.S. troops home “the worst decision” made in that debacle.
In the forward to the seventh edition of “The Conservative Mind,” Kirk predicted with precision the rise of political players such as Bolton and Trump and foresaw a time when the United States would “fall into the hands of merciless ideologues or squalid oligarchs.” He also repeated Swedish philosopher Tage Lindbom’s warning of the bleak harvest coming from a “secularized generation for which material existence is everything and spiritual life is nothing.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/03/23/john-boltons-appointment-is-a-fitting-coda-to-conservatisms-failures
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