The left shouldn't make peace with neocons even to defeat Trump

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/11/16759130/truce-left-right-resistance-wittes-kristol

The left shouldn't make peace with neocons — even to defeat Trump
Don’t trust “woke Bill Kristol.”
By Robert Wright Dec 11, 2017, 9:30am EST


Here’s a sentence I never expected to find myself writing: Recently, influential liberal commentators recommended that liberals quit arguing with conservatives about public policy.

It all started when Ben Wittes, a national security specialist at the Brookings Institution, recommended in an 18-tweet manifesto that Americans who oppose Trumpism suspend discussion of what divides them so they can together confront this “national emergency.”

He wrote, “We have grave disagreements about social issues, about important foreign policy questions, about tax policy, about whether entitlements should be reformed or expanded, about what sort of judges should serve on our courts.” He added: “I believe in putting them all aside.”

Michael Tomasky, editor of the journal Democracy and former editor of the American Prospect, then wrote a Daily Beast piece about the proposal floated by Wittes, declaring: “I’m with him.”

I’m not. And the best way to explain why is to look at someone else Tomasky says he’s now with: Bill Kristol, the neoconservative writer and political operator. Tomasky correctly anticipates that one source of liberal resistance to Wittes’s proposal will be the disturbing prospect of making nice to people like Kristol. Kristol, after all, is famous for, among other things, working hard to get us into the Iraq War and working hard to defeat Bill and Hillary Clinton’s 1993 plan to expand health care coverage. Tomasky writes, “Well, Bill Kristol’s done a lot of things I don’t like. And I’ve probably done a lot of things he didn’t like. … But I’m ready even to forget Iraq.”

Again, I say: I’m not. I’ve advocated something called “mindful resistance,” and one thing it entails is figuring out what array of forces created Trumpism so we can attack the problem at its roots. Well, (IMHO) there are few people who have more influentially abetted those forces than Bill Kristol.

Consider a few areas of Kristol’s influence.

snip//

We don’t want to get rid of Trump only to find ourselves singing the lyrics of the old Who song: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” So we can’t afford to spend the interim hugging everyone who opposes Trump and singing Kumbaya.



Robert Wright is the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God, and, most recently, Why Buddhism Is True. He runs Bloggingheads.tv and Meaningoflife.tv and publishes the Mindful Resistance Newsletter, where a version of this piece first appeared. He is currently visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary.