Review by Choice Review
Boot, a longtime neoconservative commentator and now fiercely NeverTrump, writes of his departure from "movement conservatism" and the Republican Party. Providing some autobiography, he describes his upbringing and his early writing and newspaper editing career, showing how quickly he joined conservative circles in Washington and became an important figure in conservative politics in the early 2000s. In detailing his political views, Boot exemplifies what right-wing populists decry the most. He is pro-immigration (to address labor shortages), pro-free trade, and a self-identified "internationalist"--a globalist by populist standards. And now he penitently acknowledges his "white privilege" and the pervasive effects of racism and sexism in American society. All this makes Boot an interesting character in the American political consultant class. The intent in much of the book is to shame those Republicans who "surrendered" to Trump when he won the nomination and those who continue to remain silent or support Trump. Boot goes into great detail on Trump's assorted antics, making this book a useful source. But in the end the book is more about Boot than Trump, though Trump is its great villain. Summing Up: Optional. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Stephen Wolfe, Louisiana State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
DONALD TRUMP MAY be a know-nothing demagogue and would-be authoritarian who thinks and acts more like a mob boss than a statesman, but he has at least one indisputable talent: puncturing the pieties that prevail among members of the country's political and journalistic establishments. One memorable example took place in early May 2016, shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee. Asked how he could serve as the party's standard-bearer when so many of its leaders since the election of Ronald Reagan viewed him with contempt, Trump responded with characteristic bluntness: "Don't forget, this is called the Republican Party. It's not called the Conservative Party." That line came to mind while reading Max Boot's lively memoir and acidic antiTrump polemic, "The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right." A prominent center-right pundit, Boot expressed early and vitriolic opposition to Trump - a stance that led him first to endorse Hillary Clinton for president and then, on the day after her unexpected defeat, to renounce the Republican Party altogether. (He's currently registered as an independent.) Like many of the best memoirs of ideas, Boot's story is one of conversion and deconversion - of faith gained and then lost. As a 6-year-old Jewish only child, Boot immigrated with his mother and grandmother to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1976. He was attracted to the conservative movement and the Republican Party as a teenager during the Reagan administration, drawn above all to their unapologetic championing of the ideals that led his adoptive homeland to offer his family refuge in their flight from tyranny. Many bright young conservatives of Boot's generation grew up reading National Review and honing their polemical skills lambasting liberals in their college newspapers (in Boot's case, at Berkeley). But Boot distinguished himself quickly. Only seven years after graduating, he had risen to become op-ed editor of The Wall Street Journal, at the time easily the most influential forum for conservative ideas in the country. Over the next 20 years, Boot would publish several well-regarded books of military history, be named a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, write regularly for leading conservative journals and serve as a foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Through it all, Boot maintained his faith - in America, in the conservative movement, in the wisdom of Republican voters. Until the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, that is. In November 2015, Boot labeled him a fascist. Shortly after Trump won the South Carolina primary, Boot described him as "a liar, an ignoramus and a moral abomination." Yet Trump kept winning. And as he did, the party that Boot had loved and trusted came (with a handful of exceptions) to embrace him. And that made Boot's choice obvious. Clinton may have been a "deeply flawed and seriously uncharismatic candidate," but unlike Trump, she was "extremely knowledgeable, resolutely centrist and amply qualified" to be president. So Boot bolted. It was a decision both understandable and admirable. And he does a very good job of telling the story of what led him to it. Things get rockier when he attempts to come to terms with the meaning of Trump's triumph and to reflect on what might lie ahead for him and the handful of like-minded commentators who have ended up politically homeless. (In one of the book's best lines, Boot notes that these exiles from the Trumpified Republicans - including William Kristol and George F. Will, Peter Wehner and Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin and David Brooks - are "enough for a dinner party," but "not for a political party.") In Boot's initial telling of his story, conservatism is inspiring, principled, responsible, morally demanding, wise. It collapses only when Donald Trump assaults the citadel from the outside, like a rampaging army or deadly contagion. The heroes of this narrative are Boot and his allies, who take a noble if futile stand against this evil invader in the name of their conservative ideals. But the story Boot recounts in the concluding chapters is different. Now, in light of the present, Boot sees rot on the right that has been there from the start - in William F. Buckley's pro-segregationist editorials in National Review, in Phyllis Schlafly's best-selling screed "A Choice Not an Echo," in Newt Gingrich's take-noprisoners tenure as speaker of the House, in rabble-rousing talk radio shock jocks and above all in the polarizing and poisonous influence of Fox News. All of this leads Boot to conclude that "extremism is embedded in the DNA of the modern conservative movement," as if Trump is where the movement had been headed, or fated to end up, from the start. This implies that it's mostly Boot, and not conservatism or the Republican Party, that has changed. Scales have fallen from his eyes. Once he was blind, but now he sees. He even adopts the quasi-religious language of the social justice left in describing an intellectual awakening about the persistence of racism and sexism in American society. But then what are we to make of Boot's epilogue, where he lists the policies he now supports and ends up saying pretty much the same thing he always has? He's fiscally conservative and socially liberal, favors free markets, free trade and high rates of immigration, and internationalism in foreign policy backed up by the threat (and generous use) of military force around the globe. These were exactly Boot's views in 1985,1995, 2005 and 2015. The one thing that clearly has changed is that Boot now regards the Iraq war, which he giddily championed in explicitly imperialistic terms, as a mistake - one that has taught him the "limits of American power." That's refreshing, though it would have been nice to see more evidence that this lesson is being translated into greater restraint about America's conduct in the world generally. Instead, we get reflexively hawkish comments about America's Obama-era and present-day dealings with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, China and Russia. Many of these statements follow from the same misguided assumptions that convinced Boot and so many others that a war of choice to oust Saddam Hussein was a splendid idea. One wonders how the book would have turned out had Boot taken a few more steps back from the fray, to place his lifelong ideological commitments in a wider frame. In that case, he might have seen that the principles and assumptions that first drew him to the Republican Party were not especially "conservative" at all. They were, instead, the expression of a particularly bellicose strand of Cold War liberalism that migrated from the centerleft to the center-right in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when a shellshocked Democratic Party temporarily abandoned it. By the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, this brand of muscular, centrist liberalism was back, dominating (with minor differences in emphasis) both parties. Similar stories of centrist liberalism coming to dominate mainstream politics in the aftermath of the Cold War can be told throughout the countries of the West - just as most of these countries have now begun to experience populist insurgencies aimed at dethroning that consensus. (In the United States, the challenge to the liberal center is coming from both the right and the left.) The insurgencies are inspired by widely felt exhaustion with, and anger at, the unacknowledged failures of the ideas and policies that have defined the ideological center for more than a generation. That exhaustion and anger can't be willed, wished or insulted away, no matter how unsavory the insurgents may be. Boot's book aims to tell the story of a journey, but it's far more a portrait of stasis. If Boot and his ideological compatriots hope to exercise a meaningful influence in the years to come, they will need to subject their articles of faith to increased scrutiny and demonstrate a greater capacity to adapt to a world very much in the process of pivoting to something new. damon linker, a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com, is the author of "The Theocons" and "The Religious Test."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Boot (The Road Not Taken, 2018) ended his affiliation with the Republican Party the day after Trump was elected president. He now tells the story of his political journey from conservative poster child to disillusioned independent. As a Jewish Russian refugee, Boot grew up in a virulently anticommunist household and found an intellectual home in the conservative worldview of the National Review and Ronald Reagan. Initially a print journalist, since 2002 he has worked for the think tank Council on Foreign Relations and authored numerous articles and books. He has detractors on both sides of the political spectrum. More recently, he has changed his tune about the conservative movement he once professed allegiance to because of its support of Trump, whom Boot describes as hostile to his principles and embodying the opposite of stances conservatives have championed since WWII. He lays out his beliefs and asks which party represents him. His conclusion is none as currently constituted, but he hopes a new center right will emerge from the ashes of today's Republican Party. Readers across the political spectrum will appreciate Boot's thoughtful personal and political analysis.--Dan Kaplan Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this memoir-manifesto, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Boot (The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam) frankly explores his tumultuous relationship with the Republican Party, likening it to "a tale of first love, marriage, growing disenchantment, and, eventually, a heartbreaking divorce." Boot, a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, describes the journey from the beginnings of his career at the Wall Street Journal through positions at the Weekly Standard and Commentary to his current role as a loud Trump critic at the Washington Post and on CNN. Due to his moral horror at the rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and his supporters, the author has finally turned his back on the only political party he ever identified with, as well as on many of the conservative beliefs he first formulated as a young reader of National Review in the 1980s. While he considers the Democratic Party as a necessary buffer to Trump in the next few elections, Boot refuses to completely give up on conservatism. Instead, he envisions a future for American politics that includes a centrist party led by an Eisenhower-like figure for disillusioned center-left and center-right voters alienated by the extremists in power. Boot's passionate and principled stand against alleged tyranny will resonate with many readers disillusioned with the state of contemporary politics. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Washington Post columnist and CNN global affairs analyst Boot (The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, 2018, etc.) contemplates the collapse of the GOP under the poisonous influence of Donald Trump.The author is convinced that the Republican Party will suffer repeated and devastating defeats for its embrace of extremism, conspiracymongering, ignorance, isolationism, and white nationalism. He feels those events will be necessary in order to rebuild as a center-right party. As much autobiography of a conservative as a political book, the narrative discusses Boot's arrival in Los Angeles from the Soviet Union at age 7 and his early awakenings to politics. His intellectual heroes were William F. Buckley and George Will, and his political hero was Ronald Reagan. He went to college in Berkeley, "a town that never seemed to have left the sixties behind," in the days of rallies and sit-ins. After writing editorials for a while, Boot joined the staff of the Christian Science Monitor. That neutral line, between opinion and news, has now been destroyed by the likes of Fox News, Infowars, and Breitbart. Added to that, the "alternative media" has become a massive phenomenon, giving rise to the populism proffered by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and others. The author's move to the Wall Street Journal and the Council on Foreign Relations cemented his role as an uncompromising conservative. As readers follow the GOP fall through Boot's eyes, many may wonder why it took him so long to leave. He states that the dark underside was always there. With Barry Goldwater in 1964, the GOP became a party of Southern whites, and the concept of states' rights was nothing more than a euphemism for racism. Furthermore, the party's refusal to support Barack Obama in his confrontation with the Kremlin contributed to the proliferation of Russian hacking. The Trump administration's complete lack of ethics, sheer incompetence, and Cabinet toadyism are driving home the final nail.Republicans particularly need to read this book; it's not really news to the Democrats. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
