Reddit reviews The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right is 288 pages and was published on Tuesday, so I'm guessing Kavanaugh is more "convenient foil" than "impetuous" for him leaving the right.

It's pretty remarkable the extent to which nearly every uncharitable thing that has ever been said about neocons - that they're closeted Trotskyites, think-tank ideologues, hucksters, just completely alien to any conservative tradition and indifferent to any real American concern - has been vindicated to some degree or the other in the Trump era. I'm not just saying that to be snide, because Boot (even more so than Rubin or Kristol or anyone else) is a rather stark and remarkable example of it - quite recently he was incensed when, in reaction to one of Boot's tantrums, Ross Douthat gently suggested that Boot was never a real conservative - he was always just an interloper with his own agenda, a "democratic imperialist" who wrote reams in praise of an imperial vision that sent thousands of Christian boys (and girls too; that's what sets America apart from the barbarians) from the heartland to die for reasons that still aren't quite clear to most people.

Boot protested that ok, he admittedly never cared about what social conservatives wanted, but he supported some other non-FP things that conservatives also supported. But when in Rome, you have to do at least some of the things the Romans do, and Boot would have a better case that he wasn't just going through the motions of conservatism-signaling if he hadn't just written a book tracing the "corrosion of conservatism" to Barry Goldwater - this after years of calling Goldwater a principled conservative who would have been appalled by Trump. Now of course you don't have to read Barry Goldwater if you want to claim you're conservative or a right-winger -- I outright refuse to read Barry Goldwater -- but the fact is that a lot of the "principled conservatives" are big fans of Barry Goldwater, up to and including Ronald Reagan himself. Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, George Will, all those guys in the tweed suits and bow-ties at cocktail parties who fret about the capital gains tax, the fabled pre-Trump Republicans whose party has been hijacked - Goldwater is a big part of their mythology.

It's not surprising that Boot finds a friendly audience in Jonathan Chait, the nutter who thinks Trump has been a Kremlin agent for the last 30 years, but it is surprising that even the disgruntled Republicans who say they sympathize with Boot haven't read what he's been saying or tracked the "evolution" of his views. Joe Scarborough, for instance, wrote a blurb for Boot's new book praising Boot as "a conservative inspired by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.......rightly offended by the excesses of Trump's Republican Party". This despite Boot's own admission that he'd never read anything Goldwater had written before Trump became President, that he lied for years about reading Goldwater, and when he finally got around to reading Goldwater, he came to the conclusion that Goldwater was a race-baiting lunatic who sowed the seeds of Trumpism.