The Weekly Standard, R.I.P. and Good Riddance!

Why The Weekly Standard and Its Neocon Ideology Belongs in History’s Dustbin

by Alexander Zubatov

Bill Kristol, in the center, flanked by the unsavory cast of characters whose policies his publication favored

Today marks the last publication date of Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard after a 23-year run, occasioning an outpouring of fond laments from all across the narrow spectrum spanning the gamut from the milquetoast neocon center-right to the milquetoast neoliberal center-left.

Let me be clear: the Never-Trumping, war-mongering, corporate-cronying Weekly Standard was not conservative but, rather, a neocon-job. They had some decent articles on culture, and I guess Gregg Easterbrook’s always entertaining “TMQ” will now have to find another home, but beyond that, this was a voice that it was high time to silence.

While I do not consider myself a conservative, I have a great deal of respect for and see the appeal of a true conservative ideology. True consistent conservativism in the Burkean mold entails the kind of thing many of the current French protesters (uniting segments of the right and the left) have in mind. Most of all, conservatism entails supporting the local over the global and respecting the wisdom of established local norms and traditions, which include a community’s traditional lifestyles, culture and religious norms. This is a broad vision of society, but I’ll offer a few examples of policy choices showing how it might play out:

• Not ramming the deracinated elites’ transgender ideology or other radical uprooting of gender and sexual norms down people’s throats.
• Not offending common sensibilities with public displays of lewdness of every sort.
• Supporting clean, natural, local food, and regulating where necessary to protect the food supply from interference by greedy multi-national corporations trying to deceive people into consuming their processed junk.
• Protecting local industries, and being willing to resort to subsidies, protectionist policies and other regulations to accomplish those ends.
• Not letting communities get rapidly overrun by unintegrated immigrants with radically different core belief systems and lifestyles.
• Not using “blasphemy” laws to punish people in Christian countries for offending delicate Islamic sensibilities (this is one The Weekly Standard got right) — but also not engaging in foolhardy crusades to impose our norms on Muslim countries (one that The Weekly Standard got terribly wrong, as I’ll discuss a bit more below).
• Putting people rather than multi-national industry and institutions at the center of policy choices, so that the needs and demands of Apple, Amazon the United Nations or the E.U. should not be prioritized over the needs and demands of citizens.
• As a logical corollary of the previous points, letting other nations and communities find their own way and not dictating to them, especially through military force, how their own populace needs to be governed.

If this is conservativism, The Weekly Standard had it wrong on virtually all fronts. At its most fundamental level, The Weekly Standard was a resolutely globalist rag: it was pro-corporate, pro-free-trade and pro-foreign-wars-and-misadventures. It notoriously supported the neocon-riddled George W. Bush administration’s disastrous Iraq War, a policy error that Trump led the Republican Party in disowning, at least after the fact. The Iraq War, of course, was a gargantuan waste of trillions of dollars that unsettled Iraq and much of the Middle East, while unleashing ISIS on the world.

The neoliberal Hillary Clinton declaring premature victory in Libya

It should not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention that the globalist neocons of The Weekly Standard proceeded to become resolute NeverTrumpers. The reality is that Hillary Clinton — with her support for the Iraq War, her cheerleading for Obama’s needless deposing of Qaddafi in Libya, unleashing more terrorism and chaos, her support of mass immigration, her support for aggressive intervention in Syria, her arrogant, dangerously militaristic attitudes towards Putin and agitation for revolt in the Ukraine and her record of consistent support for the big banks, Saudi oil magnates and multinational corporations that funded her — was far closer than Trump to the likes of Weekly Standard-issue neocons like George W. Bush, Jeb Bush or the hyper-militaristic muddleheaded “maverick” John McCain.

Was there ever a foreign war this guy didn’t want to fight?

Trump, on the other hand, affirmed true conservative principles by placing America and American industries first, opposing unbridled immigration, condemning the Iraq War and our other foreign misadventures, opposed our throwing more money into the black hole of a Cold War dinosaur like NATO while the European nations NATO ostensibly protected from a nation that no longer existed (viz., the former Soviet Union) didn’t bear their own weight, was willing to renegotiate bad trade deals and resort to protectionism and regulation to defend American industry against foreign abusers like China, was willing to demand that American corporations stop outsourcing labor and building factories abroad rather than at home and opposed domestic academic and cultural elites’ attempts to impose their unpopular cultural norms on the rest of us. Trump was by no means perfect — his numerous personal foibles, intemperance, impatience, laziness and susceptibility to manipulation by neocon neophytes like Jared Kushner or business-as-usual military brass bozos like H.R. McMaster — have already resulted in many compromises to the policies on which he campaigned, but the reality is that Trump, for all those flaws, was and remains worlds better from the standpoint of any true conservative than Hillary Clinton or even run-of-the-mill neocon Republicans of the Bush and McCain variety. There is a good reason Steve Bannon and The Weekly Standard both correctly saw much more in common between the economic nationalist right-wing populism of Trump and the economic nationalist left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders than either of these two had with the centrist pro-corporate internationalism of Hillary Clinton and the Bush brigade.

The Weekly Standard’s band of neocons dominated the administration of this fellow, whom I consider the worst President in my lifetime. The result? Disaster, both at home (recession) and abroad (the Iraq War).

With all of this in mind, The Weekly Standard was the standard-bearer of a bankrupt ideology that put faceless corporations, multi-national entities, costly foreign alliances and entanglements and endless, pricey and pointless military crusades over the interests of actual human Americans. So, whether you are a true conservative or a left-loving socialist, I’m here to damped down your grief: you have no reason to mourn the passing of a publication whose expiration date was way past due.

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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”

Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Tablet, Times Higher Education, Quillette, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.

He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).