I love that Jonathan Hari article that John linked to earlier. Sometimes I wonder. Consider:
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!”
[….]On Libya, he (Donald Trump) says: “I would go in and take the oil… I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.” On Iraq, he says: “We stay there, and we take the oil… In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours.” It is a view that the world is essentially America’s property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to “stop what’s going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength.”
I mean this almost half-seriously: is there a way to justify this kind of unreconstructed mercantilism with the Haykekian principles that guide today’s most principled conservatives? Is there?
This is too much to ask of a mere Reason video, it may well require a new David Brooks book. Rest assured, though, if the Republican nominee talks this way — and he or she might, at least during the primaries — some brave Burkean soul will attempt to square this circle.
We’re the kind of country that’s built to lastPost + Comments (122)