What is the deal with Max Boot and why do I keep making fun of him? Well, for one thing, his name is really short and fits easily in a headline. Another is that, well, he has a habit of falling short of the truth—the whole truth, that is.
El Maxo is a very solid never-Trumper, for which I respect him (seriously), though, still, with some major reservations, as I earlier explained in my review of his true confession, “Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: A major mea culpa just a few culpas shy of a load”.
Well, Max is still at it, and so am I. In a recent column, “How did we get a president who advocates injecting disinfectant? ‘Mrs. America’ offers an answer.”, Max references the current Hulu extended biopic on long-time right-wing media star Phyllis Schlafly, who led the successful charge on the nearly adopted Equal Rights Amendment back in the seventies and remained a severe thorn in the side of the feminist movement up until her death in 2016.
The meat of Max’s article is really a link, a link to an article by another long-time hobby horse of mine, Ronald Radosh, whom I alternately trash and praise, “Phyllis Schlafly, ‘Mrs. America’, Was a Secret Member of the John Birch Society”. As Ron, another passionate anti-Trumper, documents, Schlafly, who always denied being a Bircher, was in fact a member until 1964, when she secretly resigned her secret membership, so that she could shill respectably for Barry Goldwater,1 as she did in her best-selling right-wing rhapsody to Barry, A Choice, Not An Echo, which, as Max tells us, was chock full of standard Bircherite fantasies about establishment types like David Rockefeller, Dean Rusk and Arthur Hays Sulzberger secretly sabotaging the nomination of “real Republicans” and nominating sure losers in their place in order to further their true, hidden goal, “perpetuating the Red empire”.
All of what Max and Ron have to tell us is true, I’m sure, and Phyllis did help pave the way for Herr Donald, but SO DID THEY! They were both enthusiastic participants in the big, mean neocon machine that got us into Iraq, costing thousands of American lives, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, squandering trillions of dollars in the process, leaving our position in the Middle East infinitely weaker than before! Because everybody hates us! With good reason!
I’m glad you guys had the decency to recognize Donald Trump’s utter lack of conscience from the start, and the courage to denounce it publicly. Yet Max in particular continues to pump continued U.S. aggression overseas, in terms scarcely separable from Kiplingesque racism. Exposing the sins of other conservatives is fine, guys. But you could also use a bath yourselves.
Afterwords
To go back to Phyllis a little, though she had many crackpot ideas indeed, she was a savvy crackpot, as Joanna Weiss elucidates in her recent piece for Politico, “What Phyllis Schlafly’s Heirs Could Learn From Her”, pointing out that in her frequent debates with feminists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, Phyllis, by refusing to agree with her opponents’ “Manhattan” preconceptions, could lead them to fly into a rage, denouncing her as a “witch”, for example, while sweet little Phyllis just sat there as cool and polite as could be, allowing her opponents to caricature themselves as “angry” women.
It could also be pointed out that little Phyllis was not the only one with a hidden past. Betty Friedan was no more the average homemaker than Phyllis was. When young Friedan was a passionate Marxist, as described in a book published back in 2000 by Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique": The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Furthermore, Friedan had what one might call a “tangled” personal life, trading insults, and then taking them back, with her ex-husband, and later having a long affair with a married man.
It’s “amusing”, a bit, to think that almost all the “terrible” things that Phyllis was warning us about back in the 70s have come true, and we’re the better for them.
1. Birch Society founder Robert Welch notoriously accused President Eisenhower of being a Soviet agent, a charge so absurd that William F. Buckley very reluctantly felt that it was necessary for conservatives like himself to publicly denounce Welch, though as delicately as possible, to avoid hurting the feelings of all those JBS members, who were, after all, the salt of the earth. All this led JBS members like Schlafly to be almost as discreet about their affiliations as the communists themselves.
