This is amazing. I could spent all day watching these Weekly Standard chuds discover how their brand of capitalism treats workers.

Bill Kristol's famous policy advocacy was for regime change in Iraq and his latest suggestion is for regime change in China. He's a dangerous lunatic.

Bobo’s gonna proves that Both Sides Are Bad if it’s the last thing he ever does.

Hahahahaha get ****ed each and every Weekly Standard person! Fantastic.

Just to be clear, the Democratic Party is Sometimes Annoying But Fundamentally Good. The fascists and the armchair revolutionaries are Bad.

Sure there is. I'd say Hillary Clinton is "acceptable right".

Armchair revolutionaries = bad.

Armchair warmongers who want to invade other countries and kill millions of people = acceptable right. (HRC, Bill C., B.Obama, Joe Biden et al are at least Bill Kristol adjacent here)

*Musical notes*

Do you hear the people post

posting the words of angry men

Dang we lost the election. I guess if democracy says we destabilize China, fair's fair.

To boil this down even simpler, do we have a disagreement here between DVaut and you+Marshall about whether the George W. Bush administration, widely regarded as the worst of all time until Trump came along, is now "an acceptable right"? Because the W administration is basically what The Weekly Standard stood for in a nutshell.

The idea that the GWB administration was an acceptable right is a demonstration of how dangerous Very Serious People really are. If you have credentials, speak proper English, know how to put on the right suit with the right color tie and shoes, then as long as you don't use a bull horn instead of a dog whistle you can establish secret CIA prisons and torture sites, dismantle due process, bomb countries around the world relentlessly, etc etc and you're still within the Overton Window because that's always been about appearances rather than substance.

The Very Serious People who are calling for acceptance of a "moderate" right-wing characterize the opposition here as a bunch of Robespierres but in the real world they are just saying GWB > AOC.

I think we call the Acceptable Right "Democrats".

Another question: if liberals need an acceptable right for democracy to survive, is it enough to merely lament the loss of The Weekly Standard? Is it, in fact, our duty to:

?

Personally, I'm okay with the death of publications espousing awful, murderous opinions for decades, even if that publication has potentially worse fascists lurking to their right. If the only thing standing between us and fascism was invading Iraq and invading Afghanistan and making sure enough horrible people on the right had a platform to cheerlead doing so, because that was the only thing stopping them from sliding into even worse behavior...maybe the American project isn't worth saving anyway.


If it is somehow the responsibility of liberals to ensure the survival of an acceptable right (much like everything appears to be the responsibility of liberals; see all the Trump voters claiming we pushed them into his arms by not saying Merry Christmas anymore, etc), are there avenues of conservatism we could champion other than ones like the Weekly Standard? I mean, I disagree with lots of stuff on reason.com but I would prefer having the people there as overlords versus Bill Kristol or Gavin McInnes. Could we, perhaps, still cheerlead the downfall of TWS but maybe suggest their readers turn to Reason instead of Breitbart?

I mean, ffs, speaking of Breitbart, this theorem demands you not cheer too loudly for their downfall lest their readers turn to Stormfront or wherever Richard Spencer is these days.

Nah. **** all of these ghouls.

On its current trajectory the next GOP POTUS will be so bad you'll all be discussing whether the Trump regime was an acceptable right.

The second half of this week's Chapo (first half is talking with Liz Bruenig about Beto) deals nicely with all of this, talking first about liberal nostalgia for The Weekly Standard and then going into Ross Douthat's column on our benevolent WASP ruling class and how important it is to have nice boarding school kids bred to be our future leaders.

how about we all agree to shut down the 'acceptable' left in response?

If you go back to the tape, neither Marshall nor I were saying that liberals or leftists can or should be doing anything in particular to support TWS or any other centrist right publication. Marshall observed that it's bad to see TWS folding, and I think it is unquestionably true that losing TWS is bad if: (a) the reason it is folding is because the fascists control the right now, and (b) you are committed to a political system where people who aren't liberals or leftists can sometimes have political power. If you acknowledge that sometimes the right is going to be in control, it's quite bad if the right is horrible, and the more horrible they get, the worse it is. Maybe there's nothing you can do about it, but it's not at all out of line to observe that it's bad.

If all the people who read Breitbart start reading Stormfront, that would be an extremely bad thing! Why would you celebrate that?

It's certainly not bad for there to be opposition. If there were no opposition to the Democratic Party they would end up being no better than the Republican Party.

He didn't say all the readers of Breitbart would start reading Stormfront. Maybe he thinks some of them will start reading The Atlantic.

Okay, but...
1. If no action to help TWS is being advocated, then ultimately "should you cheerlead this or bemoan it" is kind of a silly thing to harangue about, it's like liberals debating what their rooting interests should be in the 2016 GOP primary when ultimately those rooting interests have no real world effect on anything.
2. Tying in with this quote:

Both of these posts implicitly suggest the only place for the right to go is further downward. My suggestion that we direct conservatives to try Reason instead of Breitbart has been ignored; note that my post said "lest" (i.e. potentially) their readers turn to Stormfront, your post took it for granted! In which case, I'd again suggest:

I don't think anyone would have a problem with that though. If there's going to be a New Libertarian Moment or something, I and Josh Marshall and probably a lot of people would think that was a really positive development. I'm not sure you're reading the room correctly though.

I definitely did not expect that, as a result of this discussion, the Reasonable Centrist position would be that we can't cheer too loudly for any media outlet imaginable to fall if they are not the single most fascist publication out there.