Will 2018 Be The Year Conservatives Admit They Were Wrong?

The National Review just admitted it was wrong about stop and frisk, so I suppose anything is possible.

The intellectual backbone of the conservative movement spent most of 2017 just as horrified as the rest of us spent it. They learned, to their shame, that their supposed base was never in it for “limited government” principles. They were just in it for the bigotry. Just look at what happened with Obamacare: turns out their white voters really want the government to guarantee a right to health insurance, just as long as they don’t have to thank a black man for helping them.

There were important conservative victories in 2017. Most notably, they’ve managed to reshape the courts with the kind of young, white, male, hard-right judges they’ve always wanted. Having a racist base is useful when the only thing you want in a judge is that he be white and lack compassion. And the tax bill achieves a longstanding conservative goal of starving the government of money while helping the rich white donor class. The conservative hopes that Donald Trump be a useful idiot were not entirely unfounded.

But for the most part, installing an authoritarian bigot and sexual predator at the head of their party has done irreparable damage to conservatives. Being the party of Nazis and pedophiles robs conservatives of any intellectual credibility. Conservatives are strong and powerful and terrifying even, but they are a joke. When you read what passed for conservative intellectual thought in 2017, all you’ll see is white men trying to claim that groping women and chasing ghosts is acceptable as long as tax cuts are part of the bargain. It’s pathetic.

As we enter 2018, I wonder if we’re starting to see the first glimpses of conservatives trying to get some of their credibility back. You can’t expect the conservative movement to wholesale renounce the politics of white privilege. I mean, for a lot of these guys, being a white man is literally all they have going for them. It’s too much to expect that they actually willingly reduce themselves to a state of equality.

But they can at least apologize for being privileged white douchebags whose theories have indirectly lead to a resurgence of white supremacy. And, shockingly to me, at least a few conservatives seem ready to apologize. First, there was Max Boot(!) last week, suddenly waking up to the fact that he’s been a white guy this whole time. Check out this headline:

2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege

I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at “political correctness.” The Trump era has opened my eyes.

Max Boot is woke now?!

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Of particular importance to me is how Boot acknowledges the basic reality that police brutality exists. Granted, he couldn’t be bothered to just listen to black people, he needed video evidence, but still:

I used to take a reflexively pro-police view of arguments over alleged police misconduct, thinking that cops were getting a bum rap for doing a tough, dangerous job. I still have admiration for the vast majority of police officers, but there is no denying that some are guilty of mistreating the people they are supposed to serve. Not all the victims of police misconduct are minorities — witness a blonde Australian woman shot to death by a Minneapolis police officer after she called 911, or an unarmed white man shot to death by a Mesa, Arizona, officer while crawling down a hotel hallway — but a disproportionate share are.

The videos do not lie. One after another, we have seen the horrifying evidence on film of cops arresting, beating, even shooting black people who were doing absolutely nothing wrong or were stopped for trivial misconduct. For African-Americans, and in particular African-American men, infractions like jaywalking or speeding or selling cigarettes without tax stamps can incite corporal, or even capital, punishment without benefit of judge or jury. African-Americans have long talked about being stopped for “driving while black.” I am ashamed to admit I did not realize what a serious and common problem this was until the videotaped evidence emerged. The iPhone may well have done more to expose racism in modern-day America than the NAACP.

No, Max, the NAACP has done a lot to expose racism, you just haven’t been willing to listen to them because what they were trying to tell you didn’t fit with your pro-white worldview. But, whatever: actually listening to black people is like a master class, and Boot is just now signing up for “Introduction To The World You’ve Been Living In, All This Time.”

And it’s not just Boot. The National Review came out yesterday with a shocking (for them) piece:

We Were Wrong about Stop-and-Frisk

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Mmm… I love 2018 already.

Like many conservatives, I had grave concerns about curtailing the New York City police department’s controversial tactic of stopping and frisking potential suspects for weapons. I was inclined to defer to the police when they protested that they needed the option to stop, question, and frisk New Yorkers on a mere reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing instead of probable cause that the targeted person had committed a crime. Restricting the tactic, I thought, would cause an uptick, maybe even a spike, in crime rates. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who made ending stop-and-frisk the centerpiece of his successful 2013 campaign for mayor, struck me as a man who was cynically willing to tolerate an increase in crime if he thought it to his political advantage to amplify leftist voters’ core belief that policing was out of control.

Today in New York City, use of stop-and-frisk, which the department justified via the 1968 Terry v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling, has crashed. Yet the statistics are clear: Crime is lower than ever. It’s possible that crime would be even lower had stop-and-frisk been retained, but that’s moving the goalposts. I and others argued that crime would rise. Instead, it fell. We were wrong.

This could be the start of something. If conservatives could just acknowledge that some of their racist and s**tty arguments were racist and s**tty, we might be on the road back to a broadly agreed-upon reality upon which we can base our political and legal debates. To defeat Trumpism, liberals and conservatives don’t have to agree on the solutions, but we need to agree on the facts: racism exists, the cops target minorities, climate change is real, pedophilia is bad, UCF was one of the four best teams in the country.

Trump has proven that at least a third of the country will believe literally anything. Conservatives have used those idiots for a generation to push through their agenda, but now those idiots are actually in charge. The stupid people won’t just cede power, but we can start to take it back if conservatives would just stop feeding the stupid.

So, as Sam Seaborn might say, let’s ignore the fact that Max Boot and the National Review are late to the party and embrace the fact that they showed up at all.

2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege [Foreign Policy]
We Were Wrong about Stop-and-Frisk [National Review]


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.