Max Boot Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

It's hard to know exactly when the Republican Party assumed the mantle of the stupid party.... After decades of masquerading as the stupid party, that's what it has become. But if an unapologetic ignoramus wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter.

Max Boot
Trump is a fascist. And that's not a term I use loosely or often. But he's earned it.

Max Boot
There is no shortage of Republican leaders today.

Max Boot
Republican Party is dead. It was wounded by the tea party absolutists who insisted on political purity and rejected any compromise. Now it has been killed by Donald Trump.

Max Boot
As media scramble to figure out Trump's evolving position on immigration, remember he cares *only* about feeding his ego. Policy irrelevant.

Max Boot
Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat who is more hawkish than President Obama and far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump, who is too unstable and erratic to be entrusted with the nuclear triad he has never heard of. Even in his prepared foreign policy speech couldn't pronounce Tanzania. For all her shortcomings (and there are many), Clinton would be far preferable to Trump.

Max Boot
John McCain in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012 and Marco Rubio this year. All of those candidates, different as they were, recognizably represented Reagan Republicanism.

Max Boot
Inside the administration are Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Their agenda is known as "neoconservatism," though a more accurate term might be "hard Wilsonianism." Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson's championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives.

Max Boot
Many Democrats took all this at face value and congratulated themselves for being smarter than the benighted Republicans. Here's the thing, though: The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now.

Max Boot
During the 2000 campaign, President Bush sounded very much like a realist, with his suspicions of "nation building" and his warnings about American hubris. Then along came 9/11. The National Security Strategy that he released in September—which calls for "encouraging free and open societies on every continent"—sounds as if it could have come straight from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible. I suppose that makes George W. Bush a neocon. If it's good enough for the president, it's good enough for me.

Max Boot
I have been a Republican as long as I can remember.

Max Boot
Pretty much all conservatives today agree on the need for a strong, vigorous foreign policy. There is no constituency for isolationism on the right, outside the Buchananite fever swamps. The question is how to define our interventionism.

Max Boot
Catering to populist anger with extremist proposals that are certain to fail is not a viable strategy for political success.

Max Boot
Reagan was what John F. Kennedy had been to an earlier generation: an inspirational figure who shaped my worldview. Reagan had his faults, like JFK, but he was optimistic and gentlemanly. He was pro-free trade and pro-immigration. He believed in limited government at home and American leadership abroad. That's what I believed in too — and that's what I thought the Republican Party stood for.

Max Boot
Bernie Sanders, a self-professed socialist who is almost as extreme in his own way as Trump is. I don't feel the Bern and I can't make common cause with those who do. Nor do I support Obama and his lead from behind foreign policy, which has created an opening for predators like Russia, Iran and Islamic State — dangers that would only grow under a Trump presidency.

Max Boot
There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the party of ideas, because it harvested so effectively the intellectual labor of conservative think tanks.... In recent years, however, the Republicans' relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers.

Max Boot
I haven't been mugged lately. I haven't even been accosted. I like to think I've been in touch with reality from day one, since I've never been a Trotskyite, a Maoist or even a Democrat. There's no "neo" in my conservatism. I don't deserve much credit for this, I might add, since I grew up in the 1980s, when conservatism was cool.

Max Boot
I only know one thing for sure: I won't vote for Trump. My hope is that he will lose by a landslide, and the Republican Party will come to its senses, rejecting both his ugly, nativist populism and the extreme, holier-than-thou conservatism represented by Ted Cruz.

Max Boot