PanThe Baffler\"Boot’s faux confessional is instructive [regarding the stubborn absurdities of our time] since despite his dizzying reversals and non-sequiturs, he ends up arguing that there is a direct line to be drawn from William F. Buckley to Donald J. Trump—the latter just corroded (as opposed to doubled down on) the former. Likewise, he admits America has always been beset by misogyny, racism, and an unstable class imbalance, but argues that the answer is to restore the same center-right politics that built and maintained this crisis-ridden order ... It would be nice to think that someone being paid extravagant attention and cash to write a book on partisan politics in the United States would obtain a basic grasp of the relevant fault lines. As any half-sentient observer of Boot nevertheless knows, the opposite is the case ... No one does dumb sincerity better than Max Boot ... For all his talk of leaving the right, [Boot] hasn’t wandered too far from home ... It is a testament to Boot’s failure to depart from his boyhood room that [Middle Eastern] lives and deaths remain just as invisible to him as those of Churchill’s countless victims. Whether racism has anything to do with this failure is a question neither Boot nor his fans will ever ponder.\
