{"id":22393,"date":"2017-07-08T10:33:50","date_gmt":"2017-07-08T15:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=22393"},"modified":"2017-07-08T10:40:35","modified_gmt":"2017-07-08T15:40:35","slug":"american-conservativism-from-innovators-to-imitators-to-idiots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=22393","title":{"rendered":"American Conservativism &#8211; From innovators to imitators to idiots."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I highly recommend <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/07\/06\/opinion\/conservatives-media.html?_r=0\">a thoughtful NYT column<\/a> about the Republican Party&#8217;s devolution from William F. Buckley, a man I worked very hard to understand fifty years ago when he was a conservative Sisyfus climbing America&#8217;s liberal mountain, to the &#8220;<em>idiot<\/em>&#8221; Sean Hannity. Buckley&#8217;s vocabulary was intentionally intimidating. For example, I still remember looking up the meaning of the word &#8220;avuncular&#8221; from one of his columns. That was back when I kept a pocket sized notepad chock full of fifty-cent words that were new to me.<\/p>\n<p>Looking back on Buckley its hard not to appreciate a man who wrote this appraisal of our current President almost twenty years ago &#8211; the text taken from the NYT column:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In March 2000, he trained his sights on &#8216;the narcissist&#8217; and &#8216;demagogue&#8217; Donald Trump. &#8216;When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized By its reflection,&#8217; he wrote in a prophetic short essay in Cigar Aficionado. &#8216;The resistance to corrupting demagogy&#8217; he warned, &#8216;should take first priority&#8217; for Americans.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I highly recommend a thoughtful NYT column about the Republican Party&#8217;s devolution from William F. Buckley, a man I worked very hard to understand&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,127],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22393"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22398,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22393\/revisions\/22398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}