Durantyism Is Back

Kevin Williamson wrote beautifully about the rebirth of Durantyism on the right:

I understand not liking the United States—I really, really do understand: As I have written before, I still love my native country, but I think we should start seeing other people. Ours is an often ugly, often vulgar, spiritually sick society. But turning instead for inspiration to a brutal police state in which 1 out of 5 families do their necessary business in a hole in the ground is—counterintuitive! Finding inspiration in the gulag where Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich currently is held as a political prisoner—a real political prisoner, not the victims of the “patriot purge” of Tucker Carlson’s daffy imagination—is also counterintuitive. But, then, what Carlson was up to in Moscow wasn’t journalism—journalism is what Evan Gershkovich did, and what Tucker did was, at best, tourism. It is tempting to call him a useful idiot, but he isn’t an idiot. He knows what he is doing. I myself don’t speak Russian, but I think I could read the look on Putin’s face, which said: “Good doggie.”

https://thedispatch.com/article/the-full-duranty/

And gosh, how humiliating it is to see an American being a good doggie for people who despise Americans for a living. America gave Tucker everything. Dude truly can’t complain. Yet he betrays the most wonderful country in the world, a country that everybody (including Russians and Putin himself) painfully wants to like them, for a bucket of slop he’s asked to get on his knees to lick.