Hillary Clinton, "2016’s real conservative", and “the candidate of the status quo” accord
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Neocon James Kirchick joins a slew of right-wing pundits who support war hawk Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump
Wall Street has thrown its weight behind Hillary Clinton. Some of the biggest names in the U.S. right-wing establishment have also expressed support for her.
Another neocon added his name to the pro-Clinton list on Thursday. James Kirchick penned an op-ed in The Daily Beast titled “Hillary Clinton Is 2016’s Real Conservative — Not Donald Trump.”
“Clinton is the candidate of the status quo, something that conservatives, by definition, are supposed to uphold,” Kirchick writes.
“Hillary Clinton is the one person standing between America and the abyss,” he says, seeing her as a mealymouthed centrist candidate with “better conservative credentials” than the alternatives.
Trump is “a brashly authoritarian populist,” Kirchick continues — a “charlatan, a gruesome amalgamation of the Monopoly Man and Elmer Gantry,” who is transforming “the Republican Party into an ethno-nationalist populist movement.”
On the other side, Kirchick pillories self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, hysterically accusing him of helping Trump and “risk[ing] the country’s future.”
“In the center remains Hillary Clinton, who, whatever her manifold faults, is the only candidate promising some form of economic, social and political continuity with the present,” Kirchick concludes.
Clinton is “the clear conservative choice,” he maintains, the only one who can preserve the status quo.
Kirchick is a hawkish pundit and fellow at Foreign Policy Initiative, a neoconservative think tank where leading neocons Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan sit on the board of directors.
Kagan, who served as foreign policy adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain in his 2008 presidential campaign and has been described as “the neoconservative movement’s chief foreign policy theorist,” has also strongly come out in support of Clinton.
In his defense of Clinton, Kagan told The New York Times he is “comfortable with her on foreign policy,” noting it is “something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
Kirchick and Kagan have joined numerous right-wing confrères in endorsing Clinton for president
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