Source: www.lewrockwell.com
By Jack Kerwick

Charles Krauthammer, famed Fox News “all-star,” has died at the age of 68.

Understandably enough, his colleagues have been effusive in their eulogizing of the man who has long been regarded as a sage of the conservative movement.  Even while he lived, and long before he would be diagnosed with the disease that would end his life, no one in the Big Conservative media, even when they disagreed with him (over, say, Donald Trump), would argue with Krauthammer without first qualifying their remarks with assurances that they meant no disrespect to the good doctor.

Krauthammer, doubtless, exemplified some true character excellences.  He was intelligent, certainly, and, unlike many, Krauthammer had a calmness of mind that enabled him to be among the most articulate proponents of the ideas that he shared with his fellow partisans.  Nor is there anyone who can fail to be moved by the determination, indeed, the courage, that a man must possess to become as professionally and personally accomplished as Krauthammer became despite the severe physical obstacles with which life burdened him.

Yet these commendable attributes of his aside, as a well-known commentator, even a commentator who enjoyed the distinction of being a “public intellectual,” Krauthammer had a track record—a record extending back decades—that was less than stellar.

In truth, it was abysmal.

Had Krauthammer’s not been among the more prominent faces of today’s “conservative movement,” then we could safely ignore the hagiographical-type commentary that is now being cranked out on him.  Since things are otherwise, however, the truth must be told.

For starters, Krauthammer self-identified as a Great Society Democrat until as recently as the 1980s.  He wrote for the left-leaning The New Republic and, even after he became a Reaganite, Krauthammer became a weekly columnist, and resident “conservative,” for the left-wing Washington Post.  He retained this position until the illness that would claim his life forced him into retirement in August of 2017.

Yet Krauthammer was no conservative.  Hendrik Hertzberg, with whom Krauthammer worked at The New Republic in the 1980s, once wrote in The New Yorker that when he first met Krauthammer in 1978, the latter was “70 percent Mondale liberal, 30 percent ‘Scoop Jackson’ Democrat”—meaning that he took “a hard line on Israel and relations with the Soviet Union.” Throughout the Reagan years, Krauthammer remained socially and culturally liberal-left while becoming “a full-bore foreign-policy neoconservative.”

In 2009, Hertzberg characterized Krauthammer as “90-10 Republican.”  Hertzberg, himself a man of the left, intended to suggest that his one-time colleague underwent a political-ideological transformation of sorts over the decades.  Perhaps it is precisely because of the constraints of his own ideological blinders that Hertzberg failed to see that his terms of choice for Krauthammer were but different grammatical variations for what essentially amounts to one and the same viewpoint: Krauthammer, remarkably, preserved the ideological identity that he had cemented for himself by the mid-1980s.

In other words, while Krauthammer would adopt the characteristically Republican rhetoric of “limited government,” he exerted his significant influence advocating for one policy after the other—domestic as well as foreign—that exponentially expanded and consolidated the powers and scope of the national government.

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