http://www.nationalreview.com/node/435123/print The Cult of the Businessman
Trump’s rise is the latest in a series of related errors.
By Kevin D. Williamson — May 8, 2016
For about ten minutes in the 1990s, there was a movement (more notional than real) among some economically oriented conservatives to draft Bill Gates as a Republican presidential candidate.
That seems preposterous now, knowing what we know about Gates’s politics, but at the time his political views weren’t front-and-center. The Cult of Chairman Bill thought of Gates, the man who made being a nerd paradoxically cool, as being somehow beyond politics, an emissary from the near future who would be focused on empirically measureable results and pragmatic problem-solving, as though the organic entity that is the American people, their culture, and their economy were just an engineering problem in need of some creative thinking.
Gates was attractive to a certain kind of libertarian-ish conservative because they believed at the time, as many still do, that one of the Republican party’s great challenges is cultural, that it is mired in an aggressive Evangelical fundamentalism that is off-putting outside of a few relatively narrow precincts in the South and the West. People familiar with the actual conservative movement and the realities of Republican politics, where such Christian fervor rarely is encountered (even where one expects it), must be mystified by how large it looms in the minds of many, but it does: Barry Goldwater complained of it from time to time.
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