Will and Krauthammer get it - #NeverTrump

I've never been a big George Will fan, he's always seemd a little to smug and self-righteous to me, but in yesterday's article "Donald Trump’s rise reflects American conservatism’s decay" he nails it.

I said a few weeks ago that Trump was using "The Road to Serfdom" as an instruction manual not as a cautionary tale.  Will backs me up on that:

“Charismatic authority,” wrote Max Weber in 1915, seven years before Mussolini’s march on Rome, causes the governed to submit “because of their belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person . . . . Charismatic rule thus rests upon the belief in magical powers, revelations and hero worship.” A demagogue’s success requires a receptive demos, and Trump’s ascendancy reflects progressivism’s success in changing America’s social norms and national character by de-stigmatizing dependency.

Under his presidency, Trump says, government will have all the answers: “I am your voice. . . . I alone can fix it.” The pronoun has unlimited antecedents: “I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one.”

That is the very essence of the charismatic leader that Hayek described.

Will goes on to name a number of the same sins that I had:

Kelo
Planned Economy
Centralized Authority based upon his cult of personality

Those are only a few of his shortcomings, but at least they are being enumerated. 

Krauthammer also gets it in "When facts, logic and history don’t matter"

After 15 months, the suspension of disbelief has become so ubiquitous that we hardly notice anymore. We are operating in an alternate universe where the geometry is non-Euclidean, facts don’t matter, history and logic have disappeared.