The Last Millennial from Reagan Country

In his May 1967 essay “A Guide to Reagan Country”, James Q. Wilson sought to explain what motivated the people of Southern California who elected Governor Reagan. Wilson was adamant to his Northeastern friends: “we must, I think, take Reaganism seriously. It will be with us for a long time under one guise or another. We will not take it seriously by trying to explain it away as if it were something sold at one of those orange-juice stands or preached from the pulpit at some cultist church.” In Wilson’s view, there was something deeper and more pre-ideological at work in mid-century California politics. Wilson sought to survey the landscape and the people of Southern California, to understand them on their own terms and how their way of life informed their politics. He was a Catholic who grew up in Long Beach in the 1930s and 40s, full of Midwestern Evangelical Protestants and their children. When his family drove out of town to attend mass with “Mexican farmhands and Dutch Catholic dairymen,” he knew he was different.

Charlie Kirk was different too. Last Wednesday, the conservative activist was assassinated at age 31 while answering questions and debating college students at Utah Valley University. I must confess that I didn’t fully understand Kirk’s role in politics until the weeks leading up to his death. For a while, I was too dismissive and saw him as just another one of the Rush Limbaugh imitators our online culture generates. I consider this a non-partisan descriptor; it is one shared by the left-wing online commentator Hasan Piker, who opined in major news outlets about Kirk after his death. He planned to debate Charlie Kirk later this month. Piker admitted in an interview earlier this year that he sees himself as a “reverse Rush Limbaugh,” and he is not wrong about that. But similar to the phrase “reverse racism”, the directional adjective is obscuring. Piker really is another Limbaugh, another man on the microphone for hours comfortably discussing the news, his enemies, his friends, and sometimes saying vulgar jokes or worse along the way.

Kirk had his Limbaugh moments, but he was also far more than that because of what his faith drove him to do. Similar to James Q. Wilson, he was different. Many fellow young Republicans I know in DC grieving for Kirk’s death are devout Catholics or secular. Kirk was an Evangelical, a form of Protestantism that was ascending in mainstream American culture during the 1970s, stagnated by the 2000s, and finally lost out to our fractured yet firmly technophile mass culture that took off in the 2010s. Most Republican professionals under 30 shaped their worldviews during the 2010s in response (but not always refutation) to this culture, and almost always at a university. Kirk dropped out and never finished his undergraduate degree. He didn’t need to.

More than denomination or education, Kirk’s personality stood out among other young conservatives. There was something quite mid-century about him; here was the definitive right-wing happy warrior. I never met Charlie Kirk. But every single friend I know who did told me about this optimism and friendliness when they met. It reminds me of the academic Cass Sunstein’s beautiful notes on the former president who left office in a scandal. The personal warmth underneath the public persona left an impression. It was different.

After Kirk’s death, sober condemnation of political violence was given out by virtually all nationally elected politicians alongside a very online mix of mourning, debate, and provocation. This juxtaposition is curious, but most analysis of it has leaned too partisan; the very nature of internet micro-blogging is that it cannot sustainably facilitate either mourning or debate. Many are frustrated by this stubborn fact, but it won’t go away. When we mourn, we often attend a gathering at a burial ground or a church to do so. When we debate, we begin with clear participants and premises. The nature of social media is that neither of these things can be sustained. Social media is a space for provoking above all else, and provocation is what gets rewarded by its incentives. Moderation cannot really change the nature of the product.

The Best Lack All Conviction

What made Charlie Kirk different is that he wasn’t just online and provoking. He was on the ground in college campuses, talking to students one on one. There are gotcha clip compilations out there on Youtube, to be sure. But there are also long hours of Kirk simply asking students to walk through their ideas while he quietly listens before replying. These will be too quickly forgotten on the internet precisely because they don’t provoke. He had time for every random teenage college student who stood in line. He didn’t need to be there, but chose to be. He told everyone that his mission was rooted in his faith, and Wilson’s sociology of the mid-century Los Angeles suburbs is relevant to the culture this faith encourages.

It was clear to Wilson that Midwestern Protestants helped build the mid-century culture of Los Angeles: “they brought an essential ingredient of Southern California life—fundamentalist Protestant individualism. We like to think of the store-front church as being a Negro invention; not so. I remember scores of white store-front churches—mostly of small Pentecostal and Adventist sects—lining the main streets of Long Beach.” In contrast to his church, the “preaching was evangelical, fundamentalist, and preoccupied with the obligation of the individual to find and enter into a right relationship with God, with no sacraments, rituals, covenants, or grace to make it easy.”

Wilson was observing not just the coming rise of moral majority politics, which has since diminished in our day, but a recurring old American faith in using plain and straightforward English to discuss the most important matters of all. This is still with us, even if we occasionally wish it had more grace. This straightforward civic faith was important to understanding Reagan’s appeal to Southern California voters in 1966 during his controversial campaign against UC Berkeley, and his resulting governance. Charlie Kirk tapped into that distinctly individual appeal throughout his astounding career.

Few could build political networks like Kirk, but any could walk away from his earlier claim to fame after doing so. For Kirk, what made debating college students important is that every single person has a soul, which is to say, a part of them that is not dictated by the material makeup of the body, but is always open to pondering and yearning for truth. Kirk debated college students and took mockery for it (why was this right-wing man well into his late 20s still debating undergraduates?) not only because he saw them as equal citizens, but because he believed in that soul. He ruthlessly criticized his opponents on the left for organizing politics and increasingly universities themselves by race and gender. He saw this as a very dangerous development for the education of young citizens.

As the liberal writer Maya Bodnick described two year ago, this development also destroys debate. I witnessed it myself. One time in college, a fellow student literally begged me for forgiveness because he hadn’t asked for my permission ahead of his opening speech arguing for the creation of parochial LGBTQ schools. It was a disconcerting situation. He spoke to me in a strange tone, as if I were both a small child incapable of opting out of his controversial debate topic, but also a powerful judge, capable of taking great offense at his error and enforcing a very real punishment. The fear in his eyes came from the fact that college debate was competitive, lively, and yet spiritually broken. I quickly forgave him and moved on at the time, but in truth I was disturbed by his premise for apologizing to begin with.

College debate was at times a very quiet struggle session. I don’t know when that started, only that it was the case when I was there. It too often consisted of young liberal white men eagerly agreeing with female and non-white critics that they were privileged beneficiaries of debate’s customs and rules. This consensus was an empty one, because the rules of debate were in fact colorblind and thus offered the same men agreeing to denounce it with no clear path to undo the alleged conspiracy. The result of this contradiction was a perpetual state of dishonor. Why would these men both agree the system is rigged and yet do nothing substantive but apologize for it? This contradiction quietly infuriated some participants. It seemed that a hidden privilege was being perpetually guarded by being acknowledged. Another meeting on judging standards was always around the corner, but did little to resolve the problem. Such a system provides an education in nihilism, even if it appears to proceed more politely than any right-wing campus speaker controversy. Appearances can be deceiving.

Finding Kirk’s Legacy at the Vigil

When I joined the very long line for the vigil at the Kennedy Center last night, I never made it in the door. Even though I reserved my virtual ticket ahead of time, the space had filled up, and then the overflow room hosted next door was filled up too. I ended up joining a small circle of three to four dozen people outside, who prayed together and then took turns to discuss what Charlie Kirk meant to them. It was not like what you can too easily find online. I didn’t hear any frenzied discussion of “the left” or any anger at all. This isn’t to say nobody voiced frustration. One Indian woman described her wariness of putting her kids in public schools and choice to homeschool instead. Many discussed being in spaces where they wanted to talk but felt they would alienate others. One self-described biracial girl explained how Kirk’s campus debates had helped her learn to talk about politics with different family members.

She thanked those on the left side of the aisle who had condemned the attack, and briefly suggested those who praise political violence should be fired. But that was the closest to partisan criticism I heard that night; she didn’t suggest we should gather a list or go after random people for criticizing Charlie Kirk. No one else even mentioned Kirk’s critics or even his enemies, and only once or twice were critics implied when praising Kirk’s steadfastness. While the sun slowly set, every contribution focused on how Kirk helped them rediscover their personal faith, how Kirk helped them to successfully disagree respectfully with peers they were afraid to discuss politics with, and how Kirk kept some of their friends from going down darker political rabbit holes. I realized when leaving after a closing prayer that the discussion portion had gone on for at least an hour and a half. I occasionally strained to hear over the planes flying into the airport across the river, but I stayed. Most of us stayed there the entire time.

Charlie Kirk is no longer with us. The shrewd political essayist Tanner Greer reminds us that it remains an open question if the small-r republican spirit he brought forward will endure in politics. Greer is to right to note that Kirk had many political opponents, but far fewer actual enemies, including some on the right who seek power by means other than votes. One of his real enemies on the left decided to kill him one day. We will learn more details about the exact motives that lead to this horrific murder. But Kirk’s faith was anything but abrupt or driven by hatred of his enemies. It came from a steady and repeated engagement with other people. It was not, to borrow once more from Wilson, one of those things “sold at one of those orange-juice stands or preached from the pulpit at some cultist church.” It was real. I know this because, last night, I sort of did what Kirk did countless times in his college campus debating career. I traveled to another place to hear people talk about what was in their soul. Now I understand why Charlie Kirk did this. We must take him seriously. His faith will be with us for a long time under one guise or another.

Ganesh was right. It is well known that President Donald Trump is searching for a legacy. He is also trying, like his predecessor Joe Biden, to find a reasonable conclusion to the Russo-Ukrainian war. To many liberal critics and a few paleoconservative ones, this is an outrageous claim of continuity to propose between the previous Democratic president and the current Republican one. But the most extreme doubt was always a frenzied conspiracy theory on the campaign trail, if briefly fashionable with some intelligent and foolish people. The record of Trump 1 and Trump 2 on Europe so far has proven the election propaganda wrong time and time again.

Donald Trump is not simplemindedly abandoning Ukraine (which he armed to the teeth in his first term while demanding Europe’s leaders untangle themselves from Russian energy), but triangulating between European desires for him to be a good Atlanticist and European desires for America to take up the bill of enforcing European security and whatever borders the Russo-Ukrainian war ends with. These are not the same thing. Nor is talking about your shared values and getting Germany (the continent’s largest economy and most important nation) to uncap its debt limit on defense. President Biden talked plenty about shared values with European leaders while admirably trying to triangulate Ukrainian nationalist demands for support. But he never sufficiently focused on Germany, the most important nation in Europe. Values are important, but they cannot replace actual nations and their decisions.

Donald Trump is a nationalist who talks mostly about transactions. Accordingly, he has been ruthless in his political dealings across the Atlantic. His maneuvers on the Ukraine matter effectively scared the German Green Party into reforming the military debt limit with a conservative German Chancellor, against the principles of their whole party history. Trump was certainly ruder than a Democratic president would be to center-left politicians in Europe. But since they (like most American Democrats) are uninterested in sustained defense spending on its own terms, his demand had the benefit of working. Trump’s team understands that putting America First is not the same as putting America alone. Ganesh could have written as much given his wise column’s concluding line: “The ultimate rule of negotiating with Trump is that no one will be worse at it than an intellectual.”

Unfortunately, a similarly dismal read applies to Janan Ganesh this last June. The very same week his newspaper reported on the new European defense budget goals, Ganesh was blowing the dust off Robert Kagan’s 2003 book, as if a neoconservative thesis from two decades ago1, and not the current American president, had just forced the Atlantic alliance towards a stronger path to put money where its mouth is. Two weeks ago, Ganesh went a step further and decided to become an outright parody of a liberal intellectual columnist altogether. “The worst of all worlds is one in which Trump blows hot and cold, and we are living in it.”

The old saying goes that a liberal won’t take his own side in an argument. Ganesh, always more creative than the average liberal pundit, demanded reality to undo his vindicated prediction. He writes as if Trump should abandon Europe’s defense at once so he may have a comfortable room temperature. “[Europe] might fail, of course, but there could be little doubt what should be done,” proclaimed Ganesh in ridiculous demand for clarity. What the wisest liberal columnist at the Financial Times is saying is that he, precisely like he imagines Trump to be, is so obsessed with good headlines that he would rather entertain disaster.

How to explain this alternating prescience and parochialism of a liberal intellectual2 on Trump’s handling of Atlantic affairs? We should not make too much of columnists. To focus on this liberal folly as the matter of debate is a mistake when the future of Atlanticism is up in the air. In order to understand Trump and his potential legacy3, one must delve into history and compare him to past political figures in the West, a community of nations that NATO was created to defend. It is the historic role of larger than life characters in our collective past, not their psychological motives or ideological descriptions, that might best predict Trump’s legacy. I firmly believe this man’s potential greatness or failure lies in Europe more than most of us could predict a decade ago.

In realizing this spirit of the times, I plan to publish three essays comparing Trump to other Gonzo Atlanticists who, like Trump, employed curious and controversial tactics to maneuver the issues of their day. The essays will be of sufficient length to inform, but also sufficient brevity to convince. They will be released each week on Friday. The three men of the Gonzo Atlanticism I will compare with Trump are:

Theodore Roosevelt, Right-wing Progressive and 26th President of the United States

Joseph McCarthy, World War 2 Marine and Republican Senator of Wisconsin

Franz Josef Strauss, West German leader of Bavaria and Dreamer of Greater Europe

From New York, to Wisconsin, to Bavaria, I’ve found the tradition of reconciling domestic right-wing politics and trans-Atlantic internationalism is actually a bit more strange and winding than any of us realize. It’s time for a conservative theory of how the West formed itself out of the ashes of two horrific wars in the 20th century, and how politicians on the right should envision America and Europe in the future. Whether one supported Biden or Trump, we must admit, the destiny of America and Europe hangs in the balance, waiting for a Grand Design to address its crisis. History, not newspaper headlines, will have to be our guide.

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Last year, PBS released a documentary The Incomparable Mr. Buckley on William F. Buckley Jr., leader of the postwar conservative movement. Initial reviews were mixed. Buckley’s own National Review was quick to note shortcomings, especially on the topics of McCarthyism and race. The Wall Street Journal’s review was more ecumenical and positive, while the left-liberal author Rick Perlstein complained at The American Prospect that PBS was just too nice to the man in light of the current Republican party. In frustration, Perlstein pleaded “Why do American elites seem to so desperately need this narrative of a respectable right wing” and he is not wrong to ask. PBS sought to contextualize the American right for a largely liberal audience favored to Perlstein’s read. What great motives can they find in a man who initially opposed Civil Rights and defended Joe McCarthy from critics?

The documentary tries to address this puzzle for its audience by emphasizing the harmony between Buckley’s friendly personality and his politics. But it provides trivia instead of a deeper analysis. For in truth, it was Buckley’s anti-communist foreign policy, not his quick wit or curious accent, which fueled his public role and editorship of National Review. While early critics like Peter Viereck compared the conservative anti-statist politics of National Review to the mobs of the Jacobin revolution, history has vindicated Buckley’s understanding of order. Unfortunately, the PBS producers do not begin to understand why.

That is not to say the biography falls flat on all counts. They stress that Buckley’s worldview was shaped by an upper-class upbringing to a father who made his money in the Mexican oil industry and adored Francisco Franco. The hierarchy and preparation of his early life in turn informed his rebellion at Yale University, where his feud with the administration eventually inspired his first book, God and Man at Yale. He was a man against the establishment and for conservatism. In so many snapshots of adventure on his yacht and repartee with intellectuals, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley makes its subject fun and interesting.

But while these traits make for good television, the film leaves the subject’s legacy unclear. For all the guests brought on to give asides about the man who shaped the postwar conservative movement, the documentary never convincingly answers what it all means for politics today. The film appears uncomfortably aware of this shortcoming while juxtaposing footage of the January 6th riot with an interview of the subject’s son, Christopher Buckley. He and the film ponder what his father would think of the American right today, before telling the viewer to go read Buckley’s vast record. This comes off as a sloppy excuse, as if the documentary’s writers gave up on doing their homework and slapped a post-it note in the place of an index.

To understand Buckley’s role in the 20th century and relevance today, one must understand him as a kind of poet of Cold War politics rather than as a domestic policy activist or even public intellectual. After all, Buckley did not write big theoretical books. His contributions in writing often took the form of essays, columns, forewords, and spy fiction. The spy fiction genre creeps into the documentary, which describes Buckley’s ties to the OSS (which would become the CIA) less as the mark of a serious patriot and more like an accessory for petty intrigue. At one point the film mentions that Buckley’s sparring partner Gore Vidal feared he held compromising surveillance on his sexual liaisons. This aside is utterly pointless and vulgar. Buckley detested how his rivalry with Vidal played out in public; he preferred to quickly change the subject to higher things when asked by fans about his infamous outburst against Vidal. The documentary should have taken this advice to heart.

Buckley’s creation of National Review in 1955 was not for petty insults, but took place in the midst of a postwar backlash to the military industrial complex created by the Second World War. Not unlike today, many leading academics then suggested a “radical right” was irreconcilable with any rational American political traditions. But the political scientist Aaron Friedberg demonstrated the opposite in his book In the Shadow of the Garrison State. In fact, America’s Cold War grand strategy owed a lot to American pushback against the state. The effort to push back included both a record number of Congressional investigations into Truman’s executive branch, tax cuts and union reform legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 passed over Truman’s veto, and less effective populist elements like the Senator Joe McCarthy. Numerous military suggestions toward full male conscription were stopped by elected politicians. The backlash mattered and secured Americans a freer future than they would otherwise have.

Any account of Buckley’s role in building a political magazine and movement off these discontents must give the anti-statists their due. As Friedberg explained in his 2000 book, the Cold War was won not by vast weaponry, but self-government and democratic accountability pulling America back from total military statism. The USSR was not so lucky and would spend somewhere between two to three times as large a share of its economy on the military as the US throughout the Cold War. Lacking a middle class democracy to pull its politburo back from military state capture, America’s geopolitical rival sacrificed any civil society or economy on the altar of the garrison state. The Soviet empire would be buried under these costs.

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All countries must carefully weigh their costs internally and abroad or face a similar danger. It is a simple fact eluded by PBS that the chief concern of Bill Buckley (and the American intelligence agencies he worked with) was a foreign policy in America’s national interest. A year before Buckley’s death, his future biographer Sam Tanenhaus (who provides a few brief comments in the film) asked Buckley if he thought the Iraq War would tear apart the Republican party as Vietnam did to the Democratic party. “Absolutely,” he replied in 2007. The passage of time has made Tanenhaus’s question and Buckley’s response all the more prophetic. Some of the biggest proponents of the Iraq War have gone on to leave and oppose the Republican party today. Among them is the former Bush speechwriter David Frum, a man who knew Buckley but does not appear in the documentary.

Three decades ago, a younger and more conservative David Frum told his interviewer on C-SPAN that Buckley’s biggest accomplishment was melding Republican party elements with Cold War imperatives. In Frum’s words, Buckley’s greatness lay in “taking the Republican Party by the scruff of the neck and making it a party that was committed to the military defense of Europe.” One minute of this old interview delivers a sharper and more timely insight than PBS can manage in over an hour and a half (1:42:08.) As the Russo-Ukrainian war continues, Europe’s defense becomes an expensive and open-ended proposition. Republicans generally do not like spending on open-ended propositions. Perhaps Buckley’s great accomplishment is now coming undone. On the other hand, Buckley’s anti-communism might not apply to a non-communist Russia and a richer Europe than seventy years ago. This is a live division within thinkers on the right that steadily appears in Republican congressional votes.

The PBS documentary does not bother with the curious return of a Euro-skeptic faction in the GOP. This is a remarkable oversight. Instead of asking Buckley’s son for a reading list to explain right-wing politics, it might have been more instructive to show Republican lawmakers giving speeches for and against funding for Ukraine. Political pundits too often discuss the drama in politics without any legislative details. PBS regrettably followed the crowd in this regard. As Buckley would be the first to know, America’s democracy and lasting alliances rely chiefly on the work of Congress, not television personalities or controversial presidencies.

To answer Christopher Buckley’s inquiry, PBS could have delved into the first issue of National Review, featuring Senator William Knowland’s essay Peace — with Honor. In this piece, Knowland (who was sometimes derided as “the Senator from Formosa”) rhetorically united the Asian and European fronts in a broader struggle against communism. The producers also could have sought out more obscure examples of Buckley directly speaking with allies on the right, such as his strong remarks at a dinner dedicated to Alfred Kohlberg, a financier of networks opposed to Chinese communism and early national member in the John Birch Society. In both cases, Buckley’s editing and speaking sought to unify the Asia-first wing of Republican politics with a broader mission.

Without uniting the margins on the right, without bringing the old Euro-skeptic Republicans of the Midwest into holding the line after the scandal of Yalta, and perhaps without Joseph McCarthy’s ruthless anti-communism (and his vote for the creation of NATO) which changed the Republican party, American democracy might not have as effectively handled the struggle against the Soviet Union. Confronting such a power required a notion of what made America worth defending. It was Buckley who made right-wing anti-statism and anti-communism rhyme into a particular internationalism. If PBS paid tribute to this fact, it would become clearer to its audience why liberals put up with a man who kept a bit of reactionary company. But beyond just personalities and taboos, it would humble us all to remember that crafting a successful bipartisan foreign policy is easier said than done. William F. Buckley Jr. certainly shaped the postwar conservative movement, but any serious biography of his life and mission must start with that adjective prior to conservative.

Instead of joining in this analysis, I went to one of the staffers I know in Vance’s Senate office and asked about his vision. What does JD Vance believe the GOP should stand for in the future? Here is what he said:

Republicans embrace laborers as well as capitalists within a broader framework valorizing work and social harmony. They are mercantilists, believing that the state has a particularly important role to play in ensuring economic development. They are statists, believing in strong government and the dignity of government service, and believing that good government occurred when the voice of the masses is properly channeled through institutions, rather than directly expressed. They are a party of order, inveighing against the dangers of unrestrained individualism, violence, and parochialism. They are Yankee Protestants, believing that human beings have a responsibility to reform themselves and to reform society. They are, finally, Nationalists, believers in the preeminence of American interests and American ideals.

The phrases “dignity of government service”, “dangers of unrestrained individualism”, or “Yankee Protestant” might have been a tell. I confess, I am not recounting what a Hill staffer told me, but a description of the Whig and Republican party ideology over most of the 19th century. This is a lightly edited (for tense) excerpt from a political science book on party ideology published in 1998.

A quarter of a century later, it is not far off from describing JD Vance’s aspiring worldview today.

The excerpt comes from Party Ideologies in America: 1828 - 1996, in which the political scientist John Gerring describes the early Republican party’s ideology. Before Vance’s speech invoking workers, one might consider the Teamsters speech at the RNC did not endorse the ticket so much as open a bipartisan hand. Gerring’s thesis suggests there is a reason for that; Republicans are not and have never been a pro-labor union party. Prior to their anti-statist turn in the early 20th century, Republicans were first and foremost nationalists. They primarily sought unification of American society against the disorder and threats a young republic might face (and famously did in the Civil War.)

In fact, Vance’s background as a military veteran from Ohio would fit right in with most national Republicans of this period. So would his advocacy of tariffs. Before the Republican party’s turn to what Gerring describes as their neoliberal era, the party upheld the industrial tariff as a great mercantilist device. It was repeatedly idolized in party magazines and speeches as the guardian of the rising American standard of living against poorer countries and labor conditions. Tariffs were also the means by which the post-Civil War federal government financed its expenditures, often on pensions of Union veterans (which lorded over budgets and politics then not unlike Social Security and Medicare do today.)

This mercantilist philosophy flowed into the Republican approach to labor and capital. Early Republicans believed their industrial tariff and stable currency would provide the average American with a rising standard of living. They repeatedly emphasized mercantilism to many of their working class voters, upholding the fruits of national economy over Democratic appeals to class populism. Instead of invoking the small business owner against organized union power and international communist threats, Republicans of this era handled the labor question with a more ecumenical approach.

Vance’s moral critique of large technology firms and consumerism for its own sake takes up this lineage. For all the talk of JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism (and Vance himself has personally written on it), the Republican scene of young converts can sometimes resemble the 19th century Republicans that applied their (mainline) Protestant Christian faith to matters of commerce and government. This high church approach differs from the more anti-statist and evangelical rhetoric that creeped into Republican speeches over the second half of the 20th century. To some of Vance’s critics, this potential shift suggests a threat to the separation of church and state. But for his devout fans, it might be a simply cautionary tale. The historic collapse of the mainline and the social rout of George W. Bush’s born-again Christian presidency suggest political activism and elite-connected religious faith do not easily strengthen one another.

Conservative political activism coupled with an aversion to class populism also describes another issue Vance has brought forward: Immigration restriction. Republicans are ruthlessly prosecuting the immigration issue against the incumbent Democratic administration which rapidly expanded legal immigration through asylum law. The journalist Matthew Zeitlin has noted Vance’s particular hawkishness on the issue in political economy terms.

Here too, the Republican party of the late 19th and early 20th century provides a parallel. As Gerring notes, while the Democratic party often eagerly embraced new European immigrants, “National Republicans wished all foreign races and languages, once in the country, might dissolve in a thorough process of ‘Americanization.’” This urge to assimilate an orderly citizenry could be starkly partisan for Republicans; “the Democratic party was viewed through National Republican eyes as treasonous, boss-ridden, immigrant-dominated, and prone to dangerous experimentation.” For Republicans today as in their earlier period, disorderly immigration is seen as a challenge to the republic’s work ahead.

It is worth moving from Gerring’s thesis to briefly recount how the immigration issue historically related to a recurring concern of Vance’s critics, namely the specter of white racism in American politics.

Historically, the white man’s democracy brought forth by Democrats embraced many European nationalities and encouraged religious toleration (alongside a ruthless exclusion of citizenship for black Americans, native peoples, and later on Asian immigrants.) Race was a direct means1 by which the followers of Jackson expanded America’s mass democracy, which proceeded at a faster rate than some of its European cousins. Accordingly, Antebellum Democrats repeatedly called their party “The Democracy” in many of their newspapers. But Republicans, like their forefathers in the Northern Whigs and earlier Federalists, insisted on a more small-r republican and particular folkway. To be an American was something honed in a particular middle class way of life, not granted with a party ticket to any Europeans arriving on the country’s shores. This made Republicans more open to smaller sets of native political activists, such as the abolitionists2, but also more skeptical of different newcomers to America, such as the Irish Catholics.

Such a history helpfully complicates the cultural fights that JD Vance has entered. It pushes back at some tired Republican punditry that because their party freed the slaves, they could never be bigots at the same time. The history also complicates Democratic slogans, which uphold their party’s long-standing pro-immigration nature as synonymous with inclusion itself. Democrats have always been the more ethnically and culturally diverse party in America. But that is not the same thing as being inclusive of everyone in America. While America today is thankfully far less violent and ideologically racist than its 19th century settler-state past, recent losses by progressives over civil rights cases suggest a curious development between the parties. For all the progressive scorn of the conservative originalist legal doctrine, the Democratic intelligentsia’s understanding of both racially inclusive law and American society is more originalist than ever. Republicans and Democrats will likely need one another to chart a better future on these matters.

The themes of nationalism, economic development, and internal order have old ties to the Republican party, but they are not the same as a settled policy agenda. There are important nationalist reasons America might seek to “friend-shore” our industry with geopolitical allies and offer visas to immigrants with particular industrial skills. One doesn’t have to be a senior fellow at the Cato Institute to notice wage compression is in tension with new industrial development.

Industrial growth already faces challenges in both environmental litigation and interest group politics. Unions are not eager for a middle class attitude towards labor mobility—or more bluntly, hiring and firing—for new growing industries. This might be especially true of mining and manufacturing, which any revival of American industrial might (or technological approach to climate change) will require a lot more of3. Alongside every enthusiastic column on supply-side progressivism (and often continued opposition by progressive legislators), Democrats are aware they have too many interest groups seeking to cook in their policy kitchen. In light of these industrial and political challenges, should Republicans eagerly brush off the benefits of their current anti-statist paradigm? Others doubt Republicans could shift even if some party men wanted to.

Yet the most polemical critics of Vance insist his ideology is not merely complicated by political and policy challenges, but foreign, subversive, and outright dangerous. They insist his nationalism is an import from Hungary, a hybrid regime that too easily wins odd praise by hosting weekend junkets for more disenchanted American writers on the cultural right. These critics sometimes insinuate that, under his public image, Vance is a political cynic seeking to mobilize white chauvinists against multiracial democracy. They insist he has the wrong types of fans on Twitter, and the most right-wing crowd in Silicon Valley, so he cannot offer any good development for American democracy.

In response to these accusations, conservatives can become vengeful. They often denounce attacks as nothing more than a social clique of liberal journalists and progressive academics attached to radical strains of thought from the 1960s. But conservatives shouldn’t be so certain about this ideological source. Ignorance or caricature of the pre-WW2 Republican party is often due to New Deal, not Civil Rights historiography4. Vance’s critics and supporters alike would benefit from learning about the 19th and early 20th century Republican party before narrowing the public debate to personality, rhetoric, or yet another argument about the 1960s.

The greater challenge for Vance, however, comes from other parts of the 19th century Republicans. They were a party of new industry and national unity over all forms of populism. This is not obviously the case for Republicans today. Along with his praise for the current FTC, Vance’s musings on foreign policy have notably met the harshest criticism from even his own party. Here too, Vance’s focus on Asia over Europe resembles the pre-NATO Republican party. An important question for Vance’s critics is whether a foreign policy that focuses on both actually has the votes for the necessary long-term defense spending, as opposed to one-off aid bills. Too often center-left politicians can talk like Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan on global leadership and yet vote to spend like Jimmy Carter.

The United States of the late 19th century understood security questions in recently finished expansion across the western frontier and naval power in the greater Pacific. It was far more uncertain in its future and wary of national division after the Civil War. The United States today is both more united in its internal commerce and morals and yet appears more disjointed in where to focus abroad. Whereas JD Vance prizes America’s alliance with Israel, a younger generation of Democrats speak of Israel like William Jennings Bryan did of the Philippine-American war. John Gerring’s book on the party ideologies cannot offer much analysis in the realm of foreign policy. That is probably for the best.

Foreign policy is where the limits of a 19th century Republican analogy become most obvious, more than any one-off debate on tariffs or immigration. It was a different time for leaders facing different questions. Since the 19th century Republican has evidently returned, it is incumbent on us to try and understand why. It might be a weird political tradition in the 21st century. But it would be weirder if we could not recognize our country’s own past and mistook it for something more menacing and less able to adapt to new problems ahead.

If you’re like me, you might pause for a moment to recall that ballot. It’s no secret that American politics is quite nationalized. While changes in advertising have arguably played a role, this pause might help us understand why traditional forms of local American journalism have declined. You simply don’t care. Consistent stories sourced locally are just not as exciting compared to the big national show. Surely national media is full of winners from this trade in attention. Yet they do not sound very happy.

Last week, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein bemoaned the losses in mid-sized media operations. Klein loved his Pitchfork, but not enough people did for its revenue, so it is effectively shutting down. Media life is great at the top, but the gravestones of smaller media are all around Klein. As he tells us, “The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered.” That middle is in free fall. His tone of writing is mournful and bearing witness to a loss, without any clear path forward for the future.

Ezra Klein’s somber tone reminded me of another article, albeit one looking towards the top of media. Last month, The Economist’s James Bennet argued that the New York Times is now in a slow-moving crisis, having fired him during our last presidential election cycle for partisan reasons. To apply Bennet’s account, the New York Times might not just be growing as local paper revenue dwindles, but also increasing partisan doubt and conflict. It is making everything look worse at the same time that it sucks up subscriptions from random Americans who would otherwise go read the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and so on.

But wait a second. What was the name of that last publication?

Back To The Party Rag

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is a fun relic of a title. It harkens back to the age when America was full of newspapers explicitly aligned with and financed by our political parties. It makes me wonder while reading the laments of Klein and Bennet, why can’t this happen again? If Americans clearly love reading about partisan conflicts, then could the best way to revive less-than-national reporting be to simply make it more partisan? What would that look like?

Democrats could once again read the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, but for a broader view of what those Southern Republicans and their factories are up to all the time. Republicans on the West Coast could read a once more Republican Los Angeles Times so they could gawk at all of the projects and non-profits progressive Democrats create over there. Obviously I don’t expect either of these papers, which I assume are mostly full of liberals, to turn around and focus on this tomorrow. But let’s talk about the real constraint, money.

I’m no journalist. But I do talk to and read a few people who are. They have informed me of the cash flying around in American politics. Democratic National Public Radio tells us the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary is approaching .3 billion dollars in campaign ads. Imagine a fraction of that going into an ambitious regional newspaper model, partly funded by subscribers and partly by party operatives. Now leave your imagination and learn this might not be so far off from the status quo. Columbia Journalism Review noted in 2022 that local journalism with a political agenda is rising. But I am suggesting more explicit partisanship, not less. Carrying the party banner proudly could enable loyalty on a larger scale, enabling wider geographic scope to reporters and readers alike. It’s not always true, but sometimes prestige can be acquired by simply being the biggest fish in a haphazardly determined pond.

Speaking of haphazard ponds, look at our political parties. Right now, party finances are both massive and decentralized. The defunct Ron DeSantis campaign has burnt through over $100 million this last year, but that’s not because the RNC wrote him one fat check. While some (I) wish he had beat the orange man who is still kind of bad, one can’t help but notice the Los Angeles Times was acquired for roughly half a billion back in 2018. Surely a far smaller operation than that could’ve created a little more convenient reporting for when Governor DeSantis debated with California’s Governor Newsom last November? Halfway through that debate, DeSantis brought up pictures of sexually explicit books found in some public school libraries somewhere in America.

That stunt was due to an important fact; the United States is a truly massive country full of odd stories nobody knows about. Yesterday, an enterprising writer on Substack dug into an FAA ethnic patronage racket that almost no one noticed but has been quietly developing for a decade. State and local politics probably has even more stories of government hijinks that make both of our parties look bad, not less. If you mobilize voters on those stories, you could even have some meager incentive to care that they are locally solved. For a political party though, you get to mobilize votes! So perhaps many people will get mad over half-true stories, but that’s also often true now. The important thing is this is a small improvement over talking as if the President can do most of the things he needs Congress for. Or that the President affects most of one’s own life under American democracy.

The Civil War Scare

Isn’t this just a long-winded call for more ruthless partisanship, now at different levels of our political life? You tell me. But if firmly established local reporting increasingly won’t happen for most Americans and national media is going to be increasingly distrusted on a party basis, the return of the party newspaper might be right on schedule. Starting with a regional partisan reporting focus, one could imagine other features for these papers beyond the political reporting, not unlike Pitchfork delivered on music. Yet reporting on self-government must happen, even if for the sake of making the other party look bad. The customer needs his vegetables. That requires boots on the ground reporting in actual physical places, most of which are not New York City or Washington, D.C.

Still, one might insist that America’s partisan anger is alarming and not to be trifled with for the sake of some new half-tabloids. I am inclined to agree with the first part. But this situation is obviously not regionally divided up, and our democracy is often radicalizing itself through media-saturated low-turnout primaries. That’s a problem. But it’s not a slavery problem, which the American Civil War was clearly about as we expanded westward. Our fights today are simply a lot stupider, often for the better. But honestly, it might be underrated that they’re stupid. Consider a very recent election: New Hampshire this January.

Looking at the numbers, if even half the Americans who voted for Biden in the 2020 New Hampshire presidential election had quietly filed their paperwork to vote for Nikki Haley in the 2024 New Hampshire Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump would’ve lost that state. Sure, he could’ve rallied a few more people, but then Haley could’ve rallied a few more people and won the state just as Biden did in 2020. Why didn’t this happen? Does nobody in New Hampshire think Trump is bad for national politics?

I suspect it’s because they either didn’t know or don’t really care. This is just how life is right now; people give incredibly intense opinions and do nothing. What if we had a few more facts and did a few more things (legally) to solve our problems locally? Even if Trump wins this counter-factual, and I think he probably does, I’d much prefer he did so at a party convention to the truly insane year-long primary schedule we have now.

At any rate, if we really are headed for another civil war and nobody can agree on this upcoming election, I don’t see how scrambling the media landscape is going to be the cause. It wasn’t for the last one. The national media has some haters who obviously cannot get enough of each other. To make things worse, we often exaggerate our disagreements to scare one other. Americans in both parties firmly agree more than ever in the principle of serfdom today. Specifically, becoming serfs to fund old people’s Medicare, Social Security, and exclusionary zoning property values. Congratulations to America’s truly massive bipartisan gentry; you’re doing great, live in every state, and are still insufferable on Twitter. I also enjoy being insufferable on Twitter. But why don’t we try doing something new instead of whining about the New York Times?

Now, back to the post.

Podcast: “The History of the History of the Right, with Kim Phillips-Fein” Know Your Enemy from Dissent, 18 Jan. 2024, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/the-history-of-the-history-of-the-right-with-kim-phillips-fein/.

I’ve enjoyed listening to Know Your Enemy podcast as a left-wing annotated bibliography on mid-century American politics. This latest episode is no exception. Their discussion of Hofstadter’s consensus history ruling out a broader intellectual story on the right is a decent surface level overview. Should American right-wing politics be known by the Birchers and Earl Warren/desegregation haters instead of eccentric CIA magazine operators born to Mexican oil money? Have histories of the American right now swung to close to the former than the latter for good reason? Personally, I’m inclined to ignore this dichotomy and begin the story when the Whigs collapsed and the GOP was born in Wisconsin by paranoid white protestant business-owners who hate taxes. But speaking of Wisconsin, I wish the hosts could’ve thought about McCarthyism further. Should McCarthyism be understood as doing the dirty work for the cold war liberal consensus Hofstadter popularized? Unfortunately, they were simultaneously too critical and not critical enough of the right to dig into that. Many such cases. Still a good listen for the sources cited.

How do you get a consensus anyways? Last time it involved kicking all of your Wallace ‘44 friends out of the State Department, but now I’m not so sure how that would work. The Biden administration will surely inform us after a few more of their State Department employees join protests against an alleged ongoing genocide being aided by the State Department. Comparing this to postwar America, Arab nationalism obviously isn’t remotely as menacing as international communism was. On the other hand, people have proper jobs to do betraying the West to Stalin at Malta ensuring our country can operate smoothly abroad. If they like hanging out with protestors against the State Department then maybe their protestor friends can get them a new gig that isn’t at the State Department? The real consensus will be the friends we make changing jobs along the way.

Column: Willick, Jason. "Opinion: On immigration, Democrats are the ones driving polarization." Washington Post, 14 Jan. 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/14/democrats-immigration-polarization-move-left/.

Jason is correct and probably didn‘t go far enough drawing out the problem for small-d democracy a lack of citizenship consensus can cause. My own amateur guess is Republicans are probably just going to cut legal immigration in the future because the public cannot agree on anything else, especially on internal enforcement. But there are still a lot of details to work out, and it really wouldn’t surprise me if Biden gets a couple million more legal asylum + illegal unauthorized immigrants into the country over a narrowly won second term.

If your opponents are clearly winning over the public, and have drawn on the immigration issue both while in and out of office (i.e., it’s popular for the GOP beyond regular thermostatic dynamics), why not throw a Hail Mary and improve a few million lives? That might partly explain what’s going on in this White House. In the meantime, policy wonks for high skill immigration might look at Senator JD Vance’s visa bond bill and get cracking on stuff that could make it into a RAISE Act version 2.0 down the road. I also expect the 2030 census could be enormously controversial due to a lack of a small-d democratic pact on this current White House’s policies sidelining Congress, and Republicans might just choose to flat out ignore the results for redistricting like they did in 1920. But who knows, that might be too pessimistic.

Book Chapter: Vought, Hans P. "Woodrow Wilson and Hyphenated Americans" The bully pulpit and the melting pot: American presidents and the immigrant, 1897-1933. Macon, Ga. : Mercer University Press, 2004. 12–18. Internet Archive. Web. 19 Jan. 2024.

Woodrow Wilson has undergone such a drastic downward revision that I’ve become more curious why he was praised by political scientists before our recent emphasis on his (many) sins. David Frum’s forthcoming Wilson essay should be a helpful read, as he hinted towards on the Hub podcast yesterday. (Also a good podcast!) Like many of our democracy in decline commentators today, Wilson was very concerned about division in America and had some hot takes. He published a bunch of books drawing together big ideas on American history for the glorious sake of unity. It seems forgotten that Wilson is who resurrected Lincoln as a truly national hero. Great stuff. But when Wilson ran for public office, he proceeded to have his complaints about immigrant urban political machines quoted back to him throughout the campaign trail. It ultimately didn’t matter and he became president as we all know.

The chapter helps illustrate that progressivism was a bipartisan phenomenon in the United States at the turn of the 20th century that often found currency with older stock WASP Americans, wary of corruption by which new urban politics was all too often ordered. It sometimes dipped into racism (Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr.’s emphasis on Anglo-Saxon blood, Wilson’s view of blacks and Asians as unable to be admitted to the republic) and sometimes didn’t (Vought’s chapter on Teddy Roosevelt includes his demands that California allow skilled Japanese migrants because Asia matters to foreign policy and he loved his Judo lessons.) For better and for worse, we do not have the bipartisan ethno-religious leaders that dominated Congress in that period. Perhaps we do still have Teddy’s WWE view of citizenship, where sufficient cartoonish interpersonal violence can make anyone an American. RETVRN?

But as David Frum noted in his book (published 2000) on the 70s, early 21st century America is not unlike early 20th century America. Ironically, this is in part through the politics of non-profits, colleges, and post-60s primary systems which earlier progressives surely desired to reduce political rackets with. So much for original intent. Perhaps Frum’s Wilson essay will go further and allow greater focus on this period beyond themes of the threat to democracy. Still, the odds are he’ll angle it more towards Ukraine and forget all the more interesting things he wrote 30 years ago. I wish I could be more optimistic, but Frum’s recent analysis on Congress was really underwhelming. It’s worth reading people’s older books so one can be both more informed and disappointed. But like Vought’s book, I’m still going to keep reading him with an open mind eager to learn more.

Essay: Møller, Jørgen. "Conservative parties and the birth of democracy: by Daniel Ziblatt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, xv+ 427 pp.,£ 26.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780521172998." (2019): 515-517.

I’m in the middle of revisiting Ziblatt’s 2017 book after putting it down for a while. The last chapter on British conservative organizing through the Primrose League and other civil society organizations was great, so I figured I’d take a look at a review by an academic who is quite familiar with the period. Møller suggests the book has a well-evidenced thesis, but scholars should take a broader look at state formation in Northwestern Europe prior to WW1 and WW2, given Danish conservatives didn’t go fash and lost a ton of elections during this period. I think Møller has more academic work to that effect, and I look forward to learning more about it.

Alongside Brazil’s military dictatorship, I’m finding this kind of stuff more and more interesting to read about. Perhaps John Ganz’s long fight for late 19th century France as a point of analysis has won me over a little. Ganz’s insurrection upon Ross Douthat’s NYT “dreampolitik” columns is a tougher sell to me, yet he’s putting up a worthwhile read on that front too. I have no idea who is going to accept the 2024 results at this rate. It’s too bad Ron DeSantis spent all his campaign money on Twitter influencers and ignored the media for half a year. Ziblatt’s book so far strangely reassures me things will be alright in the end. I will have more thoughts on this book in the future.

Old Magazine Clipping: (I’m not going to bother annotating this one, they’re all over the place on Google images and I cannot yet find an easy index for the contents and issues of the magazine.)

I’ve recently enjoyed looking at some of the political cartoons by Judge, a pro-McKinley break-off of another 19th century magazine called Puck (which I think Puck newsletter is named after?) They’re a lot of fun in their repeated digs against Grover Cleveland, who is probably the best Democratic president that business Republicans could have hoped for until Bill Clinton. Of course, 19th century Americans were significantly more favorable to white racism and accordingly the cartoons can get ugly in that regard. Another parochial feature is this was back when conservative business Republicans obsessed over the tariff and gold standard all the time, so you get Democrats selling out Americans to the British as motif in many of these. Parties and issues change over time. And that’s why you, dear reader, should stay subscribed; you simply cannot get this cutting-edge analysis anywhere else.