What the Chad Mayes Ouster Says About the California Republican Party

Luke Phillips

Chad Mayes, former Assembly Republican Caucus leader.

THE FALL OF MAYES

Assemblyman Chad Mayes (R-Yucca Valley) was ousted from his leadership rank by his own caucus yesterday, as the fallout of his recent political maneuvering in favor of Cap-and-Trade legislation came to a close. The Politico California Playbook this morning noted that Shawn Steel and Harmeet Dhillon- respectively the CAGOP’s GOP National Committeeman and National Committeewoman- pushed hard for the ouster and were “instrumental” in bringing it about.

The Press-Enterprise has a helpful story on this front, looking at the different perspectives and dynamics at work in Mayes’s fall from grace. One of the interesting things noted in the article was that Mayes “voluntarily supported the move to make [Assemblyman Brian] Dahle his successor…” suggesting that Mr. Mayes had calculated, by the time of the vote, one of two things: either he was sure to lose the vote and should support an orderly transfer of power, or that he had concluded he could no longer maintain order and unity among the Assembly Republican Caucus, and would therefore be impotent as its leader.

The new caucus leader, Brian Dahle, looks reasonable at first glance, perhaps a Marco Rubio-esque figure- a moderate member of the respectable establishment, with reasonably moderate views, who nonetheless enjoys the support of conservatives because he is as of yet uncontaminated by unpalatable political choices.

But how long will Dahle’s leadership last? A look at the reasons Mayes’s caucus turned against him, and why California conservatives ranging from grassroots activists to state party officials unceremoniously chanted for his crucifixion, reveals Dahle to be almost as vulnerable as Mayes, perhaps a bit less so because he hails from a more rural Northern California county.

Mayes, in short, convinced seven other Assembly members to vote for a cap-and-trade compromise bill because he thought he’d be able to extract important concessions from the Democrats on other issues (the concept of linkage.) Moreover, I suspect Mayes believes that building goodwill with the dominant Democrats is really the only way to get any legislative work done, no matter how miniscule. He also purportedly focuses his speeches and efforts on issues like poverty and inequality, rather than on the cultural and social issues- abortion, immigration, gender, etc.- that the conservatives in the party prefer.

If Mayes was ousted because he worked with the “enemy,” betraying small-government principles, how much safer is Dahle? The Press-Enterprise story describes the new caucus leader as a “Mayes ally” who “knows how to work with both parties” and is “not at either left or right extremity…” Sound familiar?

I’m not predicting Dahle’s subsequent ouster, though- I suspect he’ll learn from Mayes’s experience, that the needs and passions of the caucus that elected you cannot be neglected even as you try to steer that caucus in new directions and towards new things. In politics, everything is about balancing competing responsibilities, not achieving particular goals or promoting particular principles (an eternal verity the conservatives don’t seem to understand. They should read their Aristotle.)

And unfortunately, that decision to stay in his position of responsibility by carefully pleasing conservatives and, perhaps, following his own political preferences, will render Assemblyman Dahle incapable of advancing the image of the CAGOP’s elected officials as a responsible governing alternative to the Democratic legislature. The GOP will remain rumpy unless and until the edifice the supermajority Democrats are building collapses under its own weight. And given these same Democrats’ stranglehold over the electoral system, it’s not clear that conservatives would have a path to power even then.

FACTIONS, FACTIONS, FACTIONS

The CAGOP basically has two coalitions or factions- the Kevin Faulconer socially liberal/fiscally conservative types, and the Tim Donnelly socially conservative/fiscally conservative types. This typology is somewhat misleading- there are, after all, many different kinds of conservatism and liberalism present in different factions of the CAGOP. Rural populists like Tim Donnelly are very different from Orange County doctrinaires like Travis Allen. (Their gubernatorial campaigns of 2014 and 2018 share the same insipidity and futility.) Bay Area suburban moderates are different from SoCal mayors and councilmen.

But generally, the dividing line is between the “establishment” and the “populists.” I argued that Kevin Faulconer’s recent “New California Republicans” speech was not objectionable from a moderate Republican’s point of view; but neither was it sufficient, from a political strategist’s point of view. The state party isn’t going to grow by merely governing San Diego well and attempting to transpose that model northward- the diverse regions of California require their own methods of governance, and replacing the CAGOP’s ascendant conservative populism with a moderate conservatism would likely not do much to expand outside of the suburban/urban regions. (I do think it’s more likely to grow with some version of this, though, than with the current strategy of doubling down on conservative principles and attempting to convert working-class ethnic minority populations to the Gospel of Reagan Christ.)

The chief goal of Republican politicos and politicians in California is simple- expand the party. Reach out to new groups of voters, and meet them where they are. Craft new messages. Court new interest groups. Run suicidal statewide gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns to test that crafting and courting. Show the voters- who are by-and-large moderate- that we’re sane. Break out of the shell and build a new coalition, based not on strict interpretations of our core principles but on looser ones. Only when we have power can we implement anything like our vision.

The goal is not to govern, currently, simply because we do not have large enough majorities to govern anywhere but in the San Diego Mayor’s office and in plenty of rural counties. (Though participating in compromise governance with the Democratic Legislature can, quite possibly, enhance our party’s image as a governing party, making us more palatable at a local and possibly statewide level.)

The goal cannot even be to block all Democratic initiatives, simply because the vast majority of them will not be blocked- the Democrats control and will control both the Governor’s mansion and the State Legislature. Better to use the pittance of influence we have to alter initiatives sufficiently to protect business and ease the cost of living on workers, push towards incremental pension and education reforms, and the like. (And yes, the cap-and-trade legislation actually raised the price on workers, but there were concessions like the removal of various property fees. I don’t know the details here- the point is that Mayes was governing pragmatically.)

And most importantly, better to use the bully pulpit of elected office- as Mayor Faulconer evidently is trying to do- to promote a Californian version of Republicanism capable of providing an alternative to the Democrat’s gaia-worshipping, social justice-obsessed, free-spending, irresponsible version of liberal progressivism made applicable by their sheer dominance politically in this state. Lose seats, show petty infighting rather than principled discourse of disagreement, and what little aura we have further erodes.

I’m not saying be moderate because being moderate is intrinsically a good thing (though as a Catholic and a student of the liberal-conservative tradition of thought, I do think moderation, temperance, prudence, is a good thing for its own sake.) I am saying that the California Republican Party will not expand and gain power and find the opportunity to preserve, maintain, and advance a better future for all Californians if it continues to insist on anti-taxation, anti-regulation, and immigrant-bashing as the main manifestations of its core principles. Limited government and law and order are not (at all!) bad things intrinsically, and there are very good reasons to support their advancement. But supporting them to the point of political inflexibility and political cannibalism is not productive either.

I don’t think the Schwarzenegger-Faulconer model of business is particularly effective either, given that it hasn’t succeeded in or even advanced the goal of building new Republican coalitions in this state. But I do think it’s onto something, and stronger efforts and better thinking on the part of the Republican establishment in this state can make a real difference.

RePost: Adam Garfinkle on the Proper Political Temperament

Commentary

Years ago, as I was just breaking into my political-writing and policy-research career, I chanced across Dr. Adam Garfinkle’s essay series “What’s Wrong and How to Fix It,” which began with a deep institutional investigation into the roots of American political dysfunction and concluded with a series of 10 policy fixes for various issue areas in contemporary politics. The whole boatload of essays was gathered together and published in EBook form by The American Interest. This was midway through the Obama Presidency, probably sometime in 2012 or 2013; Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party were going strong, but the contemporary waves of protests and political violence had yet to begin.

 Dr. Garfinkle’s short treatise served as a springboard and crystallizer of my thought, and was the main impetus for me to organize and systematize my political philosophy. Given my general agreement with large sections of the series, and my ambitions as a writer, I took it upon myself to 1) reach out to Dr. Garfinkle for mentorship, then through inviting him to speak to the Political Student Assembly at USC and eventually through an internship at TAI, and 2) to start composing a little book, a manifesto of 21^st Century Whiggery that would expand on Dr. Garfinkle’s insights and adapt them to a new political party, or something.

The second project largely failed, thank God. Manifestos are among the most boring kinds of political writing, useful though they are as an intellectual exercise for any young writer. I believe I have the draft of that damn piece of work lurking in my 2013-2014 email archives, but I’m scared to look at it. Anyhow, the first project- getting access to Dr. Garfinkle- was somewhat more successful, and I’ve chatted back and forth with him over the last few years since the USC event and my internship. (I get the impression he has better things to do than talk to college students, but I’m persistent anyway, perhaps to my own detriment.) Dr. Garfinkle has even generously published some of my work over at TAI, and I’m currently working on a long-overdue project for him, to format and prepare for publication a series of EBooks archiving TAI’s 2005-2015 essays. (How soon it’ll be done, with my propensity to grab every project I can and work on them all at once, no one knows…) 

I mention this to preface the following passages I share from “What’s Wrong and How to Fix It.” This series of essays had a real and profound impact on my early intellectual development, imbuing in me the sensibility of a centrist reformer and inspiring me to think systematically outside of the most popular contemporary systems of thought. Dr. Garfinkle does this very, very well, probably better than most other intelligent thinkers, and I aspire to his level of sophistication.

God knows we need someone to do it, if not me. I share the following passages- basically the opening and the closing of the policy proposals part of the series- because of their continuing relevance a few years after their original publication. They are only more important, now, though, in the aftermath of Charlottesville and so many other divisive and murderous acts of political violence- because unless we can restore a leadership class with the proper temperament to govern this country and reform its institutions, any hope of building a more united national identity and promoting the development of social capital must effectively be lost. 

I’m not saying the ten solutions Dr. Garfinkle proposes are the right policy platform for victory or even reform. But the whole spirit of this book is important. Dr. Garfinkle once told me that “everyone should run for President, sometime” as an intellectual exercise in informed citizenship. I think he was promoting political independence of thought in the form of individualized policy agendas for each of the 300 million new presidential candidates. But there’s another reason one should “run for President” with no serious intent. 

That reason is that such an exercise and the mock-government activities associated with it- talking to voters who’ll never vote for you, commenting on great issues of state you’ll never influence, organizing pragmatically for a putative campaign you’ll never win- can, prospectively, train one in the necessary and fine arts of democratic citizenship and decency in public discourse, pragmatically and idealistically. And those, in today’s climate, are virtues we need in more people. This is a thought-exercise, of course- don’t take it as me literally suggesting we all run for the Presidency (as certain good friends of mine might interpret it and act upon it!)

But the background still stands. If we’re going to resolve the great ongoing and worsening national crisis that threatens to descend into a national nightmare, if we’re going to learn to live with each other in this great American experiment with sufficient harmony that we can agree at least to fix and renew our institutions, we’ll need statesmen and stateswomen with good habits and benign intentions. And Dr. Garfinkle’s passages below point out one way, I think, we can begin to approach that, short of actually setting up a mock presidential campaign.

Without further ado, here’s Dr. Garfinkle-

Part 4: Television and Politics (Introduction)

Now that the three groups of explanation for American political dysfunction have been laid out and their mutual connections sketched (in parts one, two and three), we can begin to discuss programmatic solutions for our problems. The ten proposals below represent “torque points” in American politics—places where positive change would resonate throughout our political culture. This is the only way to proceed, for disaggregated fixes for specific problems will never get far, given the plutocratic maw into which they will surely fall.

My ten proposals do not fall neatly into any conventional ideological category. I’m neither a registered Democrat (anymore) nor a registered Republican (never have been), and I have already suggested why: I don’t want to go back to 1965 or to 1925. But let me briefly restate my antipathy to both sets of party orthodoxy in somewhat different language before getting to my ten proposals.

The Left in this country, generally speaking, tends to excoriate corporations, even to disparage the profit motive itself, and to think of government as a proper vehicle not only for battling the depredations of capitalism but also for forcing on the nation the kinds of multicultural, politically correct social biases it likes. It has inculcated within itself the old countercultural notion of consciousness-raising, in which it presumes to know more about what’s good for you than you do. It is the self-appointed Robin Hood of our political soul, though its populist pretensions are belied by its elitist ways. The Left displays a blindness to the benefits of a non-distorted market economy, and an even more grievous blindness to the limits of what government can accomplish—especially a government that tries to do more than it should in what has become a misaligned Federal system.

The Right these days, generally speaking, tends to excoriate government, to dismiss the idea of an inclusive and fairly governed national community, and to blame those who are genuinely poor for their own poverty. Much of the Right, having regrettably abandoned its own Burkean heritage, sees through a crude Social Darwinist prism that acknowledges only individual judgment, ignoring the social context in which that judgment is seated.¹ It is blind to plutocratic corruption and doesn’t see, either, the widening cultural gap between an isolated elite and those Americans who are falling out of an often recently won and still fragile middle-class status.² It is particularly blind to the fact that a distorted market system dominated by large corporate oligarchies that deploy increasingly sophisticated advertising methodologies can be responsible for undermining both social trust and the founding virtues.³

Again, there’s no reason to choose between the problems caused by the public sector (a sclerotic, dysfunctional and wildly expensive government) and the problems caused by the private sector (a predatory corporate leadership class, and especially an increasingly powerful parasitic financial elite, that has become an extractive rather than a productive asset for the nation as a whole). Both problems exist, and both are getting worse.

Moreover, these problems are not really separate; they feed one another. Private sector abuses feed the appetite for government protection, but government is too dysfunctional to provide that protection; instead its efforts tend to harm small businesses that lack the arsenals of specialist lawyers and accountants that huge businesses use to evade government attempts to hem them in. You get a hint of this by looking at what the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements have had in common, which is a fair bit more than either group likes to admit.

We need an active and bold Federal government for several key but discrete purposes beyond national security; but we can well do without the nanny-state soft despotism it otherwise drapes over our society. If we need a model, a hero from our past who epitomizes this combination, we have at least three to choose from: Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt—Federalist, Whig and Republican….

I emphasize a single principle, one that my TAI colleagues imply. This principle, I think, is central to the renewal of American government and American democracy: Government can and must act to increase American social capital or, as some call it, social trust. Existing Federal programs should be judged on the extent to which they at least do not destroy extant social capital residing in organic communal processes at local and state levels. They must, in other words, respect the principle of subsidiarity. New programs should be judged on their potential for enlarging social capital, of which we are in sore need as we face the relentlessly individuating influence of a range of new technologies. Unless we harness those technologies in the service of worthy social goals, they will likely tear us asunder, making us easy prey for both rent-seeking parasites at home and, in due course, possibly even ambitious adversaries abroad…

Part 14: Dreaming the New/Old Liberalism

Some of my ten ideas are compatible with a “small is beautiful” or “government is the problem” ideological perspective. I affirm subsidiarity and the return of appropriate government authority from the Federal to state and local levels. But other of my ideas demand that government, including the Federal government, do more, not less. This may seem contradictory to small or rigid minds, but it isn’t contradictory at all to the sort of liberal, now evidently all but obsolete, who thinks that government’s role is to insure a level playing field and maximum feasible democratic participation where it matters most to citizens in their communities.

I am not for government “getting out of the way”, as libertarians would have it, but I am also not for government “getting in the way”, as when government doesn’t level the playing field but occupies, dominates and smothers it with social engineering schemes that never work as intended. The original 19^th century liberalism tilted to the former impulse, postwar American liberalism toward the latter. I prefer the more balanced kind in between the extremes, the kind championed by the first Roosevelt. It is the balanced liberalism whose progressive goals need to be approached carefully, that is, with a conservative temperament: the “pave the way” approach, let’s call it. We tried the “get out the way” approach and it did not suffice; we tried the “get in the way” approach but now that tack is or ought to be exhausted. Goldilocks to the rescue: The “pave the way” approach is just right. We already have a model that works; it just needs to be retooled for the 21^st century…

The larger point is that we will never be able to right our damaged political economy and our country with it unless we fix our political institutional frameworks, and we will never, ever be able to do that unless we confront and defeat the plutocratic menace that is stalking our country from, as Damon Runyon once put it an admittedly different context, dimple to duodenum.

That, above all, is what we need to fix. We’ve done it before and, while past achievement is no guarantee of future success, we can do it again. We have to try. To give in to despair is deadly. I, for one, am not yet ready to stick a fork into the American project.

Origins and Synthesis of a 21st Century Hamiltonianism

Luke Phillips

Over at the recently-retired The Hamiltonian Republican blog, there’s been a lively debate over the nature of Hamiltonianism and what it means, how it is manifested, in 21^st Century America. Those of us who still consider ourselves Hamiltonian Republicans will likely be continuing our debates and discussions on this subject over at the forthcoming The Millennial Republican blog. But for the sake of my own personal understanding of the subject, I’ll organize my thoughts here at ABiasedPerspective, and use the conclusions of this piece as a reference point in future articles.

So- what is a Hamiltonian Republican? In my view, there are three ways to define this tradition- and it is a tradition rather than an ideology or even a movement. The ways to define this tradition, though, should necessarily emphasize thinkers and statesmen, figures and movements, rather than principles, policy stances, or objectives. The principles, policy stances, and objectives should flow from an understanding of the thinkers and statesmen in the tradition- the other way ‘round would be reinterpreting the figures in the tradition, wrongly, as having held certain principles, policy stances, and objectives which they perhaps did not hold in reality.

The useful thing about defining Hamiltonianism and Hamiltonian Republicanism in a traditional, covenantal sense rather than in an ideological sense is that one thereby removes the temptation to construct an all-encompassing ideology or program that would necessarily grow rigid and unstable with time. By instead basing the system on a study of the lives, legacies, characters, intellects, and habits of mind of great individual thinkers and the movements they led, one can necessarily be more pragmatic and flexible in interpreting their ideas and applying them to the present day. One has the added benefit of having a wide panoply of historical figures to consult, as Machiavelli did, on issues and objectives that they, in a way, pursued in their own times.

Now, to some degree, any modern Hamiltonianism will be both an ideology and a reflection of personal prejudices and biases, and I am under no illusions that I am somehow the steward and gatekeeper of a lost mode of thought accessible only to myself. However, by emphasizing the traditional element of Hamiltonianism, I hope to be as true to the great men of old as possible, and honor their legacies by carrying them forth into the present age and our future glory.

THE THREE TRADITIONS OF HAMILTONIANISM

Back to the three ways to define the tradition.

THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION OF HAMILTONIANISM

First, there is what I call the “Apostolic Succession.” This is the most fruitful way because it is the only way encompassing the entirety of American history. It follows those political thinkers across American history who, generally speaking, supported an activist federal government, national consolidation under the Union, and a strong, industrially-based economy. Michael Lind details this tradition, which I adapt from him, in his great book “Hamilton’s Republic.”

There were pre-revolutionary colonial antecedents to the Hamiltonian tradition, but I don’t know enough about them to argue for them here. The American Revolution itself had its share of radicals and pragmatists, but I think it’s fair to say that John Adams and George Washington, perhaps Ben Franklin as well, and other statesmen and generals of that conflict represented the budding hope of a united national project in the postwar period. Upon the close of that conflict in 1783, and the failed experiment with the Articles of Confederation, a new breed of Constitutionalist-Nationalists arose in support of the new Constitution of 1787. These, of course, included Alexander Hamilton himself, who would go on to loom large on the national scene for the next decade or so. The Federalist Era- the presidencies of George Washington and John Adams, and the “prime ministership” of Alexander Hamilton- was a crucial era in which the Hamiltonian ethos of economic nationalism, unionism, federal activism, and foreign policy restraint was formed, in opposition to the Jeffersonian and Madisonian ethos of localism and idealism.

But Jefferson and Madison, upon assuming the Presidency successively, each became far more Hamiltonian in practice than they would’ve liked to admit. The left wing of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, led by young upstarts like Henry Clay, would eventually grow into the National Republican and Whig parties, which throughout the Antebellum would carry forth the Hamiltonian Federalist programs of national consolidation, economic activism, and foreign policy restraint in a more democratic guise.

I must confess that I am in many ways a stranger to the America between the presidency of Andrew Jackson and that of Abraham Lincoln, and then again a stranger to the America between the death of Abraham Lincoln and the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and yet again a stranger to the America between the stroke of Woodrow Wilson and the ascendancy of Franklin Roosevelt. I have much study to do to correct my ignorance of large swathes of national history. That said, I will trace Hamiltonianism through these strange lands of time so far as is possible.

The Whigs, after the decline of the National Republicans, carried forth the Hamiltonian vision. Moreover, as the secession crisis beckoned, they fought to make compromises in the interests of the preservation of the union. After their implosion and the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, the Whigs’ ideas were carried forth in the Republican Party of John C. Fremont and Abraham Lincoln- and Abraham Lincoln, of course, would smash the pseudo-Jeffersonian slave lords in the crisis of the Civil War.

The Civil War in many ways allowed for the institutionalization of Hamiltonian ideas and principles into the American experiment. America would thenceforth be a united industrial union, characterized by a government willing to use its power. For most of the post-Civil War era, it was relatively laissez-faire on this regard, but with industrial conditions worsening by the turn of the century, ascendant President Theodore Roosevelt would spend the better part of a decade and a half reorienting American government and politics towards the activism that would characterize the later 20^th Century.

After Roosevelt and the Progressive Republicans gave way to Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Democrats- semi-Hamiltonian progressives who used Hamiltonian means in the First World War- there was something of a lull in the tradition throughout the 1920s. But the election of Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, to the presidency, and his embarking on a vast program of economic development in industry and welfare, effectively caused the Hamiltonian tradition to jump parties. Throughout the New Deal and the Second World War, Hamiltonianism applied to midcentury conditions totally transformed the union and the American way of life. By war’s end, Republicans in their party’s centrist wing would adapt some of the principles of the New Deal Democrats, creating a new “Vital Center” in American politics.

The Vital Center of the Republican Party, in turn, would birth the great “Modern Republican” statesmen, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and to some degree, George H.W. Bush, the last of the GI Generation statesmen. The post-New Deal Democrats, meanwhile, would carry on the left wing of Hamiltonianism through the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. And the last generation of Hamiltonians- the first generation of Neoconservatives, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others- would ultimately rise to serve the Modern Republicans in the interests of reforming the reforms of the post-New Deal Democrats.

Between the elections of 1964 and 1972, lunatic social liberalism or reaction and various forms of fiscal conservatism overtook the main factions of either party, and by my measure, the end of the Gerald Ford Presidency in 1976 represented the last gasp of this age-old temperament as a dominating institutional force. There have been Hamiltonian statesmen since 1976, mostly in the foreign policy community, but overall their influence has waned and they have all but disappeared as the institutional forces in American politics they once were.

So there’s the Apostolic Succession of Hamiltonianism, replete with thinkers and statesmen and movements to commune with for insights on today’s problems. There are two other ways.

THE MIDCENTURY SYNTHESIS OF HAMILTONIANISM

Second is the Midcentury Synthesis- an observation and investigation, and ultimate dialectic fusion, of the thinking of four main groups of thinkers: the New Conservatives, the Old Neoconservatives, the Modern Republicans, and miscellaneous conservatively-tempered thinkers. A sophisticated study of the thoughts of these four groups sheds light on the issues of today, as the issues they studied are only a half-century removed from our own problems, sometimes less.

The New Conservatives were a group of poets and historians in the 1950s who opposed Bill Buckley’s Fusionist conservatism. They included such thinkers as Robert Nisbet, the poet Peter Viereck, and the historian-cum-political scientist Clinton Rossiter (all of whose available works are fascinating, erudite, and insightful.) Their primary contribution was the promotion of a Burkean “conservative liberalism” in an age of utopian liberalism and conservative-libertarian “Jacobinism.” Their temperament ought to inform Hamiltonians today.

The Old Neoconservatives can inform the policy side of things, particularly on domestic policy. Their left wing, encompassing such diverse and eclectic thinkers as Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and James Q. Wilson, generally brought a conservative Burkean temperament alongside a liberal Rooseveltian activism. Like Benjamin Disraeli, they were “Tory Men with Whig Measures.” Their work on welfare and regulatory-bureaucratic reform, on political economy, and on most issues of government provides an excellent model by which to promote social solidarity while making the administrative state more effective and efficient. (It is important to distinguish the Old Neoconservatives from the New Neoconservatives.)

Then there are the Modern Republicans- Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and to some degree George H.W. Bush, as well as midcentury figures like Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton. They can offer guidance on the style of politics Hamiltonians would pursue- one of collaboration yet firm standing against extremes on either side, and an insistence on perpetual reform of established institutions. They can also offer much on the foreign policy front, as Ike, Nixon, and Bush are classically regarded as some of the most successful foreign policy statesmen in American history.

Finally, there’s a smattering of eclectic thinkers on various subjects, scattered across party lines and affiliated with various groups. The main ones I think of are Henry Kissinger, with his tragic view of history and realistic strategic temperament; James Burnham, whose neo-Marxist class analysis is second to none; Samuel P. Huntington, whose institutional analyses factoring in culture, history, and other elements surpass the thought of many other 20^th Century political scientists; and Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant theologian of Christian Realism and true moderation.

The synthesis of the thought and legacy of the New Conservatives, the Old Neoconservatives, the Modern Republicans, and these various other thinkers is the second tradition by which one can define contemporary Hamiltonianism and Hamiltonian Republicanism.

CONTEMPORARY SEMI-HAMILTONIAN THINKERS

Finally, there is the third way- the prospect of using contemporary thinkers and writers on politics who think along similar lines. In my view, the two great Hamiltonians today are Michael Lind- father of the modern use of the term itself- and Ross Douthat, the young New York Times columnist. A second tier might include the foreign affairs realist Robert D. Kaplan, the Reformicon or semi-Reformicon columnists Reihan Salam, Sam Tanenhaus, and David Frum, and the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice. These figures each, in their own way, apply certain methods of Hamiltonian thought to contemporary problems and debates. I might also add that the new journal American Affairs very brilliantly attempts to cover similar culturally conservative/economically nationalist ground, and Reformicons and the journal The American Interest sometimes cover it as well.

The main trick is to find those nationalists with a conservative temperament on cultural issues and a liberal temperament on fiscal and government issues. This itself encompasses a wide variety of thinkers, as any tradition must- but it is narrow enough to be distinguishable from either the Democratic or Republican establishments, and certainly from the left and right extremes.

It is also very distinguishable from Buckleyism or Fusionism, the standard consensus of conservatism these days, in that it is fiscally liberal and socially conservative in ways that National Review-style conservatism simply is not. I wrote the other day that aspiring Hamiltonian thinkers must hold their noses and work for the various fusionist factions- libertarians, neoconservatives- if they are to gain any kind of influence over the party, but it yet remains critical to understand the differences between the two movements, one decadent and the other nascent.

CONCLUSION

Anyhow, this is my interpretation of what Hamiltonianism means in the 21^st Century. This is my view of what a new center-right movement ought to look like, and what a responsible Republican Party should promote. I’m not looking to build a new ideological coalition, propaganda machine, or mass movement so much as I am hoping that new generations of center-right elites- politicians, operators, intellectuals, funders, etc.- begin to look at things in ways more amenable to the Hamiltonian way.

The Alexander Hamilton Society, while perhaps not being explicitly Hamiltonian the way I’ve articulated here, nonetheless is doing something good in encouraging young center-right leaders to take on the label “Hamiltonian.”  That may well be a start, but we need to go further. American Affairs can help, too, on that front.

This piece has explored the traditional, intellectual, and historical backgrounds to Hamiltonianism. It has explicitly avoided policy proposals and commentary on current issues, though I’ll probably turn to writing more of that in due time at The Millennial Republican. What it means to be a Hamiltonian Republican in the U.S. Department of State, or in the U.S. Congress, or in the California State Legislature, might be entirely different things, or similar things. I need to do some serious thought on application- Michael Lind and Ross Douthat will likely be my primary guides on that front.

So we’ll see. This should be interesting intellectual exploration, moving forward.

Notes on Charlottesville and the America of 2017

Luke Phillips

NOTE: This is not intended to be a polemical or even an analytic essay. It is rather a series of observations, realizations, and arguments about the current state of American political society, including attacks on those who think wrongly and attacks on myself for previously thinking wrongly. It is organized in the dying format of “Notes,” and intended to serve as a reference point for the author and for anyone curious.

I realize my takes on these contentious subjects will offend many, and am prepared to accept the consequences.

REALIZATIONS ON WHITE SUPREMACY

I make this admission publicly to acknowledge a certain species of my intellectual failures over the last several years, and partly to begin to reorient my thinking moving forward.

So: I was wrong about white supremacists. For a while, I had held to the notion that what remained of KKK-style groups and resurgent Neo-Nazis in America was confined to the fringes of public life. Sure, they have a vigorous online presence, and sure, candidate and then President Trump dogwhistled them into relevance again over the course of the last election. But they didn’t, in my view, warrant any kind of sustained attention, simply because they were a small group not capable of mobilizing towards anything significant. And the key thing I thought was that white supremacists did not influence the Republican Party to any significant degree.

And now an innocent woman is dead in Charlottesville, Virginia, where my young, not-fully-white sister is about to start going to college. Those two facts, when I realized them, made me start thinking on white supremacy again.

So back to my former assumptions. I was wrong on most of those counts, not because I was fed wrong data, but because I didn’t want to acknowledge the trends or connect the dots that should’ve been obvious that whole time. Commentators in the center with more liberal views than me, notably my contact Chris Ladd over at Political Orphans, have been warning for years about the resurgence of active white supremacy, with ample data to prove it. I only now realize they were right about the extent of the racial prejudice- not just resentment, but active prejudice and at times identitarianism- within an electorally significant portion of the GOP, and which percolates up into its lower layers and even all the way up to the very top.

So, the concessions (or, rather, the realizations, because I’m not conceding them: I’m realizing them.)

-Neo-Nazis and Klansmen and other white supremacists are not confined to the margins of public life, though they have (rightly) been shut out of the mainstream of public discourse. The reason they seem, to a standard member of the establishment like myself, to be a marginal group, is because they don’t have columnists at National Review, The New York Times, the Washington Post, or any reasonably mainstream publications. They’re confined to Breitbart and further right, further out; they don’t even speak openly on Fox News (though Fox News, like President Trump, dogwhistles to them all the time.)

-While a plurality or even a majority of Trump voters might well have been, like many members of my family, merely disgruntled conservative loyalists who liked Trump’s straight-talkin’ forwardness, or like the 2016 election trope of the culturally conservative white working-class voter who was tired of liberal elitism in social issues and neoliberal economic policy that destroyed high-wage jobs, the fact of the matter is that a large number of Trump’s voters- some of Trump’s most ardent supporters, it should be added- were and are active white supremacists pining for an older, whiter American bereft of its growing minority groups (of which I am partly a member.) In Trump they saw, rightly or not, the prospect of a return to that America through, realistic or not, deportation and immigration restriction, the repeal of racial preference and affirmative action policies, stricter crime policies, and a general denouncement of multiculturalism.

-These white supremacists are both formally and informally organized. The question of whether Voter ID laws in the Deep South are propelled partly or largely by racial animus among white voters is no longer a question for me. The question of whether the Right’s response to police shootings of young black men and crimes committed by illegal immigrants is motivated by similar racial animus is no longer a question, either. And it’s no question which party these people vote for. Nor is it a question of whether any of them are in local office, state legislative office, Congress, party positions, and other politically significant roles across American society, in every state. Of course they’re there, and that means there is indeed an element in the Republican Party that happens to be racially resentful, racially prejudiced, and racially identitarian.

-The violence we saw in Charlottesville, as many have opined, is not likely to be the last white supremacist violence we see this year or this epoch. My former boss, Adam Garfinkle, was perhaps overly pessimistic in his initial reaction comparing the America of 2017 to Weimar Germany’s lethal streetfighting and organized political violence by nonstate actors. But he was overall correct in noting the normalization of political violence- a trend he’s been writing eloquently about for some time- not only on the fringes of contemporary America, but even in the rhetoric of those in high office and high cultural positions.

Any Republican official or conservative commentator who does not realize the above four things, and factor them into their future statements and analyses of the national situation, is not necessarily complicit in the white supremacy in their own party, as many activists on the left would bellow they are. But any Republican official or conservative commentator who does not realize those above four things, is keeping their head in the sand like an ostrich, and willfully deluding themselves as to the nature of contemporary American life. If Julius Krein- founder of the American Affairs journal and one of President Trump’s most ardent, eloquent, and sophisticated intellectual apologists- could grasp the meaning of Charlottesville and change direction publicly, in the pages of the New York Times, then any center-right figure- save, perhaps, those responsible officials in the Trump Administration who are keeping the ship of state afloat, and would risk not only their jobs but their country’s safety if they spoke out against their boss- should be able to do the same. I’m beginning to think it’s a moral responsibility, at this point, if American conservatism is going to have a future.

Anyhow, moving forward, I’ll be keeping this in mind, especially when I write about nationalism, conservatism, traditionalism, colorblind racial policies and attitudes, and American heritage issues. I have my own opinions on each of these things, some of which I’ll elaborate further down the road; but it will always weigh on me, moving forward, to know that opinions and positions I’ve arrived at with no racial prejudice or resentment in my heart or mind, and that many of my fellow Americans have arrived at in a similarly racially benign way, are nonetheless shared by thousands or millions of Americans who are motivated by racial prejudice, the dark specter of white supremacy, and the evil violence that cannot fail to accompany those.

I could, I suppose, forsake my convictions out of disgust. But I think it’s more productive to simply be aware that unpalatable people share my views, and make sure I don’t inadvertently help them accomplish dark and sinister ends by pushing for my preferred policies and reforms. It’s a thin tightrope to walk, I’m sure- but in an age of resurgent white supremacy, it is the road anybody on the center-right must uncomfortably walk.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE BROADER STATE OF AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE

The responses to the Charlottesville murder and riots were generally intelligent, especially on the reformist center-right. Ross Douthat examined our nation’s domestic divisions, which cleave across multiple spheres of identity, and concluded that we’ll likely experience more low-level violence before anything significant happens. (He also noted that, for now, the violence of the late 1960s dwarfs anything in the mid-2010s.) My former colleague Jason Willick, who has been commenting very intelligently on liberal excess and conservative reaction for years now, penned a memorable passage worth quoting at length, on the slow decline of American mores on violence over the last few years:

“Yes, the 1990s saw race riots in Los Angeles and the bombing of Oklahoma City, but those took place against the backdrop of a competent government and a strong political consensus. Yes, there were the September 11 attacks, but those at least temporarily brought the country closer together.

We’ve had polarization and culture wars before. This is different. This feels different. Stretching back at least to Dylann Roof’s mass murder of black congregationalists in 2015, the country has been getting pushed closer and closer to the edge. The summer of 2016 saw the assassination of five police officers in Dallas by a black activist. Donald Trump’s rhetoric as a candidate flirted with political violence over and over again. And since his election, the temperature has only been escalating. A Montana congressional candidate physically attacked a reporter. There have been campus riots against right-wing speakers, and clashes between Leftists and neo-Nazis on the streets of Sacramento and elsewhere. It was less than two months ago that an anti-Trump activist opened fire on a group of Republican Congressmen playing baseball in Alexandria.

The events in Charlottesville—in which a neo-Nazi ran down anti-racist protesters after a white supremacist march, killing at least one person and injuring many more—were distinctively hideous. The anti-civilizational fascists of the alt-right, no longer confined to marginal online forums, were out in force in a storied American town, maiming people on the streets. The President whom they openly admire (former Klansman David Duke praised him in an interview at the march) deliberately equivocated when given the opportunity to condemn them. Maybe he was egging them on, or maybe he is simply so narcissistic that he cannot distance himself from anyone who has offered loyalty. It doesn’t matter. Neo-Nazi blogs delighted at the President’s non-response. Fascists are emboldened. More on the far-Left will become convinced that racism cannot be fought adequately within the political system.”

But the events in Charlottesville weren’t the fault of many sides, as President Trump argued at the outset of the event. Again, Julius Krein, in his 180-degree rejection of President Trump, very correctly noted that “if Mr. Trump had been speaking about the overall political climate, he might have been right to say that ‘many sides’ are responsible for exacerbating social tensions. Yet during the events in Charlottesville this past weekend, only one side- a deranged white nationalist- was responsible for killing anyone. To equivocate about this fact is the height of irresponsibility.”

I fear we’re getting into a social blame game on the issue of domestic mass violence not dissimilar to the blame game we’re in on the issue of jihadi vs. white supremacist terrorism. (For those who don’t know, it’s the tendency, whenever there’s a mass shooting, for conservatives and liberals alike to hold their breath and commentary until the identity of the shooter is revealed. And when it is a white supremacist, as in the Dylan Roof attack in Charleston, the liberals bemoan the prevalence of white supremacist terrorism in America, while conservatives talk about the need for better mental health services. Meanwhile when it is a radical Islamist, as in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, the conservatives highlight the growing threat to the homeland of radical Islamism, while liberals argue that better gun control is the only solution. It’s really quite pathetic, and I’m getting to the point that whenever a mass shooting happens, I wonder who will score the points and make themselves look like jerks more.)

Anyhow, back to the social blame game- it should go as unspoken that when white supremacists rally, the conservative press tends to downplay its coverage of the instigators and their vile cause, while highlighting and vilifying the various breeds of counter-protestor- some of whom are indeed vile, like the Antifa types and other neo-Marxist revolutionary leftists. This is sheer apologism and it is absolutely wrong. Whereas, when anyone on the left rallies, but particularly when it’s over a racial issue, the liberal media will highlight only the peaceful nature of the main groups of protestors, while absolutely ignoring the very real riots and other violence being perpetrated by other members of the same protest. The Ferguson and Baltimore protests a few years back had their share of rioting, and it was absolute irresponsibility on the part of the liberal press to ignore or, worse, justify the wanton destruction of property and desecration of civic order.

But it’s not just a question of racial identity politics, white and otherwise, contributing to a decline in civic order (and before I’m accused of equivocating, let me say it- I am equivocating left and right, because as I will attempt to demonstrate below, the radical left in this country is every bit as guilty of ripping up the social fabric as the radical right, even though the radical left doesn’t happen to have blood on its hands from this last weekend.) It’s not just identity politics on their own- there are broader trends at play in American society in the hot, violent summer of 2017, and they need to be observed.

So: my former supervisor Damir Marusic wrote about this over at The American Interest better than most others have, so I’ll reference his piece here. Marusic absolutely shredded the contemporary diversity narrative and the ascent of postmodernism in political thinking, arguing that they’re incompatible with liberal democracy in any form. The emphasis on group identity over individual citizenship, the universal narrative of oppressor vs. oppressed in everything from political institutions to economic outcomes to “gender constructs” and everything between and beyond, so familiar to any skeptical attendee of any (post)modern university, the implication of perpetual struggle and perpetual revolution on the part of the “oppressed-“ this would seem to be a domain of the left and only of the left. But Marusic argues that this emphasis on particularistic identity, oppressed-ness by the powers that be, and the emphasis on struggle and overthrow equally characterizes the “alt-right” movement, alongside the radical racial separatist movements and gender movements on the left demanding so much recognition and booty from the common weal. It’s like Willick said so many months ago, (or rather, doesn’t appear to have said, but has certainly implied time and time again-) identity politics on the left breeds identity politics on the right. Identity politics among minorities breeds identity politics among the majority.

Identity politics, white or otherwise, spur more identity politics. Radical, revolutionary violence spurs more radical revolutionary violence. It’s a vicious cycle- and the center-right ignores it on the right at its own peril. The center-left ignores it on the left at its own peril, as well.

In probably the most provocative part of his piece, Marusic says that a President Hillary Clinton would’ve been, if perhaps not as bad as President Trump on the identity issue, still pretty darn bad. That’s because, as the ostrich-ized mainstream left has yet to admit to itself, the modern Democratic Party is organized much more explicitly along identity-politics lines than the Republican Party is. (The GOP just dogwhistles for racist white voters- the national Democratic Party website’s “People” section literally lists all the different ethnic groups the Democrats have special advocacy for. That’s the cut-and-dry definition of identity politics, folks, and it’s fully institutionalized on the cultural left.) So a second President Clinton, whatever her other virtues would have been (and relative centrism and temperance compared to Trump certainly would’ve been some of them) would’ve continued to slide along the current diversity narrative without offering up any meaningful narrative of national unity. And what we desperately, desperately need these days is a narrative of inclusive national unity- something the exclusivist right rejects, and the multicultural left cannot fathom.

But Marusic, who writes for a functionally center-right magazine, is not at all the only one making this point. The now-notorious Mark Lilla, a colorblind liberal if there ever was one and a Democrat seeking the best for the future of his party, was recently interviewed by Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative on his latest book, The Once and Future Liberal, and given that identity is a central focus of that book, Charlottesville of course came up.

The interview is worth reading in full, if for no other reason than that Lilla throws plenty of barbs in both directions and is more eloquent than I can ever be in describing the ills that face identitarian America. The basic point, though, is this- pre-Reaganite America emphasized communalism and solidarity, and great things were accomplished in the age between the Roosevelts and Gerald Ford, due largely to the emphasis on commonality, community, and mass democracy.

ON NATIONAL UNITY- ITS PROSPECTS AND ITS PROBLEMS

There are problems with the national unity narrative, of course. One of them is the fact that, as my old professor Ted McAllister says, “America is a conversation- not a creed.” That is, the definition of America is nebulous and diverse enough to inspire multiple, equally-valid ideas about it, and the same is true about American national identity. Anyone who’s read David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial work Albion’s Seed knows that Puritans, Quakers, Cavaliers, and Scots-Irish, and all their descendants, have equal justifiable claims on the appellation “the real Americans.” It is rather the interactions of these groups and more, especially including the innumerable immigrant groups whose journeys Michael Barone chronicles in Shaping Our Nation, that has formed the tumultuous and inspiring “conversation” that is America and Americanism. Anyone who has studied American history must, necessarily, concede that there is no unified American identity, never has been, and never will be. Apologies, Theodore Roosevelt.

That being said, the fact that we can’t put it into a neatly categorizable box doesn’t mean American identity doesn’t exist- simply that American identity is different from, say, the Chinese or German conceptions of national identity, and not only in the fact that Americanism includes a politically-ideological component about principles and truths. There are certain things that are American and certain things that are clearly not- certain tendencies, certain beliefs, certain lifestyles, certain habits of the heart and mind.

The problem with contemporary liberal culture, outside of thinkers like Lilla, is that it emphasizes the importance of cultural differences- the diversity or multiculturalism narrative- to the point that, as many liberals will say, “our diversity is our strength. Our diversity is what is American about America.” No it’s not- not by a longshot, on either count. Our diversity is a strength when we can find the common threads of unity beneath it, not when we push apart the components based on differences and intergroup competition. And though diversity- as mentioned, throughout our entire history, not just throughout our immigrants’ history- is indeed a component of Americanism, it is nowhere near the entirety of what is American about America.

The problem with contemporary conservative culture is that it defines American identity primarily in economic and ideological terms without looking to the cultural side of things; and when it does look to the cultural side of things, it is primarily in a majoritarian apple-pie sort of sense that is as banal as it is uncreative. One might say that the mainstream right sees pre-1960s America, plus Ronald Reagan, as American identity, while the mainstream left sees post-1960s America, plus perhaps the abolitionists and the progressives, as American identity. Both views leave out too much America, as Ross Douthat implied a while back.

The problem with contemporary alt-right culture- and there are too many to count- is that it relies on too exclusivistic a definition of American identity, and one that, in a wholly un-American twist, puts that identity in the blood and not in the heart and hands. I need not elaborate further on this. Meanwhile, the problem with contemporary revolutionary leftist culture- and there are still too many to count- is that it views Americanism as the source of most of the world’s ills, and wishes to deconstruct and destroy it entirely out of some form of warped universal justice.

Pick your poison, but I’m not satisfied with the arguments of the mainstream left or the decadent right, and no reasonable person and certainly no American patriot would accept or even consider the arguments of the alt-right or the revolutionary left.

No, I think one of the main causes of our social dysfunction today is precisely the fact that for the last half-century or so, the cultivation of standard melting-pot American pride has been driven from most of the public square and confined to the military and intelligence communities and certain civic groups like the American Legion, the Boy Scouts, and others. (Fareed Zakaria wrote today that the immediate condemnation by the five armed services chiefs of the Charlottesville riot and murder and the white supremacy it represents was indicative of the notions of honor and old-fashioned values held by the military community, alongside that community’s famed history of successfully integrating America’s diverse population into a powerful unified fighting force.)

As I’ll probably write in a piece eventually- there never has been, is not, and never will be a Rooseveltian unified American identity, a 100% Americanism fully colorblind and cultureblind in all ways. And there shouldn’t be- one of the great things about the American social fabric is the ability for so many different groups to live together in relative harmony, while the members of each hold complicated multiple identities revolving around the core identity as of American citizenship.

But to get to a healthy version of this mosaic-like pluralism revolving around shared heritage, you can’t just tell people to be proud of their ethnic and religious heritage and whatever else, and not tell them that they’re Americans as well (or, more accurately, you shouldn’t tell them that their American-ness is different from that of their fellow citizens of different races, which I believe is closer to what the contemporary diversity narrative does.) If you’re going to keep a nation as diverse intellectually, ethnically, and culturally as the United States of America together, you absolutely must have some kind of movement towards a common unity, even if you’ll never fully get there. You must have some shared notion among at least the elites who run the country and staff its major institutions, that they’re part of an American national project- membership in an international cosmopolitan project or a subnational ethnic project might be a part of that, but the primary orientation of the elite absolutely must be towards an American national project. And the population must see that the elite is working for the country first and foremost, and not for any of its particular groups or for any outside institutions, if the people are going to seriously trust that their leaders and their elites are looking out for them.

This movement towards unity, this emphasis on common citizenship even in its diverse manifestations, this cultivation of a common culture even if you’ll never fully get there, this general expectation of national loyalty despite divergent interpretations of what that nationhood means- this is Americanism, and it is neither fascist nor authoritarian. It is what the vast majority of successful American presidents have practiced, and what even the unsuccessful ones have attempted– George W. Bush, for example, did it very well in the aftermath of 9/11, if not so much over the duration of the Iraq War, and Barack Obama did it very well during his 2008 presidential campaign, though all traces of it were lost by his 2012 campaign.

And I should say again: the Pre-Trump GOP never figured out how to do this for a diverse, multiethnic nation. The Democratic Party of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton never bothered to figure out how to do it, figuring that diversity was its own reward. The Republican Party of Donald Trump has abandoned the project entirely and catered to white supremacists. None of this is healthy.

But we need it. If we’re going to keep this national bad dream from becoming a national nightmare, and if we fail and need to escape a yet-unrealized national nightmare, we need to find some kind of consensus on what the hell all 320 millions of us are doing together in this damn American project. I fear, with many others who also try to look beyond the nose of our particular partisan prejudices and towards the future state of the country a few years’ hence, that it might already be too late. But I’m not willing to stick a fork in just yet.

SOME MISCELLANEOUS AND TROUBLING QUESTIONS

I’ve discussed a lot in these notes, covering too much ground for a coherent essay (hence why I’m not publishing it as a polemical or analytic argument.) There’s a few miscellaneous things I need to cover, that will take us back to the beginning of these notes.

I have a question I ask my politically-oriented friends hyperbolically, when they say they are true centrists, true moderates, true wonks, or something of that nature. I ask them, “if you were forced to pick a side to be in coalition with- not join them, but vote alongside them- would you rather have it said that you had Klansmen in your coalition, or Communists in your coalition?”

Now, this is a somewhat unfair question given its hyperbolic nature. It’s also an unfair question given history- after all, President Franklin D. Roosevelt somehow managed to stuff BOTH Klansman Southern Democrats AND Communist Northern Progressive Democrats into THE SAME New Deal coalition (and he was neither!) But it is, I think, a revealing thing. Some people- mostly on the right- would rather be with racists than with totalitarians. Many others- most socially liberal, antiracist Millennials- would rather side with totalitarians than racists (though I don’t think many are familiar with the very real evils of applied Communism, simply because it never made its way to American shores.) In any case, it’s very often an easy answer for the people I ask- they’ll say Communists right off the bat. Communists might have killed a lot of people, but hey- they didn’t target them for their race, did they?

It’s a harder question for me. I do, actually, think that there’s something like a moral equivalency between left-totalitarianism and right-reactionary race supremacy. That’s not just because I’m more aware of Stalinist and Maoist excesses than my lefty friends; that’s out of an analysis of the social evils of both movements, and the intellectual and cultural currents that led both to commit the deeds they did.

I don’t know if I’d rather be lumped with Communists or Klansmen in coalition. For many, that makes me morally bankrupt already- it is so clear to them that racism is the greatest evil, or that totalitarianism is the greatest evil, that any other choice is tantamount to either tacit endorsement or moral cowardice. I’m just not so sure.

But how about another question- suppose everything were to go as badly as it could go over the next decade, and we in America were to find ourselves involved in a domestic conflict a little bit worse than low-scale civil war- that is, mass violence in the streets, legitimate political factions backing that violence, and a threat to the institutions and integrity of the state by one of those groups. Suppose, too, as seems likely, that the factions were roughly the alt-right on one side, and the alt-left on the other- Klansmen and Neo-Nazis versus revolutionary Marxists and Antifa black-masks. Suppose there were centrist, pro-compromise moderates like Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, perhaps this time Jon Huntsman and Joe Lieberman, like there were the last time this happened- but that they’re again taking different sides and affiliating themselves reluctantly with different radicalisms. Which side would you fight for?

This question is less difficult for me. I would side, of course, with whichever side was for the preservation of the Union, the Anti-Secessionists. I would fight my hardest to keep the Union whole and not in parts, and I would reluctantly side with whatever one-time allies were also fighting for that goal, be they interested in destroying capitalist civilization or be they interested in subjugating people of other races. It goes unspoken that this would taint my conscience and implicate me in great evils by association, be they totalitarian evils or racist evils. (A statesman must love his country more than his own soul– and the preservation of a unified American nation-state is a cause I would fight and die for.)

This is because, as I have argued before, the existence of a unified and centrally-governed American nation-state in the middle third of North America is a great moral cause in itself- for that political order, and the stability and prosperity made possible by it, protect the American people from international wars against each other, from foreign domination by outside powers, and from tyranny by petty local oligarchs and usurpers. (Just read Alexander Hamilton’s first few Federalist Papers to see why that abolitionist was willing to form a union together with slave lords- it’s a lesser-evil kind of thing.) Furthermore, the existence of American power or superpower in North America, on the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts, opens up the opportunity that American sea power can check Eurasian land power and preclude the domination of much of the world by a perhaps less-benign sovereign in Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, or elsewhere. There are significant implications for world order that a post-superpower American Civil War would open up.

And again- of course it would be a great moral evil to side with totalitarians, and of course it would be a great moral evil to side with racists. But given the hyperbolic nature of the thought experiment, there’s no way out of this question that doesn’t end in a “gotcha” soundbite.

I hope the stakes of this moment in summer 2017 are clear, then. I don’t want to have to make the choice to side with racists against totalitarians or with totalitarians against racists. I have dedicated my life and career to becoming as much of an Alexander Hamilton or a Henry Clay as possible, a public servant working to preserve our union and make it great, and I will fight and write to keep us from getting further towards the point of dissension and dissolution. But god forbid, should we ever come to that point, I know where I’ll stand.

This leads to a final question worth pondering. I noted earlier that some believe racism to be the worst of evils, and the thing that must be fought at all costs, the demon against which no sacrifice is too great. There certainly is great reasoning for this; racism dehumanizes people for the meagerist of reasons, and when it is institutionalized it is near impossible to correct the myriad injustices flowing from it. Of all the great social and political evils, racism certainly ranks near the worst.

But is it the worst? Is racism the greatest evil, the one great demon against which no sacrifice is too great? Is nothing worse than racism?

I think it’s clear that most on America’s left would argue that it is, indeed. They would point to any number of incidents and trends, they would cite Jefferson or Rawls or Ta-Nehisi Coates, they would passionately argue that the social tyranny of “free” people oppressing those of different races, the reality of half of America before Lincoln freed the slaves, was the darkest time in the history of the world, not least because of the hypocrisy it represented in our identity as a people.

They have a powerful argument, one I would not attempt to alter or defeat, and one which must be present in every American conscience- especially after Charlottesville- because it highlights the great sin of American identity, the racism inherent in our founding and expansion.

Yet, it still seems somewhat shortsighted to me. It only covers the American experience; it does not cover the whole of the human experience which must be examined, as well.

I can think of two other evils that, in my book, are greater than racism. The first is totalitarianism, not only that of the Communists and Fascists and old Monarchists and Theocrats, but that of any regime that seeks total control over the lives of its people in all aspects- thus the republicanism of the Jacobins fits this category, and the slave lords of the American South were certainly totalitarian in their power over their slaves. The labor movement, too, can credibly say that the great industrial capitalists of the last two centuries were totalitarians of a sort, though this is a far-extended argument that I don’t believe holds up to philosophical and empirical scrutiny.

Totalitarianism removes human freedom in entirety, and even if it is purported to advance a particular social ideal, it is entirely bankrupt as a political system or as the result of any ideological mode of thinking. And its close relationship to utopianism- a fallacy, one might say a heresy, which free-thinking people under free constitutions embrace far more often than is comfortable- means that totalitarianism is always a little bit closer to the human condition and thus to earthly realization than anyone would like to admit.

But there is another, greater evil, an evil worse even than the imposition of totalitarian tyranny. Hobbes thought that that evil was death; but as Clinton Rossiter argued, Alexander Hamilton thought that that evil was anarchy- the Hydra anarchy, for freedom is equally expunged in the war of all against all, and the natural, necessary remedy to anarchy is typically a temporary tyranny that is always in danger of falling into despotic totalitarianism. Moreover, anarchy is far closer to realization at any given time than totalitarianism, given the fragile nature of order and stability in human affairs. And finally, if we are to accept with Thomas Aquinas that there is a natural order to things, then political anarchy is a crime against the way things are supposed to be, even if anarchy does characterize whatever “state of nature” exists. It simply is the worst state human beings can exist in, and thus Hamilton and I seek flexible order wherever, whenever, and by whatever means possible, as did Aeneas.

I’m not sure all on the modern American left would agree that totalitarianism and anarchy are worse evils than institutional racism. I’m certainly sure the modern right would agree that totalitarianism is a greater evil, but it’d quibble over the definition of anarchy and whether anarchy is worse than totalitarianism.

In any case, the question of racism as the greatest evil is still one I must ponder- after all, my own existence as a half-white half-Asian child would have been outlawed in some places a century ago, and the descriptive effective of racism are far more visible in America today than either totalitarianism or anarchy.

But there are no easy answers. That’s why we must ponder. I just need to come to conclusions soon enough- the pace of events nationwide and worldwide is quickening, and people who will make a difference need at least a basic idea of what they think.

Purity or Influence? Confessions and Realizations of a Frustrated Political Thinker

Luke Phillips

As anyone who knows me or follows this blog can attest, I am an idiosyncratic thinker (like my great influences Michael Lind and Ross Douthat, among others.) I remain a Republican because I know to forfeit that title is to forfeit any influence over any political debates, because for better or for worse, no one really listens to Independents or Third Partiers.

However, despite that once-begrudging decision of practicality, I’ve hitherto made a point of loudly protesting it and bemoaning my circumstances routinely. I’ve made a showy spectacle out of my multiple failed attempts to cobble together a “new movement,” none of which ever went past the blogging stage. I’ve written piece after piece after piece decrying the stagnation of the Republican Party and conservative movement’s intellectual apparatus, and have always remained on the sidelines of any real influence over anything.

I don’t reject any of the views and perspectives that have led me to make these decisions, but I’ve recently realized something important that will probably shape a lot of my decisions moving forward. And that is this: the game of politics exists, and has its own rules about playing. We can stand on the sidelines and stay pure, or we can get in to play and de-purify our thoughts, but we can’t change the rules of that game (no matter how much revolutionaries in every age want to.) At a certain point, in politics, one must work with people and organizations one disagrees with on fundamental issues, in order to accomplish what might be practical (and, it must be noted, in line with one’s original principles.)

I certainly haven’t been a paragon of prudence in this regard, having made various decisions in recent years that go against this ethos. (I stand by those decisions, but acknowledge my hypocrisy, which is the proper way to deal with what hypocrisy can’t be avoided or corrected.) But I’m slowly realizing that such a strategy is the right strategy for any trite “practical idealist” who wants to get into public life and make real change. I need only look at two people I look up to, both policy thinkers with significant influence on the center-right.

TWO INFLUENTIAL INTELLECTUALS

First off, Joel Kotkin, my employer and one of my early intellectual and professional influences. A respected and, in some quarters, despised scholar and journalist of urban planning and demographics, Kotkin writes frequent reports and weekly or biweekly columns on various issues from a center-right perspective, with a strong emphasis on class struggles and issues. He’s developed a lot of interesting ideas on urbanity and suburbanism, the status of families in late modernity, and contemporary manifestations of the class struggle. A former Democrat, he’s often found in conservative and libertarian institutions and footnotes. Libertarians in particular love his emphasis on decentralization and the quantitative skills he brings to classic libertarian arguments.

But Joel Kotkin is not a libertarian.

Second off, Robert D. Kaplan, great journalist and geopolitical analyst and a thinker I’ve had the honor of speaking with a few times. A respected and, in some quarters, despised strategist and international affairs analyst, Kaplan writes books every year or two melding literature, IR theory, history, and various trends in military, political, and economic analysis, with a strong emphasis on conceptual geopolitics and the tragic view of history and human affairs. He’s developed ideas on, and called attention to, practical theories of geopolitics and great-power competition, and is hard to pin down ideologically. He tends to populate hawkish center-right circles, including among thinkers associated with neoconservatism, who in turn appreciate his analysis of the enduring nature of conflict in human affairs. Neoconservatives tend to cite his arguments on the need for strength in foreign policy and the persistence of great-power rivalry.

But Robert D. Kaplan is not a neoconservative.

Kaplan is respected and influential among the neoconservatives whose views and policies he has at times written against, while Kotkin is respected and influential among the libertarians whose views and policies he has in turn written against. Why is this? Why are these thinkers whose instincts differ from those of the circles they inhabit so influential among them?

I’d have to interview either of them on this, but I suspect it’s because Kotkin and Kaplan both realize that in order to hold influence over center-right domestic or foreign policy, they need intellectual capital among the intellectual groups popular on the center-right. And they probably realize that despite their disagreements they might individually have with thinkers in those spheres, there is enough commonality that it is worth their time to cash in their chips with the dominant intellectual factions dominating Republican foreign and domestic policy.

And they maintain their intellectual individuality while working with people they disagree with, perhaps becoming even more respected because those who consult them know that they aren’t mere lock-step yes-men who will parrot neoconservative or libertarian ideological screeds when prompted.

As such, Kotkin and Kaplan are some of the most innovative thinkers on the center-right. They are in the center-right intellectual sphere, without necessarily being of it. And in the contemporary GOP apparatus- which, incidentally, looks very much like the Pre-Trump GOP apparatus- that kind of flexibility to work with those you disagree with for the sake of higher ends is important.

WHY IT MATTERS NOW FOR YOUNG CENTER-RIGHT THINKERS

Now, back when Trump won the Presidency, I published on my blog two essays I had planned to publish “when” Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. That didn’t happen, but so I argued, the analysis I had developed up until November 8^th, 2016, was still valid.

Looking back, I’m not so sure. I certainly think I was right that there were and remain growing factions in the GOP willing to buck conservative orthodoxy, but I no longer am convinced that they are or ever were a major force that could be harnessed towards intellectual policy reformations.

For all intents and purposes, the American Enterprise Institute remains the primary institution of elite conservatism, and the Heritage Foundation remains the primary institution of grassroots conservative populism. When Congressional Republicans, none of whom are really “Trumpists,” want policy, they ask AEI. When the Trump Administration wants policy, it recycles Heritage’s ideas. This was more or less true before the election, and remains true now. The Reformicons over at the Conservative Reform Network are maybe a little bit more influential, and the “softer, gentler Trumpism” types over at the new journal American Affairs are a little bit more well-known; but these two sides of center-right reformation are going nowhere fast. The old guard of conservative policymaking, centered around the three stools of social conservatism, economic libertarianism, and foreign policy neoconservatism, continues to define policymaking and policy-thinking on the center-right, and hence in the Republican Party.

I did not foresee this. With so many mentors and fellow travelers of mine, I thought the 2016 election would be the tsunami sweeping the decadent shell of “Conservatism, Inc.” out to sea. But the institutional heft of AEI, the Manhattan Institute, and friends, as well as the staying habits of mind that have informed Buckleyite conservatism for generations, proved too strong for the semi-cataclysm of the Trump Presidency to break. I’m usually wrong when I make predictions, but I’d bet that the old tri-stool of conservatism remains the main force on the center-right, regardless of how effectively Julius Krein and Pappin Gladden run American Affairs.

So, there’s a couple of potential routes for young centrist Republican reformers. We could cash in our chips with the faction most amenable to our personal opinions, and fight to influence the future of, say, the Cato Institute, or the Conservative Reform Network, or American Affairs, or the American Enterprise Institute, or whichever center-right faction stimulates our personal fancies.

The main alternative is to ingratiate ourselves in the power structure of the AEI-style libertarian neoconservatives, and work to gain respectability among the people who actually hold power- as decentralist Joel Kotkin has done among libertarians, and realist Robert D. Kaplan has done among neoconservatives. This would entail working for neoconservatives and libertarians, or working for people who work for them.

Some combination of these two routes is probably best- affiliate with like-minded thinkers, to maintain fidelity to your own principles and further develop your ideas; but simultaneously be willing to work with the heretics and barbarians of other intellectual heritages and conclusions, for the sake of having your own ideas have some kind of influence over policy and perhaps shifting the debate ever so slowly to something you can find more to like in.

I think that third way is really the only way forward. In the long term, it may be that neoconservatism and libertarianism are in relative decline. But that’s the long term- in the short term (that is to say, the “policy-relevant” term,) neoconservatives and libertarians do still control the levers of power and the outlets of discourse in intellectual conservatism. The National Interest and The American Conservative might be more correct than National Review, but more people read National Review. Best not to burn bridges with those who control the debate, and instead be as the chameleon- capable of sliding between different groups, in all but of only the one you choose.

I don’t particularly like libertarians or neoconservatives, as it should be clear already. I’ve tried the whole start-a-movement, start-a-think-tank, start-a-blog thing, and as most people who’ve succeeded in founding think tanks and blogs professionally can attest to, the progress in that field is always slow and confined to particular issues rather than general worldviews. If you’re looking for a personal rather than institutionalized influence on public discourse and want more real results over a broader field of policy, I think it’s probably better to hold your nose and debate with and advise the movements that actually have influence over elected officials, donors, and bureaucrats- because competing directly with those movements over said influence is certainly only going to end in defeat.

Fortunately in my case (and I’d advise my fellow Hamiltonian Republicans to follow this same route) I already do some work for libertarians through Joel Kotkin, and have been in various gigs working for neoconservatives through The American Interest and The John Hay Initiative. It’s uncomfortable, sure- but it bears the fruit of knowing that people will actually read and think about your work. It also tempers you to political-intellectual reality, steeling you to the language of modern power-brokers so that you can learn that language and speak it to powerful people in time.

And you can always keep your own intellectual eccentricity and speak it bluntly under the proper circumstances- nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with fighting for it, either. But you need to fight for it strategically, rather than in a direct, head-on, “Stand for what you think is right and block the streets” kind of way.

I’ll give two examples. First, look at the various protest movements on the left, and how successful they are at doing anything other than calling attention to particular issues. They’re inept at anything else.

Second, look at the various “goo-goo” reformist movements- The Independent Voter Project, The Centrist Project, all the major and minor third parties, No Labels, etc.- and think about them. Just think about them.

Where are the results?

I hate to say this, because I was once involved in No Labels, and count as personal contacts several members of the Centrist Project’s board and staff. But frankly, they’re not going to get anywhere, no matter how much they advocate for reasonableness and political independence of the major factions and technocratic focus on public-interest problem-solving, because they all fundamentally break too many of the aforementioned rules of playing the political game. If you don’t pick an important side, you won’t get anywhere. (One of these days I might write a comprehensive list of the problems I find with the Centrist Project, but that is a piece for another day.)

But I was just as impotent when I was working on The Hamiltonian Republican and The New Hamiltonian and The Progressive Republican League. I’m none to throw stones.

WHAT TO DO MOVING FORWARD

In any case, I hope I’ve learned, and moving forward, though I will still prefer to work for thinkers closer to my views, and eschew working with the dogmatic purists whose views I simply cannot find any commonality with, I’ll probably make a point of being more open to working for, say, the neoconservative thinkers at the Alexander Hamilton Society, or the libertarian thinkers whose donations fund the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. They’re the team I’ve chosen; I’ll be better off working with them than not working with them, and perhaps I can influence them closer to Hamiltonian foreign policy and economics. We shall see.

But given that Joel Kotkin and Robert D. Kaplan have been my career models for quite some time, I’m not sure why it took me so long to realize that they are this pragmatic and that I should emulate their pragmatism.

Semi-Critical Notes on Mayor Faulconer’s Speech

Luke Phillips

Mayor Kevin Faulconer of San Diego

Shortly after I published my outline for a report on future Inland Empire Republican revivals, I opened up Carla Marinucci’s Politico California Playbook a few days past, and discovered that Mayor Kevin Faulconer of San Diego has been thinking, as well, on the future of the California Republican Party. The Mayor of America’s Finest City delivered a speech on Tuesday, August 15^th (full transcript here) to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco entitled “The New California Republicans.” He addressed various issues facing the state and called for a pragmatic and reformist California GOP to overcome odious national forces- he named no names- and balance the California Democrats.

After reading the transcript of the speech, I had some thoughts, which I deliver here in the dying format of “Notes.”

FACTIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY CALIFORNIA REPUBLICAN PARTY

One– the California Republican Party in the 2^nd Jerry Brown Era basically has two factions. These are the “Jon Fleischmann” conservative populists, who embrace the residents of both well-to-do suburbs and rural counties and count among them both candidates for Governor of California this cycle, John Cox and Travis Allen, as well as former gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly; and the “Charles Munger Jr.” moderate conservatives, who are clustered in upper-class suburbs around the state’s metropoles, and include most of the party’s establishment and leadership, including former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, presently embattled Assembly leader Chad Mayes, and former statewide candidates like Duf Sundheim, Pete Peterson, and David Hadley (full disclosure: the author worked for Duf Sundheim’s 2016 U.S. Senate campaign and greatly respects Peterson and Hadley.)

One could argue, and I do, that exposure to power and responsibility causes former Fleischmann activist types to evolve into statesmanlike Pete Wilson figures (though I hope never to see certain activists exposed to real power, for everybody’s sake!) But for better or for worse, the Fleischmanns control the dialogue and activism and the Mungers control the money and levers in the party. That results in a dangerously unstable alliance that often results in political cannibalism, as Assemblyman Mayes is experiencing at the moment. Both factions need each other, but the greatly outnumbered Munger establishment needs the Fleischmann activists less in terms of getting stuff done, and more in terms of staying in power. And to everybody’s circular, spiraling detriment, the establishment is presently unable to keep the loyalty of the activists sufficiently to expand the GOP’s power base in the state.

Which leads us to part two: Mayor Faulconer and his speech.

WHY MAYOR FAULCONER’S VISION IS INSUFFICIENT

Two– Mayor Kevin Faulconer is the epitome of the Republican establishment in California. Smart, suave, relatively bipartisan, and ostensibly a public servant rather than an ambitious climber, he could literally be Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom’s benign twin. And his speech- technocratic, focused on centrist principles, aspirational towards policy success rather than political victory- reflected his persona and standing immensely.

As a standard run-of-the-mill social moderate-liberal and fiscal conservative, Mayor Faulconer is the darling of California’s Republican elites, and reportedly an individual who the donor Charles Munger Jr. has repeatedly attempted to recruit into a Senatorial or Gubernatorial run. His speech, again, reflected the purported moderation, bipartisanship, and reformism the Mayor hopes to inject into California politics. His five points were a libertarian social ethos, an openness for immigrants, a conservative environmentalism, a turn away from national problems and towards Californian problems, and an emphasis on fiscal and bureaucratic reform at every level in California politics.

I don’t disagree with any of these stances in particular, and as mentioned before, I’ve associated in the past and continue to associate myself with California Republicans whose instincts incline towards these views. So in general terms, I don’t necessarily think any of these stances are bad steps. I do, however, think they are each and altogether insufficient to get us to the kinds of reform the California Republican Party desperately needs to reclaim relevance.

Yes, yes- Mayor Faulconer is the only prominent Republican in the state in the post-Schwarzenegger years. Clearly his model has succeeded, at least in a certain part of California. Any alternative model I could propose doesn’t have the backing of empirical political success, and is thus on the low ground. This all being said, I still find problems with the Munger-Faulconer approach that need to be acknowledged.

First off, we’ve seen this tried before. Faulconer’s model of social moderation/government reform/fiscal conservatism was basically the gist of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial instincts, and Governor Schwarzenegger’s post-2010 public advocacy. Perhaps the Governator was simply the wrong vehicle for these reforms, being an actor rather than a politician. But I think it goes deeper than that- the fact of the matter is, this kind of incrementalism just doesn’t seem bold enough to either sustain the passion and hearts of the millions of California voters needed to constitute a movement, or to actually push for reforms sufficient to resolve California’s pressing problems. I don’t necessarily think an “alternative vision” of the state is feasible or healthy, especially given the reactionary sorts of polity many far-right Republicans envision; but Bill Buckley’s critique of the Rockefeller Republicans, however loathe I am to admit it, still stands: me-too-ism really sucks as an opposition party’s credo.

Second off, the current model of governance for the state is going haywire, and simply trying to run our current model a little bit better is like patching holes in a boat with duct tape. The fiscal problems, which are very real, will be imposing constraints on our ability to fund basic infrastructure and basic human services in the coming years, and even if you’re not one of these fiscal conservatives who treats budget aesthetics as something like a political religion, anyone should be able to acknowledge the need for any polity to pay its debts. Then go ahead and add the standard raft of non-pension still-blue problems blue states and cities across America face- infrastructure overruns, shoddy delivery of healthcare and welfare services, education second to most and third to some, overweening regulatory costs doing terrible things to the housing market and energy supplies, misguided distractory crusades towards 100% green energy and 0% social prejudice, etc. etc. etc.- and you start to get an idea of why Los Angeles municipal voter participation is in the single digits. Perhaps I am overly dire- I do, after all, work for the noted firebrand Joel Kotkin as a research assistant, and a lot of his thought seeps into me- but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that reforms in governance beyond just charter schools and fiscal restraints are important these days.

Three, and this is probably the most “policy-relevant” critique I have- there just isn’t a constituency for Faulconer-Munger technocracy big enough to win statewide offices or legislative parity, let alone majorities. If there were, Republicans would control more than just one L.A. City Council District, and would probably have a few more big-city mayorships outside Southern California. We also probably wouldn’t have ceded the Dems a supermajority in both houses of the state legislature, and we probably would’ve gotten a socially-liberal/fiscally-conservative Republican into the Top Two Primary System for the 2016 Senate race. In other words, socially liberal/fiscally conservative masses of California voters would’ve voted some of their own into office, if they really were a big enough faction to do anything of significance politically in the state. But they’re not.

CONTOURS OF SOMETHING ELSE?

Three– Sure, you might say. Throw stones all you want, but at least Faulconer’s trying. What do you have to offer, oh ye of little faith and little influence in California GOP politics?

Honestly, not much right now, I concede. Earlier today I wrote up a piece outlining a study of voting patterns in Long Beach and the Inland Empire, in hopes of a Republican revival among the apparently socially-conservative/fiscally liberal voters there. My preference for the future of the California GOP is, of course, something somewhat liberal on fiscal and government matters while being somewhat conservative on social and cultural matters, tailored for the issues and demographics of the late 2010s and early 2020s- perhaps a combination of Democratic Governor Pat Brown’s ambitious economic, infrastructure, and educational initiatives, and Republican Governor Ronald Reagan’s working-class appeal and emphasis on law-and-order politics. (Incidentally, this is the kind of program Richard Nixon likely would have pursued, had he been elected Governor over Brown in 1962.) I’ll have to go back and look at the legacies of California’s late-20^th Century Republican governors Wilson and Deukmejian, and mid-20^th Century Republican governors Earl Warren and Goodwin Knight; but for some reason I suspect that during their gubernatorial tenures they practiced something along these lines.

I wrote a report for an employer of mine which remains unpublished- I might publish an edited version sometime- arguing a different but similar tack. That is, that the contemporary California Democratic Party is premised, perhaps unconsciously, on centralization of decisionmaking in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and on an absolute hostility to the physical “build-stuff” industries of energy, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture. And that therefore, the Republican Party of California ought to orient itself less on “size of government” and taxation issues, and more on a re-orientation of power from the metropolitan city centers to more local communities, including neighborhoods, small towns, and counties, while simultaneously supporting deregulation and subsidies in the interests of the industries currently being ignored or attacked by California Democrats. This kind of court-country politics is not really antithetical to the previously proposed tack of big projects and social conservatism- in fact, look at the New Deal coalition’s composition in relation to Franklin Roosevelt’s great domestic achievements. There is a shocking similarity in the roles the California Republican Party can take in “lifting up the common man” and building new greatness for California, in opposition to rather than secondhand partnership with California’s contemporary Democratic elite.

Perhaps, whatever the substantial policy agreements between Faulconer-Munger politics and “Neo-Nixon” politics are, the basic disagreement is a class representation issue- whether or not the vision of California’s elite and necessary upper class ought to be realized in California for everybody’s benefit, or whether representatives of the lower orders ought to be brought into the fray and bring alternative visions to fore. The degree to which Republicans cooperate with Democrats or build alternative visions to that of the Democrats, then, would be the litmus test of representation here.

In any case, I’d prefer a CAGOP with a third leg outside of Faulconer-Munger and Donnelly-Fleischmann- a leg socially moderately conservative and fiscally moderately liberal, capable of producing both an elite and a voter base, hopefully capable of acting independently of either other leg, and hopefully capable of being a decisive force in the future of the Republican Party of California. An outline of what such a faction would look like awaits, though I’ll probably be taking a stab at it when I turn to write that report on Inland Empire-Long Beach Republican prospects.

CONCLUSION

Again, I reiterate- I don’t necessarily oppose the substance of Faulconer’s speech. Among the proposals he outlines there are some that I agree with; among the same there are others I disagree with.

The overarching thrusts of the speech, though- that California Republicans must distinguish themselves from the national party, that they must focus explicitly on resolving California’s great issues, that they must provide a reformist alternative to California Democratic excesses- I find myself in complete agreement. The tendency of California GOP activists to be, more or less, standard run-of-the-mill national commentators and little else, renders them impotent and useless for all practical purposes. The Munger elites and Faulconer, for all their policy errors and intellectual flaws, are at least seeing the right kind of problem, and some contours of forward movement. That’s something, and perhaps in time the idea will spread.

I don’t know if Mayor Faulconer and Co. are going to set up some form of “New California Republicans” advocacy group or think tank, or not. If they do, I certainly will be working to get involved, if at all possible. It’s a cause that we need worked on and fought for soon.

Ross Douthat’s Voters in Southern California? An Outline for a Voter Research Study

Luke Phillips

I’m a fan and frequent reader of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, an idiosyncratic thinker whose temperament could loosely be described as “socially conservative and fiscally liberal.” I think it would be appropriate to describe those of this political temperament as “Douthatites” or “Douthatians” or something similar, as there are no major politicians in America today we can use for name.[1]

Now, according to a recent study by New America’s Lee Drutman, it would appear that over a quarter (28.9%) of Americans identify as socially conservative and fiscally liberal. These voters don’t have an established voice in American politics in the form of a political party, and thus the Republicans and Democrats have been jockeying over them for the last several decades (Bill Clinton’s Third Way, George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism, etc.) President Trump clearly caught this demographic in 2016, but it remains to be seen whether he can hold together his voters, let alone the Presidency, amidst everything happening nowadays.

The presence of these voters in such numbers in America came as no surprise to me. But I was absolutely shocked when, while reading a 2012 report by the Public Policy Institute of California, I learned that in liberal California fully a quarter of registered voters identify as socially conservative and fiscally liberal, as well. A map of the Golden State reveals these voters to be majority groups in a few parts of the state, concentrated in the Central Valley and the industrial ring around Los Angeles.

This gave me some pause and made me start thinking. The California GOP- which, I believe, controls most of the legislative seats in the Central Valley- is certainly socially conservative, but not in ways that the heavily Latino populations of LA’s industrial ring and the Central Valley would necessarily agree with. The California Democratic Party- which, I believe, controls most of the legislative seats in the LA suburbs- is certainly fiscally liberal, but almost to a lunatic degree, and it isn’t a stretch to argue that it serves its Bay Area elite constituents better than its postindustrial working-class constituents.

Moreover, there is no major faction in either state party that really serves this constituency (though it would appear that the elected Democrats and Republicans in either of these districts make efforts and motions towards serving it.) The California Democrats, as the recent delegate-selection process revealed, are split between powerful Bay Area plutocrats like Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, and rising Bernie Sanders-style insurgents across the state, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s. The California GOP has an old-guard equivalent of the Bay Area plutocrats that resides in the wealthier suburbs of the Bay Area, San Diego, Orange County, and LA, but this declining elite is generally socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The vast majority of Republican electeds in California are conservative populists who cater more to Tea Partiers than Reagan Library trustees. In this polarized and radicalizing environment so typical of Golden State politics, there really is no “vital center” to serve the ideologically uncomfortable populations of the Inland Empire and Central Valley, by my measure.

I’m a young Republican on my way to Washington D.C. in December, but I do plan to return to Southern California eventually. Perhaps I suffer from a form of masochism, but one of my long-term goals is to work in Republican politics out on the West Coast, and to help restore one of the formerly most formidable state Republican parties in the country to its former glory, in the interests of broader national party reform. Get a GOP functional again in Southern California, and you’ve created a model of politics with implications for half the states and counties in the country. And that has implications nationally, as well. This isn’t to say that Los Angeles is quite the city at the center of the world; but it is to say that, indirectly at least, Southern California is the tail wagging the American dog, and work here is a tad bit more important in an exemplary sense than work in other places I might choose to be.

If that means legislative work, policy work, campaign work, or something else, I hope to get my hands dirty doing it after I’ve spent a few years traveling around and working in D.C. I don’t know if I plan to run for elected office as part of that plan or not, but if I do I will certainly be setting roots down somewhere in Southern California’s suburban areas.

Which brings us back to the socially conservative/fiscally liberal voters. As anyone who follows this blog knows, I consider myself a Hamiltonian in the style of Michael Lind and Ross Douthat, and in my less prudent moments, an old-line Richard Nixon Republican. (Nixon was, incidentally, a Southern Californian as well.) I can’t be a Democrat for a lot of reasons, but I’m a bad Republican for just as many. Regardless, I remain a Republican out of loyalty to the organization and a pragmatic realization that the ticket to play the game of politics is membership in a team. The problem is that the Republican Party in California is not particularly amenable to the ideas and identity I espouse, for the most part.

That problem can be overcome- I’m slowly realizing that it’s better to work for people you disagree with who can help you get someplace than to insist on purity of any sort, if you want to make a difference. And in any case, I agree with the California GOP on enough issues- particularly the fact that California needs a competitive opposition party to check the excesses and ambitions of the ascendant and still-rising Democrats- that I happily still affiliate with them for all practical purposes.

So- I’m considering outlining an extended voter research project on voting patterns and political trends in the “LA Industrial Ring” communities listed by the PPIC report, to see if there is any prospect there for a moderate Republican revival and determine what policy and political contours local Republicans, myself included, would need to emphasize to find success. A similar project in the Central Valley would probably be easier given that Republicans already control many of those seats, but as my hope is to live and work in Southern California, it would make more sense to start focused down here.

The regions listed by the report include Long Beach, Central Los Angeles, the “East Los Angeles Suburbs,” and “West San Bernardino.” After setting up a list of the LA neighborhood districts, incorporated cities, counties, and other political units comprising this region that stretches from the Pacific to the San Gabriels and San Bernardinos, I would begin studying the demographics, economics, and politics of this vast area and perhaps some of the surrounding and demographically similar communities like North Orange County, Riverside County, and the San Fernando Valley.

Important factors to study would include ethnic and religious distribution; the shape the “socially conservative” values take would depend largely on that, alongside the class structure. Population distribution, too, would be critical, particularly in the urban vs. suburban sense. I would look at the major industries and employers, to get an impression of the economic life of the area, as well as the income distribution, as a way to understand the class dynamics and levels of inequality present.

Voter registration would be perhaps less important for my purposes here, but no less important for the eventual political strategy to take shape. And on that note, it would be important to access public domain data on voting patterns over the last decade or so, including information on all levels of elected officials across the board. The political structure- which parties and donors dominate, including donors from outside the boundaries- would be crucial, as well.

Not being from this area (unless USC falls in the “Central LA” region, which I’m not sure about) I don’t really have a good idea about any of these factors. So I’d have to do my homework and embark on an extensive search for this information- the quantitative stuff will be easy enough to come by using reports by the Public Policy Institute of California, various university research centers, and my own employer, the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. It would also probably be important to get anecdotal information as well, through interviews with residents of the area who follow this kind of thing- journalists at various local newspapers, the staff of local legislative officials, perhaps local municipal elected officials themselves, and various community leaders. I’d of course make a point of visiting the townhalls of local legislators and city hall meetings, and other political events- Machiavelli, in his exile, spent time amidst the people of Northern Italy, to “chat with passerby, ask news of their regions, learn about various matters, observe mankind: the variety of its tastes, the diversity of its fancies…” Such “democratic” methods of study would separate this project from the heavily quantitative data-gathering exercises of more mainstream voter research. There’s an art to politics that sometimes can only be gleaned from the observation of mankind.

Additionally- the report lists these voters as “socially conservative and fiscally liberal,” but does not go into detail as to how this appellation was derived. I would plan to contact the authors of the report, Daniel Krimm and Eric McGhee, to get a better understanding of their methodology questions and surveys, their parameters, the regions they studied, and other basic information. Some questions- what issues were used in the polling? Are social conservatives and fiscal liberals the same people in these areas, or are they different groups of voters in the same area who dominate different domains? These things matter.

A review of the critical issues in the region would be important, too. What do voters there get fired up over- the gas tax, President Trump’s statements, immigration flows or family reunification, something else? And how important are distinct local factors like the Spanish language and heavy immigrant populations? If most Inland Empire voters routinely vote for Democrats, what are the characteristics of the local Democratic Party that controls much of the local power structure? What is the Democrats’ relationship to the local elites and voters, and how do these elites and voters view the Democratic Party and its representatives serving them? What are these voters’ and their elites’ opinions and perspectives on Republicans, nationally and at the local level?

From all this, and probably more, I would try to cobble together a general portrait of this vast, diverse area, and speculate on some political strategies, policy agendas, and demographic qualities of candidates that might be useful in establishing Republican competitiveness in the region. I would also, for awesomeness’s sake, get a few large laminated maps of Southern California to overlay such things as voting districts, population distributions, and issue geographies.

This would carry big implications, of course. Republican electoral victories in this part of California, with its apparent ideological makeup, would result in the elevation to power of unconventional Republican policymakers, who could influence the direction of the state party in two primary ways- first, by appointing similarly moderate delegates to the state party conventions where policy platforms and major decisions are decided upon; and second, by the force of multiple small bully pulpits to argue new directions from. The establishment of a socially traditionalist, fiscally pragmatic “Mod Squad Caucus” in the California GOP of similar total size to the Democrats’ Mod Squad Caucus, but greater relative power in the CAGOP, would be a support base for future California GOP statewide candidates, who could depend on the more moderate Inland Empire Republicans rather than on the rural and suburban doctrinaire populist Republicans who demand ideological conformity.

And if enough Inland Empire moderate Republicans could influence the direction of the state party, a more responsible GOP on the West Coast could be a major player in the efforts to redesign the makeup of the national GOP in the aftermath of Trump’s scandals and the bankruptcy of movement conservatism. As I noted before- Los Angeles and its suburban rings might not be the city at the center of the world, but for California Republicans, it ought to carry a weight not unlike that as we orient our efforts to compete and serve.

There are many potential problems with my analysis. It may be that there are more Republican electeds in the area I described than I thought, and this “comeback” strategic document would therefore be unnecessary. It might be that the definitions Krimm and McGhee assigned to these voters are out of date and not truly indicative of anything useful. There might be other things I’m overlooking.

But for now, I’m going to keep this plan in the back of my pocket for occasional reflection and to give myself something to do in a few years upon my return to Southern California. We’re living in interesting times, nationally and at the state level, and if this kind of study can be useful to literally anybody trying to manage the disruption, it’ll be worth it to do it.

 

[1] Yeah, some would argue President Donald Trump fits the description. I’ll shoot that argument down some other time. It’s partly true and partly false.

Can Localism and Nationalism be Mixed in the Fourth Republic?

INTRO TO THE FOURTH REPUBLIC

At this point I’ve probably written three or four versions of the “Three Republics” thesis applied to the 2010s. I’ve even written up and delivered a toast to the Fourth Republic, and an exhortation to those who love it to bring about its existence. I have a long essay/short book outline just waiting for me to sit down and write it, as well. I’ve thought a lot about this subject.

But I haven’t thought enough, not yet.

For those who are as yet unfamiliar with the “Three Republics” thesis, it goes something like this: America, being a nation founded in a conservatory revolution, has the unique opportunity to reinterpret its timeless principles and reinvent its lasting institutions every time the social order decays and disaster strikes. This has happened, with shocking regularity, about every 70-85 years, and by my measure (and those of some people I respect) it’s happening again now, just as it happened in the 1780s, the 1860s, and the 1930s.

A “Republic,” in this context, is the unique constellation of institutions and systems propped up by a founding generation in the midst of crisis, in order to preserve ordered liberty and the American Dream for forthcoming generations and to keep the Union and its republican institutions alive. There have been three thus far- the First Republic of George Washington, established in the fires of the American Revolution and the consolidation of the Constitutional Convention and Washington’s presidency thereafter; the Second Republic of Abraham Lincoln, forged in the Civil War and Reconstruction; and the Third Republic of Franklin Roosevelt, constructed throughout the New Deal and affirmed in the world crisis of the Second World War. Each Republic had antecedents in reforms passed in the generations prior, and this one is no different. Each transformed the country to preserve it. As the institutions of the last several decades have decayed, we enter a socio-political crisis like no other, and will need to rise to the challenge.

Again, I’d like to write an extended essay or perhaps even a short book on this subject, but I will need to read more broadly on American social, economic, political, and biographical history before I have the details I need to sophisticate the narrative properly. Anyhow, aside from discussing the cycles of history, at times I’ve written up platforms of policy proposals theorizing what the Lawgiver of the Fourth Republic’s policy agenda would have to be (and these platforms have mostly succeeded only at reflecting my personal political preferences.) In my soberer moments, I do at times wonder what the general necessary contours of reform would look like.

There are some obvious ones. The fiscal/tax imbalances will need to be corrected somehow, not because “we’re spending ourselves into oblivion,” but because bad bookkeeping can’t go on forever. Entitlements and pretty much every domestic department’s spending will have to be restructured for efficacy, though I hope not reduced at all. Plenty of people, including Lieutenant Governor (and possibly future Governor of California, and possibly future President of the United States…) Gavin Newsom wrote a whole book, “Citizenville,” on the need to reform government for the Information Age using the democratizing power of information technology. (Government Executive Magazine routinely publishes laughably bad articles about how departments of the federal government are revolutionizing this and that bureaucratic process through some interwebz thingie, but hey- at least they’re trying!)

There’s a whole raft of other economic-structural and social-cultural issue areas I could go into, but I’ll withhold for now and do that another time. I’ll focus on something specific in this post- the question of where the political-institutional emphasis of American democracy should be focused.

MY WORK IN LOCALISM

Let me explain. Over the last two years or so, I’ve worked for a couple of scholars- Joel Kotkin and the folks over at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, first, and second, Mike Hais and Morley Winograd- on the deceptively straightforward topic of political and institutional Localism. The fruits of my work for Kotkin can be found here, in his COU report “Our Town: Restoring Localism.” The fruits of my work with Winograd will be published in a paper soon, though I’m not sure if I’m allowed to reveal the outlet and title, so I won’t.

Anyhow, Kotkin and Winograd- respectively a member of Senator Ben Sasse’s informal circle, and a former domestic policy advisor to Vice-President Al Gore- both independently came to the conclusion some time ago that America’s political institutions are more top-heavy and centralized than is healthy in the current age, and that the proper solution is a restoration of some form of increased authority for city halls, county boards, and other institutions closer to the people. Kotkin, having centrist and occasionally quasi-libertarian leanings, comes at this from a different perspective than Winograd, who is an old-line New Democrat with progressive leanings. Kotkin’s report emphasizes the coercive power of the central state, and the need to check it in the interests of preserving individual rights and opportunities and, most importantly, the diversity of social and economic opportunities and systems to choose from.

For Kotkin, people are mobile, markets are benign, and the greatest danger inherent to centralized bureaucracy is the imposition of a socioeconomic order inimical to the flourishing of free society. I don’t think he’s a libertarian by any means, but his reasoning for localism certainly has a libertarian, if perhaps not necessarily anti-government, ring to it.

For Winograd, people are members of communities, local decision-making processes produce results reflective of the values of the people who chose them, and the greatest danger inherent in consolidated power is the loss of sovereignty among local communities to shape their own destinies. Winograd is certainly not an old Bryanite populist in the way the editorial board of the Washington Monthly is; but in some ways he comes to similar conclusions about democratic accountability and decision-making being best done locally, as close to the people as possible.

These are oversimplifications, of course- read the entirety of Kotkin’s published report and Winograd’s forthcoming report to find out more- but they advance a narrative different than those commonly peddled nowadays. Namely, that the chief problems in American politics today rise not from wrongheaded people blocking necessary reform, but from overly zealous reformers attempting to impose their beliefs on others. Rather than seeking national solutions to pressing problems, rather than seeking a restoration of a benign national system, Kotkin and Winograd believe that the way to release the pressure of the current nationalist-cosmopolitan culture wars- and in fact, the way to give people more individual opportunities for the pursuit of happiness and for social innovation- is to relocate power to the lowest possible level, to “let a thousand flowers bloom,” to harness the natural diversity across domains of the American people and let it do its own thing.

It’s an amazing vision, and I can’t see a reasonable path forward into the American future that doesn’t incorporate some form of renewed localism. As both Kotkin and Winograd argue, and as Walter Russell Mead argued in his essays on the “Blue Social Model,” the current trends towards localism and decentralization are myriad- information technology makes more local democratic participation possible than ever before. Complexifying economic trends across state and national borders make it harder for arbitrary state and national capitals to regulate already-complex economic activity. An electorate more diverse than ever before in American history (and America was plenty diverse among even its different sorts of white people before the demographic shifts of the 1960s changed the racial equation) clearly is a different sort of governing situation than a largely homogenous electorate. Internal contradictions within the bureaucratic state that have been underway at least since the 1960s, when the First Generation of Neoconservatives started writing excellent stuff about bureaucracy, have only gotten worse.

Moreover, people have faith in local institutions at levels surpassing respect for any big institutions save the Armed Forces. Not many people participate in local governance, but those who do solve a lot more problems than those who participate in state and national governance, simply because problem-solving in city hall is more pragmatic, numbers-based, and face-to-face than lawmaking in the assembly hall. (Though it’s somewhat different in bigger cities, as my fellow Angelenos can attest.) Officials at lower levels can actually interact with their constituents- most lawmakers at the state and federal levels just can’t do that.[1]

So what does “Localism” mean pragmatically?

Kotkin’s version calls for a strategy of rollback- strip the administrative state of much of its regulatory power, in Sacramento and Washington, and let Peoria and San Francisco make their own damn climate policies and housing rules. In its place, voluntary associations a la “Associations of Municipal Governments” or the Hanseatic League, perhaps, are more efficacious and responsive to local needs.

Winograd’s approach is less concerned with legislative policy reforms and more about government-to-government interactions and cultural shifts- staying in the current constitutional framework, cities and counties and other entities should experiment with policies on their own and engage in information-sharing or innovation diffusions to spread new ideas around. And of course, local citizen participation should always be encouraged, in as many ways as possible.

I don’t really disagree with either of these approaches, in principle or practice. I think both Winograd and Kotkin would probably be open, as well, to more concrete measures like Nixonian Revenue Sharing or the replacement of federal rules with regional consortiums for rulemaking.

DISAGREEMENTS WITH LOCALISM

But I do think it’s a more complicated story than just a restoration of localism and a toppling of bureaucratic power or a revival of republican virtue.  I have two problems with the whole “localism” idea as a program, even though I heartily adopt it as a principle alongside my other principles and will try to fit it in where possible.

First off, it is something of an anti-program, and an anti-program without much meat at that. Neither Kotkin’s nor Winograd’s reports, both of which I helped with, goes particularly deep in the way of policy proposals. Kotkin’s reads like a description of what’s wrong with bureaucracy, and less like a description of what ought to replace it, if anything. Winograd’s at times sounds like a plea for a “revolution in consciousness” about governing, with a few bits of advice for how to manage it. I think both would agree with me on those partial characterizations, though they’d qualify it by saying they’re not out to start new movements, but to highlight shifts in the public debate that need to happen. And, being far less wise than either of them, I would of course defer.

But there’s a second problem. As anyone who reads this blog knows, my number one intellectual influence is Michael Lind, formerly of New America, and the last Hamiltonian in America for some time. Lind is a nationalist through-and-through in every way, a liberal nationalist in the Rooseveltian-Lincolnian vein. Though he has occasionally been known to advocate some manifestations of localism- see his NYT column on restoring local democracy or his co-written report with Joel Kotkin on industrialism in the Midwest– he is generally a thinker who more than most favors big institutions and central solutions.[2]

Whereas in the last few years, populists on the left decried big banks and big businesses and populists on the right decried big governments, Lind has been arguing for decades that big institutions like big government and big business are what make America great. They, of course, need to be regulated in the public interest and balanced against each other, so as not to destroy liberty and transform the whole of America into an oligarchic-industrial version of the Antebellum Plantation South. But generally, Lind argues that you can’t have a strong national defense and a productive industrial economy and basic social welfare protections without having a centralized, industrial state. He’d be arguing on the same side as Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and most of the postwar Presidents.

He’s not wrong at all. Big government and big business, that unholy combination, have been the source of much of what is good about America, the motor driving what is so American about America. And with Theodore Roosevelt’s caveat- that it must be regulated for public interest rather than private profit- this public-private nexus can indeed do great things.

It’s just so often inimical to localism.

MY DILEMMA

Let me state this in no uncertain terms:

Michael Lind’s Hamiltonian Nationalism remains, I think, the primary paradigm necessary to move forward with restoring American nationhood and greatness to something worthy and capable of protecting our ideals of ordered liberty and the American Dream as we advance into the 21^st Century. There are threats around the world and we have a lot of people we need to feed- so we need a strong centralized state apparatus to sustain the necessary internationalist foreign policy, and we need a productive neo-industrial economy to maintain our people’s quality of life.

At the same time, Morley Winograd and Joel Kotkin have identified serious, serious problems with that model, problems that cut to the core of what it means to be an American. And most of their solutions, which I assisted them with researching, reject national solutions in favor of the wisdom and mobility of American communities and citizens. I wouldn’t quite say their reports advocate Jeffersonian localism, but they lean that direction for sure.

And at a fundamental level, I’m not sure if it is even possible to mix the big-state centralizing tendencies of Hamiltonianism with the local-control decentralizing tendencies of the New Localism.

Well, perhaps it is- I did, after all, do some work for the Richard Nixon Foundation, and one of the insights I gleaned from that is that President Nixon’s failed reforms of the New Deal had exactly that as their goal- to retain the benefits of being a modern industrial state with a strong foreign policy, while restoring as much power to the localities and states as was feasible in the 1970s. So even if it failed, there is an extant model to perhaps revamp and work on for a combination of nationalism and localism.

So perhaps both localism and nationalism can be had, but even if they both can be had, one must clearly take precedence. I want to say that in a dangerous world, that must be the nationalist side; but I’m not sure right now.

There are other things to consider- class and culture structures, divisions between different American regions and their relative power over each other, etc. Burnhamite elite theory might be helpful here, as well. There’s a lot to think about.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, I’ve written this meandering screed primarily to organize and systematize my own thoughts on a dilemma I’ll have to confront soon enough- how to reconcile two good and basically incompatible things, two good and basically incompatible systems, two good and basically incompatible ideals. There probably isn’t a rational solution, but there probably is a practical and livable solution that can’t be rationally justified. One of the things I intend to do in due time, when I return to these issues, is to look at localism vs. nationalism issues in American politics, at both the local and state levels and federally, and think of them in this context. And eventually, when I turn to prognosticating (futilely) the contours of the Fourth Republic’s great policy and political debates, perhaps I’ll take a firmer stab at trying to reconcile Lind’s nationalism with Winograd and Kotkin’s localism.

But that will have to wait for another time.

 

—-

[1] I was formerly involved with a futile and frankly kind of dumb ballot initiative campaign called the “Neighborhood Legislature” and one of the best arguments I took out of it was the sheer non-representative nature of the California and United States legislatures- when you’re a California State Senator with 1.2 million constituents in your district, you’re effectively trying to represent nearly twice as many people as a U.S. Congressman represents. Neither can truly do anything in a way that confers anything like democratic legitimacy. (I now disagree with the utopianity of the proposed reform, though.)

[2] It’s ironic, actually- Lind is normally the more idiosyncratic thinker among the three, and Kotkin and Winograd are normally slightly more conventional in their conclusions. But in the issue of where attention ought to be focused, Lind argues at the level of Congress and the White House; Kotkin and Winograd argue for City Hall.

Personal Ramblings on Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford at USC

Luke Phillips

As a Trojan, a student at the University of Southern California, and as a disciple and student of American history, in particular the history of the Presidency, I recently made a point of reading the speeches delivered by three Presidents of the United States to the assembled USC student body- John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign speech, Richard Nixon’s 1960 campaign speech, and Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign speech.

Two of these presidents, Kennedy and Ford, are forever memorialized on the steps of Doheny Library at USC. The other one, Nixon, married a Trojan and remains the only president to have attended a USC football game. They all have a certain sort of connection to the university, then, and in a sense, they all have a certain connection to me.

There’s the surface-level things. Kennedy was Catholic, and I’m Catholic. Ford was an Eagle Scout, and I’m an Eagle Scout. Nixon was my kind of Republican- I’ve called myself “an old-line Richard Nixon Republican” many times before.

But it goes deeper than that. These three presidents who spoke at Troy, in varying contexts, all fundamentally took on themselves the same mission in different ways. Kennedy took a stagnating America, well-managed but elitist and stuffy, and sought to inspire the public to do great things. Nixon found a torn and broken America in need of reform, and did what he could to put the pieces together and set it on the right direction. Ford, inheriting the failures of Nixon, bound up the country’s wounds in an age when things could’ve gotten much, much worse.

I am reminded, in these cases and perhaps in the case of every President, of Aeneas’s speech to the Trojans in Book I of the Aeneid- “Call up your courage again.” (Every year I’ve been here, USC administrators read this speech to the graduating classes in Latin, Greek, and English.) It’s a testimony, perhaps, to the eternal nature of leadership that such things don’t change.

I’ve often thought that the purpose of the University of Southern California, as inscribed upon the statue of Tommy Trojan, is exactly as it was written: “Here are provided seats of meditative joy… where shall rise again the destined reign of Troy.” The prophecy, if we can call it that, is straightforward; here at USC shall be cultivated the talent and skill for a new generation of leaders, who shall rise to do great things for civilization in due time.

I take it a bit more literally, though. Troy was to Rome, I think, as America, up to this point in our history, can be and will be to an even greater future for our descendants. I don’t know what form this “Destined Reign of Troy” will take- but whatever it is, it is the duty of we historians and political thinkers coming out of the Trojan school to get ready to build it. I want to be part of that effort, and am working to shape my character, intellect, and career towards it.

It’s not that every statesman or every President is an Aeneas, but in a way they follow his footsteps. Aeneas, the noblest Trojan and the first Roman, embodied the kind of self-control, sacrifice for the broader good, and delicate political skill needed in any leader. The Roman virtues- pietas, dignitas, virtus, and gravitas- are necessary, absolutely necessary, in any leader.

One could argue that Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford failed to exhibit these qualities, which I think is a fair assessment. Kennedy’s sexual affairs were legendary, as was Nixon’s paranoia. Ford was nowhere near as competent a politician as Kennedy or Nixon. Nonetheless, they did their best to keep things moving in America, and to the best of my understanding, I believe Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford more or less succeeded.

As we sail through these turbulent times upon us, it’d be helpful to remember these legacies and the men behind them.

Greitens-Moulton 2020! A Bipartisan Ticket of Warrior-Scholar-Statesmen

 

Eric Greitens, Republican Governor of Missouri

Seth Moulton, Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts

 

PRESIDENTIAL FANTASIES

A while back, as he inaugurated his series of implausible proposals for an American reformation, Ross Douthat wrote something to the effect of “sometimes counterfactuals and hopeless ideas can help expose very real problems, and equip us to think more proactively and reasonably about them.” (That’s a butchery, but I can’t seem to find the column where he made the argument.) In any case, what follows is another wildly improbable proposal which, for various structural and cultural reasons, will never ever go anywhere. But it’s an argument worth making, I think, because it highlights some very real problems with American politics these days, and perhaps can help someone to think a little more clearly about it.

So to begin: ever since about 2am Eastern Time on November 9^th, 2016, people have been speculating about who will run for President in 2020. This has mostly been the domain of Democrats horrified at the Trumpification of the White House, who’ve been leaping from Hillary-esque Kamala Harris to new generations of Berniecrats. But the remnants of the NeverTrump Republicans, alongside some new Republican allies disillusioned by various aspects of the Trump presidency, have been putting names forth as well- John Kasich, of course, tops the list. And then, of course, there’s the usual speculation about Mark Zuckerberg, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and a host of small-name Senators and Governors scattered around the country.

I hate to add another fantasy-football ticket to this mix and stoop to the level of political tabloid-ism, but I’ll do it anyway. So- let’s look at the current situation of the Presidency as it relates to American political culture more broadly.

There probably have been times in American history where faith in the Presidency as an institution has been lower than it is today- the 1850s and 1890s come to mind- but none in recent memory. Many of our voting adults lived through the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush years, which, for whatever other flaws they had, nonetheless restored a sense of dignity and trust to the Presidency which had been destroyed through Watergate and was not helped by the stagnant Ford and Carter presidencies. But since Bush Sr., things seem to have gone downhill again.

That’s not to say Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have been complete buffoons- many people, including me, can point to good aspects of their leadership and character. But as a whole, the Post-Cold War presidents have been pale shadows of presidents past, in everything from overall policy achievements to strategic acumen to inspirational abilities. The institution of the Presidency has gone down a few pegs in respectability, even as public opinion has polarized across every dividing line imaginable. In this context- and a lot of pro-Trump West Coast Straussians have noted this, to their credit- Trump is merely the reaction of a disillusioned electoral bloc to the perceived failures of their elite, failures expressed most vividly in the Presidency. Trump doesn’t happen in a healthy polity that’s going in the right direction, so the argument goes.

So what we have, according to this analysis, is a negative feedback loop: we have a decadent political culture that produces and elevates less-than-great leaders, and less-than-great leaders worsen the decadence of our political culture. It spirals to the bottom regardless of which party controls the White House, and after the division and relative incompetence of the Obama years, the pendulum has swung to the right-wing populism of Donald Trump. The right-wing populism of Trump’s excesses will likely result in a 2020 or 2024 pendulum swing back to the elite far left, depending on a host of factors. All this in an increasingly imbalanced constitutional system which steadily concentrates more and more political and administrative power in- you guessed it- the Presidency.

Can this cycle be stopped?

I don’t know- the question of “social physics” vs. Great Man theory, and the answer that inevitably lies unseen somewhere in the middle, is unanswerable, but our answers to it are critical to how we’ll decide to act. And if, like me, you believe great leaders can make a dent in the historical process even if they can’t change the currents of history, you might have some futile hope in whichever particular dog you have in this fight.

 

THE QUALITIES OF MEN

“Though there never was a golden age where all men were noble and wise,” I don’t think it’s too controversial to suggest that we live in an age of distinct public debauchery and ineptitude. The daily sewage spewing from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account is certainly a proof of this, as is the generally somewhat hollow nature of contemporary political life (fraught though it is with existential questions.) While I have no doubt that individuals going into politics usually have all the best reasons, and are probably very dedicated and honest people trying to stick to their ideals, the simple fact of the matter is that our system does not place a particular premium on qualities like character, devotion, disinterestedness, unity, unselfish service, and other idealistic Boy Scout things that make consultants laugh and sneer. David Brooks lamented the decline of magnanimity in our leaders, and noted that in the entire Trump administration, only the generals seem to display manliness in the classic Periclean sense. That sounds right to me. (This is not the place to examine the complex interweavings of virtue, values, institutions, interests, and human nature, but rest assured it’s a fascinating can of worms.) There’s a very real reason Dwight Eisenhower and Theodore Roosevelt are the presidents many Americans yearn for nostalgically, rather than, say, Warren G. Harding or Richard Nixon.

It’s not just character, though. There’s a newfound competence problem with our leaders as well. In an interview, Craig Smith, President Gerald Ford’s speechwriter, suggested to me that Presidents with decades of prior experience in public life- Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, H.W. Bush- tend to be more responsible and competent than those with less experience. Compare those presidents, particularly in their foreign policies, with their Post-Cold War successors Bill Clinton (two-term Governor of Arkansas,) George W. Bush (one-term Governor of Texas,) and Barack Obama (one-term Senator from Illinois.) I need not examine Trump’s nonexistent prior public life. It seems to me that qualification is a qualification for the Presidency and for most other high offices, and that qualification is for whatever reason in dearth these days.

There are a lot of reasons for and aspects of this decline in character and competence, institutional and cultural and sociological in nature. There’s the shifting moral paradigms of the American cultural and political elite. There’s the series of well-intentioned reforms, starting after Watergate and going through the 90s, that unwittingly disempowered practical politicians and placed power in the hands of the ideologues who control for-profit media. There’s the declines in social capital and social trust so many astute social scientists have been observing for decades.

Regardless of the long-term problems, there is at least one short-term solution that can have some long-term effects. That solution, trite though it is to say, is good leadership- at a community level, at a city level, at a state level, at a Congressional level, and most importantly at the national level in the Presidency. Remember that Gerald Ford did much to heal the country after the fall of Nixon. For better or for worse, American politics revolves around the Presidency like the planets around the sun, and the caliber of person who assumes that office bodes highly, well or ill, for the destiny of the republic. Leadership does matter for politics, and character and competence- or at the very, very least, the perception of character and competence- matters for leadership.

So basically: we need to elect a President and Vice-President who the public, broadly defined as both the elites and the voting masses, believes exemplifies character and competence in service to the country. In my reading, there’s a trifecta of requirements for that-

-A strong record in public service;

-The appearance of a relative outsider uncorrupted by politics;

-A simultaneously no-nonsense yet let’s-work-together temperament.

The first two requirements seem paradoxical and, for the most part, are. To serve the public you usually need to serve in government; but to serve in government you earn the unsavory distinction of being a member of “the Establishment.”

There’s one exception, though- military service. If the polls are to be trusted, the United States Armed Forces are just about the last highly-trusted big institution in America these days, for a multitude of reasons- the perception of purity of sacrifice and of disinterested, nonpartisan service to the public are probably the biggest.

So- the easiest way to find this kind of public servant is to find a distinguished veteran of the United States Armed Forces. I don’t know if mass psychological studies have been done on veterans, but I would not be surprised if general trends were observed suggesting a kind of cooperative pragmatism coupled with individual independence among veterans in politics. (AEI’s Rebecca Burgess has done some work on these kinds of issues, and has written some great pieces on them.) Find any veteran at all who’s even a little bit less combative than Douglas MacArthur, and you have the foundations of a compelling candidate.

Intelligence would be nice, as well- so perhaps pick someone who has an advanced degree or multiple fellowships under their belt, someone who’s maybe written some books- and it would be nice if this person had relatively moderate views as well, and a history of reaching across the aisle like Americans claim they want their politicians to do.

And by a stroke of luck or an act of the divinity, there happen to be two elected officials rising in prominence in this country who fit that description to a “T.”

 

GREITENS-MOULTON 2020?

It’s as though someone wrote a fanfiction about the kinds of public servants America needs and the gods, looking with sympathy upon we mortals, made it happen. Governor Eric Greitens of Missouri and Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, by their “resume” virtues at least, would make a formidable team.

Eric Greitens is pretty much Theodore Roosevelt. Rhodes Scholar, White House Fellow in the George W. Bush administration, author of multiple books, humanitarian, Navy SEAL with tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and Southeast Asia under his belt, and founder of a notable veterans charity, the man’s a legend. He was formerly a Democrat and has listed Harry Truman as his favorite President, though he switched registration to Republican before he entered politics. Greitens was elected Governor of Missouri in 2016, running on an anti-corruption platform, and despite pursuing unpopular policies, appears to remain popular among his constituency. Before he was elected he was continuously cited as a future presidential candidate, and it’s not hard to imagine a Greitens 2020 campaign. I need not go on- just read his interview with Brett McKay at The Art of Manliness to get an idea of this man’s intellect and prowess.

Seth Moulton is also pretty much Theodore Roosevelt. An attendee of Phillips Academy Andover and Harvard University, he was commissioned into the United States Marine Corps upon graduation and served in some of the fiercest fighting in the early years of the Iraq War. He ultimately would serve four tours in Iraq, and spent the last two working directly for General David Petraeus. He apparently is loved by many generals in both the Army and the Marine Corps, the same generals who’re reining in the excesses of President Trump right now. He’ll be publishing a book next year. He ran for Congress in his home state of Massachusetts in 2014 and has been serving since then; he is a Democrat with no clear affiliations with either the progressive wing or the centrist wings of the party. But in a party that is increasingly less and less identified with “Americanism” and classic patriotism, military veterans-turned-Democratic elected officials hold a lot of power to recast the Democratic Party’s image. Politico published a glowing profile of Congressman Moulton recently, suggesting he’s in line for the Presidency as well; I need not go on.

Individually, these two men will go on to do great things in politics. It is hard to see them working together for multiple reasons, including, I would presume, probably overweening ambitions and egos that would be as scorpions in a bottle if put too close together. There’s also a partisan and even regional-cultural divide- Greitens is a populist Republican from the Midwest and Moulton is a progressive Democrat from the Northeast. But just imagine all the great things that would flow from a Greitens-Moulton presidential ticket in 2020…

First off, we’ve had a whole quarter-century now of relative incompetence and boringness in the Presidency. No distinguished public servants, not even any veterans of the military, intelligence, or diplomatic communities. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump are neither Roosevelts nor Churchills. Greitens and Moulton, by contrast, have both had distinguished and worldly military careers, as well as fantastic academic credentials.

Second off, it would be a bipartisan, trans-ideological, multi-regional ticket. Greitens is a Republican and Moulton is a Democrat. Greitens leans far to the right, Moulton somewhat to the left. Greitens hails from Trumpistan, Moulton from Clintonistan. Stranger presidential tickets have been formed; this one would unite the regions that don’t usually get along with each other, and could be a formidable, if unlikely, electoral coalition. And moreover- Americans these days say they want something vaguely called bipartisanship (even while calling for the destruction of their enemies or at least the obstruction of their healthcare or immigration proposals. Whatever.) Why not give them true bipartisanship in a truly bipartisan ticket populated by two men who, ostensibly and outwardly at least, value public service?

Third, the character aspect. The writings of Greitens and Moulton ringer richer than the writings of most politicians who prattle on about service and patriotism, because Greitens and Moulton spent the earlier parts of their careers becoming embodiments of service to country. There have been plenty of objections to the sincerity of either Greitens or Moulton- both have been accused of power-hunger and unfathomable ambitions, and the accompanying will to destroy that inevitably comes with the will to power- but outwardly at the very least, they display a kind of dedication to country that no mere political hack can imitate, no matter how hard they try. It shouldn’t be underestimated how important this aspect of image is to political capital.

It might be objected that neither has had sufficient political experience to assume the Presidency or Vice-Presidency, a critique with which I sympathize. But- Donald Trump is President of the United States with no prior public service under his belt. Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all came in with minimal public life experience as well. Experience just doesn’t matter much in presidential politics these days, and is no longer the public qualifier it once was. Might as well have competent, all-American heroes as our unqualified presidents.

There might be a further objection that the presence of two veterans in the White House and the Naval Observatory (that’s the Vice-President’s house, for those who didn’t know!) would be indicative of or otherwise lead to some kind of military rule of sorts. The intelligent bearers of this critique would point not to third world autocracies rift with coups, but to the waning years of the Roman Republic, when military veterans like Sulla and Marius usurped the power of the Senate and eventually paved the way for the Triumvirate, Caesar, and the rise of the Empire. I don’t have a real answer to this critique, since the ambitious men of today are certainly not unlike the ambitious men of Rome.

That said, perhaps we are at a phase in our national history- not unlike the age of the Roosevelts, or perhaps the Lincoln Presidency- when strong and enlightened leadership must assume the unprecedented power of the presidency to stabilize the liberal, constitutional order into something functional again. Better disciplined and patriotic veterans than, say, Kid Rock.

 

CONCLUSION

Anyhow, this isn’t going to happen. Governor Greitens and Congressman Moulton aren’t about to cross party lines and save the country. That’s not how the world works.

Nonetheless, we can open some important conversations that aren’t really being had publicly right now- conversations about the role of character formation in education, broadly defined; conversations about how to get more qualified and dutiful people into public office and high office; conversations about what kind of leaders can actually unite the country by representing timeless principles, rather than merely the kind of leaders who suit our preferences and consciences.

I wish the best to Governor Greitens and Congressman Moulton in their forthcoming careers, especially if and when they each run for President of the United States. We’ll see what happens with them, and with the country.