I meant what I said a year ago:

“…almost every opportunity the mainstream media has had to moderate or qualify themselves in relation to the Russian collusion narrative has been rejected in favor of all-out attacks.

They had better be right.

Like most American cultural and civic institutions, the old media is already distrusted by historic numbers of Americans, but has not yet been dealt a knockout blow. If it turns out that there was no collusion, CNN has become the Ivy League version of InfoWars.

Trump has already begun to wrest the #fakenews spear—hand-forged for use against him by titans like Obama, Clinton, CNN, and the New York Times—from their hands. The question is whether he’s able to drive it right through their beating hearts over the next year on the matter of collusion. Their hands are wrapped around his so tightly it looks—and, if he is right, will continue to look—as if we are witnessing a kind of old media seppuku.

It is the fact that they are waging total war against an active opponent in the White House that makes this a potential last stand: regardless of the usual obfuscation in the aftermath, if it turns out old media is wrong about Russian collusion and digital media, its collapse will be complete. It will diminish over the next few years, to be re-processed and subsumed forever into a new digital landscape.

For most Americans, the results will be deeply unsettling, but mesmerizing: like watching the old family car catch fire, crackle, and melt as it goes up in smoke.”

The car has caught fire. No doubt 30-40% of the nation expected to see St. Robert Swan Mueller III personally put the Orange Bad Man in cuffs for everything from soliciting micturation to daring to fire St. James Brien Comey Jr.—never mind conspiring with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to steal the 2016 election from Hilary Clinton the Gray in order to become the Orange Bad Man of the United States of America.

It’s ironic that conspiracy theory maestro Alex Jones was banned by legacy digital media companies even as CNN sounded increasingly like Info Wars. CNN went “all in” on their own conspiratorial narratives, and will never be regarded the same by the American public. Info Wars was at least entertaining—the digital news equivalent to professional wrestling.

As I’ve also said repeatedly over the last year, CNN will likely either go out of business or be bought up and completely overhauled in the next few years. MSNBC is second place because it doesn’t pretend about who it is or what it does. CNN, which doubled down on the collusion conspiracy while continuing to pretend to being the sole objective cable news channel, has thus been doomed to third place. And third prize is—you’re fired.

Elsewhere, bratty Harvard Law grads get jobs at the New York Times because and not in spite of performative racial temper tantrums that fall flat with all but a tiny percentage of the population (the recently miseducated elite). The news relentlessly focuses on divisive identity politics, through the lens of identity politics. Instead of asking real questions and making new hires to reflect the obvious lessons of 2016, the American media energetically doubled down on on fist-clenching resistance.

But its brain activity remained strictly low energy.

Anti-Trump fervor and the hatred and revenge-based energy that identity politics provides are almost all that’s left, and thus the fires had to be stoked daily at full steam.  At least one of the two might be an outdated fossil fuel—an increasingly unsustainable resource.

A media that prostitutes itself to the demands of the Left is decades old news, however, even if it is less trusted now than ever. As with the Kavanaugh fiasco, the real culprits are the politicians who shamelessly pushed the collusion narrative from the start, and the government officials who aided and abetted them.

And yet again, they failed.

The wildest part of it all to me is just this: the Democratic party took an unpolished, scandal-prone President who hijacked the Republican party and rendered him bullet proof. He’s been galvanized. Dipped in zinc.

After suggesting he worked with a foreign enemy of the United States of America for three years, what the hell are you going to throw at him now? And who’s gonna believe you?

From the start, when Obama and Clinton rolled out the narrative, it had a hare-brained “the deplorables don’t like Russia” and a too-clever-by-half “anything to delegitimize the election results” sheen to it. Think about how simultaneously arrogant and dumb the gambit was—and thus representative of our pathetic, ham-handed leadership class.

They could have addressed—God forbid—real political issues, or actual political disagreements. They could even have focused on making a scandal out of something much less exotic, like tax returns, instead of going for an all out national disinformation op.

Then again, our fearless leaders are often in their 80s, or the scions of dumb wealth and even more moronic fame. The youth are generally highly ranked ignoramuses and obvious hot house flowers. They lack prudence, or, in modern language, the higher level predictive capacity of the frontal lobe.

Kamala Harris is not dumb, and she may be sacrificially stretched in a series of politically correct purity tests to hold the fracturing coalition together one last time, but the Left’s 2016 rivening will not be long now—if not 2020, in 2024.

What the Right and Left become is still a wide open question; the leaders of the right have been at least temporarily dethroned, and those on the left will be soon to follow. The revolution has only just begun.

Meanwhile, the media and the Democratic party are busily committing repeated acts of public self-harm.

I don’t want to minimize the very real possibility that President Trump sabotages himself, or the certainty that the feckless and confused Republican establishment does its best to sabotage him.

But right now mainstream American media is at its lowest point in the history of the last century, the Democratic party is about to rip itself into pieces in their primary season from hell, the last parts of the administrative state the Right respected are wholly discredited, and Donald Trump is basically bulletproof.

As a friend suggests, maybe we should rename the Democratic Party the “Committee to Re-elect President Trump.”

James Poulos is very fair-minded in his treatment of Paul Gottfried’s “mixed” review of John Marini’s new book. Gottfried wrote:

According to Marini, “contemporary ideology and politics become intelligible only with reference to a philosophy of history, which originated in the political thought of Kant and Hegel.” As someone who has written on both German philosophy and the administrative state, I am truly puzzled by this statement. Am I supposed to think that German philosophers, who failed to adopt Marini’s view of natural rights, brought about our runaway public administration? Some Progressives like John Dewey read Hegel (and also Kant) but did so selectively in order to confirm what they already believed about “democratic administration.”

Gottfried may have written about the administrative state, but what has he read? Can he really be unaware of the work and influence of leading Progressive thinkers like John Burgess, Richard Ely, Frank Goodnow, or Woodrow Wilson? These are the figures who laid the foundation for administrative government in the United States, and each was explicit about his debts to Hegel. Burgess and Goodnow helped to create the American Political Science Association, establishing the formal discipline of political science in the U.S. on German historicist principles. Each of them had enrolled at universities in Germany specifically to study with Hegelian scholars.

All this is explained in detail by Jaffa students like Charles Kesler and R.J. Pestritto. Perhaps Dr. Gottfried would be less puzzled if he paid more attention to the Claremont Institute “talking points” on this topic.

Must we reconcile ourselves to the federal bureaucracy?

Paul Gottfried’s mixed review of Claremont senior fellow John Marini’s summa on unconstitutional government, Unmasking the Administrative State, leaves the reader with the more than sneaking suspicion that the answer is yes. “It represents a dramatic departure from what our federal union was intended to be, and a deviant model that may already be beyond our control,” Gottfried sighs. “We are being technically ‘administered’ by congressional agencies that run roughshod over our historic liberties;” worse, “there may be no way out of this situation.”

Also concerning, however, is the pique Gottfried reserves not for the nominal villains in the modern history of American government but for Marini himself. Marini’s account of their origins strikes Gottfried as not just overwrought—”he might have spared us his practice of repeating all the talking points of his colleagues at the Claremont Institute”—but indeed unacceptable: “In the book’s introduction, Ken Masugi lets us know (lest we miss the point) that the author is carrying forward the philosophical tradition of Jaffa, ‘who took account of the radical assaults on constitutional government demanded by Rousseau and above all, Hegel.’”

To his credit, Gottfried doesn’t scrimp on praise for Marini’s attack on Congress for abdicating its duties to the Washington regulatory apparatus. But in approvingly citing Marini’s discussion of Carl Schmitt, who diagnosed the same legislative weakness in Weimar Germany, Gottfried appears to think that “legislatures have been forced into doing what they were not meant to do” by “indecisive” executives—hardly the conclusion reached in Marini’s richer and more sophisticated account that Gottfried rejects. Faced with Marini’s claim that “ideology and politics become intelligible only with reference to a philosophy of history, which originated in the political thought of Kant and Hegel,” Gottfried, “as someone who has written on both German philosophy and the administrative state,” is left “truly puzzled.”

The process by which the philosophy of administrative liberalism was transmuted into practice throughout the West is complex and protracted. But the mystery of how it could have developed in America at all—for it was certainly not present at the beginning—raises questions Gottfried is disinclined to answer. Doubtless, a taste or case for “big government” was present since before the creation of the Republic. But as Marini demonstrates again and again, quantitative measures of the state are not the key to understanding what the administrative is; such understanding concerns the qualities of its force. Therefore me must trace the origin of the turn among American elites to embrace administration as a new kind of power—as a new science of rule that surpassed and replaced constitutional government.

Marini allows that more than one factor may be at work in the rise of administration as an intellectual temptation—and then a self-perpetuating mission—in America. As theorists of American democracy from Tocqueville to Marini have agreed, origins have a privileged and persistent influence over the character of nations, yet, as Marini notes, “some nations with long histories have forgotten their origins, or what it was that made it possible to distinguish themselves from others.” Certain technological developments such as industrialization and electrification surely helped shape a social environment in which administration and regulation took on an attraction they simply lacked beforehand.

But institutions and elites have the power to catalyze profound changes in the social order when conditions permit, and by the turn of the twentieth century, America’s intellectual elite—its academics and philosophers—had turned, too, with unprecedented enthusiasm and credulity, to their counterparts in the Old World, especially Britain and Germany, where notions of a grand unified theory of human organization reigned supreme. From Rousseau’s “general will” to Hegel’s dialectic of history, from Weber’s new social science to “ethology,” John Stuart Mill’s proposed science of character formation, Europe gave American elites a sobering but dazzling sense that if they did not update their approach to statecraft to suit the times, they, and the Union with them, would slip into a kind of civilizational backwater, becoming an orphan of history.

The quintessence of this kind of academized member of the American governing elite, Professor Woodrow Wilson, would run for president and win on exactly this basis. In his 1913 essay “What Is Progress?” (included in his book-length call for “the emancipation of the generous energies of a people,” and, notably, not the people themselves), Wilson put the matter quite bluntly. “From the other side of the water men can now hold up against us the reproach that we have not adjusted our lives to modern conditions to the same extent that they have adjusted theirs.” To the American in and out of government who hesitated to replace constitutionalism with a grand unified science of historic-heroic leadership, Wilson warned that “the world has a habit of leaving those behind who won’t go with it. The world has always neglected stand-patters.” The poor anti-progressive, Wilson said, “is going to be so lonely before it is all over. And we are good fellows; we are good company; why doesn’t he come along? We are not going to do him any harm. We are going to show him a good time.”

Industrialization and electrification may have shaped a public context in which Wilson’s revolutionary content could get the kind of hearing it did; but the formation of Wilson’s own character traces not to the Midwestern factory city or the Western telegraph territory but to the Eastward-looking university town—Baltimore, to be precise, where he wrote his PhD (under the intellectual influence of Walter Bagehot, the editor of The Economist) on the desirability of replacing the separation of powers in America’s constitutional government with a British parliamentarian system that allowed one man to lead the executive and the legislative.

Wilson was not a mere one-man wrecking crew set loose on constitutional government but the leader of a whole new class of American elites educated in such a way that they chose to break decisively with the political theory and political institutions of the Founding. Ignoring this is troublesome reality is not an act of intellectual independence from canned talking points. It is often rather an act of intellectual irresponsibility.

But Gottfried’s determination to set aside Marini’s account of the origins of anti-constitutionalism in America does not seem mainly intellectual but moral. Although he does not say so explicitly, reading between the lines strongly suggests Gottfried understands Marini’s account is what leads Marini to conclude that we must not reconcile ourselves to unlimited administration forever. Rather than casting the administrative state as a wearisome new normal to which we are obliged to submit, Marini’s study proves a political obligation, rooted in our very anthropology, to restore government and retrieve constitutionalism where today mere administration holds sway. Gottfried, by contrast, wishes to signal that the counter-administrative project is quixotic at best—and disingenuous at worst.

Marini recalls the Reagan administration as an exemplar of anti-Wilsonianism. Not so, says Gottfried; by the end, the “vast administrative apparatus” Reagan inherited had “intruded into our daily lives to a far greater extent than the government bequeathed to posterity by the New Deal.” Of course, the Great Society was designed to intrude in a manner quite different, and with different purpose, from Franklin Roosevelt’s immense executive assertions, which arose from a context of economic and ideological catastrophe itself much different from Wilson’s. But in putting forth the wrong measure of the administrative state—its size, not its power—to suggest that Reagan, and by imputation so many other smaller-government crusaders, were really all talk, Gottfried leaves Marini with the better of the argument.

“The Social Security program begun by FDR continued to grow under Reagan, expanding 15 percent during his eight years in office,” Gottfried asserts. “Despite initial efforts to apply strict means tests to welfare recipients, the Reagan administration increased welfare costs by 25 percent between 1981 and 1987.” He finds it significant that “in the early 1980s, most Western countries slowed the expansion of their social services, an expansion that had been going on since the 1960s. In the United States, this slowdown began during the latter half of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and continued at a brisker pace in 1981 and 1982.”

As Michael Anton notes in his own review at the CRB, however, Marini puts the “supernova-like growth” of the twentieth-century administrative state in proper context: expansion “not merely or even primarily in size but more fundamentally in power. He is especially merciless on Congress, which voluntarily and happily surrendered its own constitutionally enumerated powers to an unconstitutional fourth branch—the bureaucracy housed within the executive branch—which looks upon its nominal master with indifference or bemused contempt.”

Marini, as Anton explains, clearly and correctly frames the problem of administration as one of the purposes of government. The question of “limits” when applied to the economic or financial quantity of government is of subsidiary importance. “Every government of course needs executive agencies; politics is about making decisions, and decisions must be implemented. That said, to what ends do executive agencies work? How are those ends determined and by whom? What is the source of those agencies’ political legitimacy? What—if any—limits are placed on their power?” The fundamental limits of a constitutional government are described by the purposes of such a government.

All of which leaves open—not, as Gottfried would intimate, closed—the question of how constitutional government can be retrieved amid a breakdown in the potency of administrative rule as significant as the one that has unfolded in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. For all the administrative state’s entrenched power and overweening intransigence, its history since the end of the Reagan era has been a history of squandering, blundering, blindness, inefficacy, and systemic shock after systemic shock.

This experience has only intensified since the dawn of the smartphone era. Technological conditions are once again forming a new context for political speech and political audiences. As the old context wanes, the Old World dream of a grand unified science of human organization grows deeply disenchanted. Ours is therefore a uniquely propitious time to regain control over our identity and our agency—to rediscover the purpose of our governmental institutions, and thereby find our way out of the dead end that the administrative state has become.

David Brooks’s New York Times piece, “The Case for Reparations,” is so dumb, irresponsibly emotive, and wrong in both its premises and conclusions, that it deserves a section-by-section commentary. Brooks:

…So let’s look at a sentence that was uttered at a time when the concept of sin was more prominent in the culture. The sentence is from Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address. Lincoln had just declared that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. He was fondly hoping and fervently praying that the scourge of war would pass away. But then he added this thought:

‘Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

There are a few thoughts packed into that sentence. First, there is a natural moral order to the universe. There is a way things are supposed to be — more important than economic wealth or even a person’s life.

Without granting the truth of the paragraphs before the Lincoln quote, so far, so good.

Second, moral actions are connected to each other. If somebody tears at the moral order by drawing blood through the lash of slavery, then that wrong will have to be paid for by the blood of the sword. History has meaning. It’s not just random events.

This is where the piece really starts to go off the rails. Brooks here transforms Lincoln into Hegel. Lincoln submits to God’s will, which is, in its mysterious and divine way, willful—not inevitable. Injustices are not always repaid, at least not in this life. The moral arc of America does not, as we march through the years, bend increasingly towards justice. We are prone, like any other human political community, to backsliding, political turmoil, and a collapse into anarchy or tyranny (or one followed by the other).

Third, sin is anything that assaults the moral order. Slavery doesn’t merely cause pain and suffering to the slave. It is a corruption that infects the whole society. It is a collective debt that will have to be paid.

It was both Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s position that slavery corrupts both master and slave, and corrupts the morality of a nation practicing or condoning it. But hasn’t this collective debt been paid? Weren’t 620,000 American lives taken by the Civil War, to say nothing of what are today almost unimaginable losses of property and infrastructure? Weren’t the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments ratified a century and a half ago? Wasn’t Jim Crow ended and isn’t the 1964 Civil Rights Act (at least, before its corruption into a vehicle for racial set-asides instead of the equal application of the laws) the law of the land?

Fourth, sin travels down society through the centuries. Lincoln was saying that sometimes the costs of repairing sin have to be borne generations after the sin was first committed.

See above. They have been so borne, by generations.

From these thoughts we can appreciate the truth that while there have been many types of discrimination in our history, the African-American (and the Native American) experiences are unique and different. Theirs are not immigrant experiences but involve a moral injury that simply isn’t there for other groups.

If you go back far enough in history, all peoples have aggressed against all others at some point. I take it with the parenthetical inclusion of Native Americans that Mr. Brooks is here implicitly endorsing Elizabeth Warren’s plan for reparations for Native Americans as well as blacks? And why stop there? Muslims and some African peoples sold blacks into slavery to whites. The Aztecs enslaved many peoples until the Spanish arrived. Shouldn’t these sins also be repaired?

Slavery and the continuing pattern of discrimination aren’t only an attempt to steal labor; they are an attempt to cover over a person’s soul, a whole people’s soul.

That injury shows up today as geographic segregation, the gigantic wealth gap, the lack of a financial safety net, but also the lack of the psychological and moral safety net that comes when society has a history of affirming: You belong. You are us. You are equal.

Except as Thomas Sowell has pointed out in numerous articles and books, it’s much too facile to assume the black wealth gap (or poverty gap) today has anything to do with slavery. In fact, in Sowell’s telling, the trend of falling black poverty rates running from 1940-1960 actually slowed in the subsequent 20 years, despite massive government spending on Great Society programs to strengthen safety nets and address the legacies of discrimination and slavery.

Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind. What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron?

Well, what about recent African immigrants, poor whites (or whites, for that matter, whose ancestors weren’t even here during slavery; or northern whites who didn’t own slaves), Oprah, and LeBron? Brooks doesn’t answer those perfectly sensible objections, he just slides past them to quote Coates, an intellectual charlatan with few equals.

But I have had so many experiences over the past year — sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 — that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.

And what massive government experiment stands between 1953 and 2018? The modern welfare state, conceived of and run by progressives, Democrats, and the Left for over 50 years. Isn’t it just as likely that that policy regime and the Left’s domineering rule over the black community are to blame as it is the amorphous and impossible to measure “legacy of slavery?”

Coates’s essay seems right now, especially this part: “And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. … What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”

We’re a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation — the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices.

The nation is coming apart at the seams in large part because of a modern Left obsessed with multiculturalism, that stokes racial grievances for political gain, and that wants to separate Americans by sex, sexual orientation, religion, and above all, race. The vision of equal individual rights in the Declaration of Independence, a promise resulting in the Civil War amendments and brought close if not finally to completion by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, is precisely the opposite regime to that of the Left in 2019.

The multiculturalism of the Left, its politics of identity, and its political correctness enforcement arm are driving America to a future of balkanization and crackup. And David Brooks is stoking that dangerous fire. We need an American identity dedicated to the equal protection of equal individual rights, not divide-and-conquer interest-group liberalism. That is, if we want to survive as a country.

The need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives, in which all feel known. That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life. Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.

Let’s talk about reparations, then. By Coates’s calculation, white Americans (is it just whites, and who gets to decide?) owe blacks reparations to the tune of somewhere between four and nine trillion dollars. The money just isn’t there. America’s current debt-financed welfare state is already essentially bankrupt and it’s doubtful it will be turned right side up.

But let’s say we could pay for it. At that point, we would declare “debt paid,” and move on, right? And we would only compensate the descendants of American slaves, right? The answers to those questions from the likes of Coates and Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and the Left in general would be: no and no. Because this is a racial grievance racket, not a serious call to right the sins of America’s past. Just like leftists became the Soviet Union’s and communism’s “useful idiots,” so David Brooks and other “conservatives” advancing this kind of mushy-headed claptrap have today become the Left’s and multiculturalism’s useful idiots. God help us if their sophistries and policies prevail.

Kids across America know that ads are for skipping and blocking. Their elders are more anxiety-ridden. Having grown up in an America economically and culturally dependent on its fantasy-mongering industries, they look upon ads as key to unlocking the appetites, desires, and dreams that get people moving, and spending. But they also see the purity or good conscience of the fantasy-driven economy as under constant threat of contamination by the secularized sins of greed and selfishness.

So while ads mean almost nothing to everyday kids using social media, elite adults have been freaking out over the way those awful social media moguls have used our love of fantasy to “target” us with ads and “hack our brains,” turning our attention into their billions. If only there were a way to redistribute that wealth and restore the fantasy industry to its blessed purity…

A tax on digital ad spend (*cough* Facebook and Google) could bring in $2 billion for journalism. Free Press is suggesting an analog to a carbon tax on fossil fuels — but atoning for the attention economy’s perils instead of climate change.

Hello. What’s that you say?

Think of it like a carbon tax, which many countries impose on the oil industry to help clean up pollution. The United States should impose a similar mechanism on targeted advertising to counteract how the platforms amplify content that’s polluting our civic discourse.

Levying taxes on products like gasoline, cigarettes or lottery tickets, whose consumption may harm parties other than the user, isn’t new to U.S. policy. The resulting revenue has helped fund public health, infrastructure, education and welfare initiatives.

Unlike excise taxes on products, the tax on targeted advertising would be levied not against individual consumers but against enterprises that profit from targeted-ad sales. The revenues could be used to create a Public Interest Media Endowment, which would support production and distribution of content by diverse speakers — with an emphasis on local journalism, investigative reporting, media literacy, noncommercial social networks, civic-technology projects, and news and information for underserved communities.

Inevitable. Of course, if you really wanted to clean up our civic discourse, you’d skip ads like a ten year old, care less about what random strangers say online, and use the internet to seek out a readily available and roughly $0 education in civics and American history. But the mandarins of the crumbling fantasy economy don’t really want to drain the swamp of the so-called discourse. They want to sail the seas of fake news and useless takes, of performative rage and irrelevant opinions, like Gilligan on the S.S. Minnow — named, they may no longer recall, in “honor” of John F. Kennedy’s FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow, who famously pronounced television a “vast wasteland.” Fun fact:

The phrase “vast wasteland” was suggested to Minow by his friend, reporter and freelance writer John Bartlow Martin. Martin had recently watched twenty consecutive hours of television as research for a magazine piece, and concluded it was “a vast wasteland of junk.” During the editing process, Minow cut the words “of junk.” Minow often remarks that the two words best remembered from the speech are “vast wasteland,” but the two words he wishes would be remembered are “public interest.”

If our wide-eyed media mandarins want to atone for something, it should (*cough*) be their own industry, which has long since ceased — as America’s kids already know in their bones — to be in the public interest.

In the pages of Politico in May 2016, I wrote that the partisan realignment of voters among the two major parties was nearly complete, while the policy realignment had only just begun:  “What we’re seeing this year is the beginning of a policy realignment, when those new partisan coalitions decide which ideas and beliefs they stand for — when, in essence, the party platforms catch up to the shift in party voters that has already happened.” 

Since then, the partisan realignment has continued.  In the 2018 mid-terms, according to exit polls, 61 percent of white without college degrees approved of President Trump’s performance, compared to only 40 percent of college-educated whites.  In the mid-terms non-college educated whites preferred Republican by 24 points, while whites with college diplomas preferred the Democrats by 8 points.  Today three-quarters of House Republicans represent districts with fewer college graduates than the national average. 

The Republican country club is now a country and western club.  More and more intellectuals on the right have noticed.  They are asking why Republicans in Congress and conservatives in think tanks are pushing tax cuts for the Democrat-leaning rich and cuts in Social Security and Medicare spending on working-class Republican voters.   

Daniel McCarthy’s essay “A New Conservative Agenda” makes him the latest thinker on the right, joining others like Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, Oren Cass, Henry Olsen, Patrick Deneen, and the editors and contributors of American Affairs and American Greatness, to speculate about what an agenda that actually served the interests of Republican voters would look like.  This is part of a larger trans-Atlantic conversation among “postliberals” including the British thinkers David Goodhart and Philip Blond and Maurice Glasman, who are pushing back against the synthesis of economic libertarianism and radical individualism that defines today’s Western establishment. 

Postliberal thinkers, aligned with Republican voters, are on a collision course with the libertarians who still dominate the GOP donor class and enjoy lucrative think tank perches and columns.  For half a century, the American conservative movement has outsourced its economic thinking to libertarians who denounce the New Deal as fascist and idolize Calvin Coolidge—as though the brain of Ayn Rand had been put into the body of Andrew Jackson.   It is time for a brain transplant on the right, and not a moment too soon. 

Daniel McCarthy’s recent First Things essay eloquently articulates two points that have become central to the discourse of our more thoughtful nationalists. First, economic growth isn’t everything. Second, it’s necessary at this juncture to re-negotiate our social contract, making it more responsive to the needs of struggling middle-class Americans.

In very broad form, it’s hard to disagree with either claim. The devil is in the details, though. A rising GDP certainly isn’t everything, but it generally does mean widespread prosperity, which is in fact what we see: America today is still a very prosperous nation. It’s certainly clever of McCarthy to accuse America’s elite classes of “nineties nostalgia”; no doubt many defenders of free trade do think fondly on that era. However, one needn’t be in the grip of Nirvana nostalgia to prefer wealth to poverty, and prosperity to scarcity.

McCarthy isn’t anti-prosperity of course, but he does want us to get used to the idea that it might be fine to accept less overall prosperity (at least in the short term) for the sake of sustaining or reinvigorating the particular ways of life that are meaningful to subset of the populace. This is similar to what Oren Cass has recently dubbed “productive pluralism”: an economic policy that juggles a range of preferred human outcomes instead of just focusing relentlessly on growth. Maybe it is fine (even wise or just) to do that. It’s true enough that a thriving economy can’t be built on the backs of a dysfunctional culture and workforce. Still, one man’s productive pluralists are another’s special pleaders, so it’s important to flesh out the plea. What exactly would we be preserving with this new nationalist agenda, and why is it worth any interim sacrifices that might be demanded?

Though he isn’t terribly explicit about it, it seems like McCarthy must have his sights set on particular subcultures and regions that are currently struggling (for instance, depressed rust belt towns once reliant on manufacturing). Undoubtedly there are serious social problems in these regions that need to be addressed, but we should keep everything in perspective. The reality is that a substantial share of our population does seem to be thriving, and not just financially. In our nation today there is no absolute shortage of material goods, jobs, potential spouses, schools, hospitals, libraries, church pews, or anything else that should be needed to forge a meaningful life. These things may not be readily available in the most-preferred form, or in the regions where they are most wanted. But if we’re asking all Americans to help sustain fully-fleshed ways of life (as opposed to just opening opportunities or ensuring adequate sustenance for all), then it’s important to make the case for why those ways of life are good and valuable, and why people who live this way are ultimately capable of making significant contributions to the nation as a whole.

To give McCarthy’s argument a broader appeal, we will need a bit less W.E.B. DuBois, and a bit more Booker T. Washington. Just because people have lived in a particular way for a period of time, doesn’t mean that they should go on living that way, or that others should make sacrifices to enable them to do so. Not all Americans are convinced that the subcultures in question are particularly admirable. They worry that they are a bit chauvinist, or a bit racist, or just incapable of making necessary adaptations that will enable their communities to thrive in the 21st century. Is that true? Is it important? These are painful questions, but if we can’t address them, we can’t possibly expect a majority of Americans to pull together in solidarity with struggling regions of a country that in general boasts an enviable standard of living, and a great deal of opportunity.

Travel in certain circles and you will hear people lament the dearth of fiscally conservative, socially liberal political options. That’s the logic driving former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to explore an independent presidential bid, for example. Anecdotally, on careful examination the social liberalism of these voters is normally more pronounced than their fiscal conservatism. Empirically, they are not as numerous are they would have you believe.

Among members of Schultz’s former political party, the Democrats, a CNN/SSRS poll finds the decaffeinated centrist with a net favorable rating of minus 17 points. Perhaps that’s to be expected in the party of the Green New and revivified democratic socialism. But what if even among Republicans a lot of what passes for fiscal conservatism is a really a form of social conservatism, a more ecumenical or secularized version of the Protestant work ethic? And what if rank-and-file members of both parties are less globalist than their leaders and donors?

These aren’t exactly the questions Dan McCarthy grapples with in his perceptive First Things essay on a new conservative agenda, but the discussion he has started may nevertheless help answer them. Bill Clinton won states that hadn’t gone Democratic since Jimmy Carter by promising an economy for everyone who worked hard and played by the rules. Donald Trump took states that hadn’t voted Republican since Ronald Reagan by vowing to put America First.

Clinton manifestly failed and the jury is still out on Trump, though both have presided over solid economic booms. Without some kind of American nationalism, the country will lack the solidarity required to make a bigger welfare state sustainable—and a return to something approaching constitutionally limited government even possible.

Many Republicans fervently hope that whenever Trump leaves office, everything will return to normal. Indeed, the president’s most obvious successors inside the GOP are Vice President Mike Pence, an old-guard movement conservative, and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, more or less a George W. Bush Republican.

But a party that is dependent on the votes of Social Security and Medicare recipients is going to have a hard time passing the Paul Ryan agenda. Neoconservatism unmoored from nationalism has little appeal. Defense contractors, military service members and law enforcement officers, farmers receiving agriculture subsidies, and a beleaguered white working class—the GOP is no less the party of government than the Democrats.

Conservatives who excoriate Trump, much less Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, need not abandon their principles but they must grapple with these political realities. Instead many speak dismissively of their own voters. Imagine if Nixon and Reagan-era Republicans had ignored crime and welfare—legitimate issues that could easily bleed into racial demagoguery—the way so many of their successors accept the Left’s framing on immigration and globalism.

Observing, as McCarthy does, that the “way forward requires refocusing on the American citizen as the basic unit of the economy” is not as detailed the Ryan roadmap. Policy-wise, it is not clear that immigration reforms (which I support) and tariffs (of which I am more skeptical) alone will get us there. But philosophically, it is a good and important place to start.

Daniel McCarthy’s First Things essay on “A New Conservative Agenda” is a crucial reminder that the America we know is no longer the founders’ republic, the Cold War superpower, or even the liberal hegemon of the 1990s. The first step toward a governing conservatism is to come to terms with “the century in which we actually live rather than the one shaped by our political heroes.” In this sense, McCarthy offers a realistic alternative both to populist nostalgia for the midcentury consensus, and to elite nostalgia for the enthusiastic globalization and cultural liberalism of the Clinton era.

​But I fear that McCarthy is not realistic enough about the challenges facing nationalism. It has never been easy to accommodate the diversity of opinions and interests inherent to a free society on a continental scale. In a country of nearly 350 million inhabitants, it is nearly impossible to take “account of the different needs of different walks of life and regions of the country, serving the whole by serving its parts and drawing them together.” No matter what policies we adopt, there are inevitably going to be losers as well as winners.

​The current regime also has winners and losers, of course. Coastal cities, the highly educated, single people, and the service and non-profit sectors of the economy have done well over the last quarter century. The hinterlands, those without college degrees, families, and manufacturing have suffered by comparison. There are good reasons to try to rebalance the ledger in their favor. The concrete proposals in this essay—reorientation of the immigration system toward the naturalization of high-skill immigrants and trade deals that promote domestic employment—might help to accomplish that.

​But this sort of prudential rebalancing falls short of the structural renovation that McCarthy recommends elsewhere in the essay. Better trade strategy won’t stop technological developments that have made medium-skill labor less valuable. And immigration reform would need to be much more restrictive than McCarthy seems to envision if it is to seriously alter the size and composition of the labor force. McCarthy rejects what he memorably describes as “palliative liberalism”—efforts to make things a bit easier on Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” or Mitt Romney’s unproductive 47 percent by means of wage subsidies, tax credits, and other small-bore measures. I am not certain the proposals here—or related suggestions by writers like Frank Buckley or Oren Cass—amount to more than palliative nationalism.

​What would be required to bring about a “class compact” comparable to the Jeffersonian ideal of a yeoman society, Lincoln’s vision of a free labor economy, or the midcenturyAmerican dream? The historical pattern suggests that the answer is at once simple and forbidding: major war.

The wide dispersal of property in the early republic was largely a consequence of independence from Britain, which lifted limits on western settlement, and the natural rights ideology that helped to justify it. The industrial economy of the late 19th century was created by the demands of wartime production and protected by tariff and currency policies made politically feasible by the prostration of the South. In addition to the bankrupting of America’s rentier class by the Depression, which neutralized a potent source of opposition to the New Deal, the middle-class comfort of the 20th century relied on an explosion of government spending intended to best first the Nazis and Japanese and later the Communists.

War, in short, seems to be a necessary condition of meaningful national consolidation. It promotes solidarity among the population, legitimizes interventions in economic and social life that would other be unfeasible, and reminds elites that they rely on lower orders for purposes beyond domestic service. That is why campaigns to really transform the structure of our political economy tend to adopt martial rhetoric. The habit is especially noticeable among progressives, whose distaste for war itself does not stop them from declaring war on poverty or calling for a domestic Marshall Plan or a “Green New Deal.”

McCarthy is right to criticize conservatives and Republicans for ignoring or dismissing the real suffering caused by the economic transformations of the last half century. A movement and party that are not interested in making life better for their supporters—to say nothing of their opponents—do not deserve to survive. But over-promising about what can realistically be accomplished is no virtue either. In the absence of another existential conflict—with all the danger and sacrifice that involves—I do not think the prospects for a new nationalism are bright.

Last Tuesday night President Trump told Congress and the country, “As a candidate for President, I pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.” He’s dead right. Even the winners do not come out of long wars well. Ask our British cousins what winning both world wars – much longer wars for them than for us – got them. Regardless of how cheap our fruitless campaigns to reform the Greater Middle East appear to be, they are chipping away at American power, virtue, and solvency.

Trump might have added that “War is the health of the state,” as the Progressive essayist Randolph Bourne wrote in the midst of World War I (Progressives get things right on occasion). Looking around today’s Long War America, its surveillance state never stronger, its police departments boasting hand-me-down armored vehicles, and its Department of Defense the largest provider of childcare in the land, it is safe to say that Bourne understated the case.

One can and should question Trump’s commitment to restraint, retrenchment, and realism. We still have troops in Syria and Afghanistan, and the President’s foreign policy team keeps adding more votaries of the disastrous Bush agenda. Trump asks the right questions, questions that Washington’s foreign policy echo chamber invariably seeks to ignore or de-legitimize. But thus far he has provided few satisfactory answers.

And yet, Trump can confidently ask the majority of Americans who are sick of foolish foreign wars: where else are you going to go? To a Democratic Party that, in sync with its media cheerleaders, is embracing Sisyphean Forever War and flaying heretics like Tulsi Gabbard? Almost overnight, the Democrats have become the War Party. Polling, or a few minutes with CNN, confirms this. As erratic a foreign policy president as Trump has been, his opponents appear ready to allow him to ask that hoary political question with a straight face.

In his State of the Union President Trump seized the moral high ground in the on-going argument over the crisis, indeed, the national emergency, on our southern border.  The key moment in his powerful speech came when the President directly addressed the border crisis by declaring:

“This is a moral issue. The lawless state of our southern border is a threat to the safety, security, and financial wellbeing of all America. We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our people.”

These words are a full-throated articulation of American constitutional morality. The sacred duty of our elected officials is to ensure that the safety and well-being of Americans comes before any other considerations. In Federalist No 3, Publius stated: “Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their Safety seems to be the first.”

Turning the tables on the hypocritical open-borders “moralists” in Congress and in the donor class, President Trump explains how “tolerance for illegal immigration” is “not compassionate” but “very cruel” because it hurts vulnerable American workers. In other words, it hurts the least among us. While his opponents seek to cripple our brave border patrol agents, the President asks Congress to defend America’s national border “out of love and devotion to our fellow citizens and our country.” Masterful, Mr. President.

In some ways, President Trump’s State of the Union was a speech divided against itself.

On the one hand, the President extolled the virtues of “groundbreaking criminal justice reform;” ad-libbed a commitment to welcoming legal immigrants “in the largest numbers ever;” pushed once more for a new entitlement, “nationwide paid family leave;” and played, alternatively, both small-ball and the identity-group-hustle on topics like the eradication of AIDS and female employment.

These were some of the weakest parts of the speech. Anecdotal stories about redeemed criminals may be moving, but the rule will likely be closer to what Senator Tom Cotton has predicted: more criminals will hit the streets, sooner—with predictable results, as Joseph Bessette has written in the Claremont Review of Books (“More Justice, Less Crime”). The foreign-born population in America is at its highest levels in a century, hardly an opportune time to welcome a surge of immigrants, even legal ones. The reckoning with the debt-financed welfare state is coming—let’s not add another national entitlement.

On the other hand, Trump talked of the common sense necessity and morality of border walls, sticking it to Nancy Pelosi’s recent nonsense about the “immorality” of physical border security; had some ad-libbed fun with the Democrat ladies in white, many of whom seemed to be cheering, somewhat avariciously, for their newly-acquired jobs in Congress; touted our punitive tariffs on the intellectual property thieves in China; set up the passage of the U.S.M.C.A. (Trump’s NAFTA replacement) by a Democrat-controlled House as a fight between the #Resistance and the prosperity of working Americans in the crucial swing states of “Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, [and] New Hampshire;” immediately followed his call for a new national paid family leave entitlement we can’t afford with very frank language about recent Democrat endorsements of infanticide in New York and Virginia; reminded his audience about the substantive—and positive—results of his NATO-bashing; and enunciated his administration’s Monroe-doctrine stance on Venezuela, followed in the next paragraph by the juxtaposition of the “abject poverty and despair” caused by socialism and the recent pro-socialist rhetoric of the anti-American Left.

Perhaps most importantly, Trump repudiated the bipartisan foreign policy establishment conventional wisdom with a single sentence: “great nations do not fight endless wars.” Finally, echoing his first inaugural—and in an implied endorsement of American nationalism and a challenge to identity politics at the same time—he ended the speech with a call for a common American identity rooted in love of America, American greatness, and the maintenance of “America first in our hearts.”

On balance, then, the speech reflected much more of the populist and anti-establishment brashness we’ve come to expect from the President (and which helped get him elected).

The viewing public liked the speech, according to CBS and CNN polling. I doubt the President reads this site (give us time!), but the weaker parts of the speech can perhaps be seen as an attempt to address a sentence from Michael Uhlmann’s post on this website after the midterms: “If Trumpistas think they can govern without RINOs or suburban women, they are mistaken.” On the one hand, Trump was courting, among others, suburban women and a sub-species of anti-NeverTrump RINO. On the other hand, Trump was sounding some of his greatest hits, with a few new notes added in, in preparation for a very high-stakes run-up to 2020.

It will be interesting to see the political, rhetorical, and constitutional fight play out over the next 22 months—Americanism, properly understood, is once again at stake, as it was in 2016.

5   points that cancel each other out, with the final score to be determined.

1) A positive. What’s clear is that amidst the extreme and bordering-on-insane media narratives—which show no signs of abating—every time Trump gets a chance to speak directly to the people with a normal political speech in hand, he does rather well.

His first State of the Union was a case in point: all sides admitted it went very well, reality briefly shone through the clouds (“I guess this man’s election was not the end of the world, after all”), and then the turbulence of the news cycle suddenly began again.

Since the campaign against Trump—begun by Obama and Clinton with the power of the federal government—aims to fundamentally de-legitimize him, any time he gets to speak in traditional ways he is “normalizing” himself and thereby obtaining at least a marginal win.

In fact, one could make a case that a normal, “just read the words” political speech tour and a habit of giving them every so often from here on out would solidify a 2020 win and a place in history beyond. As Michael Uhlmann suggests.

2) A potential short term positive. Given his solid floor of 40% support, it’s the deeply confused 10-20% of the electorate that matters. 

Along with everyone else, Trump’s likely given up on Congress to come up with a suitable compromise on immigration and the budget. If so, the question is how the speech plays to actually wavering voters and meandering independents in the context of ferocious media narratives, especially if Trump starts to make the case for emergency powers for The Wall on the basis of both this speech and his previous compromise offer: “I tried to reason with Congress, but…”

In other words, will this speech undercut the Left’s inevitable response to emergency wall building (Executive Branch Tyranny!) in the eyes of swing voters? What Trump needed to accomplish rhetorically is determined by the ways in which the media tries to browbeat and shame that 10-20% from supporting him, and this speech seemed to give him cover and favor with them, in part because it set forth a plausible argument for immigration reform to the confused and undecided.

3) A historical neutral. The two points above also apply in some ways to previous Republicans, and it often failed to work for them.

Of course, one might well wonder how much the State of the Union really matters for any President, ever.

4) This was a squandered opportunity to call out Congress’s bipartisan failures and put the pressure on it directly, with authority, on immigration and the budget. He could have better described the history of immigration over the last decades and all the broken promises by members of both parties that led to millions of illegal immigrants. He could have condemned Congress for not passing an actual budget for many years. And then he could have said in even stronger terms, to them, in front of the people: “Get it done, or I will do it myself.” Granted, he did say “I will get it built.” And much of the argument could and likely will be accomplished in an emergency powers speech that specifically deals with immigration, or a speech explaining a deal—if one is somehow reached. But the entire framework for this argument could have been—but was not quite—set last night in front of a larger audience. We will find out if the “kinder, gentler” gambit worked soon enough.

5) Similarly, Trump avoided making clear what is really at stake right now in America and what the state of the union really is, given our deepest challenges and opponents. There was no meta-reframing of our situation, calling out the cultural Left in greater detail, as David Sorensen suggested, or an explanation of the regime-level roots of our challenge (“Who are Americans?,” as Colleen Sheehan asks), or direct confrontation of the regime-level challenges we face, as James Poulos suggests. Instead, some of the speech outside of immigration rested on various baubles, which, granted, are completely normal for State of the Union addresses.

But this is not a normal time.

Thus this avoidance feels like a deep loss to me, longer term, especially as Trump only rarely gives the scripted speeches that could likely propel him to even more winning if he but gave them.

But that’s to pine for the speech I wanted to write, which—while needed—may not have been needed last night.

Let’s face it.  State of the Union speeches are neither generally noteworthy nor much remembered.  Nothing of value would be lost if presidents reverted to the pre-Woodrow Wilson practice of submitting SOTU messages in writing only.  But that  isn’t going to happen.  Thanks to television and presidential vanity, the SOTU message has become an over-hyped political version of a dull variety show with too many commercials that goes on far too long.  Presidents present themselves as a cross between Santa Claus and an occasionally naggy Mary Poppins, but ere long pretty much everyone forgets all about the event.

All that being said, President Trump knocked it out of the park last night.  He looked and sounded presidential, which for him was something of a novelty.  Let’s hope he likes and sticks with this new persona.  He made the case for restoring American greatness more eloquently than he has ever done before.  That should help him in political battles on important policy issues, as for example his struggle to make our Southern border more secure.  He made the case on that issue last night forcefully, with arguments that can attract support beyond his base.  He needs to take a mini-version of what he said last night on the road, while avoiding his penchant for ad hominem pejoratives.  The question is whether he has the focused discipline to do so.

The reality and one of the beauties of America is that your ancestors didn’t have to be born here for you to be as much a part of the country as those whose families came over on the Mayflower or fought the Battle of Bunker Hill.

America was the first nation founded solely on an idea.  This idea transcends ethnicity, race, religion, and locus of birth.  This is the central idea that all human beings are created equal, which Lincoln claimed gives hope to all because it guarantees liberty to all.

So isn’t the project of building a border wall anathema to the beacon of hope that signals to all the world’s poor, tired, and huddled masses of humanity, who yearn for freedom and opportunity?

I for one, am not particularly keen about building this wall.  I doubt that it will make the nation substantially safer, and I don’t think that it will make America stronger or better. But I appreciate that some people do think it will, and I understand that good walls may at times make good neighbors.

The question for us today however is not so much who we will let in and who we will keep out, but who are these people already here who call themselves Americans?  What do Americans stand for?  Do we share a fundamental idea of right and a common cause?

President Trump invoked the central idea of America when he talked about protecting the youngest children of the land, whose lives are in even greater jeopardy today by new legislation in Virginia and New York.

This is a choice Americans have to make, and in making the right choice we will become stronger and better.

The President conveyed this same idea in recounting the story of Judah Samet and his family during World War II.  Having been 10 months in a concentration camp and loaded on a train for transport to Auschwitz, Samet and his family braced themselves for the worst when the train screeched to a halt and a soldier entered their car. But then his father jubilantly cried out: “It’s the Americans!”

This was a choice Americans made on the basis of their dedication to the idea that all human beings are created equal. This is the kind of choice that makes the country and its people safer and stronger and better.

This State of the Union address was notable for its subtle or quiet articulation of the American Dream, running parallel to the overt one. Beyond Trump’s affirmative messaging was an important theme sketched out through things unsaid.

Today and on into at least the near future, the president suggested, Americans still have the needed resources to dissipate fears that powerful global trends will overpower the American way, our more or less traditional manner of living. The New World need not yet kneel before the Old.

Despite taking his time with a lengthy speech, Trump devoted no space to the major forces roiling Europe. The grand meltdown of the established political economy, under ever greater populist heat that often takes a post-ideological character, posed no threat to America’s fortunes.

So too with technology. Although Silicon Valley is now held out for bitter condemnation by observers across the ideological spectrum, the dominant tech companies were spared Trump’s chastisement. Neither AI nor automation were singled out as menacing developments primed to take apart America’s social compact or labor markets. Trans-partisan criticism again notwithstanding, neither the deep state nor the Five Eyes intelligence alliance were invoked, or even alluded to, as encroachments on Americans’ freedom or flourishing.

These would be dark notes in any speech, and in this one, clearly calibrated to strike an upbeat tone without losing the political initiative, they might have felt ominously out of place. But they are the preoccupations of the public mind, and at some point they will need to be addressed—whether by Trump, his critics, or the American people themselves.

But only political victory can stop elite mobbery of our political discourse.

Between the “bombshell” Buzzfeed story that, “if true,” was finally going to sink Donald Trump, and the savaging of the MAGA hat wearing Covington High School teens, the tired old media has had another banner week. This promises to be yet another year of its protracted seppuku with the very #fakenews spear the media forged with Trump in mind.

Distrust and animosity deepen. Contradictions heighten. And as the media’s slow motion suicide rolls on, people are daily inoculated from the old illusions of “news” media.

This inoculation is what matters most, as after the cheap propaganda tricks of the televisual era are seen for what they are, they bring diminishing returns. (I’m following our Editor-at-Large James Poulos in making the word “televisual”—and Marshall McLuhan—great again.)

People have only just begun to see the cheap ideological sophistry of the televisual era, in which racism and sexism and other -isms were held up as the greatest, unpardonable sins possible and used as blunt instruments to bludgeon opponents right the hell out of the public square.

For an ever increasing number of people, this tactic isn’t going to work any longer.

In the case of the Covington kids, of course, the intended effect was to obscure and discredit the reason so many tens or hundreds of thousands of people were marching in Washington, DC.

Further, the story was supposed to reinforce the idea that you aren’t allowed to wear a hat supporting the President of the United States. Worse than passive racism, wearing the hat is active “white nationalism” and could lead to the justified public destruction of your life on national television.

Finally, the story was meant to reinforce the narrative that (smirking!) young white men are racists, especially if from private Catholic schools or privileged positions from which they might soon lead.

But, as Poulos might say, digital technology doesn’t care about your televisual narratives.

This realization came too late for the ruling class, which is why they are struggling to control digital forms of communication.

As Poulos points out, they thought the woke future was ensured by digital technology. But digital technology is simply memory and retrieval of information. As opposed to television, which remains the continuous flow of heavily controlled and produced imagery.

In principle, at least, digital technology gives the role of interpretation over to anyone who can retrieve the data.

Thus the era of imaginative narrative fantasy is over. Now everyone begins to deconstruct television. The old morality plays don’t work. Even old forms of advertising don’t work.

So you get what we got: this time around, it’s much harder to execute the Anita Hill/Blasey-Ford gambit, and 30 seconds of Covington video doesn’t cut it, either. Digital technology records and retrieves in potentially all directions, bringing us nearer to the complexity of the real (which TV was used to controlling and simplifying), and rendering propagandizing pundits irrelevant.

The powers that be are racing to control the early forms of digital communication (FB, Twitter, etc.), but it’s a thankless task. You can’t ultimately control digital the same way you could TV. But as they feel their control loosening and watch their formerly manicured narratives begin to grow wild, they are doubling down in response.

Considered in itself, the Covington kids incident was marginal and meaningless in the grand scheme of things happening under the sun. The absurdity of thinking a brief clip of moving pictures of a few people milling about in a throng of thousands constitutes objective “news” about the goings on of the world should be obvious to all but those still stuck in the idiocratic era of TV.

But while the news was fake, the intended effect by the Left of their latest classic cut-and-paste is quite real.

1) Don’t let your kids wear hats supporting a President of the United States we don’t like.

2) Don’t criticize us when we yell out derogatory and hate filled language at high school kids for hours on end.

3) Don’t let your 16 year old look old hippie protestors in the eye and smile.

If you do, we will publicly destroy your life and ignore and drown out your popular protest movement in real time.

Many speak as if the lesson of the last week is that we all need to avoid rushing to judgment and issuing Hot Takes, as if there was some larger goal for much of journalism and political discourse today other than using Hot Takes as weapons in a war based on longstanding judgments on both sides that the opposition must be vanquished.

Our more intellectually-minded pundits would like to think their audience sits waiting to “rationally” evaluate their columns, pining to be persuaded by op-ed reasoning. To “moderate” pundits, such “reasoning” often means either utilitarian policy arguments, laden with data and social science research that can be used as evidence by either side, or a some form of “But both sides…” sermonizing that splits up blame.

In our present circumstances, such reasoning is not persuasive.

There is a portion of the population that is persuadable, of course, by either side. But there is also a political war on, which requires victory (and defeat). And political victory is also a form of persuasion—in fact, it forms the very environment within which political discourse takes place.

This sort of elite mob behavior will never stop because any one of us writes another article on civility, cautioning against Hot Takes and rushing to judgment. It will stop only when such behavior involves tangible losses in the aforementioned war.

Real public cultural consequences—punishments—are necessary to counter outrageous propaganda and vicious mob attacks on the innocent. And the same is necessary for those on the Right who refuse to acknowledge reality. Public shaming and mockery is a two-edged sword.

The barbarous New York abortion bill passed this week reminds us that we live in a nation of technologically advanced savagery. And in one-party states like New York and California, where anything the Left wants now goes, things are about to get much, much worse.

Before Trump, the one-party, failed republics of California and New York were what the Democrats were hoping for nationally for the foreseeable future. Many still think they represent the inevitable destiny of America itself.

As California’s Attorney General, Kamala Harris didn’t hesitate to send the SWAT team into David Daleiden’s apartment, using the full power of the state to shut him down and punish him with the full force of the law, arm in arm with Planned Parenthood and the media.

Imagine what she would do as President.

As family, friends, and colleagues gathered to remember her beautiful life and legacy this past weekend in Washington D.C., we at the Claremont Institute join in remembering Bre Payton for her intelligence, her courageous enthusiasm for discovering truth, her memorable wit, her winsome charm, and her kindness—not to mention the unforgettable way she rocked a stunning bold lip.

It was our privilege to host Bre as one of our 2018 Publius Fellows this past summer. As Ryan Williams wrote on the day we heard of her sudden passing, “She showed up and immediately charmed everyone with her unassuming manner; amused everyone with her dry sense of humor and wry smile; and impressed everyone with her poise, command of great books, and intellectual courage. We were all Bre partisans for life.” His words ring true for all of us.

Her December interview in our Alumni Spotlight gives a glimpse into who she was and the great work she was engaged in. After graduating from Patrick Henry College, she became a Staff Writer at The Federalist and quickly rose in influence, becoming a regular commentator on Fox News and other outlets. In our Alumni Spotlight, she wrote to us about what inspired her career. “I’ve always loved to write and tell stories. When I was a little girl that meant writing books, and forcing my siblings to play roles in the musical adaptation of them in our backyard, or jotting down notes in my diary of the day’s events while watching the evening news with my parents. Today that means writing about people and events at the forefront of the cultural fight we find ourselves in today.”

When asked what she saw as the greatest challenge facing America today, she insightfully noted, “There’s a growing sense of purposelessness that’s taken root in our society with deeper political fragmentations taking root, technology disrupting the way neighborhoods and institution work, a loss of community. The growing opioid epidemic and pessimistic attitudes in poll after poll speak to how deep this problem is. As a country, we’ve forgotten what it means to be an American, and we’ve lost the habits that are necessary to be free.”

I met Bre this summer at the Publius fellowship. I will never forget how gracious, witty, vibrant, and kind she was. In the short time I knew her, I experienced first-hand how she always took the time to appreciate everyone around her. She exemplified genuine kindness, yet her ability to make a winsome argument in service of the truth was striking. She was never afraid to ask the hard questions or explore new ideas. She made an impact on people daily—in and out of the spotlight—because of her genuine care for others.

The Claremont Institute Faculty and the 2018 Publius Fellows remember and honor Bre. Thank you for the incredible life you shared with us. You will never be forgotten. May you rest in peace.

“Bre lived the great commandment: loving God and loving neighbor. In the Publius classroom, she was spunky and inquisitive in her steady search for understanding. Outside the classroom, our late-night conversations about God, community, and family will remain some of my most-cherished memories from the program.”

– Brigid Flaherty, 2018 Publius Fellow

Bre could never seem to keep a smile off of her face. That’s the way that I’ll always remember her: an infectious smile that had the ability to spark up any room.

– Alex Titus, 2018 Publius Fellow

Of all her wonderful qualities, Bre had a genuine interest in people that made her, at a personal level, easy to talk to and delightful to know, and, at a political level, attuned to the sense of purposelessness that plagues contemporary society. If we exhibited a tenth of the kindness, courteousness, and concern she extended towards friends and strangers alike, we would go a long way in restitching the spirit of friendship frayed by our atomized, antagonistic culture.

– Charles Correll III, 2018 Publius Fellow

Bre was intellectually courageous like few people are, never unwilling to reach an inconvenient conclusion if it proved right. And the longer you talked to her, the more depth of mind and soul you saw, and you’d be in awe of just how rich and full a person she really was.

– Daniel Davis, 2018 Publius Fellow

She must have recommended I read Churchill’s “Mass Effects in Modern Life” half a dozen times. I finally did so only last week. I particularly loved this line:

I have no hesitation in ranging myself with those who view the past history of the world mainly as the tale of exceptional human beings, whose thoughts, actions, qualities, virtues, triumphs, weaknesses and crimes have dominated the fortunes of the race. But we may now ask ourselves whether powerful changes are not coming to pass, are not already in progress or indeed far advanced. Is not mankind already escaping from the control of individuals? Are not our affairs increasingly being settled by mass processes?

Would have been wonderful to speak about it with her, and learn exactly her reasons for loving it so.

At the gun range this 4th of July with Ed Erler,  we received a lecture on 2nd Amendment.

E’re the contrarian, I asked Erler his thoughts on mass shootings.

Quietly, Bre Payton told me that most are done with Assault Rifle —which no one talks about regulating.

She was kind—even when chastising.

– Alexandra Hudson, 2018 Publius Fellow

Our class of Publius fellows was made immeasurably better by Bre’s presence. She brought a unique combination of wit and warmth, reflection and verve. We are better thinkers because of her acuity, better friends because of her humor, and better Americans because of her patriotism. Thank you, Bre. You are missed.

– Wells King, 2018 Publius Fellow

When Bre walks into a room, you’re undoubtedly struck by her fierce beauty… Little do you know it’ll soon be matched by the woman herself. Bre will undoubtedly be remembered as this force of nature, but what comes to mind most for me is the raw character she wore. She was open, shameless and bold with new friends and old in a way that was simultaneously intimidating and empowering. Her heart was no different – Bre’s empathetic kindness was second nature, not common for most women our age, especially in politics. This came out in the little ways: how Bre perceived others, how she reserved judgment – always. Yet another testament to this was her faith. Bre seemed to me fearless in her pursuit of conversion to Catholicism, most evidently, because she was just so excited to learn and to grow in the faith – it was inspiring to hear her talk about it. Bre was taken so early, but is assuredly at peace in Heaven with God. Thank you for blessing so many with your presence, Bre. We’ll miss you.

– Mary Monica Allen, 2018 Publius Fellow

Bre was an exceptional soul. You could see her passion for seeking and telling the truth in every action she took and with every word that she spoke. In the brief time I was blessed to know her, I was always moved by her sincerity and curiosity — she could weave between a discussion of Christian morality in one second and give you the ins and outs of DC politics in the next. I always learned something new speaking with her, and appreciated the many ways our friendship reminded me that there is so much more to life than politics.

To Bre’s family and friends, I offer my deepest condolences. There is no way to replace the joy she brought in each and every one of our lives. All we can do is carry on her memory — to finish the work she dedicated her life to and to live by the warm and shining example which she set. God rest her spirit and God bless you all.

– Ugonna Eze, 2018 Publius Fellow

Suppose the second video had never come out and the Covington Catholic High School boys had not been exonerated. Suppose the media had not been compelled to issue pathetic, half-hearted apologies for stoking the flames of hatred after the incident. Suppose the pundits had not sheepishly deleted their rush-to-judgment tweets condemning the boys.

What exactly would the boys have been guilty of based on the 3 minutes and 44 seconds of footage in that first video?

After all, no one laid a finger on Nathan Phillips and the other two Native Americans banging their drums and chanting. No one yelled at them. No one insulted them. No one asked them to leave.

The boys chanted along and acted silly. They surrounded the men in order to see what was happening, the way any crowd would if someone was making noise or playing an instrument in public. They were all smiling and being rather good-natured. The only profanity in the video comes from a scowling woman who yells out “f***ing mob mentality” and rolls her eyes at the boys.

Those with more delicate sensibilities might accuse the boys of being a little too rowdy. I, for one, incline to a Milford Academy “children should be neither seen nor heard” pedagogy (I also think students should wear uniforms and caps should be worn only at baseball games, and preferably only by the players). In any case, few others in America today would agree.

Nathan Phillips later tearfully recounted that he had heard the boys say—not chant—“Build that Wall, Build that Wall.” The subsequent longer video did not corroborate his claims. Should another video prove Mr. Phillips’ recollection correct, is it now forbidden in American to repeat commonplace political slogans in the public square?

What about the specific boy in question, whose name I will not repeat in a futile effort to respect what little privacy he has left after Friday’s incident?

He did not move. He did not say a word. You could almost say he was stoic (I say almost because the stoics are not known for their smiles). He stood there motionless for almost three minutes as Phillips, who had walked over to him, loudly banged a drum in his face and chanted—rather obnoxiously, one might observe.

But it wasn’t a smile, the mendacious media explained. It was—brace yourselves—a smirk! The boy stood there and smirked. And for that he must be “punched in the face,” expelled from school and denied admission to college. His name should forever be ruined on the internet. He should become the face of evil in the 21^st century—or at least until the next manufactured scandal erupts.

It goes without saying that if Covington had been an all-black school, a girls’ school or a Mexican high school visiting the US, the video would have sunk without a trace in the great abyss of unwatched YouTube videos. And it also goes without saying that if the boys had been wearing “Love Trumps Hate” or “Feel the Bern” caps, the episode would not have sent the media into an Orwellian frenzy of hate.

The kid in question, however, was part of the accursed white race that has wrought unspeakable evils onto humanity. He was a male and thus complicit in the patriarchal structures of oppression that subjugate women. He was the embodiment of power and privilege.

Worst of all, he wore a MAGA cap. Therein lies his crime. The inherited diseases of whiteness and masculinity, though incurable, can at least be mitigated and contained if the patient is willing to demonstrate good will by embracing leftist views and perpetually flagellating himself publicly for the sins of his race and his sex.

A MAGA hat is incontrovertible evidence that you refuse to take your medicine. While it does not necessarily make you a white supremacist, it (at least) suggests you could be. It indicates that you might belong to the half of Trump supporters whom Hillary Clinton put into her basket of deplorables, “the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”

The hysterical reaction to the first video points ultimately to an unsettling conclusion. Standing in silence with a smile before a person of color—or presumably, a member of any other aggrieved, oppressed identity group—is now a crime for deplorable white males of all ages.

We appreciate Professor Arnhart’s notice of, and comments on, our essay at his blog. As we note, we are in broad agreement with those Straussians—including Roger Masters, the early Leon Kass, and Arnhart himself—who argue that modern science does not refute the possibility of natural right.  We differ with Arnhart, however, in a few particulars.  Some of these must be put off to a future date, as we plan to elaborate on the themes in our essay in follow-up publications.  For now, we focus on two passages.

Professor Arnhart writes:

“As an escape from Strauss’s dilemma that moves towards a comprehensive science of nature that supports natural right, I have argued for a Darwinian liberal education that sustains Darwinian natural right, which rests upon what I call ’emergentist naturalism.’  Unlike the transcendentalist dualist, I affirm the continuity of nature and the integration of human beings within the natural order. Unlike the reductionist monist, I affirm the irreducible complexity of nature, in which novel properties emerge at higher levels of organization that cannot be reduced to lower levels, so that the uniqueness of human beings as a natural kind comes from the emergent properties that distinguish the human species, which include those distinctively human natural ends that constitute the ground of natural right.  I thus draw from a long tradition in Darwinian biology of thinking about emergent evolution, which Ellmers and Wise acknowledge in referring to ‘the overwhelming evidence for such ‘emergent’ order in evolutionary biology.'”

And:

“Darwin also recognized the natural teleology that supports natural right. But contrary to Strauss, this natural teleology in organic life is not a cosmic teleology of the heavenly bodies but an immanent teleology displayed in the goal-directed activity of living entities and processes. This is the sort of teleology that Aristotle studied in his biological works.”

In our view, this separation of cosmic teleology and biological teleology is not only unnecessary, it fails to escape the dualism that Strauss complained about.

Biology does not stand apart from the whole, but is part of the whole. An immanent teleology, as Arnhart identifies it, is immanent in the whole, in the basic stuff of the whole. Aristotle does not conflate, as Arnhart perhaps does, the fixed moving bodies of the heavens with the essential or necessary meaning of purposeful motion. What Aristotle provisionally observed within his domain of experience must not be confused with final conclusions about the nature of nature. We think, for example, that Aristotle would have marveled at the determination made by modern physics that any slight change to a variety of physical constants would render the fabric of our universe, and life as we know it, non-existent.

We think it is important not to get too caught up in Aristotle, per se, or in his speculative suppositions. (Still less do we think it wise to place too much weight on Darwin.) By this we mean that we are willing to depart from Aristotle’s speculative conclusions precisely in order to adhere to his method.  He was a man who put his tunic on one sleeve at a time. An astute observer of nature, Aristotle perhaps the most penetrating observer that has lived. Still, the nature he observed is one we also can independently observe. The fundamental aspect of that nature, which ties together his rebuttal of Plato’s theory of the forms, is that matter adopts form, to become a whole—a being, or ousia. That order that inheres in the world can be seen by human intelligence in art as well as nature. In art, the intention is obvious in that it resides in the mind of the artisan and his craft. But in nature, the intention can be elusive, and sighting it is subject to the critique of seeing “Jesus on a Cheeto.” You see it there because you project your intention onto the Cheeto.

That criticism of teleology—that nature’s purposes or causes are merely projections of our own wishful thinking (a criticism by dogmatic Darwinists that Arnhart is well familiar with)—cannot be definitively rebutted within the strictures of modern science or otherwise. But one can nevertheless observe that the order of the whole has a persistent quality of being predictable by human thought. That predictability strongly suggests that human thought is similar to the structure of the whole. Aristotle in his Metaphysics thus ties being (ousia) to an objective parallel between thought and actuality: a thinking whole. What is permanent about this is highlighted by the premise of the Fermi Paradox. The order of nature is such that it seems highly likely that intelligent life would arise on other planets. Skipping for a moment the concern raised by the Fermi Paradox (viz. Why has such life not shown itself?) we can see the reasonableness of an order for which intelligence is immanent and which thus tends, permanently, to produce a creature that thinks as it does. Cosmic teleology has thus in a way not been denied by modern science, but it has, unwittingly, been affirmed.

Thus, to return to the question of natural right, the cosmos may well be teleological without being moral outside of the relevant domain of moral beings. Moral action requires deliberation, and this capacity is possessed only by part of nature. Thus, the conditions for moral deliberation need not be present everywhere in order for natural right to be real. Nature is heterogeneous, and there are differences in kind among the ousia. Not every being has every capacity.

These are some of the presuppositions for our approach to a comprehensive reordering and understanding of the natural sciences—one not rooted in Darwinism, or even Aristotle as such, but one that depends on a proper understanding of political philosophy. What this means, exactly—not merely as a practical matter, but ontologically and epistemologically—is a matter we intend to develop in a future essay.

My late husband’s favorite grace, recited with a Scottish burr and good whiskey in hand:

A Selkirk Grace

 Some hae meat and cannae eat.

Some nae meat but want it.

We hae meat and we can eat

and sae the Lord be thankit.

Translated: Some have meat and cannot eat. Some no meat but want it. We have meat and we can eat and so the Lord be thanked.

Thanksgiving is one of two quintessentially American holidays. The other, of course, is the Fourth of July.

Thanksgiving is first in order of time. July Fourth is first in order of principle.

July Fourth marks the time of our common cause and dedication to the idea that all men are created equal. It marks what we collectively believe in and stand for.

Thanksgiving is when we look back in time and express our gratitude. –Gratitude for the daring of the early European settlers who crossed the broad, indifferent Atlantic to start a new life in a new land; gratitude for the goodwill and magnanimity of the Wampanoag who celebrated that notable feast day with the settlers of Plymouth Colony, and gratitude for the promise of this good land we call America.

Today, in 2018, we have the goodly inheritance of those days when our ancestors took stock of who they were, what they stood for, and for what they were thankful. This day of thanks we Americans might consider the link between the nation’s two special holidays.

For all of the political differences and animosities of our time, for this day of Thanksgiving, let us remember that we are still “one people,” and that we share in a debt of gratitude to the land that calls us to see in America something more than ourselves.

Thanks to the methodical takeover of its party institutions and non-profits by an energized philanthropic project beginning after John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 presidential election, the Democratic Party has undergone what can only be described as a radicalization process. After the donor class moved leftward, a new, woke generation—concerned with microaggressions, social justice, and stamping out contrary opinions deemed “hateful”—took the reins of media and culture. It’s been a mad dash to the extremities of reason and imagination ever since. Democratic candidates, elected officials and media voices today would no doubt be described as some synonym of “lunatic” or “extreme” by Democrats of decades past.

Even as we don’t have a contentious military endeavor with which the Left could take its traditional role in support of America’s enemies in combat, the radicalism of this new crop of progressive House Members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar manages to express itself on issues of foreign affairs and national security. This radicalism has led Democrats to reevaluate their position on America’s traditional alliances no less than they’ve reevaluated their support for free speech or capitalism.

The Democrats’ shift here comes in the wake of the most substantial legacy Barack Obama left for us in foreign affairs: a relatively binary Middle East, with America’s traditional allies alienated and disempowered in order to favor Iran and Sunni Islamist movements. When Donald Trump entered the White House, Iranian Shiite proxies had come to occupy, influence or get within striking distance of the Arab capitals of Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, and Sana’a in Yemen. Over the course of the last half-dozen years, the Arab Spring’s Muslim Brotherhood coups had endangered allied regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Led by ideological motivations similar to the Bush “Freedom Agenda,” the prior administration emboldened both these Sunni and Shia varieties of political Islam, earning the enmity of old allies Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It was really only a matter of time until the realities of this Middle East realignment influenced Members of Congress.

The hard-left’s antipathy toward our closest Middle Eastern ally, Israel, comes from the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967 and has been growing in intensity since. Once the province of the hard, Soviet-aligned academic Left, the comprehensive triumph of the New Left’s narrative of imperialism in foreign affairs has blown the legs out from under what was once the “bipartisan consensus” in support of Israel. With an empowered Democratic Party, pushed by an ever-more-radical media, look for an unprecedented amount of hostility toward the Jewish State from the upcoming 116^th Congress’ newest, most energetic Democratic Members.

It’s not just those who care about the US-Israel relationship who need to be concerned about what comes next. The president’s warm relations with the Gulf monarchies are, like his relationship with the Israelis, born of longtime social and business partnerships that are married, now, to the strategic reality of the moment: combating both Iran’s malign influence in the region, as well as the advance of Sunni political Islam in the form of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

Last month’s murder of Jamal Khashoogi exposed the most prominent voices on the Left as, suddenly, avowed enemies of the American alliance with Saudi Arabia and its young crown prince, Mohamed Bin Salman. Suddenly, lobbyists, politicians and corporations responsive to social justice concerns caved quickly to an orchestrated anti-Saudi campaign; they ignored decades-long relationships built on financial and strategic national interests, pulling out of business ventures, contracts and events in the Kingdom. The campaign to do so was successful because it was only bringing this elite, left-leaning class into line with the pro-Iran, pro-Islamist foreign policy cemented by the Obama White House.

The Khashoogi affair fed into the binary nature of the Middle East today, becoming a target of opportunity for Turkish, Qatari, Brotherhood and Iranian information operations to exact punishment on its hated rival in Riyadh; as if on cue, the Democrats have promised to put the screws to Saudi Arabia over its war against the Iranian proxy in Yemen.

Of course, some of this is new hostility is born of anti-Trump partisanship and a simple “Orange Man Bad” mental tic—if Trump likes a country or its leader, we must loathe them. More sophisticated congressional Democrats understand the binary strategic implications of moving away from the Israelis and the Saudis in particular and protecting a long-hoped-for detente with Iran, even if it comes at the cost of alienating America’s traditional regional allies.

Needless to say, none of this behavior is the country’s best interest. It’s a big deal—and indicative of major structural problems with our Republic—when the partisan divide is so strong that it colors our views of allies and adversaries. We really are, at this stage, two distinct countries sharing common nation, with completely divergent understandings of commerce, government, culture, and justice. Add to this, now, a widening gulf between the foreign nations some of us embrace and those others find threatening to their way of life.

Much of the post-election analysis will likely focus on the immediate policy implications of the Democratic takeover of the House and the increase of Republican strength in the Senate, as is appropriate. On this point, both Democrats and Republicans can claim minor victories. Democrats had a good night overall, and can take solace in the fact that the seats they lost in the Senate were in red states. Republicans can look at the history of elections during the middle of a President’s first term, and note that their losses in the House were well within the historical range. The “blue wave” never transpired.

While these immediate implications are interesting, the long-term implications of this election for political parties and Congress are more so. The trend towards “nationalization” of congressional elections continues, in which individual candidates matter less than party identification in congressional races. Not so long ago, red districts elected Democrats with frequency, and blue districts elected Republicans with frequency. Many of those examples – Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill in Missouri – are now gone.

Some argue that this means parties are back, as strong as they were in the late 19th Century, when the parties voted in lock-step. Under the surface, though, there is still evidence that parties are weaker than they were a century ago. Democrat Joe Manchin won in deep-red West Virginia, and Jon Tester pulled out a victory in somewhat-red Montana. Republicans cruised to victory in gubernatorial elections in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maryland, while a Democratic candidate won in Kansas. Voters still like to split their tickets, and this generally undermines party cohesion. In this vein, it will be very interesting to see whether Nancy Pelosi (assuming she will be the next Speaker) can hold together the disparate elements of the Democratic Caucus in the House. With a candidate-centered system such as the one we currently have, the glue that holds parties together is weak, and I suspect Pelosi will have a much more difficult time managing intra-party conflict this time around, than she had during Barack Obama’s first two years in office.

The Democrats and the entire, united ruling class threw the kitchen sink at Trump to try overturning the verdict of 2016, and failed spectacularly. The Republicans can thank the Democrats for the horror show they put on at the Kavanaugh hearings because that, with the rest of their threatening behavior, neutralized the enormous human and financial effort they had put into “the resistance.” The Republican campaign, with the exception of Trump’s last minute blitz, was pathetic, aiming as it did strictly at economic concerns. This neglected that they had done next to nothing to alleviate what had been the #1 economic concern, the ravages of Obamacare. But most of all, the Republicans failed to continue the line of attack that had paid off so handsomely in 2016: “who the hell do they think they are?” For a quarter century, Americans have lived increasingly under the shadow of political correctness. People watch what they say in front of whom, lest a stray remark be used to fire or otherwise place them beyond somebody’s pale. The arbitrary rule of “the authorities” — corporate, educational, governmental — is what had ignited rebellion. They ran an establishment campaign, which failed to motivate their establishment constituency. Trump then stepped in, and deployed the Deplorables.

Whoever expects the Democrats to drop or moderate the Resistance does not realize that they have been acting less out of choice than as an expression of their evolving identity. They are at war. That is not a question. The question is, what happens on the Republican side? Two things to watch: how Trump revamps his cabinet — especially who his Attorney General will be — and whether Jim Jordan or Kevin McCarthy will head the House Republicans. The big question, today and as it has been since 2017, is how the conservative side deals with “the resistance.”

What is most significant for our country’s future is how we understand the liberty and equality that forms us and how much we can preserve the natural sources of happiness in family and friendship. On these depend our individual virtues and our appreciation of the worth of free speech and a free economy. A single midterm election will not affect this very much, although we tend to over-interpret immediate results. It will be good for the country that Republicans will continue to be able to confirm judges, and good as well if they can recapture in 2020 voters lost in 2018. It would be useful too if the less-extreme Democrats moderated the others, although the allure of confronting the administration and maneuverings among prospective Presidents make this unlikely. The country needs two sensible parties, and the extremism of so many Democrats is our most obvious political concern.

It seems that voters did not, in fact, repudiate Republicans at the ballot box this week—at least to the extent that electoral projections based on off-year history and media hopes for a “blue wave” failed to materialize.

Even so, Nancy Pelosi and #resist-fueled Democrats will control the House of Representatives at least for the next two years. This gives them control of the crucial congressional committees from where they are poised to begin investigations meant to harass and hobble the Trump administration. On the menu will be RussiaGate, the emoluments clause, hunting for tax returns and, as Raymond Chandler once put it, “all the usual vices, besides those they’ve invented for themselves.”

As the party of the administrative state and the one that benefits from its sympathetic accomplices in media, Democrats’ abilities to wage political war on their domestic enemies will be at their peak. When I first arrived in Washington, I learned that, in general, GOP staffers do their time on the Hill before decamping on K Street; Democrat committee staffers, on the other hand are enthusiastic lifers—they know where the bodies are buried and are experts in using leaks offensively. It will get ugly, and fast. Look for non-stop campaigns and audacious information operations run from Capitol Hill committees as far as the eye can see.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, the GOP’s gains in the Senate are substantial, and especially useful with regard to judicial confirmations. In recent years, Ruth Bader Ginsberg has become the kind of media and pop culture icon only an unabashed progressive can now be—but, despite the superheroine memes and fawning press coverage of her strenuous workouts, she remains mortal; at age 85, she must be nearing the end of her judicial career. If that end comes while Donald Trump occupies the White House, Republicans will be in a good position to prevail in what will surely be the most bitter, hysterical and overheated nomination fight in recent American history. This, too, will be exhausting.

The results of the 2018 midterm elections can be considered a draw.

For the Democratic Party, their hopes of a Big Blue Wave representing a repudiation of President Trump failed to materialize. Instead, they performed well within the norm for the opposing party in the midterm elections of a new president.

For the Republicans, facing a favorable map with a host of Democratic incumbents in States carried handily by President Trump in 2016, a slightly expanded Senate majority is merely a passing grade. They left a lot of money on the table.

In the final analysis, the split indecision (if I may call it that) is merely a manifestation of the failure of both parties to fully and clearly articulate a vision for America’s future and to persuade the American people of the goodness and justness of that vision.

There was no blue wave. The election was at most a swell, with nary a whitecap to be seen. It was certainly not a shellacking.

This means that President Trump continues to be a plus for Republicans. However, it’s no secret that Trump plays differently in different parts of the country, and with different groups of voters. Some Republican House seats that were winnable were lost thanks to Trump. Some Senate seats that were losable were won thanks to Trump. Of the seats that were lost, many can be won back.

I live in the heart of Trump Country, U.S.A. — western Pennsylvania. In 2016, it was certainly not the case that I couldn’t imagine how Trump won because I didn’t know anyone who voted for him. In fact, based on lawn signs and bumper stickers, it would have been difficult for someone traveling these parts to discern that Hillary Clinton was running for office. However, then as now, I routinely come into contact with people who are or would be inclined to vote for Trump, or those Trump promotes, but for matters of … shall we say … personal style. Where I live, this is not a pose by stealth Democrats. It’s a reality. These voters — here, there, and everywhere — can be won over.

The most recent elections were largely a battle of the bases, and Republicans, with the president’s aid, did quite well as midterm cycles go. But this is not sustainable, and has its downsides. Thanks to judicially gerrymandered congressional districts, Democrats did better than they should have in Pennsylvania this November. But even before judicial meddling, in a special election six months ago, a Democrat won my congressional district — which should have been an easy Republican hold. The victory was mostly due to energized Democrats and enervated Republicans.

What Republicans need for 2020 and beyond is a governing strategy. This is something that has to be built on a much more solid foundation than a series of mass rallies and late-night tweets, which is not to say these things do not have their place. But arguments must be made. Offices must be filled — with competent people who have incentive to stay in them and continue the behind-the-scenes assault on the administrative state. And for that matter, much of what happens behind the scenes should be trotted out for political advantage.

Weaknesses within the Democratic Party and its leadership must be exploited — with just the amount of rancor, and no more — than the occasion calls for. Passion has helped us, but there is a risk of diminishing marginal returns. Now it is reason — cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason — that will furnish many, if not all, the materials for our future support and defense. Let us never forget that general intelligence, sound morality, and a reverence for the constitution and laws go together like love and marriage. Whether there is a will, or a way, to pursue a governing strategy is the great question Republicans now face.

From a region of my mind known as the top of my head:

If Trumpistas think they can govern without RINOs or suburban women, they are mistaken.

The president will learn more about the complexities of governing in the next two years than he has in the his preceding 70. Whether this will help or hurt his 2016 agenda remains to be seen. Full marks for his Senate campaigning, which really seems to have helped. Inter alia, prospects for more conservative judges looking very good.

The Senate is probably more strongly pro-life than it has ever been.

All House incumbents who lost (20) were Republican. Were they lousy candidates, or in marginal districts to begin with? Dem candidate recruitment generally appears much better, GOP hurt by so many retirements. How does the GOP lose two Hudson River Valley seats and one in Staten Island?

Once solidly conservative Virginia now seems more or less reliably blue; Georgia permanently purple at best; Minnesotans need their heads examined; Wisconsin poised to erase the accomplishments of Scott Walker; very worrisome when a candidate like Sinema can run as well as she did in Arizona. But, ah, reserve a high place in heaven for Mike DeWine and the Ohio GOP; whatever they’re eating, order a truckload.

Kudos to Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis for pulling it out, but you may want to short your Florida futures. Consider continuing post-Maria Puerto Rican influx and beginning in 2020, nearly 800,000 felons will be able to vote.

If the Dems think their future lies with Donna Shalala (FL 27th) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY 14th), they should get in line behind Minnesotans at the mental health clinic. On the other hand, maybe it’s a subtle move to rally the youth vote: Shlalala’s only 71, a mere youngster compared to Nancy Pelosi (78), Steny Hoyer (79), and Jim Clyburn (78). Get ready for a flood of articles and television bits about “the year of the woman.” These commentaries for some strange reason only surface when the women in question happen to be Democrats.

Ben Collins, NBC News reporter on the dystopia beat, has a gloomy prediction to make about the coming years. The online rule of the algorithms, he writes,

“is going to dramatically shape politics in ways that were previously unheard of, and it will not be a party-line phenomenon. It will divide the electorate into groups who rely on empirical data and information from accountable news organizations, and skeptics of all stripes who have fallen down algorithmic rabbit holes based on inflammatory language and feel-good conjecture.”

Collins casts his vision in the now-familiar terms of an attack on social media. The ubiquitous platforms have become the main focus of anti-tech sentiment for making people psychologically delusional and politically extremist—anti-democratic, it would seem.

For people looking to mock or revile online #fullcommunists or nu-Nazis, this critique has its potency. But a different point of perspective offers a more challenging view. On closer inspection, social media is much less of a disruptor than it seems. In essence, it’s just the democratic principle applied to broadcast media. If you like broadcast and you like democracy, you ought to love social media. The fact that people delight in refusing to follow the scripts handed down from the ruling communications class may inspire rage and confusion within that class, but their desired solution is simply to more effectively broadcast the right visions to the masses.

Unfortunately for the comms elite, that ship has already sailed. The way to understand exactly what happened is to recognize that social media isn’t the paragon of digital change most critics think. The real embodiment of the technological revolution is social credit—a system that fundamentally rejects both broadcast and democracy as foundations for social order. Even a social credit regime driven much more by markets than by the state points toward a broad rejection of the old notion that citizens should spend lots of time attending the secular church of the 24/7 news cycle. The rise of technology that sharply divides the real and actual from the made-up and the hyped is bad news for the ruling comms elite that wants to make its every utterance a must-watch, must-listen event—and to rake in big money for their trouble.

This view of things sheds some unusual light on why Trump-like attacks on the media make such an impact. Already the public sense is deepening that what’s sold as the news won’t save us—and that if technology is increasingly merciless in marking off facts from fiction, at least it’s not running a royal scam.

Not that any of this answers the deeper question of how to avoid a new birth of servitude under the rule of those power-hungry algorithms—and the people who want to control them.

Claremont Senior Fellow and Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles R. Kesler, Jonah Goldberg, and Patrick Deneen discussed “Is Liberalism Failing?” at an event moderated by Vincent Philip Muñoz and hosted by the Constitutional Studies Department at the University of Notre Dame on October 11, 2018. Video is available here.

Last updated October 12, 2018

* * *

Claremontery:

Dennis Hale and Marc Landy reviewed Patrick Deneen’s new book, Why Liberalism Failed, in the Summer, 2018 issue of the Claremont Review of Books in an essay entitled “Blame the Fathers.”

At Minding the Campus, William Voegeli, Senior Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, reviewed Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed in his article entitled: “A New Book Takes on 500 Years of Modern Liberalism.”

At the Claremont Review of Books, Robert R. Reilly argued that Deneen “cobbles together parts of two sentences and creates a new one that supports his own critique, creating a Madisonian strawman to indict the founding.” For an alternative account, Reilly recommended Thomas G. West’s The Political Theory of the American Founding, reviewed last year in the CRB by Vincent Munoz. On the Public Discourse, Deneen compared Reilly’s criticism to the charge Socrates faced in Athens of corrupting the youth, urging “a real revival of Catholic political thought in America.” Reilly retorted that the Founders must not have “set up a republic to vitiate the virtue on which its existence depended.”

Other Responses:

In The American Conservative, Rod Dreher said Patrick Deneen’s new book Why Liberalism Failed is “the most important political book of the year.” Deneen levels an up-to-date Catholic critique of liberalism that extends to the Founding. “Only when individuals are rootless, culture-less, history-less and context-less,” he writes, “do we realize the ends prescribed by our regime. And yet we don’t realize that we have been shaped in just this way because we understand our condition to be that of freedom,” even though “the invisible architecture of the regime continues to exert its shaping force.” In America, he continues, referencing James Madison’s words in Federalist 10, “the citizenry increasingly conforms to the stated aims of the Constitutional order, its first object being the protection and encouragement of the ‘diversity of faculties.’”

“In a time of growing inequality, accelerating change, and increasing disillusionment with the liberal democratic order we’ve known for the past few centuries, I found this book thought-provoking.” —Barack Obama

At The New York Times: “If Liberalism is Dead, What Comes Next?” Jennifer Szalai; “How Democracies Perish,” David Brooks; “Is There Life After Liberalism?” Ross Douthat; “The Political Scientist Giving the Art World Something to Think About,” Scott Reyburn

“Has the Operating System for the Western World Crashed?” Park McDougald, New York Magazine