By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Decades of intellectual and political activity preceded
the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review in 1955. A little less
than a decade later, National Review
publisher William Rusher helped orchestrate Barry Goldwater’s presidential
nomination. The following year, 1965, Buckley ran for mayor of New York City,
and Irving Kristol, then still a member of the anti-Communist Left, founded The Public Interest. The year after
that, Reagan was elected governor of California. The 1970s saw the
proliferation of single-issue interest groups that constituted the New Right.
The first Conservative Political Action Conference was held in 1973. In 1977, a
year after losing the Republican nomination to incumbent Gerald Ford, Reagan
addressed the conference. “The new Republican party I am speaking about,” he
said, “is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for
the farmer, for the cop on the beat, and the millions of Americans who may
never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide
with those represented by principled Republicanism.” When President Reagan took
office in 1981, he could count on 25 years of accumulated conservative thought,
argument, rhetoric, policy proposals, and political experience. The movement
came first. The voters followed.
Today the situation is reversed. Donald Trump won the
Republican nomination and the presidency of the United States despite the
resistance of the conservative intellectual movement and many party activists.
While his administration leans heavily on institutions such as the Heritage
Foundation, those aspects of his campaign that diverged most significantly from
the conservatism of the Beltway remain undefined. Where Trump stands on trade,
immigration, entitlements, America First, and the Iraq war is clear enough. Not
so clear, however, is whether those stances add up to a coherent worldview,
what that worldview is, and what it implies for political action. In the case
of President Trump, the voters came before the movement. Hence one explanation
for the turbulent beginning of his administration is that Trump, unlike Reagan,
is unable to draw from years of intellectual work and policy research.
That is beginning to change. The first issue of American Affairs, a quarterly journal of
policy and political thought, was feted at a reception in New York City on
Tuesday. I found the magazine lively and thought-provoking and at times deeply
insightful. In their mission statement the editors reject “a misguided and
complacent consensus” that too easily dismisses widespread protest against
social problems as populist exercises in nostalgia. “But our intellectuals as
well as our politicians are subservient to an even more debilitating
nostalgia,” the editors say, “which views the ideologies of the last few
decades as the only alternatives and their policies as the only solutions. They
are nostalgic for a present they think they inhabit, but which has already
slipped away.” And this nostalgia led the intellectuals and politicians so far
afield that they missed completely the economic crisis, the Arab Spring,
Brexit, and the rise and victory of Donald Trump.
Trump is such a singular figure that he sometimes
obscures the larger social, cultural, and political canvas on which he
operates. American Affairs got its
start as a blog, the Journal of American
Greatness, whose objective was to provide, in the words of its most famous
contributor, “a sensible, coherent Trumpism.” But one of the virtues of this
first issue of American Affairs is
that Trump is mentioned only rarely. He is but an epiphenomenon of a much
stronger force that is shaking the foundations of the post–Cold War world. It
is not Trumpism but this larger concept that needs to be made sensible and
coherent. I am speaking of nationalism.
“What binds globalism and identity politics together,”
says Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown, “is the judgment that national sovereignty
is not the final word on how to order collective life. This judgment against
national sovereignty — let us state that matter boldly — was the animating
principle of the post-1989 world order, an order that is now collapsing before
our eyes.” When the Cold War ended, Mitchell writes, victorious elites in
Washington, London, and Brussels began constructing a world where attachments
to national identity would be attenuated or even severed. One would belong to a
group above the nation — be a “citizen of the world,” an employee of a
multinational corporation or NGO, a partisan of Davos, a subject of the EU — or
to a hyphenated group below it. Capital, goods, and people would flow across
borders in search of the highest return. The immense power of the United States
would police this new world order and enforce the responsibility of states to
protect their citizens.
But there was a price. “The separation of political power
from the political community,” writes editor Julius Krein, “naturally follows
from this separation of ownership and control” in the global economy.
Increasingly, power is shifted away from individuals
elected to represent the political community toward unelected officials
qualified to hold the positions responsible for administering the government —
that is, providing for consumption. Like all managers, they derive their power
from the administrative expertise and credentials that qualify them for office
rather than from democratic legitimacy. They are accountable, that is, not to
the political community but to the other managers that define their
qualifications.
This lack of accountability has been highlighted again
and again over the last 16 years. First 9/11 happened and no one was fired.
Then Saddam turned out not to have had WMD and no one was fired. The economy
came close to collapse — and the banks were bailed out. Government reform of
health care only made the individual market worse. The depression of rural and
working-class America was exacerbated by imperialistic environmental and
financial regulations, liberal welfare and minimum-wage policies, and further
global economic integration. “The economic, foreign policy, and technological
optimism of previous decades is gone,” writes Krein. “Preserving the status quo
has become the sole aspiration — and primarily for the purpose of preserving
the class privilege of the current elite, which, even if not admitted, is
becoming obvious to voters.”
Only in the last few years have voters around the world
rediscovered the nation as a means to combat this affluent, detached, aloof,
self-serving global caste. London, Washington, and Paris have been shocked by
displays of unanticipated and sometimes crude patriotism, by voters registering
their membership in a singular political community sharing a common language,
history, and culture. Once thought to be an anachronism or an atavism,
nationalism has revealed itself as the avant-garde of international politics in
the early 21st century. This is the movement that propelled Trump to the White
House. This is the movement that the editors and contributors to American Affairs must articulate,
refine, and translate into social, cultural, economic, and foreign policies.
What does that look like in practice? Hard to say: This first
issue leans more heavily toward the abstract than the concrete. Clyde
Prestowitz suggests ways to narrow the trade deficit with China. David P.
Goldman calls for a major increase in spending on defense research and
development. Adam Adatto Sandel proposes that “workers from a range of
industries” be “represented in trade negotiations” and, “if only as a thought
experiment,” that representation be reorganized “around profession rather than
state or district.” Count me in — so long as we keep the results of that
thought experiment to ourselves.
Above all, nationalism means distinguishing between
members of a political community and outsiders, and privileging the former over
the latter. Such distinctions make many people profoundly uncomfortable. Look
at the headlines surrounding the Trump administration’s policies on refugees,
travel from failed or terrorist-sponsoring states, and illegal immigration.
Witness the recent debate in the pages of National
Review over Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry’s qualified defense of
nationalism. There are some conservatives who seem to believe that there is no
such thing as the American people, only an American idea. But this gets it
backward. Without the people, there would be no idea. Americans may come from
all over the world, we may profess every religion, but we are bound together
not just by our founding documents but by those mystic chords of memory of
which Lincoln spoke, by our love of the land, its natural beauty, its
inhabitants, its history, by what our people have achieved, what they have
lost, what they have endured.
What’s uncomfortable is often necessary. That is the case
today. Reducing illegal immigration, reforming legal immigration to prioritize
skilled workers and would-be citizens, asserting national prerogatives in trade
negotiations, spending on the military and defense research, “betting on ideas”
rather than on social insurance, bureaucracy, and rent-seeking, saving the idea
of national community through the promulgation of our shared language,
literature, art, film, television, music — this is the beginning of a
nationalist agenda. But only the beginning.
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