Seeing France for the First Time

By Dan McLaughlin

Saturday, August 30, 2025

 

Mont St. Michel at dusk.(Photo courtesy of the author)

 Two years ago, I shared my reactions as a provincial, ill-traveled New Yorker upon taking my family for the first time to Britain. We recently returned from eight days in Paris and two in Normandy. It was my first-ever trip to the European continent, which doubled as a 30th wedding anniversary trip and a family vacation with my son (age 28) and daughters (26 and 19). I share with you, dear readers, my impressions of France.

 

The Eternal France

 

American conservatives have long scorned the French. There are sound reasons for this. Conservatism itself, especially in the Anglo-American world, was born as a self-conscious tradition in reaction to the French Revolution. French political history is an endless procession of bad ideas overcorrecting for previous bad ideas. Communism was first tried in France, in the 1871 Paris Commune, which the French resolved by a general massacre of the Communards. French foreign policy for centuries has cozied up to the enemies of liberty in general and the friends of Marxism and Islamic radicalism in particular. Some of us are old enough to remember “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and “old Europe,” or, for that matter, the long French effort to stand aloof from the Cold War.

 

For all of that, French society is not all Rousseau and Sartre. Say what you will of the French, they retain a strong sense of themselves as a distinct nation with a distinct culture and deep roots in their own history and soil. Even amidst the twin crises of low domestic birthrates and mass immigration across the West, there is little doubt that half a century from now, there will still be a France and it will still be identifiably French — something one might struggle to say today even of England. It helps that, per the most recent French census data, even in cosmopolitan Paris, foreign-born Parisians are overwhelmingly likely to have come from Francophone countries once run by France (and the biggest exception is Parisians born in Portugal). If what endures of France is still a culture reflexively skeptical of Anglo-American mores and systems, it at least is a culture that knows who and what the French are.

 

Large areas of France remain stubbornly agricultural even today, with all that implies of the traditional rhythms of the land. If nothing else, Parisians remain connected to that tradition by the preponderance of locally grown food and wine in the Parisian diet. In the Franprix mini-marts where we shopped, one could find wonderful bottles of Côtes du Rhône for under $7 (in Euros); in the bakeries, a fresh baguette for less than $1.50. The countryside in Normandy looks very much as it did in 1944, and is identifiably similar to how it looked in 1848 when Tocqueville campaigned for office there, still thick with greenery and full of the famous hedgerows descended from the Viking system for subdividing plots of land.

 

The City of Lights

 

Paris does not feel like New York or London in its layout. Due in good part to D.C.-style height restrictions that preserve the sight lines to the Eiffel Tower, the skyscrapers are mostly jammed into the La Défense business district outside city limits, or in scattered spots well outside the city center. Only 2.1 million of France’s 68 million people live in Paris, which has few high-rise apartments or private houses. Another 10 million or so live in the surrounding metro area — a ratio of city to suburbs that is more reminiscent of Boston than of the world’s great megalopolises. Moreover, so much of the city’s population clears out in August that whole neighborhoods and business districts seem like ghost towns abandoned for tourists to treat like Paris theme parks.

 

In spite of its antiquity — the city was legendarily founded by the Romans in 52 b.c. — the Paris we know today is mostly a creation of the middle of the 19th century, when Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, tore down most of the old medieval center of the city (outside of the Latin Quarter near Notre Dame) to create the city’s famous broad boulevards and uniform apartment buildings. Of all the complicated legacies of the French Second Empire (1852–70), this is its greatest monument. The Opera House is still prominently flanked by the Napoleonic eagle. By contrast, the Latin Quarter is full of very un-French-themed eateries, from Irish pubs to a place promising authentic Kansas City BBQ.

 

Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements, administrative districts like precincts or wards, except that an American city’s administrative districts don’t each have their own coat of arms. Until city limits were expanded in 1860, there were twelve arrondissements; the outer eight had been suburbs. We rented an apartment in Belleville, a neighborhood in the 19th arrondissement whose large Chinese population and dense concentration of Chinese restaurants and Asian food marts made it feel more like Flushing than like Paris. It’s not like any other place in the city.

 

Arts et Métiers Metro Station, Paris (Photo courtesy of the author)

 The Paris Metro is a sprawling system and not open that late (its closing hours were hard to discern and seemed to change by line and by day). One subway line was where we got the authentic French experience of something being on strike (euphemized in a sign as “closed for a social movement.”) And yet, the metro was cleaner than New York’s subway, better maintained than D.C.’s, and more modern than London’s. Most of the cars were air-conditioned, whereas the London Underground cools passengers by opening the windows for the breeze. One of the delights of the Metro was the Arts et Mѐtiers station, which since the mid-1990s has been whimsically decorated like the inside of Jules Verne’s Nautilus.

 

We never did encounter the legendary rudeness and scorn of Parisians, even when some of us attempted to speak French. There is, I confess, something especially civilized about the word “merci” for the ubiquitous thank yous. The sidewalk cafes lived up to billing, and the irritating presence of cigarette smoke was nonetheless a stark contrast to New York — we weren’t enveloped by Manhattan’s ubiquitous clouds of pot smoke anywhere. Gas prices were appalling, albeit camouflaged at first glance by being quoted in Euros per liter. The Seine is just a giant party every night; we even repeatedly saw barges that were hosting wedding receptions.

 

American fast-food joints have penetrated Paris, but mostly not in large numbers. I spotted McDonald’s, Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut, Subway, Burger King, and Five Guys. Of these, only McDonald’s and Starbucks were present on anything resembling a regular basis, and scarcely that. American cultural products (such as ads for the new Naked Gun movie, a stage production of the Lion King musical, and Margot Robbie on a magazine cover) were more common. The main eatery in the park across the street from the Eiffel Tower is a taco stand.

 

I didn’t read newspapers or watch TV in France, but even so, I was pleasantly surprised at the total absence of Donald Trump’s visage or obsessive anti-Trump imagery. At least some of our obsessions are not entirely consuming everywhere.

 

The Tourist’s France

 

As tourists behind a language barrier (I speak no French beyond “bonjour” and “merci”), much of what we encountered was official France — the story the country tells to visitors in museums, cathedrals, and other tourist attractions, much of it reproduced in English for visitors. Here, at least, is a France that is not afraid of its profoundly Catholic heritage and does not apologize for its own history and people. Europeans tend to overemphasize how young the United States is — our Constitution is the oldest still in use, and we’re older as a nation than most of the countries on earth, including Germany and Italy — but it’s striking to be in a country that honors medieval Catholic saints among its military heroes. The Feast of the Assumption is still a public holiday in France.

 

We visited a staggering number of religious sites: Sunday Mass at Notre Dame, a vigil Mass for the Assumption at Sacré-Cœur, the church of Mary Magdalene (which contained a borderline-blasphemous mosaic of Napoleon sitting at Christ’s feet), the Basilica and home of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the cathedrals of Chartres and Bayeux, and Mont St. Michel, a site established in a.d. 708 While there were still signs of the anti-clerical damage done by the Revolution in its day, the churches all remain places of reverence, and from statues in public parks to museums such as the Louvre and the medieval Cluny museum, Christian art was offered without embarrassment.

 

Basilica of St. Therese at Lisieux (Photo courtesy of the author)

 I’d like to report that Mass at Notre Dame said by the archbishop was a transcendent experience, but we were in the back of a stiflingly hot church full of worn-out tourists and impatient children, enduring Mass in a foreign language. Even so, one could not quite escape the enormity of the place – not in size or age alone, but in a sense of how many souls down the centuries had sat through Mass in this same space. By contrast, the 10 p.m. vigil at Sacré-Cœur seemed unpromising: While the church (built to dedicate France to a national spiritual renewal after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71) commands a staggeringly scenic view from the highest point in Paris, it was surrounded by a partying crowd of people drinking beer and listening to street musicians on the steps. But inside the church was a different story: a 9 p.m. candlelight vigil and procession that streamed back in for Mass with a passionate and notably multi-racial congregation that filled the church to the rafters, fairly clearly most of it Parisians.

 

We saw many fine history and art museums, including the must-see Musée de l’Armée (the military history museum that includes the colossally extravagant tomb of Napoleon), the museum of the Bayeux Tapestry, the Museum of Paris, the Louvre, and the Musée de l’Orangerie (which is built around the monumental panels of Monet’s final room-sized Water Lilies). French history is at every turn presented matter-of-factly, warts and all, but with a clear and not always subtle celebration of the strongmen of French history — Louis XIV, Napoleon, and especially Charles de Gaulle. Military disasters and ill-advised guillotinings are offered as such alongside the great moments of French history. The war museum didn’t blanch at maybe the grimmest moment of French military history, when Churchill ordered the sinking of the French Mediterranean fleet in 1940 to prevent it from being used as a weapon for the Nazis.

 

Nothing can prepare a visitor for the labyrinth that is the Louvre. Its layout is bewildering, its scale massive, its maps inadequate, its rooms poorly marked, and even finding its exit is confusing. Yet it is a hoarder’s paradise of art from the ancient to the modern, with things crammed into every corner in such volume that one could easily overlook, say, the famous portrait of Louis XIV or the Code of Hammurabi.

 

Perhaps none of the tourist sites of Paris is less curated than Père Lachaise Cemetery, which holds luminaries ranging from Chopin to Jim Morrison to Oscar Wilde to Baron Haussman to the Armenian national hero Andranik, whose grave is topped by an equestrian monument. There’s a real dichotomy between the First World War era graves, which bespeak only sadness, and the Second World War and Holocaust memorials, which bristle with justified rage and name the Nazis and Hitler all over. The memorials to those deported to the extermination camps are profound.

 

Auschwitz memorial, Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris (Photo courtesy of the author)

 Normandy

 

August 2025 turned out to be a prime time to see the sights of Paris and, particularly, Normandy. Notre Dame is still under reconstruction, flanked by enormous cranes, but it has reopened. The Bayeux Tapestry, however, is going off display after September 1, and its museum will be renovated through 2027 while it is controversially on display in England. The 900-year-old tapestry is a masterpiece of visual storytelling, supplemented as it was in the museum by headsets with a narration of its scenes of the Norman conquest. For me, it may have been the highlight of the whole trip. Its scenes and colors remain surprisingly vivid after having been handled roughly and nearly destroyed on countless occasions over the past nine centuries.

 

Ranger monument, Pointe du Hoc, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author)

 Pointe du Hoc is in worse shape. The site of the impossible climb of the U.S. Army Rangers on the morning of D-Day is crumbling due to natural erosion compounded by 1944 bombardment damage and post-1944 trampling by tourists, to the point where the Ranger monument (where Ronald Reagan gave a famous 1984 speech before the Ranger veterans) is fenced off and likely to be removed to a new location soon. Already, the jutting cliff that guided the Rangers that morning is no longer connected to the mainland.

 

Cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author)

 What stood out to me about seeing Omaha Beach in person is how wide it is. I knew from histories quite how far the men who landed there had to come, but there’s no substitute for seeing it to grasp how broad the front was on which they landed. Films such as Saving Private Ryan (which was shot on a beach in Ireland) make the battlefield look much more compressed. Of course, the wide mass of men that were thrown onto those beaches — half of them National Guard units — were the only way they were able to overcome the bitter and unexpected German resistance.

 

Omaha Beach, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author)

 France may be more distant from us than England in its literary and political traditions, of necessity, but the depth of its history and the irresistible charms for the tourist of Paris more than compensate.

It’s a TARP!

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, August 29, 2025

 

I like alternative-timeline movies for their funny little details, like that scene in Watchmen when two former superheroes are reminiscing about how their lives were derailed by Richard Nixon, still president and essentially a dictator in this imaginary version of the 1980s. “To think, I voted for that prick five times,” says the grizzled old veteran. His younger interlocutor shrugs: “Hey, it was him or the commies, right?”

 

We live on the dumbest timeline. I know this because millions of Americans believed that they had to vote for Donald Trump to avert a national descent into socialism—“It was him or the commies, right?”—and so they sent the malignant little criminal back to the White House, where he went about . . . setting up state-owned enterprises in order to seize the means of production on behalf of the workers. It’s still more Idiocracy than Watchmen or 1984, but it’s all in the mix. If it were a series of shorts, it would be called Way More Than Three Stooges.

 

“Don’t get so excited,” the apologists say. “This is basically like the financial crisis, with the bailouts and General Motors.”

 

Oh, is that it? In the words of CFO Gial Ackbar: “IT’S A TARP!”

 

You’ll remember TARP–the Troubled Asset Relief Program—and the bailouts that were executed during the 2008-09 financial crisis. I don’t think anybody remembers that time fondly except for me and other journalists who had the daily pleasure of writing about it. Bad times, great story.

 

I suppose there are some similarities between the Trump administration’s partial nationalization of Intel and the Obama administration’s bailout of GM, in which the U.S. government owned an equity stake. You have two opportunistic presidents who like to talk about economic nationalism jumping into two businesses they don’t understand for purely political reasons and, in both cases, probably doing so illegally. The U.S. government ended up losing billions of dollars on its “investment” in GM, and there is every reason to believe that Uncle Stupid’s stake in Intel—whose Ohio-based chip-foundry is foundering because it has no customers—will end in tears one way or another.

 

Citing the bailout policies of the early 21^st century as your model going forward is a real . . . interesting choice. U.S. taxpayers lost billions on GM, and GM is still a piss-poor company that makes inferior products at every price point from $20,500 to $130,000-and-up while pissing away billions of dollars on mismanaged overseas partnerships. It didn’t even make sense from the political baloney “saving jobs” point of view, inasmuch as GM has shed some 80,000 employees since 2008. The heavy-handed government-backed GM restructuring saw the firm kill off Saturn as a sop to the union bosses, who did not like the semi-autonomous division’s independence from rigid work rules. The parallel bailout of Chrysler (not Chrysler’s first) saw the administration essentially rob the bondholders—the secured creditors who had first claim on the firm’s assets—to pay off its union-goon allies.

 

The bank bailouts were no better. The geniuses in Washington who fretted that firms such as JP Morgan were “too big to fail” watched, apparently helpless, as those firms grew larger and larger during subsequent years of consolidation—JPM today has a market value four times what it was back when we were all hearing the words “systemic risk” five times a day.

 

The economics of failing banks can be pretty funny, in a so-obvious-you’d-think-somebody-would-notice kind of way: When a badly run bank gets bailed out by the badly run government, the market concludes—correctly—that the badly run bank has the badly run government’s backing, and access to the badly run government’s magical money machine. That means that the badly run bank can access capital at a lower cost than its better-run competitors, and it uses that cheap money to buy up those better-run competitors and various little fish, creating a much bigger badly run bank. Financial systems dominated by a relatively small number of large banks rather than by lots of smaller players in a large competitive marketplace tend to be more brittle, experiencing worse outcomes during economic crises.

 

The bank and nonbank bailouts of the TARP era were different from what Trump is doing in many important ways: The GM shenanigans probably were illegal, but the overall bailout program was, for good or for ill, duly authorized by Congress (it was the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008) and other relevant authorities, and the program was kept on a reasonably short leash—and by the very modest criterion of having prevented a total worldwide credit collapse, you might even call it a short-term success. We are not in a comparable crisis now. And Trump, being Trump, is pretty vague about the legal authorization for his moves at Intel and elsewhere. The CHIPS Act gives the government the power to make grants to chipmakers (i.e., to engage in massive corporate welfare) but no explicit power to use those grants to buy stock in firms. As with the “golden share” that gives the U.S. government the power to veto decisions at U.S. Steel (now a subsidiary of Nippon Steel), setting the government up as a boardroom dictator is the whole point of the exercise. It is an open-ended project.

 

You can call that corporatism if the right-wing flavor of the word makes you feel better, but it is simply a half measure of socialism, a government takeover of certain economic assets for the purpose of replacing market forces with political mandates.

 

Hey, it was him or the commies, right?

The Trump Administration’s Very Online Celebrities Are Its Biggest Headaches

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 28, 2025

 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

 

America’s governing institutions are so sclerotic, corrupt, and co-opted by the undemocratic permanent bureaucracy that only a really destabilizing shake-up can right their course. We need fresh eyes — heterodox figures unbeholden to the staid Washington conventions that made it the swamp it is today. Indeed, those who object to flipping the tables in D.C. are part of the problem; either they don’t understand the scale of the challenge or they’re acting in concert with the deep state. Thus, there can be no good-faith objections to a revolutionary reversal of fortunes in the bureaucracy.

 

If you did not encounter this argument or some variation of it when the Senate was rubber-stamping Trump’s nominees, keep doing whatever it is that you’re doing. It sounds like a blissful existence. The rest of us, however, were shouted down more than once as we observed that, while iconoclasts have much to offer, they often cause more problems than they solve — particularly when they are placed at the top of sprawling institutions that they neither understand nor appreciate. Those of us who voiced that contemptibly conventional wisdom, we were told, just didn’t know what time it was.

 

We’re now confronted with an entirely predictable situation: The Trump administration’s appointees who represent the biggest departures from convention are also its squeakiest wheels. They demand attention, and they receive plenty of it, but not the sort that reflects well on them or their boss.

 

Late Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal provided an update on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s follies. Recently, the DNI ordered 37 current and former members of the intelligence community stripped of their security clearances, one of whom was an “undercover CIA officer” whose identity was exposed as a result.

 

“Gabbard didn’t know the CIA officer had been working undercover, according to a person familiar with the fallout from the list’s release,” the report read. “Three other people with knowledge of the situation said that Gabbard’s office didn’t meaningfully consult with the CIA before releasing the list.” Moreover:

 

The national intelligence office didn’t seek the CIA’s input about the composition of the list, and the CIA had no foreknowledge of Gabbard’s posting on X the following day that revealed the names, including that of the covered CIA officer, according to two of the people familiar with the events.

 

In sum, the person whose only job is to coordinate with and synthesize the information produced by America’s intelligence agencies didn’t bother to do her only job before outing and defenestrating a 20-year veteran of America’s clandestine services. That’s a potentially prosecutable dereliction — or it would be, if appointed or elected officials were charged with offenses for which public servants of lower rank would doubtlessly find themselves in the dock. Not exactly the high-test populism we were promised from this administration.

 

Of course, this violation of protocol will not register as an offense to those who are consumed with contempt for the intelligence and security establishment. Disruption for disruption’s sake is, however, only a majority proposition on social media. The voters who are warm to bold experimentation in these institutions want them to function better, not worse. For that reason, the broader voting public is unlikely to be as dismissive of such scandals as the MAGA cheering section may be.

 

This is only the latest rake the ODNI has stepped on during Gabbard’s tenure. She recently returned to her portfolio after freelancing an unsettlingly bizarre warning about imminent nuclear conflict, a message that irritated the president. “Sidelined” in advance of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, Gabbard was tasked with keeping the online influencer set happy — by uncovering a “treasonous conspiracy” orchestrated by the Obama administration to “promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump.” Her contention rests on “a nonexistent contradiction in the 2017 intelligence assessment,” Robert Farley’s fact-check observed, and it contradicts the work of a 2020 bipartisan Senate committee, which found “no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.” But it gave Gabbard a way back into the president’s good graces.

 

The totality of Gabbard’s work suggests that her role is not to coordinate intelligence but to frustrate the intelligence community — and to undermine rather than contribute to the restoration of its credibility. Indeed, she seems to see her own credibility as inversely proportional to that of the agencies she oversees. That would make sense given the degree to which she has staked her reputation on the contention that the American security establishment actively and deliberately thwarts her conception of what U.S. grand strategy should be.

 

Gabbard is not the only reckless freelancer in the administration who’s busily creating bad headlines for the president. So far, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role as secretary of health and human services has been a madcap romp from one humiliating episode to the next.

 

“I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” the HHS secretary said during a “Make America Healthy Again” event alongside Texas Governor Greg Abbott. “I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”

 

That’s some searing medical insight. And that’s not all. Kennedy claimed at that event that a staggering 38 percent of U.S. teenagers are “diabetic or pre-diabetic” (it’s closer to 0.35 percent for people under 20, according to the CDC) and that, when he was young, autism was not a phenomenon at all (rather than a less regularly diagnosed phenomenon). The longtime vaccine skeptic then spent this Thursday morning venting his frustrations with the CDC over its promotion of vaccinations as one of the “greatest advances in medical science.”

 

If it seems to you that the CDC is in the way of Kennedy’s crankish advocacy, it apparently seems that way to Kennedy, too. He recently ignited a bureaucratic scandal attributable almost entirely to the qualities that endeared him to the MAGA movement in the first place: his contempt for protocol.

 

CDC Director Susan Monarez was abruptly dismissed by Kennedy on Wednesday, only one month after her Senate confirmation. Or, she would have been, if Kennedy had the constitutional authority to fire her. He doesn’t. Monarez is suing the administration over the abridgment of the president’s sole (and debatable) authority to terminate Senate-confirmed appointees. Monarez is refusing to resign, but three of her CDC colleagues tendered their resignations in protest.

 

Kennedy’s backers in the very online ecosystem are already mounting a counterattack. At least one departee has a history of flamboyance — a pattern of odd behavior that is illustrative of the public health establishment’s estrangement from the American majority during the pandemic. What we’re left with are dueling eccentricities, right? Who could possibly adjudicate that?

 

The answer: practically anyone who has not subordinated his or her capacity for logic to the demands of partisanship. Once again, we’re left to conclude that RFK Jr.’s fan base does not care if the institutions he’s tasked with overseeing function as advertised. That is probably not a majoritarian view.

 

There are few Republicans who would say that the CDC handled itself with aplomb during the pandemic. And yet, the agency is not held in especially low regard by the GOP, to say nothing of everyone else. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center’s August data, the CDC is one of the most favored federal agencies. Owing entirely to RFK Jr.’s ill-planned flight of fancy, the Trump administration must now devote bandwidth to this organizational fight with the CDC, and it’s not starting from a position of inherent advantage.

 

In fact, RFK’s antics are already creating cracks in the GOP’s united front. “Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda,” Senator Bill Cassidy (R., La.) said of a forthcoming summit of CDC vaccine advisers. Cassidy wants it postponed. “If the meeting proceeds,” he added, “any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership.”

 

Indeed, both Gabbard and Kennedy have taken initiative more than once, and more than once they’ve derailed more-considered administration priorities. That’s what we should have expected from figures whose unconventionality was their foremost qualification for the roles they occupy — that, and their unfailing loyalty to the president, because nothing screams fealty like the convert’s zeal evinced by these former Democrats.

 

Their defenders are liable to retreat into the abstractions they retailed during these officials’ confirmation hearings. They will claim that these actions are a belated and justified response to long-forgotten grievances. That will work on those on whom it has always worked: those who cloister themselves in heady, ideologically homogeneous salons and online forums. The rest will be forced to witness an administration that is increasingly set against itself, and they will conclude that they are witnessing chaos. And despite what infotainment addicts tell themselves, the voting public has never responded well to chaos.

The Enduring Relevance of Reaganism

By Dan McLaughlin

Thursday, August 28, 2025

 

Mark offered a response to the question posed by Michael: Why do we still care so much about Ronald Reagan and his ideas? Mark’s answer is that “Reagan is remembered so fondly by Republicans because he was the last unambiguously successful two-term Republican president.” I’d add a few more pieces to the puzzle.

 

First, we’re conservatives. Good ideas don’t become irrelevant just because they’re old. We still care about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, long after their voters died off, because they were right about many things and accomplished a lot for the country. “Reagan is for the Olds” should not be an insult.

 

Second, the scale of Reagan’s political success was immense. Michael notes that nobody in the Seventies was producing Herbert Hoover nostalgia, but the Democrats of that era were still awash in FDR nostalgia, because FDR shattered the ceiling for what was possible for a Democratic leader. Even today’s Democrats pay him periodic lip service, 80 years after his death. As I explained of Reagan’s success in 2015:

 

Reagan unquestionably (though not alone) shifted the nation further to the right than he found it, in some ways temporarily and in other more lasting ways. Victory in the Cold War was the obvious headline – as late as 1979, there were voices throughout the West arguing that we could never defeat the Soviets and that Communism represented a viable alternative model to the American system, whereas today even an open socialist like Bernie Sanders cites the increasingly more free-market Scandinavian model. Reagan revolutionized the politics of taxes – in 1980, the top federal income tax rate was 70%, and married couples making $30,000 a year paid a top rate of 37%; at $35,000 they hit the 43% bracket. Taxpayers over $200,000 in income paid, on average, a total effective tax rate over 40%. These would be unthinkable tax rates today, when we argue over top marginal rates in the 35-39.6% band. Other long-term policy wins that shifted the conversation included ending the Fairness Doctrine, nominating the first explicit originalist to the Supreme Court (Antonin Scalia), breaking the air-traffic controllers union, finishing the (started under Carter) project of airline and trucking deregulation, and starting the free-trade processes that would yield dividends into the 1990s (he promised a NAFTA-like agreement in his 1979 speech announcing his candidacy). And Reagan’s victories laid the groundwork for the welfare reforms of Newt Gingrich (presaged in some of Reagan’s own policies as California Governor) and the law-enforcement revolution spearheaded by his U.S. Attorney in New York, Rudy Giuliani.

 

Or look at the electorate. We talk today about a general electorate dominated by Democrats, because the exit polls showed a D+7 electorate in 2008, D+6 in 2012 (that is, for example, 38% Democrats and 32% Republicans in 2012), and how this gave Barack Obama an unbeatable edge. But the electorate in 1976 and 1980 was D+15, with only 22% of voters in 1976 identifying themselves as Republicans. Yes, many more of the Democrats in those days were fairly conservative-leaning, not just in the South but in the Midwest, but these were still not people you could walk up to and say “I’m a conservative Republican” and have their vote (a March 1979 poll had Reagan trailing Carter 52-38). Even the South had gone heavily Democrat in 1976, with Carter carrying all but one state (Virginia) below the Mason-Dixon Line. Reagan in 1980 carried 27% of Democrats to Carter’s 67, and 56% of independents to Carter’s 31. And Reagan’s success changed the electorate’s view of his party – the electorate was D+3 by 1984, D+2 by 1988.

 

Inheriting a country in which Republicans were distinctly the minority party and conservatives were distinctly their minority faction, Reagan won 44 and 49 states. His coattails helped Republicans in 1980 to gain twelve Senate seats, breaking a majority the Democrats had held continuously for 24 years, often with majorities of 60 or more Senators (they had 61 seats in 1977). Since 1824, only four presidents — Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, FDR, and Reagan — have served two full terms and then handed off the White House to a successor of their own party. It would be strange if Republicans didn’t consider Reagan a permanently monumental figure in the party’s history.

 

Michael is correct that the right’s political and media institutions (including National Review) came of age alongside Reagan’s movement and were intertwined with it, but that, too, is a symptom of the massive success of the Reagan era.

 

Third, it’s a bit of a leap to pin solely onto Reagan how the right went from “protectionism and foreign policy restraint in the 1920s to free trade and internationalism in the 1980s and 1990s.” If Reagan’s foreign policy was more hawkish and internationalist than his predecessors, it was not dramatically out of line with the basic orientation of Republican foreign policy under Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, and which continued for decades after Reagan. If Reagan looms largest in that conversation, it’s both because he was the best at explaining its ideas and due to the conspicuous success of his policies in defeating the multi-generational menace of Soviet Communism. It is, moreover, a bit artificial (as I’ve observed before) to begin the tale with the post-World War I turn in foreign policy, when more assertive foreign-policy figures such as William Seward and Teddy Roosevelt have been in the GOP since the beginning. On trade, it’s true that Reagan pushed the party much further toward free trade, but that, too, was a turn that begins with the Eisenhower years, not with Reagan. Compared with Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, what was newer under Reagan — or at least, newly recovered from the past — was the revival of Coolidge-era small-government and low-taxes Republicanism and Grant-era Christian social conservatism.

 

I suppose I should expect by now that any generational analysis will simply ignore the existence of my generation (Gen X, born between 1965-79), who came of age in the Reagan era. It’s not hard to see why the most directly Reagan-influenced generation of Republican politicians is Gen X, including Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, Glenn Youngkin, Ron DeSantis, Chip Roy, Steve Scalise, Paul Ryan, Tim Scott, Mike Lee, Joni Ernst, and Bobby Jindal. When Donald Trump (a textbook Baby Boomer, born 1946) hit the scene, it was easier for Boomer political figures who had lived through the Nixon years (such as Newt Gingrich) to accommodate themselves to his style of politics (marinated as it was in the culture-war assumptions of the late 1960s) than for those of us who had Reagan as a formative model. In that sense, Gen X now has both the Millennial generation that doesn’t remember Reagan and the Gen Z generation that knows only Trump, and that makes it harder to ensure that our patrimony of ideas doesn’t die off with us, but is shown to remain relevant to new settings and situations. But then, that’s always been the challenge for conservatives.

And That’s Why You Don’t Do Summitry with the Russians

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 29, 2025

 

The history of presidential summitry with the Russians and their Soviet predecessors is fraught, but only because Moscow likes it that way. Summits have provided the Kremlin with a platform from which it has confused and embarrassed American presidents for decades. The pattern is so consistent that it could only be deliberate and strategic. And it looks like they’ve done it again.

 

After the close of the Anchorage Summit, the Wall Street Journal’s reporting indicated that Trump thought he might have a breakthrough on his hands. “Putin accepted, Trump said, that any peace would need to include the presence of Western troops in Ukraine as a way of ensuring its durability, according to four of the officials,” the dispatch revealed. Yet, Trump noted that “Putin wouldn’t stop fighting during any peace talks,” and he “insisted Ukraine cede territory” to secure peace in our time.

 

Trump’s Chamberlin-esque formulation for a durable cease-fire was inauspicious, but the prospect of a European peacekeeping force on Ukrainian soil supported by the U.S. and even tacitly legitimized by the Kremlin’s acquiescence had promise. Extending NATO-style security guarantees to Ukraine while under-committing to that project would provide Russia with many opportunities to secure its ultimate objective: testing the Atlantic Alliance’s integrity with the goal of exposing its mutual-defense provisions as hollow and, thus, all but formally defunct. But if something approaching “Article V-like” security guarantees manifested in a visible and tangible defense architecture, including not just the provision of men and matériel to Ukraine but integrated command-and-control, it could deter future Russian aggression.

 

So, the West has pressed ahead. On Tuesday, the Financial Times outlined the details of what NATO-style security guarantees might look like, and they sound fairly robust. Senior U.S. officials “voiced in a flurry of meetings” their willingness “to contribute ‘strategic enablers’ including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), command and control, and air defense assets to enable any European-led deployment on the ground.” America’s “vastly superior” ISR capabilities would monitor activity along a frozen line of contact and coordinate Western forces in the region.

 

The proposition is, however, “contingent on commitments by European capitals to deploy tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine, the officials cautioned.” The FT was careful to note that the proposal “could still be rescinded,” but it “represents a significant shift” from the administration’s erstwhile hostility toward any direct U.S. involvement in a postwar settlement on Ukrainian soil.

 

Unsurprisingly, Russia is not as game for this proposal as either Putin let on or Trump and Steve Witkoff misheard. Either way, Moscow is playing bad cop.

 

“This line violates the principle of indivisible security and assigns Kyiv the role of a strategic provocateur on Russia’s borders,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. “Security guarantees must be based on reaching a common understanding that takes into account Russia’s security interests.” In the days since Anchorage, Russia has flat-out rejected the prospect of any Western security guarantees, insisted that the communist Chinese should take a leading role in postwar Ukraine, and floated a “non-aligned,” “non-nuclear” U.N.-style peacekeeping force.

 

This is not a Kremlin that doesn’t know its own mind. It is a Kremlin that is stalling for time as it continues to prosecute a war it has never tired of — a Moscow that has used the unrequited diplomatic gift Trump presented to Putin to convince Western dupes that the path to peace is open if Western leaders give up on their quaint attachment to a defensible and sovereign Ukraine.

 

In the days since, Russia has ramped up its attack not just on Ukraine’s civilian population centers but Kyiv’s Western allies. Russia targeted a U.S.-owned electronics manufacturer near Poland, a reprisal of its April attack on a Boeing plant outside Kyiv. It executed attacks on a Turkish drone factory. It has hit a European Union diplomatic mission and buildings used by the British Council, the U.K.’s cultural exchange outfit, killing 23, including four children. All this signaling is about as subtle as, well, an airstrike.

 

The Kremlin is conveying through the application of force that it will not guarantee the security of Western forces in Ukraine, compelling the NATO alliance to contemplate the full horror of what invoking “Article V-like” provisions would really look like.

 

The president has invested a significant amount of political capital in a peace process that was predicated on the aspirational hope that Putin could be persuaded to abandon his perceived strategic interests in Russia’s so-called “near abroad.” The self-described “realists” in the president’s orbit viewed the conflict through the lens of domestic politics, convincing themselves that the war was a byproduct of the policies backed by the people they hate, therefore wholly misreading the nature of the conflict.

 

In fact, the summit was the ultimate expression of a constructivist foreign policy — one predicated not on hard power but social interactions, mutual ideational affinities, and the notion that we can remake the world if we just choose the right words to describe it. It has been an embarrassing failure, but the president and his advisers are only partly to blame. From the Russian perspective, embarrassment was the whole point of this exercise.

Breaking the Barrel

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

 

The Cracker Barrel farce that Jonah Goldberg wrote about last week is the first case of “cancel culture” I’m aware of in which the accusers couldn’t articulate why the accused was being canceled.

 

Which was to their advantage, I think. An offender charged with a particular thoughtcrime can answer the charge but an offender charged with nothing in particular has little choice but to surrender. Which is what the company did on Tuesday.

 

Broadly speaking, Cracker Barrel’s critics objected to its effort to “modernize.” That effort began when it changed its distinctive decor, shifting away from tchotchke-bedazzled kitsch designed to evoke a southern grandma’s dining room. But the gauntlet was thrown when the company purged the kindly farmer in overalls—and the eponymous barrel—from its famous logo and switched to a text-only brand instead.

 

“We said we would listen, and we have,” management said in a statement on Tuesday in response to the outcry. “Our new logo is going away and our ‘Old Timer’ will remain.”

 

Jonah already put his finger on the absurdity of feeling earnest nostalgia for a chain restaurant that trades on fake nostalgia. Cracker Barrel isn’t a relic of 1920s America; it was founded in 1969 at the height of hippie culture. And if it’s authenticity—or a campy simulacrum of it—that you crave, you should favor the new logo: The company’s original branding was text-only, years before the old white coot in overalls was phased in.

 

Hardly anyone alive right now is old enough to remember the general-store culture that the restaurant is mimicking, in fact. “The only nostalgia Cracker Barrel evokes for most people today is their memories of eating at Cracker Barrel,” our friend Andrew Egger said at The Bulwark, aptly describing the company as “a Xerox of a Xerox.” So why were the usual populist suspects so irate about it?

 

They couldn’t explain. The Twitter account for Hillsdale College, ostensibly an institution of learning, compared the logo change to leftists tossing paint on a statue of George Washington with the pithy comment, “Same energy.” Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida denounced the “woke rebrand” amid reminiscing about becoming born-again in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee linked the logo change to Joe Biden, which places this episode alongside the riots and lockdowns of 2020 in the category of things that Republicans insist on misremembering as having happened under a Democratic presidency.

 

Soon some of the leading geeks in this movement of freaks stepped in to try to backfill an ideological rationale for guillotining Cracker Barrel. The Federalist founder Sean Davis sputtered about diversity initiatives the company has undertaken as proof of its devotion to “gay race communism.” Christopher Rufo, probably the New Right’s most influential culture warrior, admitted that he’s never set foot in the restaurant but declared war on it nonetheless in the name of making an example of any business “considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”

 

“The Barrel must be broken,” he announced with no apparent irony. If a progressive culture warrior had said something as clownishly imperious, self-important, and Stalinist as that 10 years ago, right-wingers would still be making scornful jokes about it today.

 

Needless to say, Cracker Barrel’s online agonistes did not throw a collective tantrum over its logo change because they were mad about obscure DEI policies. If there was any concrete “move that might appear to be ‘wokification’” that bothered them, it was the “old white coot” erasure from the now-defunct text-only logo.

 

But even that didn’t bother them much on the merits, I think. What bothered them was the fact that a company that’s associated with right-wing culture was attempting to weaken that association. In Donald Trump’s America, the cultural ratchet is supposed to turn in one direction only.

 

Redefining ‘woke.’

 

“Not everything is woke,” National Review staff writer Caroline Downey said last week on CNN of the Cracker Barrel criticism. “I think we’re abusing the term a little bit too much, where it’s losing its meaning. And that’s really important because some things actually are woke and we should call it like it is.”

 

I wouldn’t say the term is being abused. I’d say it’s being redefined.

 

“Woke” used to describe progressive initiatives to challenge and reduce the social power of traditionally dominant groups—men, whites, straights. Under that definition, you need to squint to find wokeness in the Cracker Barrel rebrand. Yes, granted, they expunged the white (and presumably straight) man from their logo, but they didn’t replace him with a pierced, purple-haired lesbian BIPOC, did they?

 

They dumped him for elementary financial reasons: Their customer base is dying out and having a senior citizen as their brand isn’t the most obvious way to attract a younger clientele.

 

The meaning of “woke” changed on November 5 of last year, though. “Woke” now refers to any cultural change that isn’t directionally aligned with the right-wing cultural revolution that supposedly conquered America when Donald Trump was reelected president.

 

That’s what Rufo was getting at in his clumsy way when he condemned “any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’” Dumping the “old timer” in the logo wasn’t woke in the traditional sense, but insofar as Cracker Barrel hoped to rebrand as something less distinctively old, rural, and southern—i.e., right-wing—it affronted the right’s new cultural order. The company was subjected to a struggle session not because its descent into wokery was egregious but because it wasn’t, to show the rest of American society that even minor infractions won’t be tolerated.

 

It was cancel culture in full flower, which is itself extremely woke, ironically—or maybe not so ironically. The postliberal right has always seemed more jealous than resentful of the postliberal left’s cultural bullying. They’ve never wanted an America where people don’t get canceled; they want an America where they get to do the canceling.

 

And now they have it, thanks to Trump.

 

The president himself finally weighed in on Cracker Barrel on Tuesday, coincidentally just a few hours before the company announced it would keep the “Old Timer” logo. That gave him an opportunity to take credit for the decision and of course he seized it. It was revealed later that one of his advisers had spoken with management earlier, although it’s not clear which side initiated the call. Did Team Trump dial up Cracker Barrel executives and threaten one of its usual extortions if they didn’t relent? Or did Cracker Barrel dial up Team Trump and try to preempt the extortion by capitulating preemptively?

 

It would be pathetic beyond words for any other president to carve time out of his day to liaise with a corporation about its mascot but this sort of thing matters to our glorious leader. It’s not just that he imagines himself as a “cultural pontiff,” one of his many duties as “the dominant authority in all spheres of American life.” It’s that muscling public and private institutions into adopting the postliberal right’s priorities is a core part of his political remit.

 

Republicans wanted a strongman who would force American society to look the way the right wanted it to look. What was Trump supposed to do when Cracker Barrel made a tentative move in the opposite direction? Pretend not to notice?

 

Flag-burning.

 

It’s interesting to me that, while this was playing out, the president coughed up a new executive order that purports to ban flag-burning. Sort of.

 

Flag-burning is not a serious problem in the United States, any more than removing a farmer from a corporate logo is. It does happen but not often, for obvious reasons: So many Americans find it offensive that the practice is self-defeating. It’s impossible to imagine a cause growing more popular, not less, when it’s associated with torching the Stars and Stripes.

 

It’s so counterproductive that Trump’s order might plausibly be viewed as bait. Prohibiting the act could tempt the dumber elements of the Resistance to defy him by burning the flag more often in protest, which would make for some dandy Republican campaign ads next fall.

 

But Trump didn’t actually ban the practice. He just wants you to think he did.

 

Flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment, at least for now, and the fine print in the president’s order acknowledges that. Essentially, he instructed the Justice Department to pursue charges only in cases where the First Amendment might not apply—i.e., when someone burns the Stars and Stripes in a way that violates a local fire safety law or damages another person’s property.

 

It’s an unusual order, Charles Cooke notes in National Review, in that it’s designed to seem more oppressive than it is. It’s unconstitutional in spirit, seeking to punish an act because of the disfavored political opinion that motivated it, but “prosecute this whenever it’s legal to prosecute it” is a lawful directive by definition.

 

The question is: Why now? If ever there was a moment when Americans shouldn’t need extra reason not to burn the flag, you would think it’s when the president is militarizing U.S. cities and publicly threatening his enemies multiple times a day. “Be careful, we’re watching you!” he warned George and Alex Soros just this morning, calling for them to be charged criminally for funding violent left-wing protests.

 

Citizens in a country that’s collapsing into fascism don’t need to be formally informed that desecrating the national standard won’t be tolerated. It kind of goes with the territory.

 

But Trump did tell us, and I think he did so for the same reason that his fans were so irked by Cracker Barrel’s logo revamp. Pride in the American flag is associated with right-wing culture, and disrespect for right-wing culture simply won’t stand under the president’s new “anti-woke” cultural order.

 

That’s the only way to explain Hillsdale’s social media team finding the “same energy” in a restaurant chain’s marketing makeover as protesters defacing a statue of Washington. It’s a preposterous comparison in a vacuum: The “Old Timer” who graces the entrance of the place old people go to feed at the trough of mediocre southern slop isn’t even an A-list corporate mascot, let alone a figure of national reverence.

 

But through the narrow lens of culture war, there’s a throughline. In both cases, a cultural symbol that the right claims exclusively as its own has been assailed. Southern farmers, the Founding Fathers, the American flag—the right lays claim to all three, to some degree because the left often seems to have little use for any of them, and in Trump’s America you don’t get to take away or impugn what belongs to the right without paying a price.

 

That’s what cultural hegemony, the dream of Trumpism, means.

 

Hippies or authoritarians?

 

So it’s no surprise that the right-wing intelligentsia might see more virtue in banning flag-burning today than it did just a few years ago. “I think burning the flag is stupid and gross but obviously it is free speech,” Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh declared in 2019. “‘Free speech doesn’t include desecrating a piece of cloth’ is a really weird position that cannot be intellectually justified.”

 

In 2025, his position has changed. Boy, has it. “The people who burn the flag are, without exception, degenerate communist filth who want you and your family dead and your nation destroyed,” he wrote on Tuesday. “You don’t have to debase yourself by defending these scumbags just because five random Supreme Court justices in the 80s decided out of nowhere that burning the flag is a God-given right.”

 

Typically political movements grow more radical as they lose power. Walsh belongs to one that’s as powerful as it’s ever been, not just politically but culturally, yet here he is suddenly frothing at the mouth over a scourge of cloth-desecration that doesn’t actually exist. Did he change his tune simply because Dear Leader—or, more to the point, paying Daily Wire subscribers—demanded it?

 

Maybe. But one can also read his change of heart as reflecting the seemingly earnest, if abhorrent, ideological devolution across the broader right.

 

Liberalism in the GOP was down to its embers by 2019, as we would all discover following the 2020 election, but I think the right still remained generally committed at the time to Reaganite suppositions about maximizing individual liberty by shrinking big government. (They sure did with respect to pandemic restrictions.) Most of that is gone now. The postliberal right prioritizes cultural hegemony and sees big government as its tool to achieve it, whatever that might mean for liberty. And so its converts are destined to change their position on flag-burning to favor state power over individual rights.

 

The endless national debate over that issue ultimately comes down to this: Do you loathe the idea of the government getting froggy about punishing dissent more than you loathe the idea of hippies torching Old Glory? That question is easy for liberals. But it’s easy for postliberals too.

 

“I am neither conservative by temperament nor by political ambition: I want to destroy the status quo rather than preserve it,” Christopher Rufo said last year, reminding us why Jacobins tend to make better leftists than rightists. The right, after all, seeks to preserve the status quo—it’s just that the status quo that the modern right wants to preserve is one it remembers, or thinks it remembers. That’s how we ended up with pants-wetting threats to “break the Barrel” for the sake of protecting a decades-old logo at a failing restaurant chain. We must destroy the status quo in order to save it.

In Defense of Prayer

National Review Online

Friday, August 29, 2025

 

A disturbed and evil man killed two children in cold blood, ages eight and ten, and injured 18 more people on Wednesday morning. As of this writing, at least a dozen remain hospitalized. This man’s targets were the students and parishioners of Annunciation Catholic school and church in Minneapolis — and while the students attended the first all-school Mass of the fall term. Police have identified the murderer, a 23-year-old man who petitioned the State of Minnesota to legally change his name in 2020 to match his self-proclaimed female identity. He turned his own weapons on himself in a final killing.

 

As news of the killer spread, many Democrats and trans activists reacted with fury at anybody who pointed out that he was transgender, belittling the faith of the Catholic students in the process. “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey declared. Frey then dismissed anyone offering “thoughts and prayers right now.” When they were attacked, Frey thundered, “these kids were literally praying.” Yes, they were, which added to the horror of the crimes. In fact, the murderer’s video and written manifestos make clear that he targeted the Christian students specifically: “Where Is Your God?” he wrote sardonically in silver paint on one of his magazines.

 

Frey’s comments echo a common refrain of Democrats after every mass shooting. Frustrated by the roadblock that the U.S. Constitution and the American people pose to their anti-gun agenda, they have chosen to mock those who turn to prayer when confronted with unspeakable evil.

 

Jen Psaki, MSNBC host and former press secretary, blared on X, “Prayer is not freaking enough.  Prayers does [sic] not end school shootings. [P]rayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.” California Governor Gavin Newsom posted, “These children were literally praying when they got shot at.”

 

Democrats’ dismissive attitude toward prayer is rooted in arrogance. It contains the condescending assumption that people of faith are like little children who think that prayer works like magic pixie dust to grant all of their heart’s desires. In times of tragedy, according to this crowd, people should find solace not in God, but in government.

 

In reality, praying does not preclude any sort of legislation, but even the best legislation — and the mockers of prayer are not spelling out what they want so its workability could be discussed — takes a significant amount of time to craft and pass. In the immediate aftermath of a horrific event, prayer can address pain in a way that legislation cannot. When people pray, they can find strength in the face of helplessness, wisdom at a time when nothing makes any sense, and comfort when the soul is being drawn into the abyss of grief.

 

Only a full investigation will provide a complete accounting of the shooting that will help inform any debate over what sort of policy response, if any, could have prevented this tragic event. But in the meantime, it is appropriate to pray for the victims and their families. Prayer is efficacious and ennobling. It was not in vain that the Psalmist declared that the Lord “healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”