How to Make Conservatism Great Again
Gladden Pappin'south terminal task, earlier he headed off to an election dark party on November iii, was to teach an undergraduate class on Marsilius of Padua, a fourteenth-century Italian critic of the papacy. Pappin ended by hinting at the subject of his next lecture: the Great Schism, the four decades of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries when rival popes battled for command of the Church. It was an era of crumbling institutions, political realignment, and deep anxiety. A resonant topic, in other words, for our times, and good grist for Pappin, a 38-year-erstwhile assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas and a rising star in the American conservative intellectual empyrean.
"On Th, I came into class after the election," says Pappin, "and I said to the students, 'So you're living with a few days of uncertainty. Imagine living with forty years of not knowing who the pope is, at a fourth dimension in the Middle Ages when that'south incredibly important.' "
In the aftermath of the ballot, Pappin has been puzzling through what path conservatism might have after Donald Trump's presidency. The endeavour is part of Pappin'south major project of the past four years, ever since he first came onto the scene as one of the pseudonymous writers of the Journal of American Greatness, a pro-Trump blog that launched in early 2016. He'south been using the tools of political theory and history to parse the meaning of Trump and the deep political and cultural forces that brought him to power and continue to support him. Pappin has been plotting out, and fifty-fifty trying to help write, the next chapter of the conservative movement.
What he sees—in Trump's 2022 victory, in the results of the 2022 ballot, and in more subterranean shifts in conservative politics—is the possibility of a new kind of Republican party. Information technology is i that is economically populist, culturally bourgeois, multiracial, cautious nigh the use of military power, and, above all, comfortable with the do of state power. It's a large-government conservatism in both the economic and cultural spheres, more generous with social benefits, more prudish about sex, and more Christian in altercation if non in explicit doctrine. "The base is already at that place," says Pappin, who is working on a volume on the future of the American correct. "It'south broader even than what the Republicans can entreatment to right now."
Trump'due south loss was a disappointment for Pappin, but he sees it as "a best-case loss scenario." The president did non secure a 2d term, only at that place were meaningful signals of discontent with both the Republican and Democratic establishments. Voters in Florida supported Republican candidates—and also a ballot initiative that raised the minimum wage to $15 an 60 minutes. Voters in deep-blue California elected to uphold the land'south ban on affirmative action, barring officials from considering race, ethnicity, and gender in college admissions, hiring, and the awarding of contracts. Nationally, Trump did better with people of colour, particularly Blackness and Latino voters, than he did in 2016.
Trump lost, in other words, but it's not clear that Trumpism lost. "I recall that a lot of working-class voters were attracted to Trump'south championing of them," says Pappin. "The question is whether Republicans tin can find someone who seems similar a champion who is more effective and less cocky-destructive than Trump."
Gladden John Pappin was, in many ways, born to get a conservative intellectual. His begetter is a denizen of the Osage Nation, a convert to Catholicism, and a professor of philosophy whose scholarly specialty was the eighteenth-century bourgeois thinker Edmund Burke. His mother was raised equally a Southern Baptist and earned a doctorate in music from Louisiana State University. Born in St. Louis, Gladden and his younger sis followed their parents to various higher campuses beyond the Due south and Southwest. Books, ideas, family, music, and organized religion were the air the children breathed. "As a ten- or eleven-year-erstwhile, I knew my father was seriously reading and studying the philosophy of John Paul Two," says Pappin. "Information technology was a standard Catholic household but a household of professors. I thought academia was the only profession."
As an undergraduate at Harvard Academy, Pappin joined the staff of the Harvard Salient, a conservative student newspaper, and cut a distinct effigy on campus, playing the role of loftier Tory dissident from the liberal educatee mainstream. A 2003 profile of him in the Harvard Ruby features a photograph of the then twenty-year-old wearing a three-piece accommodate and bow tie. During his twelve years at the school—he stayed on to earn a PhD in political theory—he plugged into the network of institutions, funders, and publications that over the past fifty years has adult an effective pipeline for cultivating young conservative thinkers. It was through both Harvard and this national network, including the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, that Pappin connected with many of the thinkers and writers who would course the nucleus of the Journal of American Greatness and its successor publication, American Affairs. "He was incredibly funny," remembers Mark Henrie, a longtime bourgeois movement leader who recruited Pappin, then a graduate pupil, to teach summer seminars for the ISI. In detail, Henrie recalls Pappin doing a twenty-minute "reading" of a raunchy Tupac Shakur anthology in the style of Leo Strauss, the High german American philosopher love among certain swaths of the political right. "Information technology was plausible. It even had Straussian numerology."
What united Pappin with many of his beau conservative travelers equally he went from Harvard to bookish jobs at a series of Catholic institutions was a growing dissatisfaction with the GOP establishment. Ane of his gripes was that Republican candidates would whip upwards civilization state of war hysteria to become elected and so do niggling nearly issues such as ballgame, gay rights, and pornography. But Pappin and his confreres were also taking an unusually hard look at the economical, technological, and environmental social club that the Republicans, fifty-fifty more than the Democrats, had ushered into being. Was this a order that was structured for the good of its citizens, they asked, or for its corporations, their shareholders, and the "managerial aristocracy" who ran them? And if the latter, then was the answer for conservatives to keep promoting modest government, or the opposite—to start imagining a big authorities that was both conservative in the values it promoted and economically redistributive?
In February of 2016, the same calendar month that Trump began his romp through the Republican primaries, Pappin and a few close friends launched the Periodical of American Greatness, adopting ancient Roman pseudonyms to protect their jobs and friendships. "It was acidly humorous nigh the troubles of Conservatism Incorporated," says Henrie, who blogged nether the pen name Petronius. "The writers were people of the correct of center who were discontented with the institutional expression of correct-of-middle politics in America."
The tone was both highbrow and high-drama. Trump was deployed as a character in the story—sometimes a hero, sometimes a fool—representing larger historical forces. For his posts, Pappin chose the nom de guerre Manlius Capitolinus, a reference to Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, a fourth-century BC Roman hero who, according to fable, saved Rome from the Gauls, championed the plebes amongst the Roman elite, and was eventually condemned to death by the Senate for beingness a behemothic pain in the ass.
Unexpectedly, the Journal of American Greatness took off, helped in particular by a mention from columnist Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Periodical. It turned out there was an ambition for a frontal assault on the conservative establishment that lent an air of scholarly depth and critical clarity to the chaotic and vulgar Trump candidacy. In ofttimes very long, dumbo posts, Pappin and his young man bloggers criticized GOP positions on trade, big finance, health care, income inequality, strange policy, and a host of other problems. More than broadly, they told a story of an elite course that was clueless virtually the struggles of regular Americans and that needed drastic reformation or replacement.
"We expected that Trump would lose the general election and that there would be a big fight in the GOP over what would happen next," remembers Julius Krein, who blogged as Plautus and, with Pappin, cofounded both the Journal of American Greatness and American Affairs. "The idea at the time was that we would urge resistance to the return of a Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney–style orthodoxy."
But the most widely read piece by a member of the American Greatness cohort was published elsewhere, in the Claremont Review of Books, another conservative outlet. Written by Michael Anton, a Republican strategist who blogged for the Periodical of American Greatness as Publius Decius Mus, "The Flight 93 Election" gave vocalism to a broad feeling on the right that Trump, for all his flaws, was the one candidate who seemed to grasp the stakes of the election. It besides vented an anger simmering in the party'due south base at establishment Republicans who didn't share their view that a Clinton victory could represent an end to the American republic.
As Trump's entrada fortunes connected to rise, Pappin and his fellow bloggers, including Anton, who went on to serve in the Trump administration, became more convinced that they were on to something: the Trump phenomenon was important. But they also worried that they were becoming too popular to remain anonymous. Some days, traffic would exceed 50,000 hits, and among their readers were many of the biggest players in conservative media. Mainstream bourgeois publications such as National Review and the Weekly Standard oftentimes covered Pappin'south oversupply. "About of the people contributing were fairly concerned that they might lose their jobs over it," says Krein, who at the fourth dimension was working at a hedge fund in Boston.
In June of 2022 they shut down the web log. Pappin won't say who made the call, in part to protect the identities of the blog's contributors, half of whom remain anonymous. Pappin had accepted a tenure-track position at the Academy of Dallas, a modest Catholic higher in Irving with long-continuing ties to the American bourgeois motion. He wasn't worried about losing his job. Only he recognized, as did Krein, an opportunity to build something more serious, and less Trumpy, than the Periodical of American Greatness. The effect, which debuted not long later on Trump's inauguration, was American Affairs, a quarterly print magazine and website that made an instant splash, with profiles in the New Yorker, the Nation, and Politico and a launch political party at the Harvard Gild that attracted a who'southward who of conservative eminences.
The mag, which has emerged in the years since as the unmarried virtually vital publication of new bourgeois (and sometimes liberal) ideas in America, is much more sober in tone and aesthetics than the Journal of American Greatness. It brands itself, instead, as "a forum for people who believe that the conventional partisan platforms are no longer relevant to the nigh pressing challenges facing our land." The editors and board of directorate lean heavily correct, and the editors have fostered connections to semi-populist right-wing figures and possible Trump heirs such as senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri. But the politics of its contributors have go more heterogeneous since it launched. What its writers and editors tend to share is a skepticism virtually neoliberal economics, an disfavor to articulatio genus-jerk militarism, a root-and-branch concern over the supposed decadence of American civilisation, and a willingness to radically rethink the institutions of government.
The magazine has also fabricated deliberate efforts to shed any lingering associations with Trump. Krein voted for Trump in 2022 merely very publicly denounced him after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017, writing an op-ed in the New York Times: "I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It." Pappin's ain stance has been more clashing. He didn't publicly endorse the candidate in 2022 or 2020, and he has been careful in his writing to "put a lot of distance betwixt myself and the MAGA world, which does trade in a politics of nostalgia and resentment." At the same fourth dimension, he voted for Trump in both elections and doesn't see him as a sufficient disgrace or threat to merit repudiating. "I do believe politics are either left or correct in our world, and so as someone on the right, I desire the right to win."
Pappin's focus in American Affairs has been to game out a theoretical framework for big-authorities conservatism and to articulate some of the policy reforms that would follow, including tighter restrictions on access to pornography, an overhaul of the Senate that would assign seats to representatives of business sectors rather than states, and much more than aggressive efforts to strategically protect and foster cardinal American industries.
Pappin's signature proposal, laid outin his American Affairs essay "Affirming the American Family unit," is what he and his coauthor call FamilyPay. The program would encourage childbearing, marriage, and stay-at-home parenting past giving every married couple in the country $6,500 a twelvemonth for i child, $11,500 for ii, and $17,000 for iii (with additional incentives for couples who prefer). It'southward a fascinating glimpse into a vision of a more redistributionist but also more culturally conservative nation that doesn't fit comfortably into either of the electric current parties' platforms, a reshuffling that Trump sometimes seemed to promise when he was campaigning merely and then failed to advance once in office. Its more obvious analogues are Christian Autonomous parties in Western Europe and culturally nationalist parties in Hungary and Poland.
One question for Pappin and his colleagues—perhaps the question—is whether Trump'due south failure to deliver on his populist rhetoric was mainly his fault or that of the Republican party. Did Trump's lack of discipline doom the reforms he campaigned on, or was there simply never going to be room in the party of Mitch McConnell and the Koch brothers for deviations from Republican orthodoxy? And if not, why would that ever change? "Information technology's not clear to me who they think is going to practise this," says Samuel Goldman, a libertarian-minded bourgeois who has been sparring with Pappin since they were at Harvard together. "I cannot imagine a hereafter in which the bedroom of commerce is non an of import office of the Republican party, and as long as that's the case, it'due south hard to imagine the comprehensive shift that they're talking about. Not to say that there shouldn't exist some rebalancing, just I think this talk of a working-form political party is exaggerated, at best."
Geoffrey Kabaservice, an anti-Trump conservative who is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Middle, a correct-leaning Washington, D.C.–based call up tank, sees the same dilemma. "At this point, the Republican political party represents the working form for whom these kinds of proposals would have the greatest appeal and do the most aid," he says, "and withal the party is in the control of the donor class, to whom this is abomination. Where is it going to become? To the relatively few people who pay the bills? Or the many? My bet is on the donor class."
Kabaservice, who is the author of Dominion and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Political party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, is too skeptical that Pappin and his crew have traveled as far from Trump as they criminate. "I recall," he says, "they are function of this intellectual sphere which is trying to put a post hoc rationalization for Trumpism upon the Trumpian project."
Pappin is not naive about the future of his political party or motion. If something like his vision succeeds, it will be the work of years or decades and will depend not just on charismatic new political candidates simply on the education and training of hundreds or thousands of mid-level functionaries—legislative aides, retrieve tank analysts, committee staffers—who can interpret the large ideas into the minutiae of policy. It will depend, above all, on new allegiances of donors and corporate interests. "Economic power wins in this country," he says, "and until nosotros have some sectors of economic power aligned with the national interest, and then you won't really see the realignment."
Pappin argues, however, that assuming things will get on every bit they have earlier can be every bit mistaken every bit bold they will dramatically modify. America's past is rich with realignments, and thinkers have often played a function in shaping them. The history of the mod correct, in particular, demonstrates how powerful ideas can be, forth with those who articulate and disseminate them. From postwar anti-communists like Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham to William F. Buckley and National Review to the neoconservatives in the George West. Bush assistants who championed the invasion of Iraq afterwards 9/11, intellectuals take played important roles in shaping policy, often in the shadow of, or in concert with, more jingoistic politics. "Politics e'er changes at the margin," says Pappin. "The large, hulking institutions, they go on the social club, but they don't brand the changes. I think that with the MAGA stuff swept aside at the D.C. level, without Bannon crawling effectually, we will be able to get more serious."
Perhaps the all-time evidence that big authorities conservatism has a future is our crunch-prone present. It's COVID-19 and Hurricane Harvey and George Floyd. Big shocks to the arrangement are going to keep coming, and nix in the recent American past suggests that shrinking the state is probable to be the outcome, whichever party is in power.
The question, Pappin believes, is whether the right will continue to abound the state grudgingly and reactively, every bit it has in response to COVID-19, or whether it volition drop its small-authorities rhetoric and ideology and instead embrace the bigness.
Daniel Oppenheimer is the writer of Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, forthcoming from the University of Texas Press in June 2021.
This article originally appeared in the January 2022 issue ofTexas Monthlywith the headline "Can Trumpism Transcend Trump?" Subscribe today .
Source: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/gladden-pappin-wants-to-make-conservatism-great-again/
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