Making Sense of the New American Right

Keeping track of the Jacksonians, Reformicons, Paleos, and Post-liberals.

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history by distinguishing between three groups. There is the Republican party, with its millions of adherents and spectrum of opinion from very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, and yes, liberal. There is the conservative movement, the constellation of single-issue nonprofits that sprung up in the 1970s

  • gun rights,
  • pro-life,
  • taxpayer,
  • right to work

— and continue to influence elected officials. Finally, there is the conservative intellectual movement: writers, scholars, and wonks whose journalistic and political work deals mainly with ideas and, if we’re lucky, their translation into public policy.

Lawmakers Question How Long Paul Ryan Will Stay in Post After Likely Tax Overhaul

Many Republicans consider the tax-code rewrite, expected to pass, a legacy accomplishment

.. Trump called Mr. Ryan Thursday and “made sure the speaker knew very clearly and in no uncertain terms, that if the news was true, he was very unhappy with it.”

.. Mr. Ryan himself on Thursday listed two major legislative campaigns he said were necessary to reduce the federal debt. One, he said, is

  1. the tax-code overhaul lawmakers are on the verge of finishing. The second is
  2. a push to overhaul federal safety-net programs to incentivize more people to work, which he intends to spearhead early next year.

.. “Next year is going to be the year where we work on people,” Mr. Ryan told reporters Thursday.

.. Many House GOP lawmakers and aides believe Mr. Ryan will leave in 2019 if the GOP loses its control of the House majority in next year’s midterm elections.

..  If he intends to run for president in the future, his next career move will have to keep him connected to the political realm, GOP strategists said.

..  I think he would need to stay in office for at least a few more years just to remain relevant.”

.. House Republicans said they wouldn’t be surprised to see Mr. Ryan assume a senior role at a conservative think tank at some point.  “He is a policy guy,” Mr. Ross said, “through and through.”

The New Republic’s Super Buzzy, Lefty Upgrade

103-year-old magazine today is a repudiation of its stuffy, neo-liberal past.

Two months later, the “new” New Republic resurrected itself, with eminent Canadian leftist Jeet Heer in the driver’s seat and a buzzy cover story stolidly titled “Whitewash”—a sizzling takedown of the magazine’s complicated racial and social-class history under Peretz’s nearly four-decade tenure. Then the magazine went full-throttle in favor of the Sanders cult, with sometimes frankly Marxist cultural analyses, attacks on Hillary Clinton (from the left), calls for single payer, the $15 minimum wage, resistance to Trump, and opposition to military interventionism.

.. Hughes’ move was not merely a rebooting or rebranding—it was a repudiation of the magazine’s past.

.. “I bought The New Republic to take back the Democratic Party from the McGovernites,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2012.

..  If William F. Buckley Jr. sought to reform and update the conservative movement with National Review in the 1950s, Peretz was just as redoubtable in his goal to remake Democratic liberalism in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Not until Roger Ailes joined Fox would an editor exert the kind of ideological tone-policing that Peretz proudly did at TNR.

.. During the 1980s and ’90s, The New Republic’s rise mirrored that of neoliberalism (a philosophy for which it became the definitive journalistic exponent), alongside yuppie New Democrats such as Gary Hart, Joe Klein, Larry Summers, Al From, Al Gore, and an Ivy-educated Arkansas power couple named Bill and Hillary Clinton

.. Once the Vietnam War (and the Pinochet takeover of Chile) ended virtually all support on the left for “imperialist” U.S. interventions, these foreign policy hawks (with which Peretz, Charles Krauthammer, and Leon Wieseltier were very much in accord) left for Team Republican.

.. Once the Vietnam War (and the Pinochet takeover of Chile) ended virtually all support on the left for “imperialist” U.S. interventions, these foreign policy hawks (with which Peretz, Charles Krauthammer, and Leon Wieseltier were very much in accord) left for Team Republican.

..  TNR’s two signal editors—a wisecracking Jewish atheist who attacked supply-siders from the right (Kinsley never believed that tax cuts for the rich, or anyone else, paid for themselves)

.. University of Kansas grad Thomas Frank ruthlessly satirized The New Republic in Salon as a place where sheltered young Ivy know-it-alls would “exercise the prerogatives of their class” by sliding into “ready-made” positions of power where they would “pantomime seriousness” while “trolling” the real left.

.. Peretz and Kinsley transformed the stodgy Washington insider into a brash, impudent, ironic, and irreverent voice that no other “serious” journal dared to match in those pre-cable/pre-Twitter days.

.. Peretz and Kinsley transformed the stodgy Washington insider into a brash, impudent, ironic, and irreverent voice that no other “serious” journal dared to match in those pre-cable/pre-Twitter days.

.. Kinsley agreed utterly with Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Margaret Thatcher—three of his all-time favorites—that the stagflation of the late 1970s and early ‘80s was directly due to greedy labor unions

.. And when Andrew Sullivan, openly gay, Catholic, Thatcher Tory, took the helm in 1991, TNR doubled down on “trolling the Left,”

.. Then came the attacks by conservative writer Betsy McCaughey against Hillarycare in 1993-94, followed by the controversy over Charles Murray’s 1994 bestseller, The Bell Curve.

.. “DAY OF RECKONING” cover—bordered in blood red with a cigarette-smoking “Preciousand Mary” black welfare queen—where the editors demanded that President Clinton sign Newt Gingrich’s welfare reform bill.

.. None of this would have been particularly remarkable in the pages of National Review or The American Spectator. But what made The New Republic sui generiswas that it took these positions while proudly, even aggressively, touting itself as the arbiter of acceptable liberal Democratic dialogue. TNR was a living rebuke to other opinion-meisters such as The NationMother JonesIn These Times, and NPR’s Democracy Now!, which more-or-less stayed with New Deal liberalism and 1960s-style idealism.

..  Peretz’s best friend and former student Al Gore was humiliated in his 2000 run for the Presidency—denied victory because of Ralph Nader’s Bernie Sanders-like attack from the left

.. And when TNR offered full-throated support for Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan interventions after 9/11—while capital-L liberals stood in opposition—whatever credibility the magazine had as The Voice of Liberalism finally collapsed. As far as left-wing voices were concerned, TNR’s neoliberalism and George W. Bush-style neoconservatism had now become practically one and the same.

.. one might say that there was simply no room left on the Left anymore for “even the liberal” New Republic. The death of the Peretz TNR and the rise of Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Socialists of America, Jeremy Corbyn, Chapo Trap House, The Young Turks, Mr. Robot, and Jacobinmagazine were all but simultaneous.

.. TNR alum Jonathan Chait, who has emerged as perhaps the top (white male) tone-policeman of (neo) liberals versus The Left, as he illustrated in his recent New York magazine piece, “How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult.”

.. From 1975 to 2014 (not coincidentally the era that historians Sean Wilentz and Gil Troy christened the twin “Ages” of Reagan and the Clintons), The New Republic was as indispensable an idea factory for “New Democrats” as the Heritage Foundation and Fox News were for Republicans