The Dialectics of Realignment

Part 1 of a series on the much-discussed, but little understood, political "realignment.”

As the walking political crisis known as Donald Trump exits the stage, another walking crisis, slightly more polished, of the bland continuation of unpopular centrist neoliberalism known as Joe Biden, is waiting in the wings. Trump’s shock politics seems wild and irrational, but he means something to a lot of people—Biden doesn’t, he himself doesn’t even seem to know why he is president. He didn’t really want to be president (Obama famously said “Joe you don’t have to do this”). Biden means little to most people, except as a replay of the Obama years—which were so bad that they created conditions that a swindler like Trump could exploit.

But Trump’s wild politics is far from new or populist—it is just a useful cover for established national conservatism, political theology, and corporatism. Trump’s shock politics is a perfect smokescreen to brand an unpopular agenda as populist. And with such a weak, meaningless figure as Joe Biden leading the Democratic Party, there is plenty of room for right wing intellectuals and politicians to sell the idea of a Realignment that benefits them. The Right has another advantage fueling its populist aspirations—it wholly rejects identity politics, social justice, virtue signaling, cancel culture, “wokeness,” and associated tendencies, which are championed by liberal Democrats, even as they are increasingly distasteful to the general public. And Biden’s unwillingness to fill his administration with any progressives, opting for neoliberal corporatists at every turn, will further open space for the Right to attempt a populist maneuver.

The term “realignment” is being bandied about by politicians and pundits these days, alongside a vague kind of populism. The Republican pundit Saagar Enjeti, for instance, coauthored a book called The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising. He also cohosts a podcast produced by the right-wing Hudson Institute called The Realignment, which describes its reason for being as: “The United States is in the midst of a dramatic political realignment with shifting views on national security, economics, technology, and the role of government in our lives.” Senator Josh Hawley (R-MI) was an early and frequent guest on the show, and is building a national profile pushing a national conservative populist narrative. He has also been pushing the realignment on other right wing shows talking up what a “new” brand of “populist” conservatism might look like. And the right wing Cato Institute published a paper titled “The Great Realignment: Understanding Politics Today.”

In a recent article titled “A Patriotic, Pro-Worker Republican Party is Emerging,” Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) takes the “realignment” as a fact that must be politically taken advantage of: “To seize the realignment,” he says, Republicans “must…embrace a pro-American capitalism – one that promotes the common good, as opposed to one that prioritizes Wall Street and Beijing – and become a patriotic, pro-worker party that fights for dignified work, strong families, and vibrant communities.” So at once we can see what this so-called “realignment” is really about—not a populist shift away from capitalist exploitation at all, but simply a more patriotic capitalism. This is, evidently, how to achieve a more “dignified work” environment for the American people—infusing patriotism into capitalism. As if a lack of national pride is what makes the capitalist labor relation undignified—instead of the fundamentally exploitative nature of the capitalist labor relation itself.

When considering this right-wing pro-worker posturing, it should be noted that Tucker Carlson, in his keynote address at the 2019 National Conservative Conference in D.C., praised Elizabeth Warren for her “economic patriotism.” (The two other keynote speakers at the Conference were Hawley and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel). Warren is, as everyone knows, a capitalist to her bones. No real populist or anti-capitalist would support Warren (who was perhaps more responsible than anyone for torpedoing Bernie Sanders’ more authentic pro-worker campaign), and so neither should these conservative remixes of her ruling class politics be supported.

Rubio’s “patriotic capitalism” and Warren’s economic patriotism are not pro-worker, populist, or new, and should be thought of along with other kinds of neoliberal snake oil New Capitalism: the conscious capitalism of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey; the stakeholder capitalism of billionaire Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff; the creative capitalism of billionaire entertainer Oprah Winfrey; the philanthrocapitalism of billionaire software salesman Bill Gates, and so on. None of this is new or populist—it’s the same old capitalist exploitation, dressed up in various ways. Patriotic capitalism, the “economic populism” of this Realignment, is just capitalism draped in a flag, instead of Oprah’s creativity. The patriotic capitalism of Realignment hustlers like Hawley and Rubio is just as pro-worker as Bill Gates’ philanthrocapitalism—which is to say, not at all.

Back to Rubio’s article about the “pro-worker” future of the Republican Party, conceived of as fighting for dignified work (which can’t actually exist in a capitalist system), strong families, and vibrant communities. The “strong families” part is telling—there is a consistent line of attack against liberals that they are anti-family, based mostly on liberal support of abortion, which conservatives genuinely believe is the original sin of America—not slavery. Overturning Roe v Wade is what the crustiest old conservatives have been yelling about for decades. None of this is new at all, and it isn’t populist either—the majority of the American people do not support overturning it.

As Fintan O’Toole put it in his insightful essay about Attorney General William Barr, “Enabler in Chief”: “For William Barr, Roe v. Wade, not slavery, is America’s original sin, the moment at which the fall from ‘traditional moral order’ begins. It is what he called, in a highly revealing speech in October 2019 at the Catholic university Notre Dame, where Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett both studied and taught law, ‘the watershed decision.’” This is an old conservative line, and it is at the heart of this National Conservative (NatCon) workerist politics of Rubio, Carlson, Hawley, and others. Part of the reason that they have been reacting so hysterically to Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project is because it promotes the idea that slavery, rather than Roe v Wade, is the original sin of the nation.

One of the key journals of this bogus right wing populism is called American Affairs. Its aim is to try to capitalize on the quasi-populism of Trump to the advantage of the establishment, elite NatCon vision. The question is often asked—what happens to Trumpism after Trump? The answer is: bourgeois populist National Conservatism. But how would that work today? American Affairs is leading the charge in offering ideas. It was launched in early 2017, in true populist fashion, at the Harvard Club. Its Editor and Deputy Editor are two Harvard-educated intellectuals: Julius Krein and Gladden Pappin. Before launching the journal, Krein had a very populist career as a finance bro. Pappin is a professor of politics at the University of Dallas, as well as a permanent research fellow at Notre Dame University. Krein is the face of the journal, promoting it on talk shows and so on, but Pappin is the real source of ideas there.

The keynote at the launch was a conversation between the aptly named warhawk Anne-Marie Slaughter (who could not be more of an establishment figure) and Peter Thiel. Thiel embodies Krein’s vision for a new kind of conservatism: future oriented (Thiel is a Silicon Valley demigod), pro-science, and socially liberal (Thiel is one of the most prominent openly gay conservatives). If this just sounds like the same old 2008 Ron Paul libertarianism, it should—Peter Thiel is a libertarian. Is libertarianism anything new, populist, or interesting? Far from it.

Thiel also excels in the exact area that the NatCons want—antagonizing liberal media and educational systems. Thiel famously sued the website Gawker into oblivion, and at his NatCon Conference keynote, he spent a chunk of time lambasting the liberal university system. This goes along with his larger social vision—the Thiel Fellowship, basically a new spin on apprenticeships. As college becomes more discredited, as a waste of time and money, and as a source of indoctrination in scary Marxist ideas that the NatCons, despite their workerist pose, constantly demonize, apprenticeships like this will become more prevalent.

This apprenticeship replacing college scheme is sold as the “empowerment” of the lower classes, but it isn’t actually empowerment at all—it’s just putting an empowering spin on neo-feudalism. In the same way that progressive neoliberal dogma about empowerment is actually oppressive—but from a NatCon faux populist angle. The children of the elites will continue being educated at elite institutions like Harvard, where they will study history and literature and so on. Steve Jobs, for example, strictly limited the amount of time his kids could use his products—but the masses used them nonstop for a decade plus, and we’re seeing the results of that in how stupid and crazy the world is now.

This is another way in which this “new” Right isn’t new at all—it’s bringing back the feudal master-apprentice social relation. In his article, Rubio mentions apprenticeships as a key part of the new vision—and he mentions “school choice.” Choose an apprenticeship instead of going to school—get your career started early, and engrain yourself in the guild system of your chosen corporate sector, which, in their vision, will come to replace public institutions. Their long term goal is for you to become an apprentice in a corporatist system, rather than a college student studying history and literature.

No more free men with liberal arts educations who can take their shot at the world—that’s all gone in the NatCon corporatist social vision. Instead, the new class of serfs will scurry into a corporate sector and have that be their silo. There is some room for social mobility in the silo, but it is directly tied to work-virtue as determined by your corporate demigods: “These corporations are also ‘hierarchically ordered,’ meaning that members must, in some fashion, earn status and responsibility within them.” As the corporate sector comes to take total social control, ushering in a system of neo-feudalism, which is fraudulently sold in Realignment discourse as somehow freeing and new, you have to earn every scrap your overlords toss you—and if you don’t like it, too bad, because what recourse will you have against corporations in a corporate totalitarian system?

Back to Rubio’s article. He mentioned “vibrant communities” as a key part of the fake new pro-worker Republican Party. This goes along with the new Right’s social philosophy of corporatism, as laid out in Pappin’s article “Corporatism for the 21st Century.” One argument Pappin makes for why corporatism is the right social philosophy for right now is that it “is a system of interest representation which places an emphasis on cooperation rather than competition among interest groups.” This goes along nicely with Rubio’s vision of National Conservatism as featuring strong families and vibrant communities. Cooperation rather than competition is needed. Pappin says that “Society has become more segmented than ever,” implying the focus on the self, identity politics, intersectionality, and other liberal buzzwords, as well as the competition inherent in capitalist society.

For Pappin, there’s been too much focus on self-identity, and too little focus on work identity. “Even in recent decades,” he says, “Americans have been remarkably consistent in claiming a sense of identity from their jobs.” This is the “good” type of identity politics, that the NatCon workerist Right wants to have become as hegemonic as the "bad” liberal identity politics is. The “Realignment” that’s happening is from liberal corporate hegemony to national conservative corporatism, on political, social, and cultural levels. Liberal identity politics is bad and corporate—everyone knows that by now. But National Conservative identity politics is just as bad as liberal corporate identity politics.

This segmentation of liberal society can be offset, Pappin claims, with a corporatist social vision—have the corporate industrial sectors themselves take over for the failed liberal institutions. “Bachelor of Arts programs…would then shrink to a size more in keeping with the genuine demand that exists for liberal arts education,” Pappin says of his vision for a NatCon corporatist society. This is the same old Trump logic ( running society like a business), but applied to education. Nothing new here—despite American Affairs making efforts to distance themselves from Trump, as he becomes increasingly buffoonish and discredited, their corporatist social logic is identical. We can also see how consistent the NatCon anti-education vision is—shrinking down the sphere of influence of liberal arts education synchs up with Peter Thiel’s neo-feudal corporatist vision for a society of apprentices getting engrained in an industrial sector from a young age, instead of the failing liberal education system.

Back to Marco Rubio. Few other major right wing politicians combine workerist rhetoric, shameless political theology, and nationalist fervor quite like him. He also excels at the kind of free-floating hostility against vague elites that fueled Trump’s faux-populism. The ongoing Covid measures make especially good fodder for his kind of populist charlatanism—as he tweeted on December 28: “Dr. Fauci lied about masks in March. Dr. Fauci has been distorting the level of vaccination needed for herd immunity. It isn’t just him. Many in elite bubbles believe the American public doesn’t know ‘what’s good for them’ so they need to be tricked into ‘doing the right thing.’” It’s easy to sell the NatCon’s bogus anti-elitism during the effort to combat coronavirus, since attitudes about the virus have become so politicized.

When Rubio isn’t doing his anti-Covid populist act, he’s obsessively tweeting quotes from Scripture. He is a true believer, and he sees no reason why theology and politics should be separate. This is the root of his special relationship with Gladden Pappin—in one of his articles for American Affairs titled “From Conservatism to Postliberalism: The Right After 2020,” Pappin references a piece that Rubio wrote in the Catholic journal First Things, which shares many editors and board members with American Affairs—it is something of a sister publication. (Peter Thiel has been on the Finance Committee of First Things in the past). Pappin references Rubio’s point that “The Church’s tradition cuts across identitarian labels…” as a way of suggesting a kind of religious community as a solution to competition, atomization, and segmentation of identity of liberal capitalist society. Pappin spells out what the Right must do to combat the threat of “borderless globalism”: “…the Right [must] become more corporatist in its approach to directing business activity in the national interests, and more integralist in its view of the link between government and the common good.”

Integralism is a term for the fusing of church and state—integrating religious social, cultural, and political power with the modern state itself. The modern state is a liberal institution, which is why the relentless critique of “the Left” is such a big part of Realignment discourse. Once the Left and the liberal state are kaput, NatCon populism will deliver the politics of social corporatism and Christian Nationalist political theology. And this is ironic because the whole thrust of the anti-liberal, anti-left populist moment is that liberals, like Biden and Harris, are too corporatist (which is certainly true), and that liberal identity politics and so on is becoming a new state religion. The NatCon populist Right has no problem with corporatism and religion dominating social and political life—they just don’t like the liberal version of it.

The term for this is national communitarianism. It is being offered as a right-wing populist response to elite liberal atomization, yet it is totally compatible with corporatism. In a manifesto called “Against the Dead Consensus,” First Things railed against what they view as one of the great political and social evils—”individual autonomy,” which they also call the “fetishizing of autonomy.” So the answer to this liberal fetishizing of autonomy is to have strong families, social corporatism, and the church shaping “vibrant” communities. In their vision, as the liberal state and the cult of the self wither away, the corporate sector and churches will pick up the slack, and deliver the vibrant communities that liberals couldn’t.

Keep in mind that when NatCons use the word vibrant, they don’t really mean actually vibrant. In their manifesto, “Our Declaration of Independence from the Conservative Movement,” the editors of American Greatness, a publication that was a precursor of and inspiration for American Affairs, lament that “The once-vibrant political movement [National Conservatism] that nominated Barry Goldwater, elected Ronald Reagan, and defeated global communism has become ossified and unthinking…” Imagine thinking Barry Goldwater is vibrant! If that’s their idea of a vibrant man, then imagine what their vibrant communities will look like.

As Rubio claims in “What Economics Is For,” his First Things piece: “The Church emphasizes the moral duty of employers to respect workers not just as means to profit, but as human persons and productive members of their community and nation.” This is the “vibrant communities” part of Rubio’s NatCon vision. An increased social role for the Church, in the eyes of Rubio, Pappin, and the NatCons, would alleviate the dreaded liberal autonomy and atomization. It would replace the cult of the self, with the time-tested, trusted local Church. And we all know that the Catholic Church has never done anything anti-social in its long history, right?

Rubio also takes a shot at the new wave of democratic socialism that has slowly infiltrated Congress, mostly with fairly tame figures like AOC and Ilhan Omar, who are considered radical in the U.S., but in most industrialized democratic countries would be slightly left of center. He writes: “Compare a politics dedicated to restoring the dignity of work to the contemporary interest in abstract concepts like ‘democratic socialism.’” He is claiming that the Catholic Church’s views on labor are more reliable and concrete than democratic socialist ideas about labor. Rubio is claiming that the religion, that most abstract of things, is somehow more concrete than socialism. There is also anti-universalism here; conservatives have always critiqued socialism for its universalism—the belief that every individual person deserves rights. This is considered too abstract by national conservatives.

Something less abstract would be virtue. In a national communitarian system, abstract liberal universal rights take a backseat to virtue. It is more particularized, more concrete, more nationalist, less global. As editor Rusty Reno says in First Things, liberal “…universalism underwrites a post-national globalism that will destroy politics and usher in a technocratic empire.” It is hard for virtue to exist in such a universalist, globalist situation. Indeed, one of the leading figures of National Conservatism, Yoram Hazony, who runs NationalConservatism.org, wrote a book called The Virtue of Nationalism. The idea is that virtue is better able to be developed, and to shape social relations, in a national, rather than global, system. So liberal education destroys virtue at home just as liberal globalism destroys virtue in the world—apprenticeships, corporatism and national communitarianism, according to the NatCons, will save it.

Pappin further elaborates his national communitarian vision in “Toward A Party of the State.” He continues his critique of the atomization of the liberal state, and offers suggestions for a common good vision to replace it, to better integrate people with their communities and foster a sense of belonging that has been lost under liberalism. Some of these policy programs are “national-interest based (aimed at civic solidarity and international competitiveness), and others still religious in certain contexts (aimed at clarifying the unavoidable spiritual element of every polity).”

Pappin’s critique of liberal capitalism is that its emphasis on competition has left people isolated and atomized—but he doesn’t want to get rid of competition entirely. Rather, competition should be on the large scale, between nations—we are all American nationals in a community, and we cooperate with each other, to compete against emerging competitors like, obviously, China. The national-interest based civic solidarity of his communitarian program is basically shorthand for patriotic education replacing liberal arts education. And the religious element acts as the glue to hold the common good together. So these are the three main ingredients of the faux populist NatCon moment: competition between nations, patriotic education instead of critical thinking, and embracing religion as a social and even political bond.

Another of Pappin’s American Affairs articles, “Affirming the American Family,” expands on Rubio’s message that the NatCon vision will emphasize strong families and communities. Virtue is a big part of it. The article details NatCon family policy, a way to incentivize Americans to have more children, in an effort to reverse a trend of Americans reproducing less than previous generations. The upshot of the article is what Pappin calls a “robust proposal [that] would include a mixture of direct cash transfers (FamilyPay), credits toward child-related expenditures (CarePoints), and possible investment toward future expenses (CareBonds).”

This is a blatant right-wing, theological imitation of Obamacare. And you can bet anything there will be strict rules about who deserves their FamilyPay, CarePoints, and CareBonds. You will probably have to do something like signal your virtue in order to receive the benefits. You have to earn them, by having a family, and you can bet it will have to be a family that adheres to very traditional definitions. In a communitarian system, you have to signal to other members in your community—and especially to the Church, which will have an expanded social role—that you are a reliably virtuous member of the community. Just as in Pappin’s corporatist social system, you will have to earn your status at all times in your social existence by signaling your work-virtue to your corporate master, FamilyPay will have to be earned, by virtue signaling your healthy, happy, constantly growing, perfectly normal family.

The NatCon view of poverty is also deeply tied in with their virtue framework. As Bill Barr said at a 1995 symposium on violent crime: “Violent crime is caused not by physical factors, such as not enough food stamps in the stamp program, but ultimately by moral factors.” He continued: “Spending more money on these material social programs is not going to have an impact on crime, and, if anything, it will exacerbate the problem.” Poverty is ultimately a reflection of virtue, like everything else for these National Conservatives. There is no universal right we share to being protected from poverty—that would be too much like socialism. The only protection that these people want you to have from poverty is your own virtue. If that’s not enough to keep you out of poverty, then in their view, you deserve to be in poverty. And this is trying to be passed off as populist or new.

In all of this, we can see that the so-called Realignment, of the Republican Party becoming pro-worker, and of National Conservativism becoming some kind of populist movement, there is nothing new or populist at all. It is the same corporatism of the liberal Democrats, the same identity politics (except your identification is with your corporate sector), and the same virtue signaling (although now it’s signaling to the nationalist government and your Church-dominated community that you are worthy of benefits). Nothing is being realigned in this Realignment—it is the same hated policies of liberal hegemony, but from a right-wing perspective. All of this is following in the wake of Trump upending our politics—but just because Trump seemed like something different, it doesn’t mean that the National Conservative movement hoping to capitalize on his success is anything different.

The NatCon movement is trying to pass itself off as populist, but it only has a shot to do that because it is trailing in Trump’s wake—and he has managed to brand himself as populist. He, of course, is anything but populist—but many still buy this lie. Trump’s fake populism was well-understood by Julius Krein of American Affairs, who shrewdly harnessed it for his fake populist conservative magazine.

In a 2017 piece for the New Yorker, Kelefah Sanneh described the launch of American Affairs, noting that Krein’s vision for the magazine was largely a negative one. This makes sense, since Trump’s populism was only ever negative—Trump mainly got popular because of how viciously he attacked Jeb Bush, the Iraq War, the liberal media, and Hillary Clinton. All of those things are wildly unpopular, but no major political figure had ever gone after them with both barrels quite like Trump did, and the American people loved it.

Trump shrewdly attacked the essence of neoconservatism, the Iraq War/Bush Dynasty, and the essence of neoliberalism, by taking down the Clinton Dynasty. One of Trump’s only valid boasts is that he destroyed the Bush and Clinton dynasties, and it’s true—that’s why he got so popular. We had two despised political dynasties in this country, and nobody had the guts to treat them with the contempt they deserved—until Trump. That’s really why he won.

In the same way, American Affairs is “populist” only negatively, in opposition to two key figures, one arch-neoconservative and one arch-neoliberal: Dick Cheney and Larry Summers. Cheney is perhaps the most despised architect of the neocon Iraq War, and Summers is perhaps the most despised of the high priests of neoliberal economics, and a former Harvard president, to boot. This was Krein’s explicit intention—to create something that was staunchly opposed to the Cheneys and the Summers of the world. It worked for Trump—but he wasn’t populist at all. He did no real populist things—he didn’t do anything on healthcare, he didn’t do anything for wages, he handled the pandemic horribly (that’s probably why he lost to Biden). He also did nothing really new—he was just continuing the Reagan Revolution and the old Claremont Conservative vision (about which, read part 2 of this series). And in the same way, American Affairs, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and the rest of the NatCon populists have no intention to promote anything populist or new or different from the justifiably despised liberal hegemony—just to replace it with national communitarian corporatism, identity politics, and virtue signaling.