Field Notes vol. 1

Current reading, listening, and watching

Dear readers,

How’s everyone been? I find it hard to focus this time even under the best of circumstances, but have been plugging away at a long-overdue book proposal. This book on risk, as many of you know, is going to be a behemoth, and it’s taken a lot of time and research to get my brain around the enormity of it all. Given the limits of my time and attention span, this post is a little bit different — a peak inside the media consumption habits of Dr. Small Talk with a little bit of commentary to go with. It might even be a recurring thing.

Photo by Tony Tran on Unsplash

What’s caught my attention this week?

• Reading: “Populist Conservatism and Constitutional Order,” a lecture that Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently gave at Hillsdale College.

• Listening: “How Lobbyists Ate Politics,” an episode of American Moment’s podcast with journalist Brody Mullins, author of The Wolves of K Street (if you want to know more about American Moment, this post may be of interest).

• Watching: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yes really, for the very first time (!!!), with my teenage daughters.

Go read, listen, watch and let me know how my commentaries match up (or don’t) with your own.

*Also, eleventh hour addition here, since I drafted this post on Friday the Assad regime has fallen! I do not know what will come next for the long-suffering Syrian people, but I do know Bashar al-Assad is a war criminal’s war criminal, and I am glad to see him go. I promise an explainer post soon to walk through some of the different factions—e.g. why not all ‘jihadis’ are the same—and what role (if any) Western powers can play in encouraging a genuine democratic transition.

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Let’s start with Kevin Roberts. I wrote at length about Roberts, the Heritage Foundation, and the New Right economic project a few months ago so won’t rehash too much of what I said there, but I did want to highlight a few things about this speech.

1. It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.

   Reading the New Right’s diagnosis of economic malaise is often an uncanny experience for a leftist like yours truly because there are genuine points of overlap (see also: the Khanservatives and Sohrab Ahmari’s critique of private power). But reading Kevin Roberts is downright nonsensical because he 1. Has to acknowledge the strength of populist economic positions; but 2. Cannot adopt populist critiques of the free market or corporate power without alienating Heritage’s traditional support base. What’s a boy do to?

   Roberts’ strategy is to harken back to a pure, conservative Reaganite economic vision that is somehow distinct from the neoliberal project advanced by (checks notes) oh yes, Ronald Reagan, and literally every president since with the partial exception of Joe Biden. Ignoring the bromance between neoliberal economists and the Reagan administration—from tax cuts and deregulation to the free financial flows that allowed for offshoring of both manufacturing and profits—Roberts casts the free trade agenda as a partisan Democratic project:

   In 1993, Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, led the fight to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement, which gutted America’s industrial Midwest and lit the fuse on an illegal immigration bomb still exploding today. In 1994, Congress passed a law submitting the U.S. to the World Trade Organization, surrendering America’s economic sovereignty to globalist bureaucrats. Soon thereafter, a bipartisan majority in Congress granted Most Favored Nation trading status to the People’s Republic of China, handing over working Americans’ multi-trillion-dollar peace dividend to our greatest international rival.

   Roberts is not wrong that Clinton and the Democrats championed the neoliberal project, but he elides the fact that these policy ideas did not originate on the left, or even among mainstream Democrats (who adopted them in an attempt to move rightward and appease the mythical Moderate Voter), but from the Heritage Foundation and its allies on the right who red-pilled themselves on Milton Friedman. You can find much of the neoliberal economic project outlined in Heritage’s original 1981 Mandate for Leadership—the granddaddy of Project 2025—which Ronald Reagan reportedly handed out at his first cabinet meeting.

   Heritage’s own archive of position papers is also illustrative in this regard. Take this one from April 1993, for instance, which reminds us that NAFTA was initiated by George H.W. Bush and chiefly faced opposition from Democrats:

   George Bush signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) last December 17. If approved by Congress, this trade pact will link the United States, Mexico, and Canada into the world's largest free trade zone. Bill Clinton has expressed support for the agreement, but he faces considerable opposition in the Congress, primarily from his own Democratic Party.

   Lest the point be lost, there’s this headline from a November 1993 piece by former Heritage director, Michael Wilson: “The North American Free Trade Agreement: Ronald Reagan's Vision Realized.” Even as recently as 2018, Heritage was publishing defenses of NATFA that claimed the treaty actually boosted American manufacturing. It requires an extraordinary level of chutzpah or amnesia to absolve Heritage from wreckage of neoliberalism. Roberts apparently has both.

2. He’s not ready for the startup state

   This is for the real nerds, those of you who are deep inside the right’s inter-factional battles. Roberts includes a not-so-subtle rebuke of the neo-monarchist movement centered around Curtis Yarvin and our finest tech overlords. The who? The what? You can read this or this for the long version, but the short version is that Yarvin is a computer programmer turned court philosopher of Silicon Valley’s right flank. His essential idea is that democracy spells disorder, and that only the reemergence of absolute monarchy—this time with a CEO king who governs the state like a startup—can restore virtue and harmony to the West. It is a profoundly hierarchical, anti-democratic, Nietzschian wannabe sort of argument that has become increasingly popular among the young, male, and very online. Anyway, here’s Roberts throwing a gentle first punch:

   Speaking of which, it is still the case that legitimate and enduring change in the U.S. will only be accomplished through the Constitution. It’s too bad that this point needs to be made, but there are anti-establishment voices within the populist movement—especially among the young and online—who reject the Constitution as an artifact of liberal, Enlightenment errors that must be replaced with a pre-Enlightenment form of government. But the American people are not interested in thrones and altars. They want a secure border, safe streets, economic autonomy and opportunity, a family-friendly culture, and a government that works for them instead of the other way around.

   What’s a couple of barbs among friends?

Ok, next up, let’s talk about this conversation between American Moment’s Saurabh Sharma and Nick Solheim, and Brody Mullins, an investigative journalist who previously worked at the Wall Street Journal. Mullins was on the show promoting his recent book, The Wolves of K Street, which is billed as “essential reading for anyone looking to understand how corporate interests are undermining American democracy.” Oh hi!

Mullins spoke in refreshingly open terms about how the intense partisanship of contemporary America serves as window dressing for more fundamental power struggles. While Democrats and Republicans may blame one another for all that ails our democracy, he argues:

It’s really corporate America. Corporate America wins no matter who is in charge. They don’t care if it’s Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George Bush - they’re going to win either way because they’ve got both sides wired.

There’s interesting stuff in here about the shift of lobbying focus from the federal to the state level and how the tech lobby has evolved over the last decade — it’s well worth your time if you want to get a sense of how traditionally left-wing ideas have been coopted and repackaged by the New Right.

And finally, just a side note: this is such a dude-heavy conversation. I don’t just mean the hosts or guest, but the fact that every question during the Q&A was from a man and also, this is a still from the event video:

There are all sorts of snarky things one could say about the dearth of women on the New Right (too busy tending the chickens to go to events, etc.), but I would love to see a more substantive take on whether or not this is recognized to be a problem, and if so, how they are trying to appeal to women who don’t want to become homeschoolers.

Ok, finally, BUFFY! How did I never watch this before? I think the boring answer is that we didn’t get the WB on our very limited cable package growing up, and that I’ve never been a big TV watcher in general. But very smart and good friends of mine have long been massive fans, so I decided it was time to dive in with my teenage daughters. I feel a bit wary wading into a very crowded cultural commentary space but—five episodes in—I keep thinking about one thing in particular: Life goes on. How many dead bodies have to appear in this school for it to even partially close? For police to cordon off the block? Maybe an assembly that acknowledges the trauma of routinely losing students and staff to the forces of darkness? Any interruption at all in the flow of the daily drama of being an American teenager?

Sure, we can talk about the need for suspended disbelief, but what’s interesting here is that it’s wholly believable. We live in a country in which mass shootings at schools are routine and where the continual refrain during a pandemic that killed over 1 million people was a plea to “get back to normal.” It also made me remember how Columbia made us all go back to class the morning of September 12, 2001, or more recently, how the United Healthcare investor meeting proceeded after the CEO was shot outside a Manhattan hotel. Can’t let a little death get in the way of business as usual.