Dear subscribers,

I’ve indefinitely paused all payments for this Substack. I have been too busy managing Passage Publishing, which is experiencing enormous growth at the moment and is therefore taking up any additional time I might have to write. I will get back to writing soon, but I doubt I will have much time for long form until the New Year.

In the meantime, our Fall/Winter catalog is now out and includes an anthology from the great John Derbyshire, a debut short story collection from First Things editor Justin Lee, and our print edition of volume 2 of Unqualified Reservations. We also have additional reprints of the original Hardy Boys and the original The Storm of Steel that are now available and will make excellent Christmas gifts. Earlier in the summer, we also released an anthology from Paul Gottfried, a memoir from Taki Theodorocopoulos, and a story/essay collection from Rambo Van Halen, Hollywood Samizdat that are all worth your time.

I encourage you to all buy these books and please sign up for the Passage Newsletter (link at the bottom of the Passage website) for information about new releases (of which there will be dozens over the next 6 months) and sales for the Holiday Season. Finally, Passage’s catalog will now be available everywhere books are sold, including big box retailers like Barnes & Noble and Target (something I would not have thought possible even a year ago).

Also, you may have heard that I’ve started a bi-weekly podcast with the great Chris Rufo. While there is a lot we agree on, Chris and I come to the right from a slightly different place and intend to use the show to try to stake out some common ground for where we think the right might move forward from here on out.

If you are so inclined, please subscribe to our Youtube channel, or subscribe on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you don’t subscribe I am going to call Stephen Miller and have you deported.

With great love,

L

About a month ago I recorded a nearly three hour conversation with New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat for his new podcast, Interesting Times. The conversation, which was edited down to an hour for publication, was released last week.

Before getting into the meat of it, let me first say that Ross was a great conversation partner and approached our ideological and philosophical disagreements in good faith. The New York Times editors, who I had some reservations about going in, emphasized certain aspects of the conversation that I think maybe weren’t as interesting or important as some others, but it’s their show and their audience and those decisions are theirs to make, and nonetheless on the whole they did a fine job of capturing the tone and vibe of the conversation, and didn’t engage in any deceptive editing at my expense nor distort any of my arguments or anything like that, so I thank them for their efforts and withdraw my reservations.

We discussed many things, but at the heart of the conversation was the question over whether or not the right could wrest back any kind of significant cultural ground after decades of near total domination of American arts and letters by liberals, and if so what the characteristics would be of the new “right” cultural production that would occupy this ground.

These are fair questions, but they get at the problem a little sideways, and so I thought it might be worthwhile to clarify a few points about what we’re even talking about here and what the take-away should be for anyone thinking about the intersection of art and politics.

In the interview, Ross and I began by contrasting the old right that he graduated out of (NRO) with the new right that I graduated out of (Twitter). After explaining some of my criticisms of conservative culture from years past—that it’s too moralistic and didactic, that it traffics in nostalgia and sentimentalism, and that it’s too pre-occupied with grievance, with its own sense of cultural subordination—Ross then asked me to name an example of "successful right-wing art” to help flesh the point out.

On the spot, I came up with three examples:

1. No County for Old Men (book or film)

2. anything by David Lynch1

3. and the HBO series Girls.

Ross then asked the load-bearing follow-up question: “What makes [these examples of cultural production] right wing to you?”

I glibly responded that these things are right wing because I like them and want them to share my political preferences (true), and then followed up by adding that they are right-wing because they tell the truth about the world and about the human condition. Here is the full quote:

What constitutes “right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people.

My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art.

In short: Is it good? Is it honest? If yes, then right.

This is a rather simple formula, and has the scent of tautology, but is nonetheless perfectly coherent and perfectly adequate as a basis for defining “right wing” art. The problem with this definition is not that it’s wrong, but that the question itself is asking us to conjoin two spheres of human experience that are mismatched in the way that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mismatched. Both art and politics describe the world, but do so for different purposes and at different scales and when you force one set of descriptions onto a space of inquiry that belongs to the other, the math just doesn’t work out.

In other words, politics and art are NOT the same thing. There is a feedback loop, yes, but politics does not circumscribe art. Art is not contained within its boundaries, or not totally, and so to apply ideological labels to art is a fundamental category error that got us into this problem in the first place.

We don’t want to make the same mistake the left did by insisting that art satisfy our political priors. This will distort our creative undertakings in all sorts of ways that will reduce the quality of art and therefore reduce its cultural power (and therefore its political power). Instead, all a new cultural right has to do is tell the truth.

Firstly, what does one mean by telling the truth in art? I have written about this here, spoken about it here, and spoken about it elsewhere here. You can draw this idea down into more and more fragmented claims about epistemology and what it is for something to be true in the philosophical sense—which discussions will get you precisely nowhere, and not incidentally are the foundations for post-modernism—but instead, at a higher level of abstraction, rather than be concerned by truth, you can more plainly identify whether the artist and the art he is making is honest to itself, whether it passes the test of verisimilitude, or, to the contrary, whether it compromises itself because it is forced to or because the artist makes bad (inauthentic) artistic choices.

What in practice does that mean? Here is a straightforward and highly-visible case of dishonest art: anything that requires “sensitivity readers.” Sensitivity readers first emerged in the mid to late 2010s, mostly in the world of young adult fiction, which had already become an ideological wet market for tumblr-style identity politics. Publishers and editors would hire “sensitivity readers” to flag manuscripts for perceived moral offenses. One of the earliest high-profile cases was the novelist Keira Drake’s The Continent which featured a battle royale of warring tribes that were described in “racialized” language. Bowing to political pressure, the publisher shelved the books, hired two sensitivity readers to correct these transgressions, and then had Drake spend six months overhauling the book before republishing it again.

In the years since, the practice has become commonplace. At many major publishers, last I checked anyway, sensitivity vetting has become baked-in to the regular editorial process. In one instance, which I have discussed previously, the novelist Bruce Wagner’s book The Marvel Universe was flagged by a sensitivity reader for the inclusion of a character named “Fat Joan.” Wagner refused the publisher’s demands to rewrite the character and his book was subsequently dropped. More notably, earlier this year, the British publisher Puffin retroactively edited the works of Roald Dahl to remove words like “fat” and “ugly” and to rework gendered descriptions into gender-neutral ones. In one of the more absurd cases, Augustus Gloop of Willy Wonka fame is no longer “enormously fat,” he is just “enormous,” which presumably makes him more morally acceptable. Dahl’s estate and the publisher both justified this bowdlerization of his work with vague appeals to “making the books work for modern audiences,” a euphemism for treating literature as a kind of hazardous material that must be made safe for public consumption, or, even more to the point, a kind of compliance document for whatever political fashions are currently in style.

But of course, these crude and ham-fisted examples of political imposition on creative output are just the visible eruptions of a much deeper cultural condition. The more pervasive and more insidious problem is the quiet, habitual self-distortion that creatives and the culture industry more broadly now perform reflexively, often without even recognizing it as compromise. They learn early on, often before they publish a single word or screen a single scene, what can and can’t be said, what kinds of “representations” will sell to distribution platforms, which characters are “allowed” do this thing but not this other thing, which moral frameworks must be affirmed, which narratives can be subverted and which can’t, who the heroes are, and what constitutes both evil and its salvation. The audience knows this too. We can smell it. And we don’t like what we smell.

This is why the antidote to this is so deceptively simple. If you truly believe that your worldview, and how that manifests as politics, was accurate in its suppositions and predictions about human nature and the social world, then you wouldn’t need to coerce your creative output into alignment with it. This will all happen naturally as a simple function of honesty, of artistic integrity. Just tell the truth. Whether, as in No Country for Old Men, it’s the evocation of civilizational precarity and the nature of entropy, or in the case of David Lynch, the fuzzy, ineffable, semi-permeable veil of reality that our lives all nervously breech from time to time, or in the case of Girls, the cold, bitter consequences of total “liberation,” being honest, being uncompromising in your vision, tapping into the root conditions of the human experience is enough. That will get you as far as you need to go and that is all that art can hope for anyway. Art is not a tool for winning elections. Again, that is a category error.

And so long as your politics are anchored in an honest assessment of how people behave, including their limitations and messy particularities, “honest” art will confirm those politics more powerfully than anything you can say explicitly on the subject. And if it doesn’t, if the true and beautiful things you experience through art keep pointing elsewhere politically, then you should follow where they lead.

If you are on the right and you care about culture, this puts you in a pretty good place. The question Ross posed—what would right-wing art look like, and can the right produce it?—is, in the end, the wrong question. Or rather, it’s the wrong way to solve the problem of reorienting legacy institutions and incentive structures and distribution mechanisms that are artificially gunking up the system and preventing good and better culture from piercing the mainstream membrane. Yes, something is wrong with contemporary culture. Yes, it is politically compromised, often boring, and swarmed by the lamest people imaginable. Yes, there is an opportunity for artists who reject those conditions to make something better. But that better thing will not be made by trying to make it “right-wing.”

The moment you begin with the assumption that art must serve politics, even yours, you’ve already forfeited its power. Stop worrying about that. Make it honest. Make it good. The rest will sort itself out.

This week, I have something a little different. It’s a written interview with one of my favorite new fiction authors, V.N. Ebert. Ebert’s debut short story collection was recently published by Passage Press (which you can buy now by clicking on the link).

The back jacket of the book describes the stories thusly:

In this debut collection of short stories, author V.N. Ebert cuts deep into the heart of the American South. Haunted by ghosts of ancestral battles and violent histories, these stories explore the lives of flawed but heroic characters, each fighting an existential war for reclamation. Some win, some lose, and some have already lost, their struggles playing out amidst the decaying, jasmine-scented ruins of a world outside of time.

This book first came across the transom when I started the original Passage Prize in late 2021, a contest I’d hoped would draw out some of the hidden artistic and literary talent that had been left to languish during the era of radical censorship and cultural decay that had taken root in the previous decades.

Ebert’s titular story ended up winning First Prize for the fiction category. Among the many entrants, his writing above all was a vindication of my thesis for the contest, that indeed highly talented people were out there who, for petty political reasons, had been denied the opportunity to have their work taken seriously by the legacy gatekeepers. While green in certain respects—as virtually all unpublished writers are—Ebert’s command of language, his unique style, his understanding of the elements of story, and the inexplicable magic of this combination of native talents, all compelled me to demand of him a book-length manuscript to publish.

Two years later, Georgia Buddha finally came to fruition. This is a remarkable collection that achieves moments of incredible poignancy. It is also very funny, darkly so, and unlike so much contemporary literature tells compelling stories full of action and excitement.

I am as proud of this collection as any editor or publisher has a right to be of someone else’s work. V.N. Ebert is a remarkable talent who I firmly believe will help revitalize the world of American letters. Over the last several weeks, Ebert and I had the following exchange in which we speak about his collection, his thoughts on writing, his thoughts on the current political and cultural environment, and what comes next for him.

Enjoy.

Lomez: It seems to me that the main character of Georgia Buddha is its setting. In these very different stories of very different kinds of people, the throughline is the place where they all live. Southern writers seem to be especially aware of the physical environment of their stories and its spiritual qualities. I am thinking of Faulkner of course, but some of my other favorite southern writers like Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, and Padget Powell who all treat the south as a living thing which, like their human characters, has motivations and interests all its own. So what’s going on here? What is it about the south–the geography, its history, its people, its spirits–that gives rise to this perception?

V.N. Ebert: Southern whites are unique among white Americans in having lost a total war on their own soil. That’s the starting point, I think, for Southern writers, white Southern writers and the white Southern experience. The second point is that Southern whites think of ourselves as native to the South, as not having immigrated here, but of this being our native soil.

To explain that, the South had a failed national awakening. It is unique in having that experience, the Confederacy which in practice was a collective suicide attempt. And the South spends over a century, maybe now a century-and-a-half, as a defeated nation trying to retrench itself and decide it fits into the larger American culture. What’s left, because of the destruction of the Old World, slave-holding, plantation dominated culture of the antebellum South, which itself required an act of redefinition, of deciding what the South was in its defeat. The South produced a posthumous national epic, or a sub-national epic, in Gone with the Wind, which is not good history but remarkable national mythmaking. And, because the South is part of the national culture, that becomes the biggest movie Hollywood ever made, and so it’s that process of the South defining itself and its own place in the national culture.

So, the South has a spirit, a tragic spirit. The South is the tragic part of America. The South is also, paradoxically and relatedly, the most American part of the country and the part of America most alienated from the rest of the country. How sons and grandsons of Confederate generals saw action in World War II, or guys today who fly large twinned American and Confederate flags from their lawns.

This all gives the South a particular sense of place, and a sense of history and of a people traveling through history that has acted on them in a very powerful and irrevocable way. And there’s other elements, of course, including being a self-consciously aristocratic and racially stratified society that throws a wrench in the egalitarian self-image of the larger nation.

In a literary way, I think the history seeps into the landscape and the people. Writers and the intellectuals of the South have a way of investing history and a tragic sensibility into both of those. I certainly do, it informs and probably helped inculcate my interest in transience, in inevitable defeat and survival after defeat, and in the transcendence that can arise from spiritual crisis.

I’m a writer of crisis. I’m more interested in defeat than victory, and I think that’s common to Southern writers. We’re intellectuals living after the defeat, and so our victories are necessarily limited and temporary, and circumscribed, as are the victories and successes of our characters. That condition is spiritually and aesthetically interesting, and it’s the Southern condition. I suppose it’s also the Human Condition, but it’s very apparent in the Southland.

Along these lines, the book also seems to be interested in acts of stupid and chaotic violence. Reading through many of these stories, I was reminded of a Coen brothers movie. These characters are not always redeeming, but are very often agents of unforgiveable and unthinkable villainy to the point it becomes morbidly funny. Is the connection between violence and humor something you are conscious of while writing your fiction?

I am—I have a dry, dark humor, and an absurdist streak. I thought the book was funny, not laugh-a-minute-funny, but, how you put it, morbidly funny.

I wear my influence from Flannery O’Connor on my sleeve, her interest in violent and grotesque, comic characters who wrestle with God. And, to pull in the previous question, the South has that violent and comic element, both in its history and in its stereotypes, back-slapping old boys with shotguns.

Especially starting with the title story, Georgia Buddha, I was interested in how extreme a character could be and still be sympathetic. My process, my experience of writing is that I’m spending time with the people involved in my head, and maybe aspects of that are wanting to capture the fullness of the person. Say, Medea Gothic, which is I think the most pitch-black story in the collection, was also one where I thought, these people are funny. It’s the Coen Brothers, or the literary antecedents of the Coen Brothers like, among others, Jim Thompson and Elmore Leonard, crime writers who wrote about criminals who were bumbling idiots and demanded to be taken seriously.

There’s also a position that someone else articulated, I can’t remember who at the moment, that comedy at its best was the greater spiritual vehicle than tragedy. That tragedy is recognizing the tragedy inherent in being alive, and crying, while comedy is recognizing that tragedy and laughing. And violence is tied into that, in people who are absolutely in over-their heads, and responding poorly and chaotically.

Maybe this treatment of violence and humor and the human animal as such brings us finally to the spiritual center of this book. The title, Georgia Buddha, points our compass east, but also stories like “Floating World,” “Death Poem,” “Mother Kali” and others have unmistakably eastern spiritual undertones (and even overtones). This collision of the Far East and the South is not something I think I’ve encountered before. It creates such a complex metaphysical texture to the writing. There’s a great moment at the end of “Floating World” where a southern officer is visiting Japan after World War II and has a tender moment with a geisha, telling her, “I got beat by the Yankees, too.” Such a funny and poignant scene.

I don’t really have a question here. Tell me more about this collision–or fusion–of worlds, Far East and American South. Is this unique to you as an author, or is there something more fundamental about this relationship?

Maybe both? Or, there’s a commonality which I haven’t seen explored by other writers, and I was positioned to write on it. Or had flat enough associational gradients to recognize it. A branch of my family has been over-educated for four generations, and has an eccentric streak, or a strain which produces idiosyncratic seeker personalities.

My grandmother would have done well born to professors in the Bay Area and instead she was born very poor in East Texas and migrated within the South, but she was a product of the post-World War II expansion of the university system and completed a PhD and became a college professor which, given her background, would be impressive even today and for the time and place she did it in, the early 1960’s in Texas and the Deep South, was remarkable. But, she was New Agey, she changed religions a few times in her life, and later in life she was deeply committed to Psychoanalysis, so she would talk about Jung in a strong Southern accent to her ten year old grandchildren, and not even the like personality inventory Jung but the, we are all ascendent spiritual beings and eventually we will become omniscient Jung, which maybe gets to some of why I am how I am.

So, there’s an atypical New Agey strain in my Southern family. I half-jokingly say that I’m a Calvinist Buddhist. Maybe that’s the starting point. Because there’s a long tradition of Americans finding something in Japan, or what they imagine Japan is, or East Asia more generally. Alan Watts, the Beats, Joseph Campbell, other people who I imagine were difficult to deal with. Most of whom were also not likely to interpret what they saw through a Southern lens. Bay Area or prototypical Bay Area, California tends to show up in my work as a metaphor for escape, the West Coast where people reach the sea and can’t go any farther, and it’s also the farthest place, spiritually, from the South. So, they were people who tended to see the Zen, but ignored or downplayed that, say, D.T. Suzuki was also a booster for the Empire of Japan before discovering pacifism in defeat. Or that Hinduism also has caste and sati and a devouring Shiva, among other aspects which don’t fit well with the kind-of Americans most likely to become interested in India.

Because there are commonalities. Japan and the South particularly were both aristocratic, militaristic, racialized societies that came into conflict with and were crushed by the greatest power in human history, the productive capacity of the American military-industrial complex, and were partially remade in the image of the victorious power. Hence, “I got beat by Yankees too,” which I liked, too. They are both nations that live their defeat, and are trying to find their place after a civilizational crisis.

So, there’s that, a commonality almost of mood, and of a shared impulse to self-annihilation by violence. And, relatedly, there’s a part of the East Asian, religious and philosophical tradition that I think becomes deracinated and woo-woo-ish when it’s being handled by Yankee pacifists. Because it’s a tradition with a great capacity for violence, and thoughts on violence, and morally complicated elements that deserve to be taken seriously instead of being written off. Much of which could also be said of the American South.

And so, I was interested in driving that commonality as far as I could. In seeing if Sri Ramakrishna could be situated, not just in India or in California, but in the Southland. In sparse ink-wash paintings of the Deep South. So, I think I’ve worked my way to more definitively saying, it’s both. There’s a fusion of the two cultures that is suggested from a certain perspective, and that perspective might be idiosyncratic enough that I was an appropriate writer to see it. To the extent that they gesture to a universal philosophy, Ramakrishna and the Buddha have to be in the South as much as they are in India.

Your above answer talks some about your biography, but you’re writing this under a pseudonym, and outside of some generic details I don’t know anything about you—and I’m your publisher! The audience knows even less.

This is par for the course for this online space we’re in and where I discovered your writing (the titular story won 1st place for fiction in our first ever Passage Prize), but is less common for mainstream publishing. Despite the so-called “death of the author” made famous in the 60’s by Roland Barthes, identity in authorship is perhaps more important now than ever. Whether the author is a woman, gay, black, disabled, [insert favored identity category here] seems to be all that matters in fact.

So how do you think about anonymity in your case? Why is it necessary? Or is it necessary? Or anyway what is the function of anonymity as a writer/artist in the Current Year?

In my few interactions outside of Passage, there’s been some ambiguity as to whether it was a pseudonym. As well as to what V.N. actually stands for. I think I’ve given you my name, at least it’s on some of the forms somewhere, although actually I signed the contract as V.N., now that I think about it.

On some level, I like being V.N. Ebert. I think writers, or writers who aren’t writing autobiography or thinly-veiled autobiography, have an impulse to become other people. It’s freeing, you escape the judgment of others, and free yourself from being yourself. And, I’m a private person - there’s a particular variation of attention-seeking introvert that probably describes authors. It’s a field where even if you do well, no one actually knows what you look like.

There’s also, semi-seriously, it helps with my actual life. It wouldn’t, it’s not as though I’d lose my job, or be driven underground, but it would be at best an awkward conversation I’d have to have and, from then on, like it’d be something I’d have to say about myself. As though I’d have to introduce myself as, here’s me, and oh, I also write and have some things published, don’t worry, you’ve not read them and I don’t want you to. Most of my family doesn’t know I do this, and very few of my friends. It makes it easy to compartmentalize my life.

So, I suppose it’s not absolutely necessary, but it helps. I have some idea that V.N. arose to write a series of works, gothic fiction set in the postwar South, about God and violence and the passing away of things, and then he’ll pass on himself. Embody the theme. Or I get doxxed and just use some version of my actual name in the reprinting, which is less romantic and more practical.

Maybe, to try to answer the larger question, anonymity creates a blank slate. I like the work being read as the work, rather than being refracted through my biography. It lets me be read on my terms, which is in the tradition of Southern writers, and as an American writer, which I suppose is not totally a blank slate, but then again it’s probably what someone would expect from reading the book. In the premodern world, Camille Paglia I think discusses this somewhere, actors were almost unique in taking new names, stage names going back far into history. And pen names also have a long history, I think there’s a long impulse in trying to shape how the work is received, and how a writer or creative can operate, by taking on a pseudonym.

In the Current Year, I suppose it’s the only way to have the work be read as the work, instead of being forced into a box. I wouldn’t like to be stuck as an identity-politics writer. And, like I put it already, it does help compartmentalize. That’s maybe the enduring value, it lets a person be who that person is, and who that person is as a writer or artist, and for people who for various reasons personal and psychological need distance between those things, anonymity lets them be writers or artists. There’s an element of self-transformation in creative work, I think it helps with that.

One of the bets I’ve made with Passage is there’s a bunch of untapped literary and creative talent out there that for a variety of complicated reasons have been gatekept out of traditional literary circles over the last several decades. By positioning Passage outside of that network—politically, culturally, aesthetically, etc.—the idea was that we could draw that talent out and maybe find some escape from the broad cultural malaise we are in. You are one such example of that talent.

Do you have any thoughts about where the culture is going broadly speaking and how your writing and/or this project fits into that assessment? As a writer, what did the existence of Passage mean for you, and/or do you have any sense of whether we might be able to solve the problem identified by the New York Times recently as the “disappearance of literary men?”

Put more plainly: do you accept the premise that literary culture in America is in a deep depression at the moment, and if so what can be done to fix it?

I’ll start with saying, thank you and everybody else at Passage for making me part of that bet. It’s been a great experience, and I had never thought that I’d be able to come this far as an author.

Passage was a unique opportunity for me to be a traditional author, with a book that exists in the physical world and the legitimacy and opportunity that brings with it. It opened a door, and I’ll discuss this a little more later, for me to pursue writing with the possibility that what I’m writing will actually find an audience. It's a symbiotic relationship, because searching for talent encourages that talent. And it has been really incredibly creatively stimulating, I had a certain amount of material ready for this book when you first reached out to me but the period after that has been very fruitful. It’s difficult, not impossible but difficult, to be entirely internally or intrinsically driven. Writing purely for yourself, I do that, I have done that, and plenty of writers do, but it is incredibly rewarding to write for an audience. A book, someone said this once and I liked this description, is a conversation held by an author with unknown readers. Passage, in my way of thinking, provides authors who, for whatever reason, are outside of the traditional literary network, with an interested and receptive readership. In my own, personal, small way, the times people on Twitter reach out or mention this book, those have always made my day.

I tend to think that literary culture in America is maybe very narrow? I guess that’s a kind of depression. American literary culture, from my outside perspective, seems like it’s very good at nurturing a particular kind of talent and putting out a certain kind of book which appeals to a certain kind of reader. Whatever is on the front table at a Barnes & Noble, or a local bookstore, the kind-of book which has a tendency to be described as brave or urgent or important. The machine has an assembly-line quality to it, with this year’s model book. Maybe that's depression, a kind-of creative stasis. It’s simultaneously, and perhaps relatedly, very faddish, and I suppose I have doubts that the best-reviewed American novels of the last few decades have much staying power.

I don’t have any great thoughts on fixing the culture. It would be nice if literary culture were more open to novels which appealed to men, or expected more of the reader, or had a stronger sense of literary history, or the Western Canon generally. I had a creative writing teacher who once gleefully started listing significant novels and saying that none of them would be published now, which struck me then and has stuck with me. I don’t know if that’s a matter of the audience’s taste or the publisher’s, but that seems less than ideal to me.

That said, I do think the internet has also stimulated the classics, meaning broadly the Great Books, at least for a certain variety of the terminally online. I have no idea if that means anything to the wider world, but at least there’s some community that keeps the classics going. A different teacher, who I liked a bit more, said that the thing about the classics is that they never sell a lot in a given year, but they always sell something in a given year, and will forever. Hopefully the forever part remains true, but I’m optimistic that some people will keep reading, even if the stereotype about the kinds of people who are over-literate might shift over the next decade or so. Maybe it’s all about searching for an audience, the literary men, who probably are still out there unless there really was a great die off, and getting them contemporary material that they would actually like to read.

What are V.N. Ebert’s plans? What do you intend to work on now that you’ve completed this book? When I put on my editors’ hat, I see the seeds of a few novels in these stories waiting to sprout. Do you have any ambitions in that direction?

I guess this is a good time to announce that I’ve been working on a novel, provisionally titled Boll Weevil, and am about a month from finishing the manuscript. I would describe the novel as a child of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 with a Zen Buddhist upbringing and wartime combat experience. I’ve been picking it up and putting it down for years, working on a couple variations on the same characters and setting and never quite being happy with it, and shelved it while I tried to get Georgia Buddha finished under deadline.

To back up a bit, I had originally thought that I would write a novel before trying a short story collection, I had written “Georgia Buddha” and “Sky Burial” already but thought I would try something on a grander scale. I wrote part of what would have been a multi-part novel during COVID before abandoning the project. I actually got V.N. Ebert out of that book, incidentally, the pseudonym used by a character that was based on me. In retrospect, it reminds me of what I think Larry Brown said about his first novel, that he needed to get the crap out of him before he could write something good. Or maybe that every writer needs to write a million bad words before he can write a single good one, something to that effect.

And, this involves a little bit of a glimpse behind the curtain on the production of this collection, there was some lag time between the manuscript being substantially completed and the book coming off the press, and during that period I kept working on short stories. I had momentum, and every time I went back to the novel I conked out. I decided that I would try to get to the point where I had enough finished material that I could put out a second collection, and then I would go back to the novel.

I ended up having a very productive period, and I reached that point sooner than I had expected. As an aside, one of the stories from that batch, “Tar Paper,” which is available on my WordPress, would probably serve as the title of that collection if it ever appears. And the novel ended up coming together. That weird way that a switch gets pulled and suddenly it’s working creatively. For a while I had an early version of the first two chapters on my site, I pulled those and ended up changing the structure, I stripped the book down and found that it moved much better.

So, from here, I’m trying to finish up that novel, there’ll be some amount of editing and revision but I think it has good bones. And I do have two that are outlined, one of which would be derived from actually one of the shorter stories in the collection, “Eumenides County,” and probably share that title. It would be a crime story set in the South shortly after World War II, about a corrupt declining family of planters, and a Western agent of an industrial concern seeking to invest in the county, being pulled into a murder of a local girl, and a character like the avenging character in Eumenides County, Hoss, also appearing.

The other might end up, assuming I ever actually write it, I’m bad about changing projects, being closer to a linked short-story collection, but would share a setting and tone with the last story in this collection, “Appomattox Courthouse,” in the Deep South and the dying days of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction.

Generally, I’m working on how to get stuff out there. I’ve been toying around with starting a Substack, but I’ve been running around in my personal life and have been willing to carve out time to write but not to figure out how to market the work. But, I’m much farther along than I ever expected to be, and I’m grateful. I’m really just happy to be able to write something worth reading with the expectation that, sometime, someone will actually see it.

Yesterday I caught up with right wing activist and Panda Express chief of recruitment, Chris Rufo, to digest the last 10 days of political…

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No matter that final outcome, now is a good time to do a post-mortem on this episode since it feels unique in many ways and is likely to be replayed over and over again in the coming years. There are some important lessons to be taken from the last several days—the arguments and the meta arguments and the manner in which the arguments happened—so taking a snapshot of it all while it is still fresh may be useful down the road.

1. You Matter

Firstly, dear humble poaster, YOU ARE IN THE ARENA. There is a shopworn notion, mostly leveled by a kind of teenage goth above-it-all style of thinker hiding his own insecurities in his edgy performative indifference, that says whatever is happening on X is only fun and games, politically irrelevant, and that you are shouting into the void (don’t ask him what exactly he’s shouting into by pointing this out). In any case, if you still believe that, there is no hope for you. These lesser posters, those who failed the test of the election or who feel embittered about their own modest audience relative to larger accounts will insist that anons are wasting their time with this stuff. Don’t believe them.

You can take my word for it.1 The things you are saying are being read and considered by the people who matter. X discourse is not just trivial recreation. These ideas trickle up. The tweets themselves trickle up. They land in the laps of the people in Palm Beach and D.C. You are being heard. Your objections are being noted. Your good arguments improve the chances of the things you want to see happen actually happening. Your bad arguments hurt those chances. Policy is getting hashed out in real time and you have a say in it.

And in large part Elon Musk is to thank for this. None of this is possible without Musk buying Twitter and reforming it into the platform he promised to make it: the vehicle for free speech and real debate, the digital public square. Whatever your differences with the man, don’t lose sight of that. He is owed a tremendous amount of deference and respect. Elon, thank you.

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I get it. This was the prudent th…

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I can’t resolve that problem, but I will try to offer some clarity around the topic that will at least keep the term legible, separate out its adherents from its detractors, and maybe most importantly explain how its successor ideology has transmogrified into the ruling ethos of the Global American Empire.

Part II.

After the Cold War ended in 1991, neoconservatism had become one of the most powerful forces in American politics, but without an obvious next step. For decades its foreign policy agenda had been firmly anchored to the fight against global communism, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union that raison d'être vanished and there was no longer an obvious enemy to focus its energies or cohere the right-of-center coalition that Reagan had managed to knit together during the 80s. So where were neocons supposed to pivot in the wake of Soviet collapse? And for that matter, how was the right going to redefine itself without the clarity of purpose that had shaped its agenda since the end of World War II?

Exacerbating the confusion was the fact that the domestic issues around which the neocons first raised their profile seemed increasingly “solved” or in any case thoroughly absorbed into mainstream Republican and Democratic platforms. The social and cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s became far less salient as hippiedom forfeited its cultural ascendancy to yuppiedom and the emergent “moral majority.” Reagan’s War on Drugs and Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill set in motion the most dramatic reduction in crime the country had ever seen, and the issue of welfare dependency, which was maybe the first and most frequent target of neoconservative critique, was effectively put to rest when Clinton passed welfare reform in ‘96.

American life was pretty good. NAFTA, which passed in ‘92 but only went into effect in ‘94, hadn’t quite yet gutted the interior. Reagan’s amnesty and the 1990 Immigration Act would have disastrous downstream consequences (which remain at the center of our politics today), but in this post-Cold War period were mostly concentrated in a few border states. A sense of optimism prevailed. Economic liberalization, suburbanization, and the “culture of narcissism” that defined the boomers had come into full maturity and resulted in a largely depoliticized society.2 To the extent there were salient socio-political questions, they revolved around a totally new set of priorities, mostly driven by the Christian right. Issues like abortion, school prayer, and the sanctity of marriage supplanted earlier debates around drugs, crime, and urban decay.

In such a context, the neocons of old didn’t really have much to contribute. Not only did the neocons not care as much about these questions, their more academic, data-driven approach––so useful in debates over welfare and crime––didn’t apply as well to debates on abortion. Further, as pointed out in Part 1, if you take Alexander Bloom’s assessment seriously that the early neocons were primarily motivated by a deep-seated fear of anti-semitism,3 the 80s and 90s made that fear a literal joke. American Jews enjoyed unprecedented levels of social and cultural assimilation during this period, and the rise of Christian evangelical support for Israel in the 1980s created an unlikely but powerful alliance that reinforced Jewish security in the American political landscape. You’d be hard pressed to find a place and time in history where Jews had it so good.

With their relevance on domestic questions made more or less obsolete, and the old generation of neocons now giving way to the new generation (famously in the case of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to their sons, Bill and John), the neocons turned their attention to the unsettled debate over how to assert American military might in a world devoid of the Soviet threat. How the neocons are perceived now, and their reputation as reckless chickenhawks is based largely on the reorientation of their politics starting in the 90s. Where you start or which figures or writings you choose to include to make sense of this shift is an open question, and again, for the third time, I’m almost certainly leaving something out, but for the sake of “good enough” I will look at three main texts: “The Unipolar Moment” by Charles Krauthammer which was published in Foreign Affairs in 1991, the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide from 1992 authored by Paul Wolfowitz under the purview of Scooter Libby, and “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for a New American Century published in September of 2000.

Krauthammer’s 1991 article in Foreign Affairs is the place to start not only because it clearly spells out the neoconservative foreign policy vision of the 90s and beyond–– both its practical and moral justifications––but also explains the post Cold War departure from neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick whose more realist foreign policy approach prevailed during the Reagan administration.

As the Cold War drew to a close, Kirkpatrick wrote an essay that ran in the National Interest titled “A Normal Country in a Normal Time”4 where she argued that America could retire its foreign policy obsessions and recenter its efforts on domestic concerns, that the world and America no longer faced the same degree of existential threat from abroad as it did in the decades prior, and that we should therefore relinquish any presumptions to being the world’s sole global superpower. She writes:

Foreign policy becomes a major aspect of a society only if its government is expansionist, imperial, aggressive, or when it is threatened by aggression. One of the most important consequences of the half century of war and Cold War has been to give foreign affairs an unnatural importance. The end of the Cold War frees time, attention, and resources for American needs.

…

Most of the international military obligations that we assumed were once important are now outdated. Our alliances should be alliances of equals, with equal risks, burdens, and responsibilities. It is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status and become again an usually successful, open American republic.

But few have the constitution to throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom once it is in their possession. Kirkpatrick may have been right, but her fellow neocons were not persuaded. Krauthammer’s “Unipolar Moment,” published shortly after “A Normal Country,” explicitly rejected Kirkpatrick’s view, asserting instead that the world remained fraught with threats that required active U.S. leadership (citing the first Iraq War as evidence of this fact), and that moreover the U.S. had an obligation to act as the guarantor of global stability and to shirk from this responsibility would be inviting chaos into the international system that would ensure more and worse military aggression in the years to come. For Krauthammer, war was the natural condition of the world, and to the extent you weren’t fighting one, you were staving one off. For Krauthammer, there was no such thing as a “normal time.”

In the essay Krauthammer goes on to reject a number of other foreign policy approaches. According to Krauthammer, isolationism or Kirkpatrick-esque retrenchment leaves a power vacuum, Kissinger-esque realism overestimates the possibility of muli-polarity where countries like Japan or Germany can effectively balance power in their region, and liberal internationalism is a delusion that falsely imagines that the U.N. or the fiction of “International Law” can ever mean anything if not enforced by the U.S. military, that liberal internationalism is in effect just American unipolarity but dressed up in toothless formalities we might as well do without.

Karuthammer puts it like this:

“The true geopolitical structure of the post-Cold War world, brought sharply into focus by the gulf crisis [is this]: a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West…. American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself.”

Where it gets more interesting is deeper in the essay where Krauthammer pays lip service to the isolationist position, speaking more or less directly to Pat Buchanan and Jeane Kirkpatrick who represented the other path in the fork conservatives were facing at the time.

“I have great respect for American isolationism. First, because of its popular appeal and, second, because of its natural appeal. On the face of it, isolationism seems the logical, God-given foreign policy for the United States.

It is not just geography that inclines us to it––we are an island continent protected by two vast oceans, bordered by two neighbors that could hardly be friendlier––but history. America was founded on the idea of cleansing itself of the intrigues and irrationalities, the dynastic squabbles and religious wars, of the Old World.

…

Isolationists say rather unobjectionably that America should confine its attentions in the world to defending vital national interests.”

But here Krauthammer pauses and signals the exception to his sympathy for isolationism that would predict the next two decades of interventionist war on behalf of the “unipolar” worldview. This is perhaps the most important paragraph in the essay and in many ways the key that unlocks the post Cold War neoconservative approach to foreign policy:

“Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and hegemonic designs on Arabia posed as clear a threat to American interests as one can imagine––a threat to America's oil-based economy, to its close allies in the region, and ultimately to American security itself. The rise of a hostile power, fueled by endless oil income, building weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them regionally and eventually intercontinentally (Saddam has already tested a three-stage rocket) can hardly be a matter of indifference to the United States.

If under these conditions a cadre of influential liberals and conservatives finds that upon reflection (and in contradiction to the doctrine enunciated by the most dovish president of the postwar era, Jimmy Carter) the Persian Gulf is not, after all, a vital American interest, then it is hard to see what ‘vital interest’ can mean.”

Go ahead and re-read that. All of it. What is being defined here as a “vital” American interest? Is what he describes as “clear a threat to American interests as one can imagine?” The presumptive yes Krauthammer expects you to answer these questions with, and the military obligations implied by that answer becomes the defining feature of the neocons from this point on.

Two foundational documents emerged in the subsequent decade that gave institutional shape to Krauthammer’s vision: the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), primarily authored by Paul Wolfowitz, with recommendations from Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Perle, and eight years later a report from Project for the New American Century (PNAC) titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” published in September of 2000. Together, these texts formalized Krauthammer’s assertion of American global dominance as a moral and strategic imperative and paved the way for what was to come in the wake of 9/11.

The Defense Planning Guidance, leaked in draft form to The New York Times in 1992, set out an explicit strategy to prevent the emergence of any rival power that could challenge the United States’ global supremacy. It identified the dissolution of the Soviet Union not as the culmination of America’s global responsibilities but as the beginning of a new era requiring active measures to consolidate the unipolar world. Wolfowitz and his co-authors argued:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival… This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The DPG’s focus on preempting regional hegemons across Western Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union echoed Krauthammer’s warning against isolationism and multipolarity, and it took them a step further by operationalizing this principle: the United States must, at all times, be using its military and economic might to actively shape the global environment to ensure no competitor could rise. The document prescribed a military posture capable of swift interventions, noting that “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” was a fundamental objective. Wolfowitz’s guidance also reified the moral dimension of this strategy, conflating the spread of democracy and open markets to U.S. security interests.5

The strategic framework established through the DPG went somewhat dormant during the Clinton years. Clinton’s more liberal internationalist approach came under heavy attack from the pages of The Weekly Standard,6 which by the late 90’s had supplanted Commentary as the neoconservative magazine of record, and made a routine of bashing Clinton for his reticence to fully embrace America’s global obligations, hedging military engagement and getting bogged down in bureaucratic entanglements with the U.N. and NATO, and thereby squandering opportunities to cement American dominance by failing the test of the Balkans and elsewhere. The story the neocons told of the impotent, half-cocked liberal approach to foreign policy of the mid-90s was full of holes but ultimately convincing since no one could explain how the “multilateral institutions” beloved by liberals could justify their authority apart from the sheer fact of American military might. America was the undisputed strongest nation in the world and Americans rightfully believed they should, if responsibly exercised, flex that power however they pleased.

In 2000 Bush came into office with the explicit mandate to reassert American military dominance abroad. The braintrust at Project for a New American Century, a think tank founded by the editors of The Weekly Standard, published a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” that expanded and updated the Krauthammer-DPG foreign policy vision in the aftermath of Clinton’s eight years of “strategic drift.” PNAC’s signatories and staff included a who’s-who of the eras conservative figureheads––Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, Eliot Cohen, John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Steve Forbes, our old friend from Part 1, Norman Podhoretz, and many others––who all came to together to identify a clear strategic objective:

“The United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.”

This ambition underscored the PNAC’s commitment to maintaining American military dominance through significant investments in defense, the modernization of U.S. forces, and the expansion of military capabilities into every corner of life, including the internet. It also identified the Middle East, particularly Iraq (please take note of why Iraq keeps coming up over and over again) as a central theater for asserting U.S. influence, arguing for regime change as a necessary step to stabilize the region and protect American interests.

The practical application of these ideas became a fait accompli after 9/11. The Bush administration, populated largely by the neocons listed above, had finally found the pretext to implement the policies outlined in these documents with almost total carte blanche from a freshly wounded and blood thirsty American public. The event was so well suited to the neocon agenda that even the most hardened skeptic can forgive 9/11 conspiracy theorists for drawing certain connections. Strange, improbable things happen. Fate conspires toward its own ends. Fine. But one might at least raise an eyebrow for good measure.

In any case, the neocon moment had arrived. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 embodied of the broader vision articulated in Krauthammer’s essay, the DPG, and the PNAC report. The Iraq invasion, in particular, reflected the neoconservative belief that regime change could transform an entire region into a stable, democratic, pro-American bloc—a conviction rooted in the idealistic strain of neoconservatism totally at odds with the steely-eyed pragmatism its practitioners applied to just about everything else. The wisdom, or catastrophic hubris of the neoconservative worldview would finally be proven out on the battlefield.

Suffice to say, the battlefield won. The invasion quickly turned into a disaster. The occupation was marked by strategic failures, from insufficient troop levels to the disbanding of the Iraqi military, which fueled a violent insurgency and gave rise to terrorist groups that would haunt us for the next decade. The neocons who held the line were reduced to sputtering cope. David Frum, for example, a then speech writer for Bush, insisted that the war was necessary despite its challenges, resorting to moralistic abstractions and asserting that anyone who rejected the wisdom of the campaign was an “unpatriotic conservative.”

But many neocons jumped ship and the American people jumped ship with them. Major media figures and public intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama and Andrew Sullivan, once staunch proponents of the war and neocon-style interventionism more broadly, now led the charge against it in places like the Atlantic and the neocon home turf of the National Interest. Even William F. Buckley, while not a neoconservative per se, called the war “a failure” and argued that it was fundamentally “a mistake.” Their arguments followed from a public increasingly skeptical of the war’s aims and outcomes.7 The promise of a swift liberation followed by democracy-building was replaced by grim images of sectarian violence and an endless insurgency that claimed thousands of American lives. Our people were dying. And for what exactly?

A giant Israel-shaped elephant stalks the room.

Reading through these seminal neoconservative documents it is actually quite surprising how little Israel is mentioned. Krauthammer doesn’t mention Israel at all in “Unipolar Moment.”8 The DPG doesn’t either (at least not in the excerpts that were leaked to the New York Times in 1992). In the PNAC report the word Israel only shows up once, in a throwaway sentence about “Israeli and Saudi citizens donn[ing] gas masks in nightly terror of Scud attacks.” But the absence of the word “Israel” does little to obscure the shape of the negative space it occupies in all of these writings. Even the most ardent neoconservative apologist cannot deny the centrality of America’s “special relationship” with Israel in the neoconservative foreign policy mission.

How far you want to roll back the clock on this issue is a matter of taste. As I said before, this whole topic requires a book, and I only have this (now very long) post, so keeping with the focus on the 90s through the Iraq War, the first place to turn is the policy paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, authored by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser for Benjamin Netanyahu when he first took office as Prime Minister of Israel in 1996.

A Clean Break explicitly called for a shift in Israeli policy away from territorial concessions and peace negotiations, instead advocating for aggressive unilateral actions, including regime change in Iraq and the destabilization of Syria. The authors envisioned a “clean break” from the Oslo Accords and proposed a strategy focused on “weakening, containing, and even rolling back” regional adversaries to secure Israeli dominance. Remarkably, the policy’s recommendations—particularly the emphasis on removing Saddam Hussein and reshaping the regional order—aligned almost perfectly with the subsequent U.S. actions in the Middle East under the George W. Bush administration. However you perceive the motivations of the authors of the document, you’d have to be wilfully blind not to recognize the almost perfect 1:1 overlap between this paper and the broader neoconservative agenda as it was put into action after 9/11. Whatever daylight between Israel’s strategic interests expressed in A Clean Break and America’s military operations, you’d have to strain to find it.

You’d have to strain even further to conclude that the totality of this overlap was incidental. As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued in their widely criticized but poorly refuted paper9 The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the policies championed by the neoconservative movement in the post-Cold War period—and especially after 9/11—aligned remarkably with the interests of the Israeli state, often to the detriment of America.

Keeping in mind that the core of neoconservatism’s post-9/11 foreign policy was the idea that democratizing the Middle East would stabilize the region and, by extension, secure Israel’s safety, Mearsheimer and Walt write:

“Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel’s Likud Party… Although neoconservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not.… Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%. Thus, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence.’ Rather, the war was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially the neoconservatives within it.”

As detailed above, key neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith had long advocated regime change in Iraq as part of a broader strategy to remake the Middle East in Israel’s favor. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and eventually Iran all posed existential threats to Israel’s security and it is no wonder why these nations and regimes have become the central focus of U.S. military efforts in the middle-east for the entirety of the 21st century.

The problem, of course, was that these neoconservative priorities often ran counter to America’s own strategic interests. Iraq, which had been a secular counterbalance to Iran, became a vacuum for chaos after the U.S.-led invasion, empowering Shia militias and allowing Iran to extend its influence throughout the region. The unintended consequence was a badly fragmented region that unsurprisingly to everyone but the neocons invited only more chaos and danger. As Mearsheimer and Walt observe, “Israel was becoming a strategic burden,” and our ability to deal with terrorism and “rogue” Middle-East states was made more difficult, not less-so by ensnaring ourselves in narrow concerns over Israeli security.

Whether you find Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments compelling or not, it’s hard to refute that the results of neocon-led foreign policy efforts in the Middle East have been catastrophic for American security. The destabilization of Iraq birthed al-Qaeda and later ISIS, while U.S. policies inflamed anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world, creating new threats that demanded further interventions, and badly damaged our credibility and capability to deal with emerging threats elsewhere.

Even Israel itself did not emerge unscathed. By closely aligning with neoconservative policies, Israel became more straightforwardly a client-state of American empire, rather than a self-sustaining state of its own, and which made it an even larger target for regional hostility. Furthermore, the reliance on American power to secure its interests reduced Israel’s own incentives to pursue a sustainable peace with its neighbors. As Mearsheimer and Walt write, “Israel’s dependence on American support has given it the confidence to pursue policies—including expanding settlements in the West Bank and using disproportionate force in Gaza—that have made a two-state solution virtually impossible.”

Whether cynical or genuinely believed, motivated by selfish ethno-religious interest or belief in “Judeo-Christian” American might, or some other third thing, the neoconservative foreign policy strategy to wed itself so completely to the perceived mutual interests of Israel and the United States has done either country, or the world at large, little good.

As Americans started to intuit these contradictions at the close of the Bush years, the neoconservative project, over-extended and having lost sight of the warnings leveled by both its realist detractors and its more sober adherents like Jeane Kirkpatrick, collapsed under the weight of its failures. As the Obama presidency began, the neoconservative establishment did not vanish exactly but instead went underground, subtly repositioning itself within the new political landscape.

Its major figures seemed to pay little professional cost for their role in the foreign policy disasters that occupied the center of U.S. politics at the time. Figures like Robert Kagan and Max Boot became regular contributors to major publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times, reframing their arguments to appeal to a liberal audience that was increasingly wary of the GOP’s post-Bush turn toward populism.

Meanwhile, the Obama presidency’s foreign policy, while ostensibly a rejection of Bush-era interventionism, provided a surprising avenue for neoconservative influence. The more full-throated hawkish rhetoric preferred by people like Krauthammer was slightly softened by Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, but shared all of the same belligerent moralism that had justified the neoconservative attempt to export liberal Democracy to the rest of the world a decade earlier…

The third wave of neoconservatism that emerged during the Obama years, and then really hit its stride during the Trump Era is going to require a Part III, I’m afraid. I was going to try to squeeze it all in here, but I am already nearly 5,000 words in, and the transition is a bit complicated to explain, and the Thanksgiving holiday, and so on... This should give you plenty to chew on until next time.

So please stay tuned. Like. Comment. Subscribe. Etc.

[Part 2 can be found here]

A few weeks ago on Twitter/X there was another semi-regular flare-up where people try to define what a neocon is. Shrugging your shoulders and declaring the term meaningless is perfectly reasonable, but it got me thinking that trying to earnestly answer the question and put the term in the context of the Trump Moment might be a worthwhile effort for my new Substack (which you should become a paid subscriber to immediately).

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Approaching the topic of neoconservatism with any degree of thoroughness requires a very long book. There have been books about the neocons, some of them pretty good, mostly about its rise to prominence during the Cold War and up through the end of their ascendancy during the Bush years, but the meaning and consequence of the neocons has been profoundly scrambled during the Trump Era and deserves an updated account.

I don’t have the time or inclination to write a book on the subject,1 and I’m well aware that anything I can fit in a single post will exclude important details, so yes, my apologies in advance for not mentioning “that other thing.” My ambitions for this post are fairly modest. Think of this as a Wikipedia-ish article but inclusive of the thornier details that Wikipedia can’t talk about. Who are these people? Where did they come from? What distinguishes them from other kinds of conservatives? How did they get so much power and influence? And how did they screw everything up so badly?

Everyone knows the neocons were (are) mostly Jewish and were (are) foreign policy hawks,2 but beyond that the term is indeed something of a floating signifier. Still, there is no other ideological movement of the last half-century that has taken up such a large share of the political imagination, for the left as a catch-all bogeyman to describe “far-right” excess (mistakenly, since the neocons are not really right wing at all), and for the right as the scapegoat for two decades of failed military adventurism (not so mistakenly). 

The left has a hard time understanding the internal nuances of the right and for them neoconservative can mean anything from “conservative I really don’t like,” to “those Jewish foreign policy obsessives you see on Fox News.” There is this idea that if you add the modifier “neo” to conservative it makes you sound like your opinion is especially well-informed. I had one experience where a liberal colleague accused Trump of being a neocon. By this he just meant, “Trump is extra bad.” There is a lot of confusion out there.

On the right, the meaning is more narrowly tailored but still with very loose boundaries. It generally refers to the collection of politicians and talking heads, including some Democrats, from Bill Kristol to Lindsey Graham to John Bolton to Victoria Nuland, who seem to always be agitating for war or regime change somewhere in the world. It can also mean “those Jewish foreign policy obsessives you see on MSNBC.” This is true, but also incomplete.

Neoconservatism has come in three waves: its origins in the 1960s through Reagan, its apex during the Bush years, and its realignment (or decline) in the Trump era.3 What it is now bears only a vague resemblance to what it began as, but its origins are nonetheless central to understanding its trajectory all the way to the present. I’ll spend this post talking about the first wave of neoconservatism. Part 2, which I’ll publish next week (hopefully), will cover the 90s to the present. Much of this history mirrors what is happening with our current political realignment in the death throes of the Great Awokening so pay close attention.

Part I. The 60s, Kristol and Podhoretz, “mugged by reality,” the Cold War, Reagan, and the Post-War Right

The turmoil of the late sixties and its leftist social projects rearranged the political map and gave rise to many strange bedfellows and Frankenstein ideologies to accommodate it. The combination of militant black radicalism, the subversion of gender and sexual norms, “countercultural” revolt in the arts and media, targeted political violence, plus the codification of these trends in the overreach of the civil rights regime produced a number of social pathologies liberal moderates began to quietly turn away from throughout the mid 70s. Crime spiked. Divorce rates spiked. Church attendance plummeted. Drug use spiked. Welfare dependencies spiked. Cities fell into disrepair. Education standards plummeted. Et cetera. Et cetera. It’s all the same stuff as now, but with a little more woo and a lot more blood.

These problems also produced a wave of defections from inside the left (also like now4), in particular a small group of Jewish academics and public intellectuals who had been “mugged by reality,” and could no longer countenance the revolutionary zeal of their co-ideologues. Leading the exodus was former anti-Stalin Trotskyist and member of the Fourth International, Irving Kristol, the so-called "godfather of neoconservatism.” Though he quickly abandoned Marxist orthodoxy, its economics specifically, the underlying Trotskyist impulse toward moral universalism and the need for a vanguard to initiate global ideological struggle stayed more or less intact. All one needs to do to square this circle is replace “one-world communism” with “one-world liberal democracy.”

But in reality Kristol was not really focused on fighting wars overseas or exporting liberal democracy to the rest of the world. Though support for Israel was a neoconservative obsession from the start, mostly framed around shared democratic values in opposition to Soviet influence in the middle-east, the singular emphasis on foreign policy would come later. During the first wave of neoconservatism both Kristol and his neoconservative co-founder, Norman Podhoretz, a liberal “Truman-Democrat” who ran neoconservatism’s most influential media organ, Commentary magazine, spilled most of their ink on the country’s domestic problems. 

You go back and read through this stuff (stop and check the footnote5), tweak a few details here and there, and you can easily imagine these articles running in Free Press or Quillette or wherever today’s “classical liberals” inveigh against Wokism. This is not meant to be a criticism. Inveighing against leftist excess is always admirable, especially when done as forcefully as the early neocons. It is only to say that for anyone who does not believe history is cyclical, an afternoon in the archives is all it takes to be disabused of the notion.

The neocons were remarkably effective as social commentators. Commentary and the Public Interest (Kristol’s magazine which was even more domestic policy oriented) had massive readership and recruited a wide swath of highly accomplished figures with major institutional backing into their orbit. Just as now, the right suffered from a certain amount of status-anxiety over their lack of mainstream credibility, which the erudite and highly-credentialed neocons helped alleviate. People like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer, Samuel Huntington, and a number of other Ivy League academics with backgrounds in economics and the social sciences––as well as the neocon founded high-brow arts and culture magazine New Criterion––inflected the right with a degree of sophistication and intellectual seriousness that among the people who covet the approval of the New York Times editorial board helped normalize conservative critiques against the left.

But this also created a rift within the right. The Old Right, more literary and philosophical by nature, raised on Edmund Burke and Chesterton rather than Marx and Freud, had significant ideological disagreements and––let’s call them––aesthetic differences with the neocons that made for an uneasy truce. The neocons’ emphasis on data, social science, and the various academic fashions of the day often put them at odds with the old right even when they were on the same side of any given issue. For example, over the question of some welfare program, a writer in Commentary would likely present an empirical argument using data to suggest the program didn’t work as intended, or the funds were being misspent, whereas the writer at National Review would be more likely to rely on first principles, arguing that expansive welfare programs violated the Constitution through federal overreach, or that welfare undermined traditional values like thrift and community charity.

Both arguments could simultaneously be true, and both might achieve the same policy goal in the short term, but there were limits to how far these two distinct analytical frameworks and approaches to government could be conjoined before coming into conflict. Importantly, for all of their biting rhetoric aimed at the era’s leftist derangements, the neocons were in the end just moderates, administrative pragmatists who rejected the “night watchman” model of government favored by the libertarian faction of the old right, and instead wanted to preserve a bureaucratically managed welfare state; they just wanted to do it better and more efficiently than their former allies on the left.

Exacerbating the rift were the obvious theological and cultural differences between the neocons and the rest of the right. The most salient fact about the neocons is that they were (are) Jewish (not all, but most of them), and what gave rise to their ideology––across every dimension, and undergirding whatever internal differences might have been layered over the top––was their fear of anti-semitism and by extension the question, “What is good for the Jews?”

Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming in their excellent book, The Conservative Movement, provide a quote from Alexander Bloom’s book about the early neocons, The Prodigal Sons, that is worth reproducing here in full:

“Although psychohistorical explanations have substantial, built-in limitations, it is apparent that the development of neoconservatism in the last twenty years has consisted of a reaction to one major trauma—the fear of anti-Semitism. Since, of course, not all Jewish intellectuals are neoconservatives nor are all neoconservatives Jewish, a conventional disclaimer of universality should and must be entered. Despite the caveats, however, there can be little doubt that the Holocaust constituted the seminal event not only for European Jewry but for many American Jews not far removed from their East European or German heritages.”

To this end the neocons perceived themselves as fighting a two front war. On the one hand, anti-semitism from the left came in the form of ethnic grievance politics in which Jewish interests were subservient to the interests of competing ethnic political blocs, blacks domestically (see Malcolm X, e.g.), and Arabs abroad (revolutionary Palestinian groups especially). 

On the other hand, the neocons could not bring themselves to fully embrace their newfound allies on the right either. They reserved a certain paranoia for a domestic right-wing uprising rooted in the still very much living memory of World War II. Gottfried and Fleming also point out via Isidore Silver that the neocons were hugely influenced by Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and in particular her contention that anti-semitism’s most virulent strain is the one arising from populist, blood and soil sentiments. In the American context this meant the neocons felt they had as much to fear from an army of Roscoe Jethroes as one of Malcolm Xs. The neocons were wrong of course. Ironically, it was precisely the Roscoe Jethroes who would come to be the most ardent supporters of Israel, most eager to embrace neocons as political partners, and most readily enlist to serve the neocons’ foreign policy interests in subsequent decades, but a fog of suspicion nonetheless hung heavy over this new allegiance.67  

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that concerns over anti-Jewish sentiment were not entirely hallucinatory. Critiques of American Jewry, and skepticism over whether the neocons could ever have a home on the American right, were a non-insignificant feature of conservative discourse. Questions over the degree to which ethno-religious differences could be tolerated, in turn led to questions over the degree to which those questions could be tolerated, which in turn led to more questions over the degree to which ethno-religious differences could be tolerated, and so on and so forth. Everything old is new again.

This never got fully worked out since whatever the differences between neocons and the old right (and for that matter the new right, a coalition of conservative forces that would be largely defined as the evangelical right in the coming decades), were papered over by Ronald Reagan and the more urgent matter of the Cold War and defeating Communism once and for all. On that issue, the entirety of the right was aligned. Ronald Reagan, with his well earned reputation for coalition building, successfully united these diverse forces by leveraging widespread animosity toward leftist excess—which attracted many working-class voters to the Republican Party—and embracing a hyper-aggressive foreign policy exemplified by neocons like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, his leading foreign policy advisor, whose belligerence toward America’s perceived enemies would shape U.S. military strategy all the way up through the Global War on Terror.

For the time being, the coalition appeared rather strong. Credit where it’s due, the Reaganites won the Cold War and the era of leftist excess in culture and politics was (at least temporarily) put to bed. The neocons played a major role in these successes and their efforts were duly rewarded with increasingly prominent positions in the GOP power centers, in think tanks, in op-ed pages, and at the White House and the Pentagon in particular. The neocons had made good on their promise to fight the commies at home and fight the commies overseas and the vast majority of Republican voters were more than happy to count them as their own.

But the ideological tensions between the neocons and their coalition partners were never entirely resolved, even under Reagan. Neoconservatism, for all its intellectual rigor and policy sophistication, remained a fundamentally alien presence within the conservative movement, tethered to its ethno-religious origins and latent Trotskyism more-so than any ideological tentpole it shared with the rest of the right (especially in the absence of the the communist threat).

The neocons would have to answer whether they believed the United States should be viewed as a distinct nation composed of a distinct people with distinct interests, or as an ideological vanguard in a permanent global struggle for liberal democracy. Moreover, could the neocons coexist within an intellectual milieu where critiques of Jewish-centered politics could be fairly leveled, or would there be a prohibition on such topics, leading to stale thinking, dogmatism, and ultimately bad decision making, as is the case for any topic on which people cannot speak freely? Would the paradox between the treatment of democracy as a near religious precept on the one hand, and the elitist, anti-populist tendencies on the other, ever come to a head? Would their posture of moderate pragmatism at home ever come into conflict with their revolutionary moralism abroad? Would their commitment to political centrism eventually lead them to isolation and eventual obsolescence?

(You see where this is going…)

As I mentioned at the outset, and it bears repeating here, this essay only scratches the surface. The history of neoconservatism is dense, its influence sprawling, and its contradictions worthy of a more detailed examination. In Part 2, I’ll try to do some of that, going beyond the honeymoon period of the Cold War consensus and into the period where the neocons truly came to define themselves as the architects of an interventionist foreign policy that would squander all of their good will in the aftermath of 9/11.

I’ll also try to explain how this failure eventually devolved into the tragi-comic spectacle of the Global American Empire and its misguided and often bizarre obsession with “Human Rights.”

Subscribe and stay tuned.

…I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall
By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,
The city my blood had built I knew no more
While the screech-owl whistled his new delight
Consecutively dark.

Stuck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

-Allen Tate, Aeneas at Washington

I. The Age of Anti-Heroes

When I tell people that I love Donald Trump, they think I am joking or at least exaggerating. When I say this to liberal friends and family they think it is a put-on, a kind of elaborate troll to make them uncomfortable. “You couldn’t possibly love him,” they say. They draw the word “love” out when they repeat it back to me and usually laugh in the condescending, self-satisfied way liberals treat all kinds of right wing opinions. Even right wing friends, some of them anyway, those who stake their reputation on being “reasonable,” think I am egging them on.

“No. I actually love him,” I insist.

The conversation usually stops there. How or why anyone would love Donald Trump is too impenetrable a mystery to inquire about any further. 

Granted, this is an odd thing to say, let alone earnestly feel. Americans are not meant to love their politicians. Secular liberal democracies stand in opposition to these kinds of sentiments. To love a man like Trump is to fall victim to a “cult of personality.” Devotion, loyalty, deference to a man––a mere man––is considered pathological. Something to be mocked, for the chuds. Instead, we are supposed to regard our politicians with suspicion, even contempt. And it’s true that politicians are, for the most part, uninspiring people. That has always been my impression of them. I cannot think of a single politician in my lifetime, other than Trump, that I have felt any positive emotion toward at all. At best, like a good referee, I don’t notice them at all.

Historical figures are another matter––or used to be. We were once allowed a certain reverence for the founders: Jefferson’s fierce independence, Washington’s selflessness, Franklin’s eccentric genius. These men were as near to demi-gods as a Christian nation will allow. I was in awe at Remini’s Jackson when I encountered the abridged biography in high school. Here was a true man of history. I had similar feelings about Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln, too, though I have revised my view of him in recent years, is a man who nonetheless stood above his time and circumstances.

But would any of us say this about their modern counterparts? About either of the Clintons? The Bushes? Romney? McCain? Kerry? It’s laughable. Not too long ago, some liberals may have believed Obama would go down as a historically significant figure, but that star appears to be fading. He will be remembered as the first black president, sure, but his accomplishments are unimpressive, his legacy entirely overshadowed––and largely undone––by his successor, and as this last election demonstrated his cultural influence is minimal. More importantly, does anyone love him? Does he stand above the mundane cultural circumstances of his time in office? Could he fill Madison Square Garden to capacity with adoring fans, and with tens of thousands more waiting outside?

Even Obama’s most ardent supporters know the answer is no.

One might conclude, simply, that the Age of Heroes is over. We have become too disenchanted and too cynical to accommodate them. Public life is much too transparent for one thing. The problem with high definition TVs is that they reveal every flaw and blemish of the actors on the screen. Even the most beautiful woman, the most angelic face, at a sufficient level of clarity shows the wear and tear of age. I mean this literally, but it also applies to the microscopic scrutiny to which all public figures are subjected. Every indiscretion, every pronouncement, every faux pas, every cringe and regrettable thing anyone has ever said or done is recorded and remembered, made permanent and instantly retrievable by the perfect memory of the machines. We become our imperfections.

Likewise, the great heroes of the past are dug up and their corpses re-examined in the harsh light of modern political sensibilities. Are we allowed to hold the same reverence for the founders that I was taught in school? They were all racists and misogynists, after all. Anti-semites. Chauvinists. Benighted science-deniers. Do you know Lincoln wanted the freed slaves deported back to Africa? Look this up for yourself. FDR, the giant of modern progressivism, referred to blacks as “semi-beasts,” said Asians were biologically unassimilable, and remarked that the Germans’ complaints about Jews were “understandable.”

Conservatives and “classical” liberals find themselves caught in an impossible bind when confronted with the revisionist histories of the left. The 1619 Project was wrong about a lot of things, but it’s dead right that the men we elevate to the pantheon of history were, ultimately, just men—with beliefs that would make them pariahs in modern America. As my friend Covfefe Anon puts it, “Woke more correct.”

The problem is much deeper than this of course. The problem is not just one of technology or the chattering class’s petty moralism, but a spiritual emptiness that has hollowed modern life to its core. The world has been flattened. It has become measured, quantified, cataloged and made to be managed. A world that gets mapped according to the spreadsheets does not lend itself to the sublime. The global village, its hot-pot of undifferentiated slop, offers only mere life, sustenance for its own sake. Great men, and the veneration they inspire, have no place here.

Put simply, our civil religion is dead and so are its gods. If it is true what John F. Kennedy said that “a nation reveals itself by the men it honors, the men it remembers,” or Carlyle’s version that a nation’s heroes tells us what that nation “longs inexpressibly to be,” then what does it say about us if we no longer have the capacity to honor anyone? 

Erik Erikson, the mid-century psychologist, came up with the concept of “charisma hunger” to describe what happens in a society that has given up on religion, civil or otherwise, and given up on the notion of national heroes. We become like oprhaned children, wayward and terrified, clamoring for guidance and protection from parental figures that are nowhere to be found. We become deranged and frenzied in their absence, unmoored from meaning and incapable of true self-understanding. Who are we exactly? Where did we come from? What do we aspire to become?

This feeling of loss is not new and resonates in every corner of the culture: 

“Where is my John Wayne?
Where is my prairie song?
Where is my happy ending?
Where have all the cowboys gone?”

This is the charisma hunger talking. The archetypes handed down by the Greeks––the embodiments of Aristotelian poetics like Achilles and Odysseus––or their later iterations in Shakespeare, in Tennyson, in Racine and countless others (I’ll spare you the complete lineage), they have long since passed. 

It is no coincidence that just as Nietzsche declared the death of God, the classic hero vanished with Him. The two are not the same but run along parallel tracks and describe a similar terrain. In the 19th century, a new archetype emerges as the dominant character of our narrative imagination: the so-called anti-hero. This figure appears in many forms. Most of us picture him as gruff, troubled, rudderless, casting about in a darkened, chaotic world. He is misunderstood, a victim of circumstance, but is offered redemption, if he gets the “good ending,” in the opportunity to demonstrate his courage (however reluctantly) and improve our fallen world by just a little bit. In the “bad ending” he is resigned to further alienation, his efforts a meaningless whimper amidst the great sucking sound of cosmic indifference.

Musil called him the “man without qualities.” That’s partly right. He is defined by an absence, but not so much of “qualities” as the absence of a divinity to guide him. The anti-hero, unlike his Greek predecessors, is hemmed-in by the world as it appears to us. There is nothing outside. There is no heavenly realm to appeal to. Whereas the hero is an instrument of the gods, subject to their explicit commands, the anti-hero is profoundly alone. There is no intervention from above or beyond. There is no conference with the angels. There is no descent into the underworld to retrieve wisdom and bring it back to the world, or perhaps (an even more grim possibility), there is only the underworld, hell-baked through and through. 

“What does any of this have to do with Donald Trump?”

If you asked me a year ago, I would have probably said something like this: Trump is the anti-hero of our age. It’s an argument that practically makes itself. Trump stands-in as the ultimate expression of society’s decadence even as he postures against it. I mean “ultimate” here in both senses, the fullest embodiment of our cultural decline, but also its final chapter. Trump is the final boss of the boomers, representing the triumph of 20th century Pax Americana and also the opportunities it squandered. He is not Washington. He is not Caesar. He lacks their disciplined gravitas. He is a showman and a real estate mogul. He is a celebrity, as a vocation. More parvenu than aristocrat. Mostly he is a fuck you to the self-serious scolds and mediocrities who presume to rule us. He is crass and undignified and exactly what we deserve. He is earthly and low, so far from god and the numinous the notion is a joke.

I have always liked Trump. I have always supported Trump. I have always thought Trump was a very good politician, a much better president than he gets credit for, and also a much better person, a much better character than his public image suggests, but he is an anti-hero if he is anything at all. That’s what I might have said a year ago.

II. Peripeteia

This all changes at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the evening of July 13, 2024 at approximately 6:15 p.m. when eight shots are fired in the direction of Donald Trump, grazing his right ear and fatally wounding Corey Comperatore. Trump falls to the ground. He is swarmed by his secret service detail. The crowd is oddly subdued. Everyone seems to be waiting for something to happen, for history to make a choice…

This is the image that sticks with me more than any other. The more famous one, the image of him standing defiantly with his fist in the air, as well as all that has come after (and all that came before), is a consequence of whatever was happening down there. You can tell by the blood streaks on his face that he had yet to wipe any of it away. His hands are in penitent repose, palms slightly up. Out of context he appears to be in genuflection. It is at this moment, in all likelihood, that he first tasted the blood, first realized he’d been shot, first became aware that his life had been spared.

It’s almost a minute before he stands up again. There is a decision to make. The secret service are almost certainly telling him to stay low and crawl off the stage to safety. By now the shooter is dead but who knows who else might be out there. We know from the audio that Trump has lost his shoes. The secret service is telling him that he needs to get to the car.

“Wait,” Trump commands them.

He pushes himself out from the scrum of agents and raises his fist to the stunned audience. This is where he yells fight. What compels him to do this? This is a Trump we have never seen before. There is anger in his eyes. There is rage. We have seen Trump speak sternly, speak with hostility, but never like this. At this moment he is no longer Trump the showman, Trump the comedian, or even Trump the president. He is something else, something unexpected, an older and more elemental type. History indeed makes a choice, and in sparing him, confers upon him a new role, one of strange consequence that is not so easily explained, but rather felt.

We would come to find out that the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear should have, in all but one chance out of a million, split his skull open and ended his life, his candidacy, and the MAGA movement forever. But for a random turn of the head at just the split second the trigger was pulled, it all would’ve been over, everything changed. 

Some have suggested that Trump’s assassination might’ve sparked a civil war. I highly doubt it. Most likely, we would’ve entered into a period of uneventful malaise. There would have been a few somber retrospectives on Fox and maybe CNN, Joe Biden shuffling to the Rose Garden podium to slur through five minutes of an unintelligible eulogy, bi-partisan pleas to “tone down the rhetoric.” This brief stage of national mourning, mostly insincere, would be followed by admonishments to begin our “national healing.” The Republican Convention would have been a bizarre exhibition of grief-stricken loyalists juxtaposed with manic and impotent appeals for optimism. There would be no agreement on a successor. J.D. Vance had not yet been chosen as the V.P. and would have been wise to bow out of contention. Trump’s Silicon Valley donors would have quietly stepped away from the wreckage. The MAGA base would have retreated back to their natural home of political apathy. Mourning would have given way to despair. Then resignation. The conservative media, with some muted relief, would have comfortably slipped back into their doom loop. Biden in absentia would have cruised to reelection, virtually unopposed, and we would have sunken deeper, perhaps permanently, into cultural and political decay…

III. Retrocausality, Virgil the prophet, Rome again…

The miracle of July 13th, and it was a miracle, is the most significant political event since 9/11. Like 9/11 it initiated a kind of radical break from the course of events that preceded it and will affect all others that come after. I do not think it will resonate in quite the same way as 9/11. I do not think the date of July 13th will hold much significance in the collective consciousness even a year from now. It will be largely hidden away from view. There will not be any memorials, holidays, or anything like that. July 13th will recede into the background. Future generations may not think of it at all, except the famous photo which will likely grace high school textbooks, a minor curiosity––among many––of what will almost certainly be called the Trump Era. 

One runs the risk of over-indexing an event like this. Recency-bias is another way to describe this trap. I am aware of the problem. But my theory of why the assassination attempt creates an inflection point in history is not so much what it means for the future, or even right now, but what it means for the past.

What we have experienced is a rare instance of retrocausality. We think of the arrow of history only running forward. We can never be unburdened by what has been (this was always a strange and nonsensical rhetorical indulgence), but surely what has been will always remain unburdened by what will be. Events of the past must remain unaffected by whatever comes after them. This is basic stuff. Except, well… one starts to wonder.

I have been rethinking the meaning of Trump over the last four months––his pre-political life, his unlikely candidacy, his even more unlikely presidency, his persecution while in office, his loss, his exile, his resurgence, his further persecution, his near death, his return, his victory, and now, it appears, his quest for vengeance. The narrative arc looks very different now than it did before July 13th. It is like an optical illusion where a change in perspective reveals that an array of disjointed dots is actually a dynamic scene of figures and forms that were always there.

The future does not merely follow the past, but instead influences the past in ways that revise its meaning and its purpose. In the case of Trump, the near-death experience acts as a hinge on which the entire structure of his legacy turns, shifting him from a symbol of our period’s decadence and tragi-comic death-march, to a potential, even inevitable catalyst for its rebirth.

What I am groping at is the realization that Trump is not, and never was, an anti-hero. Or he is both that and something more than that. The assassination attempt has reached back in time and revealed––actually reconfigured––a very different story to tell about his life and about the time we are living in. It has remade history.

Again, some prudence is in order. Trump is just a man. And it is Trump the man on which most analysis of his presidency and historical significance ought to be framed. It is Trump the man making policy and personnel decisions. It is Trump the man who diagnosed the American situation and through some combination of once-in-a-generation political instinct, guile, and showmanship defeated both the Clinton and Obama factions of the Democratic party, defeated the Bush, neocon, and Koch factions of the GOP, and out flanked the media on every important question of public sentiment from the time he came down the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015.

But there is another dimension, one that Henry Kissinger anticipated in his reflections on Trump as a “phenomenon” rather than simply an individual man. What Kissinger sensed is that Trump has come to subsume and symbolize a moment in history—a confluence of forces that transcends any single person’s talents or intentions.

I will leave it to the wonderful writer, Librarian of Caelano, to describe the critical turning point:

By pure coincidence, shortly after it became manifestly clear that Joe Biden was unconcealably senile and would obviously lose the general election, a young man with no criminal background, whom despite studying computer science had no social media presence whatsoever, decided for reasons about which law enforcement remains solidly uncurious to assassinate Trump at a rally. His bullet missed by centimeters, leaving one man dead and Trump with a bleeding head wound. Before the whole world he stood and shook his fist at death. He told his supporters to fight.

Everything changed at that moment. I knew then that whatever else happened Trump would win the election. I felt the difference. Rising from what had been certain death and continuing was a demonstration of his total commitment to hazard his life for his people. Trump was no longer running for president. Trump had become a king.

I don’t mean that in the literal sense that he made some claim to monarchy. I mean that in that moment he transcended politics to become a figure beyond party or cause. The Emperor of Austria once told Theodore Roosevelt that his job was to protect his people from their politicians. It was to this ideal, this archetype that Trump ascended. If it can be said of a man in his seventies, he matured, but went far beyond that in becoming a kind of patriarch, possessed of more charisma, gravitas, and personal authority. The Mandate of Heaven settled upon him.

In other words, Trump became a hero in the classical sense. He became, though unbeknownst to us had always been so, an instrument of fate. That’s what I mean by retrocausality. Fate is not forward facing. It is not oriented in one direction or the other. It is fixed in place and outside of time.

The Homeric heroes like Achilles and Odysseus are more complex, more agentic, and better epitomize universal poetic virtues. Rather Trump, like Virgil’s Aeneas, is more purely the expression of manifest destiny. To the question of Roman v. Greek, Trump is clearly the Roman type. Trump, like Aeneas, does not profess to understand nor even desire his fate. No one would confuse Mar-a-Lago for Carthage, or a retirement of golf and filet-o-fish for Dido, but Trump was plenty comfortable in Florida and after his initial attempts to refound Rome were rebuffed, he could have and probably wanted to stay put.

In 2020, Trump had been challenged and defeated. He had made a good run at it but his enemies in D.C., the “occupational class” to whom he was meant to be a direct rebuke, won out in the end. His loss in the reelection campaign, amidst the almost supernatural fact of a global pandemic and however suspicious the circumstances, should have been the end of it. In all meaningful respects he was removed from public life, facing bankruptcy, and counted few remaining allies. Had they left him alone, he may have never returned to the campaign trail, but the zealous lawfare against him gave him no choice. It was win or go to jail. It was as if his enemies, however unwittingly, had intervened on his behalf. Much like for Aeneas, who finds himself shipwrecked by Juno’s storms, it was only through the malign influence of his antagonists that the necessary path to his return was set in motion.

Aeneas does not found Rome without first failing. His hardships become prerequisites for his eventual triumph. Trump’s success now––the electoral sweep of the swing states, the popular vote, control of both houses, and the taste for revenge that animates him and his newfound allies, the titans of Silicon Valley who would have otherwise remained sidelined––does not happen had Trump and Pence and his former team of bellwether hangers-on somehow prevailed and limped through another four years of lawfare and administrative obstruction. In that version, Trump, for all his merits, is still just another president, his legacy marred by scandal and legal trouble, and mostly thwarted in his administrative agenda. The swamp obtains.

But that’s not the version we got. That’s not the version fate had in store for us. The world that Yeats describes of his Seanchan, which conditions the destiny of ordinary men, is transcended by Trump the phenomenon. A superior and higher authority pulls him forward and out from modern life’s rigid and pedestrian constraints. It pulls him back into a past of grander heroes. Into the mythic. I don’t know how else to describe it.

IV. “Love. It’s about Love.”

I can feel myself reaching for a feeling that cannot be fully articulated. Perhaps not by me, or not quite yet. For one thing, the story is not over. Much of it is untold, and just as July 13th had the effect of reconstituting the past, so too might future events reconstitute what I am describing about Trump. I am as charisma hungry as the next man and it is possible I have imagined an oasis where there is only more sand.

The story of Aeneas, as the embodiment and symbol of Rome, rests on the credo, vincit amor patriae. “The love of my fatherland prevails.” 

For both Trump the man, and Trump the phenomenon, this is equally apt. If there is anything I can say with certainty about Trump it is that he loves America and the American people. It is his primary quality, and is as authentic and apparent as anything about him.

A friend wrote to me shortly after Trump’s acceptance speech:

My main observation watching the speech was his complete emotional control. It seemed that he knew it would happen. There was no sense of relief or emotional release. It was as though this was his destiny and he had fully expected and been prepared for it.

He continued on:

I have a level of respect and love for Trump that is pretty primal. My feelings for him are as close as I can imagine to the reverence one might have felt for Caesar or a long serving monarch. I can imagine the country accepting him as a “Great Father.”

As another friend put it, “Trump is the living Constitution.”

Time will tell. It is not ours to judge. Whether Trump ushers in a reawakening of our civil religion and the proper conditions to accommodate a hero, a man of destiny, a man who stands above his circumstances, and comes to initiate and symbolize whatever God has in store for our nation as it stumbles out of its End of History hangover, I cannot say. The signs are there, the story is pre-formed. I am certainly optimistic. I have never felt even close to this level of positive potential for America in my adult life. It has been a long time coming and I can see clearly out to a very bright future, one literally among the stars. American dynamism has been tamped down for decades by bureaucratic dead weight and the spiritual lethargy of the longhouse. The doorway out is now opened, and we need only to walk through it. The Good Timeline is right in front of us.

And even still, if it is only a mirage, if it is only Trump the man we are graced with, the ultimate anti-hero, I will love him no less. At least he made us laugh.