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The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed
The Republican Workers Party is the future of American presidential politics, says F.H. Buckley. It’s a socially conservative but economically middle-of-the-road party, offering a way back to the land of opportunity where our children will have it better than we did. That is the American Dream, and Donald Trump’s promise to restore it is what brought him to the White House.
As a Trump speechwriter and key transition advisor, Buckley has an inside view on what “Make America Great Again” really means―how it represents a program to restore the American Dream as well as a defense of nationalism rooted in a sense of fraternity with all fellow Americans.
The call to greatness was a repudiation of the cruel hypocrisy of America’s New Class, the dominant 10 percent who deploy the language of egalitarianism while jealously guarding their own privileges. The New Class talks like Jacobins but behaves like Bourbons. Its members claim to support equality and social mobility, but resist the very policies that promote mobility and a choice of good schools for everyone’s children, not just the well-to-do; a sensible immigration policy that doesn’t benefit elites at the expense of average Americans; and regulatory reform to trim back the impediments that frustrate competitive enterprise. It isn’t complicated. What’s been lacking is political will.
This book pulls no punches in describing how liberals and conservatives had become indifferent to those left behind. On the left, identity politics offered an excuse to hate an ideological enemy. On the right, a tired conservatism defined itself through policies that callously ignored the welfare of the bottom 90 percent. Trump told us that both Left and Right had betrayed the American people, and his Republican Workers Party promises to renew the American Dream. Buckley shows how it will do so.
As a Trump speechwriter and key transition advisor, Buckley has an inside view on what “Make America Great Again” really means―how it represents a program to restore the American Dream as well as a defense of nationalism rooted in a sense of fraternity with all fellow Americans.
The call to greatness was a repudiation of the cruel hypocrisy of America’s New Class, the dominant 10 percent who deploy the language of egalitarianism while jealously guarding their own privileges. The New Class talks like Jacobins but behaves like Bourbons. Its members claim to support equality and social mobility, but resist the very policies that promote mobility and a choice of good schools for everyone’s children, not just the well-to-do; a sensible immigration policy that doesn’t benefit elites at the expense of average Americans; and regulatory reform to trim back the impediments that frustrate competitive enterprise. It isn’t complicated. What’s been lacking is political will.
This book pulls no punches in describing how liberals and conservatives had become indifferent to those left behind. On the left, identity politics offered an excuse to hate an ideological enemy. On the right, a tired conservatism defined itself through policies that callously ignored the welfare of the bottom 90 percent. Trump told us that both Left and Right had betrayed the American people, and his Republican Workers Party promises to renew the American Dream. Buckley shows how it will do so.
- GenresPolitics
208 pages, Hardcover
Published September 4, 2018
About the author
F.H. Buckley
15 books24 followersFrancis H. Buckley: Son of F.J. & H.B. Buckley; M. Esther Goldberg; child Sarah.
BA, McGill University 1969
LLB, McGill University 1974
LLM, Harvard University 1975
Exec Dir/Assoc Dean of Geo Mason Law & Economics Center & Foundation Law Prof who's taught there since '89 & was Visiting Olin Fellow at the U of Chicago Law School in '88/9. Shimer College trustee. Twice visiting professor at the Sorbonne/ Paris II, in fall '07 he was visiting professor at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris. He writes on law & economics & has published in journals, including the Journal of Legal Studies, the International Review of Law, Crisis & Economics & Public Choice. He's defended free markets before the American Enterprise Inst. His books include Fair Governance (Oxford '09), The Morality of Laughter (Michigan '03) & Just Exchange: A Theory of Contract (Routledge '05).
Geo Mason's Law & Economics Center, focusing on issues like tort reform, declines releasing fundraising & donor information. Documents released by the Community Rights Counsel, including some released as part of the nat'l tobacco settlement, show that its officials asked R.J. Reynolds Tobacco for $20,000 for its federal judges program, according to a Reynolds internal email. The center received $40,000 from Philip Morris from '96-99 & was listed among "key allies". It also received $40,000 from Exxon Mobil Foundation in '04. Buckley said their policy of silence as re donors is best for all. He declined to say where the seminars take place, citing security reasons: "We've been advised that there are more ethical problems if you disclose than if you don't."
BA, McGill University 1969
LLB, McGill University 1974
LLM, Harvard University 1975
Exec Dir/Assoc Dean of Geo Mason Law & Economics Center & Foundation Law Prof who's taught there since '89 & was Visiting Olin Fellow at the U of Chicago Law School in '88/9. Shimer College trustee. Twice visiting professor at the Sorbonne/ Paris II, in fall '07 he was visiting professor at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris. He writes on law & economics & has published in journals, including the Journal of Legal Studies, the International Review of Law, Crisis & Economics & Public Choice. He's defended free markets before the American Enterprise Inst. His books include Fair Governance (Oxford '09), The Morality of Laughter (Michigan '03) & Just Exchange: A Theory of Contract (Routledge '05).
Geo Mason's Law & Economics Center, focusing on issues like tort reform, declines releasing fundraising & donor information. Documents released by the Community Rights Counsel, including some released as part of the nat'l tobacco settlement, show that its officials asked R.J. Reynolds Tobacco for $20,000 for its federal judges program, according to a Reynolds internal email. The center received $40,000 from Philip Morris from '96-99 & was listed among "key allies". It also received $40,000 from Exxon Mobil Foundation in '04. Buckley said their policy of silence as re donors is best for all. He declined to say where the seminars take place, citing security reasons: "We've been advised that there are more ethical problems if you disclose than if you don't."
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 27, 2018
Along with left-wing books decrying the supposed Trump-driven decline of democracy, I have been reading right-wing books about the supposed Trump-driven realignment of politics. They have mostly been tedious, and this one, Frank Buckley’s "The Republican Workers Party," has not improved my mood. It is poorly written, unoriginal, blinkered, simplistic, and annoying. Worst of all, reading the book is like watching a spastic jumping frog. It lurches from half-covered topic to half-covered topic, never settling on anything. Don’t waste your time.
Buckley, a Canadian-born law professor at the Scalia School of Law (George Mason), has lumped together many short chapters, each probably tossed off in an evening, into a “book.” The alleged theme is that a new political party is aborning, the “Republican Workers Party,” though any concrete details or plan must have missed the final cut. If there is a core idea that can be teased out of the book, buried under the chaff, it’s that the United States lacks economic mobility, and focusing on improving the lot of workers can lead to an alliance of the socially conservative and the economically liberal.
Thus, this book is in the sub-genre about “workers,” by which is usually meant “working class.” Certainly, it’s generally agreed that the working class has suffered in the past few decades, failing to participating in rising wages and subject to numerous debilities, extreme in some cases, such as opiate addition and suicide. And Buckley is entirely right that workers need help; that income and wealth inequality within the United States, as well as mobility, is bad and has gotten worse. He is also right that modern politics should be viewed as a quadrant, where a plurality are relatively socially conservative (a term he does not really define, for reasons to be revealed) while being relatively economically liberal, in that they favor a generous safety net, and that this is part of the key to Trump’s success. From there, though, it’s downhill.
First, after a stream of consciousness about his own minor role speech writing for Trump and his even more minor connections to the Trump White House, Buckley starts talking about decline. He informs us America hasn’t declined at all—rather, other countries have become relatively richer, so we have less money by comparison. That (irrationally) makes us feel bad, which we perceive as decline. Yes, that’s really what he says. This introduces the main problem with all of Buckley’s analysis—everything is viewed exclusively through an economic lens. Any other concerns of anybody are either irrelevant or pernicious. This is why he never defines, in any way whatsoever, “socially conservative,” because he doesn’t think it has any relevance, other than to have lip service paid to it. Buckley is the mirror image of Joan Williams in "White Working Class." She thinks social conservatives should be hoodwinked with promises to address their economic problems, so they will support progressive social causes with their votes. Buckley thinks they should be hoodwinked with promises to address conservative social matters, so they will keep voting for social democracy. In both cases, though, their social conservatism is an embarrassment to be satisfied in no way whatsoever.
Yes, Buckley admits, the culture may have some problems, vaguely referred to, but there’s no solution, and therefore no need to discuss it, much less to consider if government might have a role in culture, something that is explicitly rejected in the first pages. Don’t you know, “conservatives [read: like me] have accepted gay marriage and abandoned the racial prejudices that disfigured the Old Right”? This equation of acceptance of the homosexual agenda and racial equality is all you really need to know about Buckley, and he beats it repeatedly in the book. Certainly, not a single social conservative issue is ever to be addressed by the Republican Workers Party, even though the bedrock premise is that the party will consist of social conservatives. Abortion? Never heard of it. Guns? What are those? Religious belief is only mentioned as a spur to economic liberalism. “Supreme Court” and “judges” have no entry in the index. Even talking about such matters is not allowed; “moral rearmament” is very, very bad, because what that really means is “heartless conservatism that blames the victims.” Luckily, Frank Buckley is here to set limits to what the workers are allowed to talk about. They can elect people like Trump, but they better not ask for anything but decent jobs, or they’ll be told off as racist cavemen.
So, while this is supposed to be a book about the rise of a new political party, it’s not. Yes, every so often Buckley nods to how Trump sometimes embodies this new approach, although he complains about Trump’s inadequacies just as much. But to the extent any program can be discerned, though no details are offered, it appears that what the Republican Workers Party will offer is the welfare state without the welfare bums. Which is a sound enough program, I suppose, but seems a trifle . . . incomplete.
Along similar lines, that is, the lines of Buckley preening his own supposed moral and intellectual superiority at the expense of talking substantively about political realignment, we are berated continuously that all aristocracies are abominations. Not just our current ruling class—all aristocracies, for reasons unspecified. Buckley seems unaware that every society ever has had an aristocracy. No, in his imaginings imposed egalitarianism is a conservative value. He at least has the self-awareness to call his exaltation of economics and his embrace of forced egalitarianism “right-wing Marxism,” which is an, um, interesting turn of phrase. Thus, the main attractions of the new Republican Workers Party apparently will be that everyone will have a good job (how, exactly, we are not told) and nobody will be more important than anyone else. Buckley misses that the working class doesn’t mind an aristocracy; it minds a bad aristocracy that fails to fulfil its obligations. It’s perfectly happy to have an aristocracy that sees its social role as helping all of society flourish—especially if good jobs are on offer.
Buckley’s ideological rejection of social conservatism repeatedly backs him into asserting overt falsehoods and fantasies. So, he actually claims that the entertainment media isn’t Left. That is a “bugbear of the Right.” In reality, he claims, “since the studios are in the business of making money, they are consumer-driven and don’t shape the culture so much as they are shaped by it.” The facile stupidity of this is stunning. One has only to read or watch any popular media for the past twenty years to know the exact opposite is the case. For example, I am now watching the third season of the generally excellent Amazon science fiction series "The Man in the High Castle." Two of the three romances portrayed are homosexual, both presented prominently in every episode through a gauzy lens of warm, glowing happiness. The third is heterosexual; after a few episodes the woman cuts the man’s throat with a straight razor when he threatens her (he’s a literal Nazi) and he bleeds out slowly in a pool of red while she watches. No doubt her next act will be to take up with a woman. Anyone who sees this as anything but propaganda, given that, at most, 3% of the population is homosexual, is a moron, and I can assure you that Amazon doesn’t care if they lose some money as a result of people being turned off, any more than the movie studios did when producing anti-Iraq War flops one after another. Ideology is the chief driver of all those in charge of entertainment media, as merely reading about the Academy Awards will clearly show, but since Buckley agrees with this set of socially liberal ideologies, he can’t see it (or chooses not to).
Of equal stupidity, Buckley lectures the reader that we shouldn’t complain about the ever-more-aggressive censorship of conservatives by the Lords of Tech, because “competition is only a click away, and nothing stops conservatives from starting their own social media platforms.” Buckley, an airy-fairy academic and pundit who probably has never had to earn an honest living, is apparently unaware of the network effect, the money and power behind and devoted to this censorship, and the lengths to which the Left would go to destroy any possible alternative that managed to beat the odds (see, e.g., Gab), working hand-in-glove with all of corporate America and the Deep State. I could multiply the idiocies into which Buckley’s ideological blinders force him, but that’ll do.
My low opinion of Buckley’s book isn’t helped by that Buckley steals (inadvertently, I’m sure) many of my own cherished ways to address today’s problems relating to today’s overweening administrative state (one of the few areas of politics he actually discusses, though only in service of his attacks on aristocracy), while expressing them poorly. He endorses, without any real discussion, policies including rustication of bureaucrats, restoration of the spoils system, mass rollback of laws and regulation, a ban on working in the private sector in any related area by former government workers, and forced retirement of private foundations. You’d think that would make me like this book, but it just irritates me, especially since his inadequate presentations make my ideas seem less attractive. And the author’s poor writing is not helped by attempts to provide a gloss of sophistication by mentioning everyone from Blaise Pascal to the Emperor Justinian to Oswald Spengler, never to offer substance, of course, just to splash the names onto the page.
What Buckley never gets around to is actually focusing on workers; he’s too busy complaining about (portions of) the Left in an incoherent fashion and hectoring social conservatives. Thus, he never gets around to creating a program that would attract workers to his new Republican Workers Party. That would mean, presumably, creating good jobs: well-paid, secure, and dignified. That might involve, for example, massive infrastructure spending (something Trump promised but failed to deliver); funding vocational training combined with sharply reducing loans and funding for social capital-destroying “learning” like Gender Studies; forced repatriation from overseas of jobs and money by big corporations; enhancing the power of unions while preventing any political activity by them (and absolutely banning all unions of government workers); and so forth. But talk about those things is not what we get. We get jittery incoherence. Buckley should be ashamed of writing this book and frittering away my time.
Buckley, a Canadian-born law professor at the Scalia School of Law (George Mason), has lumped together many short chapters, each probably tossed off in an evening, into a “book.” The alleged theme is that a new political party is aborning, the “Republican Workers Party,” though any concrete details or plan must have missed the final cut. If there is a core idea that can be teased out of the book, buried under the chaff, it’s that the United States lacks economic mobility, and focusing on improving the lot of workers can lead to an alliance of the socially conservative and the economically liberal.
Thus, this book is in the sub-genre about “workers,” by which is usually meant “working class.” Certainly, it’s generally agreed that the working class has suffered in the past few decades, failing to participating in rising wages and subject to numerous debilities, extreme in some cases, such as opiate addition and suicide. And Buckley is entirely right that workers need help; that income and wealth inequality within the United States, as well as mobility, is bad and has gotten worse. He is also right that modern politics should be viewed as a quadrant, where a plurality are relatively socially conservative (a term he does not really define, for reasons to be revealed) while being relatively economically liberal, in that they favor a generous safety net, and that this is part of the key to Trump’s success. From there, though, it’s downhill.
First, after a stream of consciousness about his own minor role speech writing for Trump and his even more minor connections to the Trump White House, Buckley starts talking about decline. He informs us America hasn’t declined at all—rather, other countries have become relatively richer, so we have less money by comparison. That (irrationally) makes us feel bad, which we perceive as decline. Yes, that’s really what he says. This introduces the main problem with all of Buckley’s analysis—everything is viewed exclusively through an economic lens. Any other concerns of anybody are either irrelevant or pernicious. This is why he never defines, in any way whatsoever, “socially conservative,” because he doesn’t think it has any relevance, other than to have lip service paid to it. Buckley is the mirror image of Joan Williams in "White Working Class." She thinks social conservatives should be hoodwinked with promises to address their economic problems, so they will support progressive social causes with their votes. Buckley thinks they should be hoodwinked with promises to address conservative social matters, so they will keep voting for social democracy. In both cases, though, their social conservatism is an embarrassment to be satisfied in no way whatsoever.
Yes, Buckley admits, the culture may have some problems, vaguely referred to, but there’s no solution, and therefore no need to discuss it, much less to consider if government might have a role in culture, something that is explicitly rejected in the first pages. Don’t you know, “conservatives [read: like me] have accepted gay marriage and abandoned the racial prejudices that disfigured the Old Right”? This equation of acceptance of the homosexual agenda and racial equality is all you really need to know about Buckley, and he beats it repeatedly in the book. Certainly, not a single social conservative issue is ever to be addressed by the Republican Workers Party, even though the bedrock premise is that the party will consist of social conservatives. Abortion? Never heard of it. Guns? What are those? Religious belief is only mentioned as a spur to economic liberalism. “Supreme Court” and “judges” have no entry in the index. Even talking about such matters is not allowed; “moral rearmament” is very, very bad, because what that really means is “heartless conservatism that blames the victims.” Luckily, Frank Buckley is here to set limits to what the workers are allowed to talk about. They can elect people like Trump, but they better not ask for anything but decent jobs, or they’ll be told off as racist cavemen.
So, while this is supposed to be a book about the rise of a new political party, it’s not. Yes, every so often Buckley nods to how Trump sometimes embodies this new approach, although he complains about Trump’s inadequacies just as much. But to the extent any program can be discerned, though no details are offered, it appears that what the Republican Workers Party will offer is the welfare state without the welfare bums. Which is a sound enough program, I suppose, but seems a trifle . . . incomplete.
Along similar lines, that is, the lines of Buckley preening his own supposed moral and intellectual superiority at the expense of talking substantively about political realignment, we are berated continuously that all aristocracies are abominations. Not just our current ruling class—all aristocracies, for reasons unspecified. Buckley seems unaware that every society ever has had an aristocracy. No, in his imaginings imposed egalitarianism is a conservative value. He at least has the self-awareness to call his exaltation of economics and his embrace of forced egalitarianism “right-wing Marxism,” which is an, um, interesting turn of phrase. Thus, the main attractions of the new Republican Workers Party apparently will be that everyone will have a good job (how, exactly, we are not told) and nobody will be more important than anyone else. Buckley misses that the working class doesn’t mind an aristocracy; it minds a bad aristocracy that fails to fulfil its obligations. It’s perfectly happy to have an aristocracy that sees its social role as helping all of society flourish—especially if good jobs are on offer.
Buckley’s ideological rejection of social conservatism repeatedly backs him into asserting overt falsehoods and fantasies. So, he actually claims that the entertainment media isn’t Left. That is a “bugbear of the Right.” In reality, he claims, “since the studios are in the business of making money, they are consumer-driven and don’t shape the culture so much as they are shaped by it.” The facile stupidity of this is stunning. One has only to read or watch any popular media for the past twenty years to know the exact opposite is the case. For example, I am now watching the third season of the generally excellent Amazon science fiction series "The Man in the High Castle." Two of the three romances portrayed are homosexual, both presented prominently in every episode through a gauzy lens of warm, glowing happiness. The third is heterosexual; after a few episodes the woman cuts the man’s throat with a straight razor when he threatens her (he’s a literal Nazi) and he bleeds out slowly in a pool of red while she watches. No doubt her next act will be to take up with a woman. Anyone who sees this as anything but propaganda, given that, at most, 3% of the population is homosexual, is a moron, and I can assure you that Amazon doesn’t care if they lose some money as a result of people being turned off, any more than the movie studios did when producing anti-Iraq War flops one after another. Ideology is the chief driver of all those in charge of entertainment media, as merely reading about the Academy Awards will clearly show, but since Buckley agrees with this set of socially liberal ideologies, he can’t see it (or chooses not to).
Of equal stupidity, Buckley lectures the reader that we shouldn’t complain about the ever-more-aggressive censorship of conservatives by the Lords of Tech, because “competition is only a click away, and nothing stops conservatives from starting their own social media platforms.” Buckley, an airy-fairy academic and pundit who probably has never had to earn an honest living, is apparently unaware of the network effect, the money and power behind and devoted to this censorship, and the lengths to which the Left would go to destroy any possible alternative that managed to beat the odds (see, e.g., Gab), working hand-in-glove with all of corporate America and the Deep State. I could multiply the idiocies into which Buckley’s ideological blinders force him, but that’ll do.
My low opinion of Buckley’s book isn’t helped by that Buckley steals (inadvertently, I’m sure) many of my own cherished ways to address today’s problems relating to today’s overweening administrative state (one of the few areas of politics he actually discusses, though only in service of his attacks on aristocracy), while expressing them poorly. He endorses, without any real discussion, policies including rustication of bureaucrats, restoration of the spoils system, mass rollback of laws and regulation, a ban on working in the private sector in any related area by former government workers, and forced retirement of private foundations. You’d think that would make me like this book, but it just irritates me, especially since his inadequate presentations make my ideas seem less attractive. And the author’s poor writing is not helped by attempts to provide a gloss of sophistication by mentioning everyone from Blaise Pascal to the Emperor Justinian to Oswald Spengler, never to offer substance, of course, just to splash the names onto the page.
What Buckley never gets around to is actually focusing on workers; he’s too busy complaining about (portions of) the Left in an incoherent fashion and hectoring social conservatives. Thus, he never gets around to creating a program that would attract workers to his new Republican Workers Party. That would mean, presumably, creating good jobs: well-paid, secure, and dignified. That might involve, for example, massive infrastructure spending (something Trump promised but failed to deliver); funding vocational training combined with sharply reducing loans and funding for social capital-destroying “learning” like Gender Studies; forced repatriation from overseas of jobs and money by big corporations; enhancing the power of unions while preventing any political activity by them (and absolutely banning all unions of government workers); and so forth. But talk about those things is not what we get. We get jittery incoherence. Buckley should be ashamed of writing this book and frittering away my time.
March 17, 2020
A real 2.5-star book if there is one. I picked this up because I knew that: A. I would likely disagree with it and B. It seems to be important in understanding the tumult in the Republican Party right now. Buckley occasionally has some good insights, especially in his diagnoses. The US' social immobility is indeed a growing problem. Democrats losing their historic focus on economic issues is problematic too. Yes, the traditional Republican Party, in its drive to please elites, forgot about the working class. And indeed, the Never Trump movement, demonstrated by folks like Kevin Williamson, does display a callousness to the GOP's rising base. Hence their inability to gain ground, which John Ganz does a great profile of here.
Some of Buckley's comparisons miss the mark. For example, he devotes a decent portion of "The Republican Workers Party" to suggesting that the US take up Canada's mantle on immigration (points-based system), corporate taxes (lighter up North) and education (greater support for private schools), pointing to Canada's far higher rates of social mobility. This omits a TON of other important facts though. All Canadians have healthcare. The GOP recently tried to take healthcare away from millions of Americans by providing an inadequate replacement for the ACA. Canada's income taxation is more progressive than America's, funding things like affordable education from pre-k on up. Canada has generous paid leave and stronger labor unions than we do. All these things contribute to their higher rates of social mobility, which Buckley forgets about or ignores.
Moreover, he tends to downplay Trump's role in the GOP policy initiatives that do not in fact represent a shift towards the economic left. The tax cuts, the benefits of which disproportionately accrued to the wealthy, are downplayed in a line or two. The ACA repeal? Blame it on Congress. The fact that we've had like 10 "infrastructure weeks" and no meaningful progress? Unmentioned. Trump's administration seems to escape a lot of criticism, and the critiques Buckley levies aren't very strong, purposefully so I'd posit. The only place he seems to vocally diverge is on trade, and even then it's unconvincing.
Buckley proposes bringing back the spoils system to root out the deep state, but this is a terrible idea. The Trump administration's turnover and handling of major crises should attest to total incompetence. Maybe nepotism isn't a good idea when the President's cronies are either out there or just not fit to serve. His idea about breaking up private foundations seems intriguing, but I'm left with many logistical questions. Buckley's ideas seem less like the foundation for a real movement and at times like a slightly arrogant bucket list.
I would recommend reading this short book if you want to understand what some folks in the Trumpsphere are thinking. But it falls short of being a good agenda-setter or explainer for the shifts occurring in the GOP right now. Nonetheless, in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak and the reaction of some GOPers to suggest handing out cash, some of the ideas percolating here might become more relevant in the months and years to come.
Some of Buckley's comparisons miss the mark. For example, he devotes a decent portion of "The Republican Workers Party" to suggesting that the US take up Canada's mantle on immigration (points-based system), corporate taxes (lighter up North) and education (greater support for private schools), pointing to Canada's far higher rates of social mobility. This omits a TON of other important facts though. All Canadians have healthcare. The GOP recently tried to take healthcare away from millions of Americans by providing an inadequate replacement for the ACA. Canada's income taxation is more progressive than America's, funding things like affordable education from pre-k on up. Canada has generous paid leave and stronger labor unions than we do. All these things contribute to their higher rates of social mobility, which Buckley forgets about or ignores.
Moreover, he tends to downplay Trump's role in the GOP policy initiatives that do not in fact represent a shift towards the economic left. The tax cuts, the benefits of which disproportionately accrued to the wealthy, are downplayed in a line or two. The ACA repeal? Blame it on Congress. The fact that we've had like 10 "infrastructure weeks" and no meaningful progress? Unmentioned. Trump's administration seems to escape a lot of criticism, and the critiques Buckley levies aren't very strong, purposefully so I'd posit. The only place he seems to vocally diverge is on trade, and even then it's unconvincing.
Buckley proposes bringing back the spoils system to root out the deep state, but this is a terrible idea. The Trump administration's turnover and handling of major crises should attest to total incompetence. Maybe nepotism isn't a good idea when the President's cronies are either out there or just not fit to serve. His idea about breaking up private foundations seems intriguing, but I'm left with many logistical questions. Buckley's ideas seem less like the foundation for a real movement and at times like a slightly arrogant bucket list.
I would recommend reading this short book if you want to understand what some folks in the Trumpsphere are thinking. But it falls short of being a good agenda-setter or explainer for the shifts occurring in the GOP right now. Nonetheless, in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak and the reaction of some GOPers to suggest handing out cash, some of the ideas percolating here might become more relevant in the months and years to come.
May 30, 2019
A very interesting book on how Trump related with the working class of America and compares it with how the new Democratic Party has abandoned them. The book makes an excellent case on why economics and good jobs needs to be the focus of the Republican Party moving forward and how Trump has been succeeding at doing just that. I didn't quite appreciate the Marxist overtones in the book where a complete focus on good labor as the means through which our society will improve is the solution that Trump and the party needs to exclusively focus on. A three percent unemployment rate in West Virginia will not solve the opioid crisis by itself. There needs to be a moral resurgence which can only be found in the gospel of Jesus Christ, which even in these seemingly "Christian" areas of the country is lacking in even the most basic understanding of the gospel. However, the book does leave the reader with an optimistic view for the future of our nation and for the Republican Party as 2020 rapidly approaches.
August 20, 2019
This reads like satire in places.
Page 19: The author has just become a US citizen (he was born Canadian). "But you look at things differently after you become a citizen. First, of course, you'll want to roll up the immigration wall to keep out the damn foreigners."
This is the mentality. No apparent satire. I can't even fathom the cluelessness...
Full disclosure, I did not finish this book. Read a few further chapters, but his thinking is so simplistic it's just silly. Questions to tell if you live in a bubble include things like "have you ever walked on a factory floor"? Only liberals live in bubbles I suppose. Or only liberal bubbles are problematic.
Just so silly.
Page 19: The author has just become a US citizen (he was born Canadian). "But you look at things differently after you become a citizen. First, of course, you'll want to roll up the immigration wall to keep out the damn foreigners."
This is the mentality. No apparent satire. I can't even fathom the cluelessness...
Full disclosure, I did not finish this book. Read a few further chapters, but his thinking is so simplistic it's just silly. Questions to tell if you live in a bubble include things like "have you ever walked on a factory floor"? Only liberals live in bubbles I suppose. Or only liberal bubbles are problematic.
Just so silly.
March 6, 2019
This book makes some good overall points but is rife with digressions not really relevant to the topic and it isn’t all that clear about what its main thesis actually is.
Read
March 25, 2019Among the many untruths told about Donald Trump is the claim that his is not a movement of ideas. As a candidate in 2016, Trump may not have spoken the language of the policy wonks. But unlike those Republicans who did, his view of the world was not a stale ideological cliche. It was instead refreshingly frank: about a foreign policy that couldn’t win the wars it waged, an economy that imperiled middle- and working-class America, and an immigration regime only the employers of illegal nannies could love. Trump recognized reality, and that drew to his cause independent-minded intellectuals who had also done so. The Trump movement suffers not from a dearth of ideas or thinkers, but a dearth of institutions. It has thinkers but no think tank.
F.H. Buckley, Foundation Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, is one of its thinkers. His new book, The Republican Workers Party, comes from a publisher—Encounter—led by another, Roger Kimball. Buckley is no relation to William F., who as writer, editor, and Firing Line host did more than anyone to make conservatism a byword for eloquence in the latter half of the 20th century. But much as the other Buckley remade the Right by founding National Review in 1955, this one aims to bring about a profound change of heart and mind among conservatives. He wants to make good on the promise of the GOP as a party for American workers.
Read the rest: https://www.theamericanconservative.c...
F.H. Buckley, Foundation Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, is one of its thinkers. His new book, The Republican Workers Party, comes from a publisher—Encounter—led by another, Roger Kimball. Buckley is no relation to William F., who as writer, editor, and Firing Line host did more than anyone to make conservatism a byword for eloquence in the latter half of the 20th century. But much as the other Buckley remade the Right by founding National Review in 1955, this one aims to bring about a profound change of heart and mind among conservatives. He wants to make good on the promise of the GOP as a party for American workers.
Read the rest: https://www.theamericanconservative.c...
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