At the New York Post, Daniel Halper reports on the launch of a new quarterly journal, American Affairs:
“It attempts to understand the ideological and political transitions, of which Trump is the most prominent one,” said founder Julius Krein in an interview. The journal, which will be published by the American Affairs Foundation, will be edited by Krein, as well as Gladden Pappen, a professor at Notre Dame, who will serve as associate editor…. “Our goal is to provide a forum for people who believe that the conventional ideological categories and policy prescriptions of recent decades are no longer relevant to the most pressing problems and debates facing our country,” Krein said in a statement. “The journal’s contributors will include well-known authors and new voices, both from the ‘right’ and the ‘left.’ We hope not only to encourage a rethinking of the theoretical foundations of “conservatism” but also to promote a broader realignment of American politics,” Krein added, describing his forthcoming “journal of public policy and political thought.”
Krein wrote an essay for THE WEEKLY STANDARD in late 2015 that explained how Donald Trump’s full-throated embrace of American nationalism was driving elites crazy—and hurting their ability to correctly evaluate the Republican candidate’s appeal. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:
Most candidates seek to define themselves by their policies and platforms. What differentiates Trump is not what he says, or how he says it, but why he says it. The unifying thread running through his seemingly incoherent policies, what defines him as a candidate and forms the essence of his appeal, is that he seeks to speak for America. He speaks, that is, not for America as an abstraction but for real, living Americans and for their interests as distinct from those of people in other places. He does not apologize for having interests as an American, and he does not apologize for demanding that the American government vigorously prosecute those interests. What Trump offers is permission to conceive of an American interest as a national interest separate from the “international community” and permission to wish to see that interest triumph. What makes him popular on immigration is not how extreme his policies are, but the emphasis he puts on the interests of Americans rather than everyone else. His slogan is “Make America Great Again,” and he is not ashamed of the fact that this means making it better than other places, perhaps even at their expense.
Read the whole thing here.
