The Prophet of Trump’s Revolution

A year or so before the most recent election of Donald Trump, I read a newly-released book that, while little-noticed upon publication, opened a window on the new era of America politics, outlining virtually every issue that Trump would raise on his march to the presidency while detailing the powerful structural and institutional obstacles he would face.

At a time of cowardice on racial issues, the book was forthright, noting that America’s black political leadership has been “courted, coddled and fawned upon by the press as no other assemblage of politicians in history. Even today it is kowtowed to by the Democratic Party in a manner and approaching the servile.” The book attacked the hypocrisy of “upper-middle class bureaucrats and judges” who mouthed politically correct slogans while sending their children to schools far away from minorities.

It noted the moral bankruptcy of current civil rights leaders and how they advocate for discrimination against whites rather than equal treatment: “Equal rights have been replaced by the demand for equal reward,” the author noted, blasting the left’s misuse of the 14th amendment as “grounds for upholding executive action discriminating against white males.”

But the author also understood that the challenges conservatives faced were structural, driven by an iron triangle of media, bureaucracy, and the courts: “More and more,” the author declared, “we are governed by an unelected oligarchy of bureaucrats, judges and press guided by their own ideology and insulated from the electorate.”

He called out the radicalism of the left, blaming their demands for absolute fealty to the party line as “less characteristic of pressure groups in a democracy than of the militant wing of the Chinese Communist party” [during the Cultural Revolution].

Anticipating DOGE, he noted the corruption of the liberal deep state and the malicious motives of its progenitors: “It was designed that way… The leviathan welfare state is… a pyramid to ambition masquerading as altruism.”

And he understood that mass firings were necessary because dismissing a few bureaucrats would not stop systemic resistance to Trump: “bureaucracy [is] crawling with potential martyrs who would salivate over the chance to win prestige, publicity, plaudits and guaranteed careers this most liberal of cities provides automatically to those who managed to get themselves fired for zealotry.”

And crucially, the author understood the necessity of wiping out the NGO empire behind much of the corruption, encouraging the business community to “attack the loopholes of the left, [and] the big foundations and to demand and know why it is that corporate taxes are going to subsidize tax free public policy institutes and ‘public interest law firms’ which use their privileged positions as a base from which to launch assaults on business.” He understood that rather than reflecting the public interest, these firms represented “only their own ideology. They are among the nation’s new unelected elite determining the course of this country. . .”

Finally, he called for an assertive foreign policy based on the national interest against the wishes of liberal intellectuals who believe that “regardless of who is elected to office its own perception of what is moral and immoral should prevail over any asserted pragmatic national interests of the United States.”

While clear-eyed about the structural challenges facing any conservative president, the author saw, as Trump sees, the left’s fundamental weakness: “a great gulf in America between the upper middle class progressives and the average citizen,” and he called the leftist establishment “soft at its core. [They are] intellectuals who have no hold on the political allegiance of the working or middle class. Much of the esteem in which academics were once held was erased by their squalid performance when confronted by the militants of the student left in the last decade.”

And he understood the necessity, for any right-wing strategy to be successful, of capturing the White House: 

only the president has a podium of sufficient elevation, a microphone of adequate power, to give America’s attention on the issues the national press ignores. Only the White House has the discipline and resources to conduct siege warfare against the bureaucracy. Only the president can transform the Supreme Court justices who will slam shut the book belatedly on this unfortunate era of government by decree, and the presidency remains the only repository of national power and authority remotely within the reach of the right.

The book made clear that success required a candidate to break from party constraints and run on an “independent conservative ticket for president running free of and against the establishments both national parties. The objective would not only be the capture of the presidency but the realignment of the nation’s political parties.”

The problem with the book, as some readers may have guessed, is not that it was wrong, but that it was far too early. Every passage and phrase quoted above does not actually come from a “newly-released” book, but from Conservatives Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right has Failed, the now largely-forgotten first book written by a then little-known, 36-year-old ex-senior staffer of the Nixon administration, Patrick Buchanan. The book was published 50 years ago, long before Buchanan was a household name, and even longer before he would launch several presidential campaigns that would strike fear in the hearts of the GOP establishment. 

Reading such an acute diagnosis of our political ailments today from an author writing a half century ago is exhilarating, but also terrifying, because it highlights a few discomfiting facts: First, the problems we face were seen by clear-eyed conservatives such as Buchanan decades ago. Second, we’ve made almost no fundamental progress over the last half century in tackling them. It also makes clear that anyone who is pushing any version of a return to “traditional conservatism” from the MAGA agenda is at best a dupe of the liberals and at worst a cowardly or malicious actor, willfully ignorant of a half century of political and policy failure, and afraid to take the difficult steps that Buchanan outlined decades ago and that Trump and his team are actually undertaking now. 

In other words, for several decades there were figures on the right who knew what needed to be done. Either we just didn’t listen to them—or those who did lacked the power or the will to turn that knowledge into action. 

That is why President Trump is the perfect actor for this political moment. Because what Trump has in spades is exactly the sort of iron will and unquenchable desire for victory that previous GOP leaders have lacked. That was why the voters chose him.   

While there are always new insights to be gained as we face new situations, Buchanan’s book shows that what we fundamentally have lacked are not insights but men and women with the courage to put those insights into action. That means we need to make sure the administration selects personnel, nominates judges, and forges alliances with congressional leaders not solely on the basis of their having the boldest and most brilliant ideas (though of course good ideas are important!) but based on their willingness to be maximally disagreeable in the fight against the leftist leviathan—even when the leviathan turns up the heat to uncomfortable levels.

In our current political moment, the primary value that writers and policy analysts can provide is not some brilliant new intellectual synthesis, but steady and unflinching encouragement that will help fortify the wills of Trump and his administration, and to let them know that when they are being attacked most brutally, that is likely the surest sign they are doing a good job.  

Buchanan outlined the problem a half century ago—Trump has arrived to provide our first chance at a real solution. 

As for the rest of us who wish to help him, what is required is not mere cleverness—but something rarer and much more important: courage.

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