War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism
By Kevin Slack.
Encounter Books, 2023.
Hardcover, 456 pages, $34.99.
Reviewed by Mark G. Brennan.
This just in: Rural Americans are fleeing the Democratic Party! In case you missed “Why Democrats Are Losing Small-Town America” on The Wall Street Journal Weekend’s June 15-16 front page—gentle reminder—now’s the time to take down the William Jennings Bryan banner festooning your covered wagon. The article cites Wilson County, North Carolina’s 19% decline in registered Democrats since 2016 as proof. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall a presidential election that year.
The Wall Street Journal, aka Pravda of America’s corner office caste, only published Monday through Friday until 2005. Businesses transact during the workweek. Who needs to read newsy stuff when he’s not in the office? On weekends, the Journal’s subscribers prefer to play golf or sweat through hot yoga when they aren’t shuttling junior to travel baseball games or dropping the Escalade off for its 2,500-mile servicing.
Now, thanks to the paper’s weekend edition launched in 2005, oblivious middle managers can broaden their intellectual horizons all week. The article above taught them about rural America’s “mistrust of government” thanks to “political and economic policies” that led to “the loss of well-paying jobs during the collapse of manufacturing and farming.” Newly enlightened cubicle jockeys will wonder why no one from HR on last quarter’s Zoom call warned them that the peasants might get uppity after their firm shipped its last remaining jobs to Guatemala. As the Journal pointed out, 62% of rural North Carolinians plan to vote for Donald Trump in November. Supply chain management meets human nature.
If you sneered in disdain at that June headline and wondered who could possibly find it newsworthy, then you likely understand the political and economic fiascos that have bedeviled working-class Americans since 2020’s Summer of Love, if not 2008’s financial crisis. However, our national nightmare began long before your cleaning lady bought her third condo in Vegas with no money down or George Floyd hopped on a bus from Houston to Minneapolis. Hillsdale College political scientist Kevin Slack traces our continuing national horror back to its roots, America’s roots, in his scathing new book, War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism. Slack dedicates his screed to patriotic Americans “disgusted by our rotting plutocracy,” which has been commandeered by a “ludicrous priesthood that deifies profits.” Don’t expect to see it reviewed favorably in The Wall Street Journal.
Slack’s thesis—“progressivism, liberalism, and radicalism break from each other in distinct ways”—hides more than it reveals. Fortunately, he provides ample evidence for his pithier contention that “the old idols of conservatism…are dead.” Where should conservatives turn when the American Enterprise Institute “embraces the trans revolution,” the Heritage Foundation’s stance on immigration mimics the Left’s, and Catholic integralists “teach open borders”? Slack spends most of the book crafting a “genealogy of the movement from American republicanism to kleptocratic despotism” to trace how these putatively conservative organizations and American society more broadly veered so far left. Those on the right must consider his arguments since the right is rarely right in either sense of the word these days.
Slack bases his case on first principles, a concept anathema to the opportunists, utilitarians, and relativists atop the current United States regime. In his first chapter, “Republican Citizenship,” he reminds us of the “natural law consensus” that once underpinned the states’ bills of rights in the 18th century. He quotes liberally from the Federalist about hoary values like citizen virtue and civil liberty. Though academic historians will howl when he claims that “women were an essential part of the citizenry” in early America, the caravan of truth will move on. His reminder that “Republicanism requires clarity about who is a citizen and who may be admitted” stands in stark contrast to our southern border’s open floodgates, which have long garnered full-throated support from the so-called right. Conservatives’ frenemies at The Wall Street Journal proposed a “five-word constitutional amendment” to solve 1984’s then quaint-by-comparison immigration crisis: “There shall be open borders.”
According to Slack, three central factors combined to gut the republic around the turn of the 20th century. First, Progressive social science, with its shock troops of “Anglo-Protestant crusaders” leading the charge, “undercut the American republican orthodoxy” and hastened the United States’ “descent into empire.” At the same time, as record numbers of immigrants, supposedly just “yearning to breathe free,” brought along disruptive “ethnic divisions [and] political instability.” And, like today’s lopsided wealth distribution, the Gilded Age’s economic inequality further fractured a republican society already under stress.
As Slack describes, Progressive intellectuals’ hubristic omniscience snowballed throughout the 20th century despite a litany of domestic and foreign policy failures. And both Republicans and Democrats drank from the same trough of cognitive conceit. According to Slack, yet contrary to every conservative first principle, Republicans “embraced the new libertarianism and neoconservatism.” By contrast, “privileged White and minority Democrats”—unconstrained by any first principles whatsoever other than libertinism—grounded their mission to save humanity at home and abroad on their exclusive, credentialist educations and unearned, bureaucratic sinecures. In the 1990s, neoliberals in both parties took sinister pleasure in singling out white males and traditional family values for abject mockery. By the time Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator in 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy, normal Americans had finally had enough.
2016’s shocking election results served as a clarion call for the left to circle the Priuses to fend off the NASCAR fans and stay-at-home moms, or the “AR-15 crowd” as Slack provocatively calls them. To keep these modern Know Nothings at bay, the left did whatever it took to “distort science into a source of political authority” and shut off all debate about COVID protocols. People, and not just women, became pregnant. “Morbidly fat and transgender models” supplanted Gisele Bündchen and Naomi Campbell on the covers of glossy fashion magazines. Membership in the church of BLM exploded in a nation where mainstream religions had been shrinking for decades. The United States isn’t just polarized. It’s insane and getting more insane by the day. Slack’s implicit message becomes clear as one proceeds through his painfully documented text: Those on the right who cling to Republican Party bromides share just as much blame as leftists gloating at the American republic’s demise.
Slack’s uncensored takes will enrage Con Inc.’s gatekeepers. He skewers leftist icons like Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez, a mortal sin according to the catechism of the acceptable right. William F. Buckley, the godfather of those same Con Inc. gatekeepers, comes in for equal criticism due to his silly fusionism, almost none of which was “republican,” as Slack reminds us. Ronald Reagan, like Buckley, deserves the harsh lashings Slack metes out. The Gipper’s “rhetoric of fiscal responsibility did not match his soaring deficits.” He pulled a reverse Robin Hood as he merrily took away the poor’s social safety net and gave it to his avaricious donors.
Unfortunately, Slack also provides easy pickings for his opponents to marginalize his work. His Pat Buchanan citations will get the ears of both kooky left-wingers and the schoolmarms of Con Inc. to prick up. But those two indistinguishable groups will bay in social justice rage when they see his citations of Steve Sailer and Peter Brimelow, not to mention E. Michael Jones, Sam Francis, and Kevin McDonald! While those on the right can engage with Freud, Freire, and Adorno without requiring tranquilizers, leftists can’t read a single author to the right of David Brooks without consulting their therapist first. Then again, by including so many dissident right thinkers, Slack proves Stalin’s assertion that quantity has a quality all its own.
What is to be done at this late date? Slack proposes two alternatives. We can either return to the “founder’s citizenship revolution,” which would require sound policy moves like the abolition of the oxymoronic dual citizenship, a freeze on immigration, and an America-First economic agenda. Unfortunately, the other alternative has already begun. “Civil conflict” now ambiently reigns, with acute episodes like the COVID lockdowns, the ongoing climate change emergency, and the incessant media drumbeat about white supremacy all providing background music for the collapse. Let us hope Slack’s suggestion that the Right exercise its moral confidence can find a wider audience. You certainly won’t read about it in The Wall Street Journal Weekend.
Mark G. Brennan lives in Manhattan and teaches at New York University.
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