Last Friday, Amity Shlaes reviewed Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream by New York Times writer David Leonhardt. In his book’s detailing of the economic and social distress Donald Trump called “American carnage” and its advocating centralized, statist solutions à la the New Deal, Leonhardt has performed a useful service — for a certain political group.
The group consists of those who claim to be on the right yet reject Reagan-Buckley conservatism, especially those among them who identify as “national conservatives.” And Leonhardt’s service is to “draw out some of their conclusions” on those matters, especially economic, where they differ most with Reagan-Buckleyites. Their policy program there — pro-union, pro-industrial policy, anti-trade (Senator Josh Hawley embodies all three) — amounts “to a call for converting America to an official European-style, group-oriented, class-divided social democracy,” Shlaes argues. Reagan would have had no time for this program. Hence the hesitation among some of its advocates to acknowledge its full implications, or their preference dishonestly to contort Reagan into a champion for it. For all their tired claims that the Right needs to move past “Zombie Reaganism,” the Gipper rightly retains a powerful hold on their imagination. But Leonhardt, a man of the Left, has no such burden, allowing him to realize these schemes in full.
Comments