Julius Krein, American political analyst: 'Many Republican candidates are very amateur cultural warriors'

It started almost as a joke.

It was 2015 and Donald Trump, the business magnate probably best known for being the face of the reality television show

The Apprentice

, had decided to run for president with the Republican Party.

There is no doubt that what he offered was novel: unscripted, politically incorrect and ideologically unconventional.

For the Harvard-educated political philosopher Julius Krein (1986, South Dakota) and several of his colleagues who were then working in the world of finance, among some of their most scandalous outbursts were sensible opinions about the state. of things.

So they opened an anonymous blog to delve into some of his ideas, especially around the economic model, international trade and China.

This intellectualization of Trumpism quickly gained traction, more than they expected or could handle, so they shut it down before the election for fear of losing their jobs.

In 2017, however, during Trump's first year in office, the quarterly political magazine

American Affairs

was launched , largely to challenge parts of what can be called the neoliberal consensus: open borders for capital;

transfer of power from national governments to transnational technocracies;

unrestricted markets;

and promotion of democracy as the sole premise of foreign policy.

“There was an audience for these things,” Krein says from Boston over a video call.

At first, some called the publication an “organ of the Trump administration,” but Krein is quick to deny that representation: “They never really cared much about us,” he says.

In August 2017, Krein himself had publicly turned against Trump, publishing an op-ed in

The New York Times

titled

I Voted for Trump.

And I Sorely Regret It

, in which he acknowledged that Trump's positions and behavior were indefensible.

Since then,

American Affairs

has earned a reputation as a “heterodox politics magazine,” publishing, for example, conservative arguments in defense of a greater role for the state, but also left-wing articles against identity politics and open borders.

When the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred, the cracks that Krein had been pointing out for years burst.

It seemed that the neoliberal consensus had collapsed under its own weight.

But what can follow at the end of the “end of history”?

The slate is clear for a new political and economic consensus to form and this year's US presidential election is the obvious stage.

However, for Krein, neither Biden nor Trump nor any of his parties are up to the task.

Question:

How would you explain the sequence that ended with the end of the so-called “neoliberal consensus”?

Answer:

Neoliberal economic paradigms have been gradually undermining the conditions on which they are based, and I believe that this became especially acute after the year 2000 and China's entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization).

But I think politically the Covid-19 and supply chain crises, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, accelerated interest in these issues.

They became more than an academic narrative and were expanded to interest the centre-left establishment.

Q:

The Biden administration has moved away from basic neoliberal ideas, but it hasn't really sold its policy as a paradigm shift.

It is?

A:

Yes and no.

There is a paradigm shift because uttering the words “industrial strategy” in the United States now does not cause shock and repulsion among the intellectual elite.

It's a big change, but many of the underlying dynamics haven't really changed, both politically, in terms of winning voters, and more substantively, for example in changing financial and corporate incentives.

Q:

What are those incentives that have remained intact?

A:

It begins in the seventies and eighties with the transfer of labor to the rest of the world.

And after the end of the Cold War, it skyrockets.

He would also add that, although neoliberalism aspires to a kind of fiscal rectitude, it actually relies heavily on debt to keep things going;

and as we have seen with the financial crisis, that tends to add more financial instability.

This situation has simply gone so far that it is causing a lot of problems.

The first and most obvious is with the industrial base, particularly defense.

At a macroeconomic level it has meant the loss of production and the isolation of benefits for the majority of employees, and that generates geographical and financial inequalities that then enhance political instability.

Q:

But no one on the American political scene is explaining it beyond buzzwords about the China threat or anti-globalization in general.

A:

I think there are people on both sides who are capable of developing a post-neoliberal agenda, or have it or have parts of it, but they tend to be technocrats, they are not the dominant voices of either party.

Q:

Is it electorally difficult to sell these types of ideas?

A:

I don't know if the difficult thing is the media attention, because when you start talking about these complex and dry issues, the media doesn't want to cover them.

But there are surveys that say this is what everyone wants.

What happens is that they don't have the opportunity to vote on it because the parties are engaged in cultural wars or whatever.

Q:

How can a party build a broader electoral base in this context?

A:

Republicans have two problems that prevent them from building greater realignment.

The first is that there are still significant segments of the party that are stuck in a sort of caricature of 1980s Reagan economics, and that has a pretty clear ceiling right now, even with a portion of Republican voters.

And then, two, I think the party in general has an aptitude problem.

Many of the Republican candidates are very amateur culture warriors, and Trump himself doesn't really run with an agenda.

He presents himself with an effective campaign, but fundamentally

stand-up comedy

against the excesses of progressivism, which I believe may be enough to win the elections, but it is not a program on which things can be built.

On the Democratic side, I think his commitment to identity has created a reverse polarization.

They have a hard time talking about nationalism in a positive way and really presenting themselves as leaders of the American nation, which is what they really have to do to win elections.

Q:

It doesn't seem like a very good selection...

A:

Voters will have to choose between people who are immersed in a very unpopular and, in some ways, un-American elitist morality;

or people who at least claim to be nationalists and support America in general, but who are consumed by all sorts of strange culture war issues and actually show very little interest in running the government effectively.

Q:

And is there any way out of this deadlock?

A:

I do not believe that this state of affairs is permanent or inherent.

But it will probably be resolved by external events.

We are already experiencing a situation in which the United States is depleting its artillery reserves.

There are major problems in the Middle East that could get worse;

And while the American industrial base could probably withstand a war with Iran, it's actually a very tight shot.

And if China—and I'm not predicting this, but it can't be ruled out either—made a move and blockaded Taiwan or something, the current estimate is that the United States would probably run out of ammunition in a week or ten days.

As more members of the American elite have to confront these realities and a world in which the US-led world order moves further away, domestic politics will be driven more than any kind of national campaign issue.

But that is absolutely unpredictable, of course.

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