Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the first seven here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
In 2022, I wrote one of a pair of dueling articles in Compact magazine looking ahead to the 2024 election. Mine, called Bernie Can Deliver for Workers, urged the most popular and successful socialist candidate in American political history to take a third run at the presidency.
If you care about the working class, Bernie Sanders is the only choice that makes any sense in the 2024 presidential cycle. Former President Donald Trump sometimes made pro-worker noises, but the mismatch between rhetoric and reality was dramatic. His National Labor Relations Board waged a relentless war against organized labor. President Biden has been an improvement—but the man Trump once aptly dubbed “Sleepy Joe” is simply never going to take serious action to tackle runaway economic inequality and its corrosive effects.
We live in a country where corporations and wealthy individuals more or less openly purchase politicians, where diabetics have to start GoFundMes to buy life-saving insulin. Thirty-two million people still earn less than $15 an hour—and $15 buys a lot less than it did when fast-food workers launched their “Fight for $15” campaign in 2012. Unionized taxi drivers have seen their industry “disrupted” into oblivion by gig-economy apps. Even college professors are likely to drive around between multiple campuses teaching adjunct classes without health insurance or any sense of security for the future.
The Trump administration was one long orgy of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. Biden promised voters a few positive reforms in 2020, even as he told donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” under his presidency. So far, his record in office has been much more Sleepy Joe than Dark Brandon.
Little wonder Bernie Sanders “clocked in with the highest favorability rating among a list of 23 potential 2024 contenders” in a new USA Today-Ipsos poll—beating out not just profound mediocrities like Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Mike Pence, but also Biden and Trump.
Was he too old for another run? Please, I argued at the time. Compare his mental or physical health to either Trump or Biden. Was “democratic socialism” too unpopular in the most anti-socialist country in the first world? Bernie’s polling told a different story. All of these, I concluded, were “thin excuses for focusing on horse-race considerations instead of arguing about politics.” And I spent the rest of the piece talking about Medicare for All, labor unions, and the like.
In the other corner, conservatives Sohrah Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz co-wrote He’s Still the One, a full-throated right-populist case for Donald Trump.1
Republican voters face a clear choice in the 2024 presidential cycle. Those who think the conservative movement has the solutions to the nation’s crises should vote for a conventional GOP candidate. But those who believe the conservative movement is part of the problem should support Donald Trump.
Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement. Only Trump has taken on the mania for free trade and outsourcing. No other figure of the right has shown the same willingness to break with his own side’s orthodoxies.
Trump’s opponents on the right often describe themselves as “principled” conservatives. But this is no cause for boasting when one’s principles are bankrupt. The policies pursued by GOP elites since the Reagan era had plunged the nation into costly wars while accelerating the decline of the middle class. Trump promised to punish the architects of these failures. His rhetoric evoked the party’s older Eisenhower-Nixon tradition, which made peace with the New Deal and pursued realism and restraint abroad. [My emphasis]
Now, for reasons suggested by the passages I’ve bolded, Ahmari at least has had second thoughts. In an UnHerd article this week called Trump Was Never the One, he writes:
Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent. Ordinary Americans do their best to protect their pocketbooks and 401(k) accounts from his whims; other world leaders increasingly look beyond him in preparing for the unstable international order he will leave behind.
Personally, I would argue that it was never a caricature. To be fair, he credits his movement’ Never Trumpers for seeing what he didn’t about Trump’s lack of virtue. A small point I would insist on, though, is that this wasn’t some special insight of Never Trump conservatives. Everyone everywhere who wasn’t a Trump supporter saw these things. Trump’s cruelty and capriciousness were visible from space.
I will give Ahmari a lot of credit, though, for recognizing the enormity of the betrayal of the non-interventionist principles Trump has (occasionally and inconsistently) pretended to hold.
Trump had famously described George W. Bush’s Iraq War as a “big, fat mistake” in a 2016 Republican primary debate. And four years later, he’d vented the American people’s fatigue with the Middle East more generally, blaming bipartisan hawks for sinking “$8 trillion” into the region that could’ve been spent “fixing our roads in this country” or “fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals even, our schools even — it’s crazy.”
Well, here we are: Trump has now launched a broadly unpopular invasion of Iran in conjunction with Israel. And this, in pursuit of vague objectives that shift depending on which Cabinet member you ask and when. The result: an open-ended regional war that has decimated America’s military basing architecture in the Middle East, triggered the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and sent gas prices spiking back home (the sharpest four-week rise since Hurricane Katrina). An expeditionary force of 2,500 Marines is on its way to the Gulf as I write. What Trump reportedly envisioned as a quickie, Venezuela-style affair will thus widen into a prolonged operation with a ground component.
I can’t claim to speak for my co-author, but this was exactly the type of scenario I had in mind when, back in 2022, I celebrated Trump for ditching the foreign-policy consensus of conventional conservatism.
Would it be petty to say I told you so? Because I did. Here, for instance, is an article I wrote in early 2023 pushing back against the idea that Trump had somehow “ditch[ed] the foreign policy consensus of conventional conservatism” and reminding readers of first-term greatest hits like the Bolivia coup, the Soleimani assassination, tearing up the nuclear detente with Iran, doubling the rate of drone strikes in Yemen, and the first attempt to overthrow Maduro (by installing Juan Guaidó). Some dove.
At any rate, if Sohrab (who I should say for the sake of full disclosure is a personal friend) was far too forgiving of Trump’s first term, he certainly has a better memory about the 2024 campaign than the army of pundits who remain loyal to the MAGA cause and claim that America First always meant do whatever’s in America’s interests, even if it’s starting regime change wars that we claim are justified by vague talk of terrorism and preemptively neutralizing future threats (the exact rationale used to start Bush’s wars in the Middle East).
In 2024, he reminds us, the Trump/Vance campaign
listed the plank “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE” near the top of its platform.
Pro-war pundits insist that there is no betrayal, no switcheroo. They dig up obscure, decades-old anti-Iran statements from Trump: You fell for the “PEACE TICKET” sloganeering from 18 months ago? Well, sucker, you should have combed through 1980s news clippings! They also point to polls showing that the war — erm, “excursion” — is overwhelmingly popular among self-identified “MAGA Republicans.” Last week, Senate Republicans posted a graphic on X touting “94% support” for the war in a huge font; beneath it, in minuscule font: “of MAGA Republicans.”
Such arguments, of course, elide the fact that Trump supporters recoiling from the war might decline to identify as “MAGA Republicans,” thus leaving a self-selecting pool of hard-liners who would be as likely to back Trump if he made peace with Tehran and converted to Twelver Shiism tomorrow.
Then, too, “MAGA Republicans” are only a part of the coalition Trump assembled in 2016 and expanded over the decade that followed. That broader coalition also included many Independents, of whom only about a third approve of the Iran war (at best). The full Trump coalition also included nearly half of Hispanic men, a fifth of black men, and normally Democratic-leaning Obama-to-Trump voters: the groups, in short, that were drawn by Trump’s talk of leaving the Mideast behind to build up roads, schools, hospitals.
I believe, for both political-strategic reasons and more basic human ones, in rolling out the welcome mat when people admit they were wrong. But I would urge both Ahmari and any of his readers who broadly share his political preferences to think long and hard about 2028. Even I don’t hold out any hope that Bernie Sanders (who would be 87 years old on January 20th, 2029) has another presidential run in him. But AOC, for example, might well go for it. If she manages to beat the inevitable clown car of Democratic establishment androids and snag the nomination, and she goes up against JD Vance or Marco Rubio or whoever, the political shape of the choice will be indistinguishable from the Bernie vs. Trump argument Ahmari and I were having in 2022. So, if you actually want to “leave the Mideast behind to build up roads, schools, hospitals,” do you swallow any culture-war disagreements you might have with someone like AOC and pull the lever for her? Or do you hold out hope that the next Republican who mouths anti-interventionist and right-populist phrases will be the first to actually mean it—that, in other words, this tiger this time will turn out to be a strict vegetarian?
All I can say is that, four years later, my case for Bernie doesn’t embarrass me.
Meanwhile, though, admitting that you were on the wrong side of the divide about the most divisive politician on the planet isn’t easy. And if you’re generally positioned on the Right (even in an as idiosyncratic a way as Ahmari), making excuses for each new bit of Trumpian awfulness is definitely the path of least resistance. The audience likes it better. See the comment thread under his article at UnHerd for a sense of what I mean there. So, credit where credit is due.
Read Trump Was Never the One.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, check out my MS NOW article on my strange history with Tulsi Gabbard, and her even stranger evolution from selling “No War in Iran” t-shirts to kissing Trump’s ring and agreeing not to criticize his war in Iran:
The only thing consistent about Tulsi Gabbard is a lack of principles
Also, while I’ve got your attention, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s a little bit halfway there. Consider chipping in!
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I’m more of a Black Sabbath kind of guy, so I’m not sure, but I’m told this title is a Shania Twain reference.
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