The History of an Idea
A Heritage Worth Preserving
“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it's foundation on such principles & organizing it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety & happiness.”
The United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave, was not merely born as a political experiment, but as a fundamental rejection of the system of hereditary and autocratic rule that defined the Old World. The foundation of what would eventually become the philosophy of America, was born through the Genevan philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau who first laid down the revolutionary principle that political sovereignty resides not in a monarch, nor even in the halls of Congress, but rather, in the general will of a united people. The very premise that sovereignty was vested in the people themselves rather than in any particular economic or social class undermined the very foundations of hereditary rule. In Rousseau, we find the affirmation that the nation itself, the people bound together by common language, customs and destiny, constituted the only legitimate source of political authority.
These notions immensely influenced American revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, Common Sense, published in 1776, articulated a vision of America as a nation set apart, exalted, an asylum for liberty where the ordinary working man could participate in governance free from the corruption of the Old World's parasitic aristocracy. In Paine, one may find the conviction that the State ought to serve the interests of the productive classes who labor with their own hands, rather than a ravenous elite. In his later works, including The Rights of Man (1791 & 1792), Paine was insistent that republican government must not merely enshrine equal rights on paper, but ensure that equality is guaranteed through providing land, credit, and opportunity for ordinary working Americans. Paine would go down in history as both the most important ideologue of the American Revolutionary War, and a great philosophical inspiration to future American president, Thomas Jefferson.
From its founding, the United States was caught in the crosshairs of a struggle between two competing visions for America's future. On the one hand stood Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, who sought to remodel the young Republic in the backwards and un-American image of British mercantilism. They envisioned a financial system funded by public debt and managed by a commercial oligarchy allied at the hip to the federal government. On the other hand, stood Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans who understood that concentrated wealth, left unchecked, would inevitably corrupt republican institutions. Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence enshrined the truth that "all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable." These words, ratified on July 4th of 1776, became the sacred charter of the American Republic, a charter that every subsequent generation of patriotic Americans would demand be honored. True to his principles, as President, in 1807, Jefferson outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, making the United States of America one of the first nations to do so, and in 1824, prior to his death, he proposed a national plan to completely end slavery altogether.
Under Presidents Madison & Monroe, the American tradition was carried forward. Madison led the United States through the War of 1812, also known as the Second War of Independence, which gave the young American Republic its industrial awakening. Monroe, Madison's Secretary of State, presided over America's "Era of Good Feelings" and in 1823, issued the Monroe Doctrine, the most consequential declaration in American history until the Cold War. The Monroe Doctrine declared the entire Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonization and warned the old powers that any attempt to extend their system to the Americas would be considered a threat to the security of the United States of America. No longer was this hemisphere to be treated as the playground of the Old World.
In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected in a landslide electoral victory, having conducted America’s first successful populist campaign. Taking office in 1829, President Jackson began his vicious battle against the Second Bank of the United States in what would go down as the Bank War. The Second Bank, chartered in 1816, operated as a "hydra-headed monster", an institution that concentrated wealth in the hands of Eastern financiers while immiserating the agrarian heartland of the United States through speculative credit expansion and contraction. Jackson understood that the bank operated as a state within a state, accountable to nobody but its shareholders, corrupting Congress and pacifying the press with easy money. Jackson denounced the corrupting power of the Bank, writing "The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes". Though Jackson was aware that distinctions in society would always exist, he believed that when the laws undertook to add artificial distinctions that made the rich richer and the powerful more powerful, then the humble men of society had a right to complain. Jackson ordered the removal of federal deposits from the Bank and their placement in selective state-chartered institutions, and by 1837, the Bank was dead.
As industrial capitalism emerged and mass immigration began to transform the labor market, the American working class organized to defend its interests. Over the course of the 1840s, a mass wave of immigration transformed the cultural landscape of the United States. In response to this wave of mass migration, the American Republican Party was founded in New York City in June of 1843, demanding a 21-year residency before naturalization, the restriction of public office to the native-born, and the rejection of all foreign interference in American institutions. Its most charismatic early voice was Lewis Charles Levin, a Jewish American who became the second Jew ever elected to Congress. Out of this ferment, the American Party, more popularly referred to as the "Know Nothing Party", rose up and briefly dominated the American political landscape, controlling 100 elected congressional seats, 8 governors, and a half-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California. However, as tensions between the North & South erupted into gunfire in 1861, the Know-Nothings and their pro-American crusade faded into the history books.
The American Civil War was the greatest crucible of this country's nationhood. Both the Union and the Confederacy, driven by the overwhelming demands of total war, expanded executive power far beyond anything the Founders had envisioned, conscripting men, directing industry, and seizing private property. The American Civil War taught our ancestors not that one side was virtuous and the other villainous, but rather that a house divided against itself can never stand. Out of the unparalleled sacrifice and bloodshed of brothers that took place during the Civil War, came a renewed and indissoluble Union. The war settled forever the constitutional question of secession and, through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, wove into the fabric of the Republic a national guarantee of freedom, equal protection, and suffrage that had been unimaginable in 1860. The period that followed, often called the “Second Founding”, or the Reconstruction, was an era of national unity, in which the United States redefined itself as a single, sovereign people bound by a common destiny. But this was also the era in which the modern corporation was born, the trusts that would soon dominate oil, steel, sugar, and finance, and with it the first great concentrations of private economic power against which the people would soon revolt. Immigrant laborers and newly freed Black workers were absorbed into the wage system of the mills and mines, trading the plantation for the company town. From this cauldron of industrialization, the first organized challenges to corporate oligarchy would soon emerge.
During the period of Reconstruction, the Greenback Party emerged, an anti-monopoly political organization active from 1874 to 1889 which attempted to forge a farmer-labor alliance by backing the 8-hour workday and opposing the use of monopolistic pricing mechanisms. In 1869, the Knights of Labor was founded, seeking to organize all productive workers, skilled or unskilled, black or white, into "one big union" that would challenge the wage system itself. By 1886, the Knights of Labor claimed nearly 1,000,000 members, and fought against the mass Chinese immigration of the late 19th century. In 1892, the People's Party was formed in Omaha, Nebraska, calling for the nationalization of railroads and telegraphs, a graduated income tax, the free coinage of silver, and restrictions on foreign land ownership. The People's Party's 1892 presidential nominee, James B. Weaver, garnered over 1,000,000 votes, though the Populists would eventually be absorbed into the Democratic Party in 1896. The fall of the Knights of Labor would clear the way for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded by Samuel Gompers in 1886. Gompers was an English-born immigrant of Dutch Jewish descent who opposed mass-migration from China, recognizing that unrestricted migration would serve the interests of the wealthy by flooding the labor market and depressing wages. The unionism of Samuel Gompers was plain and simple: Higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions.
The Progressive Era
The American patriotic impulse found its most powerful and enduring expression in the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Born in 1858 to a wealthy New York family, Roosevelt overcame a sickly childhood through sheer force of will, embracing what he later referred to as "the strenuous life". The young man ascended rapidly, from Colonel of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, to Governor of New York, to Vice President, and finally, to becoming the youngest President in American history at age 42. Roosevelt believed that the President possessed a unique duty to act as the steward of public welfare, not merely as a passive executor of congressional will. He believed that the President ought to serve the people over corporate greed, and that the executive must be prepared to act wherever the Constitution did not explicitly forbid. Roosevelt promoted his platform as the "Square Deal".
Roosevelt championed equal opportunity and equal treatment under the law, alongside the elimination of special interests. The year 1902 alone was dominated by trust busting, with the Department of Justice breaking up the massive Northern Securities railroad monopoly, sending a shockwave through Wall Street, while during the Anthracite Coal Strike, Roosevelt threatened to use military force to nationalize the mines, securing a compromise for workers that awarded them a 10% wage increase and an 8-9 hour workday, which he referred to as a "square deal" for labor, business, consumers, and taxpayers alike. In 1903, he established the Department of Commerce & Labor, and from 1903 to 1906, he pushed through legislation to regulate railroad rates and protect consumers from adulterated products. Roosevelt established 150 new national forests, 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 51 wildlife refuges, and built the US Navy into the largest on the planet, doubling its tonnage. From his days in the New York legislative assembly in 1882 until his death in 1919, Theodore Roosevelt was a friend to organized labor, fighting for the rights of the common man against the industrial elite of the still-young American republic.
In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt announced his “New Nationalism” platform on August 31st of 1910, in Osawatomie, Kansas. Here, the former president declared:
“The American people are right in demanding that New Nationalism, without which we cannot hope to deal with new problems. The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock. This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.”
It was in the Osawatomie Speech of 1910 that the true, authentic tradition of American Progressivism was born. In 1912, Roosevelt abandoned the Republican Party and founded the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party, running on a platform that included women's suffrage, child-labor laws, workers' comp, a minimum wage for women, an inheritance tax, and national social insurance, all ideas years ahead of their time. Despite presenting the most challenging third-party campaign in American history, winning 27.4% of the popular vote, Roosevelt failed to secure the presidency, which was instead secured by his Democratic rival, Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson won the 1912 presidential election on his "New Freedom" platform centered upon breaking up monopolies and supporting ordinary working Americans. In his first two years, Wilson established a modern graduated income tax and strengthened trust-busting while exempting labor & farm organizations from prosecution. His administration created the first national Cooperative Extension Service, improved safety, wages and conditions for sailors, provided affordable long-term loans to farmers, established the first 8-hour workday for interstate rail workers, appointed the first Jewish justice in American history to the Supreme Court, and supported the 19th Amendment. On April 6th of 1917, the United States declared war on Germany, thus entering the bloody battlefields of the Great War. Theodore Roosevelt applauded Wilson's plea for a declaration of war, remarking "It now rests with the people of the country to see that we put in practice the policy the President has outlined." In 1917, Wilson established the War Industries Board to coordinate and channel economic production. The Board collaborated with various companies in each economic sector, imposing simplified standardized specifications while directing the flow of raw materials and finished goods. Wilson's Food Administration encouraged voluntary food conservation, and convinced farmers to surge production so dramatically that America could feed both its own troops and the starving Allies of Europe. The National War Labor Board, meanwhile, endorsed equal pay for women, the 8-hour workday, and collective bargaining rights. Unions agreed not to strike during the wartime emergency, and in return, millions of workers gained higher wages and shorter hours.
During this period, two organizations merited special attention: The American Alliance for Labor & Democracy (AALD) and the Social Democratic League of America (SDLA). The AALD was established in 1917 through the initiative of the AFL, to build support amongst American workers for intervention in World War 1. The SDLA, founded by pro-war socialists including John Spargo and William English Walling, performed a similar function. Spargo, a British-American stonecutter and leading socialist thinker, broke with the Socialist Party over its opposition to American entry into the World War, on the basis that Germany's invasion of Belgium was a crime against socialist principles. Walling similarly broke with the Socialist Party due to its servile anti-war policy. These figures believed that a "socialism of the nation" was possible, one that sought to nationalize the commanding heights of the economy for the sole benefit of the American people.
Following the death of Theodore Roosevelt on January 6th of 1919, despite an extensive personal rivalry between the two towering figures, President Woodrow Wilson mourned his death, commenting "In his [Roosevelt's] death the United States has lost one of its most distinguished and patriotic citizens, who had endeared himself to the people by his strenuous devotion to their interests and to the public interests of his country." In the aftermath of World War 1, and in response to a wave of communist bombings, Woodrow Wilson arrested thousands of Marxist radicals and conducted over 500 deportations. Assisting in the crackdown against communist subversion stood the American Legion, founded in 1919 by World War veterans including Theodore Roosevelt Junior.
And yet, the United States of the Progressive Era was not merely born in the halls of politics and labor, but also in the halls of great businessmen, none more emblematic than Henry Ford. Ford was an instinctive populist, and the first tycoon to serve as a hero to ordinary Americans. Born in 1863 on a Michigan farm, Ford despised the idleness of the hereditary rich and believed that industrial capitalism, if properly managed, would uplift the workingman rather than crush him. In 1914, Ford stunned the world by doubling the prevailing wage for factory workers, cutting the workday to eight hours, and hiring thousands of disabled and immigrant workers when other manufacturers turned them away. By paying his workers enough to purchase the very products they assembled, Ford created the first mass middle-class market for automobiles, transforming what was once a mere luxury toy into a necessity of American life. Ford was also a fierce opponent of the financiers and speculators whom he blamed for the boom-and-bust cycles that immiserated working families. He refused to borrow money from Wall Street, built the largest industrial complex in the world using only his own capital, and maintained a personal fortune that remained stubbornly modest compared to the Morgans and Rockefellers. When Ford died in 1947, half a million people lined the streets of Detroit, and ordinary Americans from every walk of life mourned a man they considered one of their own.
The New Deal Era
In late 1929, following nearly a decade of “economic growth”, the United States experienced the Wall Street Crash, inaugurating the Great Depression. As the government failed to intervene in any meaningful manner, the United States seemed well on the road to total oligopoly. In 1932, the Bonus Army organized under Walter W. Waters, marching tens of thousands of jobless World War 1 veterans and their families on Washington DC to demand the early payment of their service bonuses. President Hoover responded by ordering the Armed Forces to remove these desperate veterans by force, burning their shelters and scattering their families.
In the midst of this chaos arrived Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office on March 4th, 1933, with over 57% of the popular vote.
“I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army … I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 14th, 1933
When FDR delivered these words in his inaugural address, a quarter of all American workers were jobless, banks were failing, and deflation was devastating American farms. In his first Hundred Days, FDR closed the banks, established federal deposit guarantees, and launched the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) which established the National Recovery Administration NRA), led by General Hugh S. Johnson, a man who had served as representative of the military on Woodrow Wilson's War Industries Board.
Johnson saw workers as essential partners in national recovery, once remarking "If we didn't have trade unions, we'd have to form them". Johnson believed that unions and management were two halves of the same producer interest, and the NRA's job was to bring them together. Johnson's NRA followed a balanced process of recovery in which industry would propose codes of fair competition, public hearings would occur including consumer, labor and business representatives, and a Deputy Administrator would seek consensus amongst them. If no consensus was possible, then the State would provide the final say. The "Blue Eagle" became the symbol of this national recovery campaign. Businesses compliant with the NRA would display it, rallying consumers to support them. Within four months, 96% of commerce & industry was in voluntary compliance. In two years, the NRA created over 2,785,000 jobs, more than all other New Deal agencies combined during that period, and it did so without a single treasury draft. It added $3 billion annually to purchasing power, established regulated working hours and wages, ended child labor, dissolved sweatshops, and guaranteed labor's right to unionize. Unfortunately, the NRA was killed by the Supreme Court in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), effectively marking the death of America's self-governing industrial democratic economy based on voluntary mass movement. Following this, FDR pivoted to moderate piecemeal reforms including the Social Security Act, Wagner Act & Wealth Tax Acts.
But the judicial murder of the NRA did not extinguish the militant energy of the American worker, for the spirit of American labor merely found new hosts in organizations such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), founded in 1935 under the towering leadership of John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, who took up the banner of industrial unionism. Lewis understood that the great mass-production industries of steel, automobiles, and rubber, could only be organized on an industry-wide basis that united skilled and unskilled, native-born and immigrant, white and black. The CIO’s sit-down strikes at General Motors in 1936-37 and its pitched battles with the steel barons fundamentally shifted the balance of power between labor and capital.
Following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States entered World War II, ushering in a generation of American military heroes, including Generals Douglas MacArthur, George S. Patton, and Curtis LeMay. MacArthur led American forces to victory in the Pacific, while Patton pulled America's military into the most advanced realms of highly mobile armored warfare, as LeMay pressed the daylight bombing offensive against the Third Reich and later designed and implemented the strategic bombing campaign against Japan. In the fires of the Second World War, America produced a generation of soldiers who, ready to fight and die for their nation, stormed the beaches of Normandy, conducted the Doolittle Raid, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima, Midway and Okinawa. With no better choice, the United States dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, finally bringing the Empire of the Rising Sun to its knees.
Over the course of the World War, and across occupied Europe, entire communities that had existed for centuries were erased from the face of the earth by the Third Reich. Tens of millions of innocents were rounded up, transported in cattle cars, stripped of their possessions, and murdered in industrialized killing centers whose sole purpose was death. When American soldiers entered these camps, they encountered scenes so horrific that many believed them impossible. General Dwight Eisenhower immediately ordered journalists, members of Congress, and ordinary citizens to witness the camps firsthand, fearing that future generations might dismiss such atrocities as exaggerated. The United States of America promised “Never Again,” a slogan which proclaimed that the civilized free nations of the world must forever more remain vigilant against those who preach racial extermination.
The Cold War
No sooner had the guns fallen silent in 1945 than American workers unleashed a massive wave of industrial action that shook the postwar order to its core. In 1946, more than 4.6 million workers walked off their jobs, the largest strike wave in American history. The year saw strikes in steel, coal, railroads, automobiles, meatpacking, and electrical manufacturing. At General Motors, 225,000 workers struck for 113 days, demanding a 30% wage increase to match soaring corporate profits. In Pittsburgh, 750,000 steelworkers walked out, shutting down the nation's mills. Longshoremen, lumbermen, and telephone operators joined the uprising. President Truman, facing a collapsing economy, threatened to draft striking railroad workers into the army and personally seized the nation's railroads. The working class had emerged from the Great Depression and the World War with a militant consciousness, refusing to return to the poverty and powerlessness of the 1920s. The 1946 strikes forced corporate America to recognize that the postwar social contract would have to include the recognition of the power of the working man.
The strike wave of 1946 produced a furious backlash from the business community and its allies in Congress. In 1947, Congress passed the Labor-Management Relations Act, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. The Act was a counter-revolution against the gains labor had won under the Wagner Act of 1935. Taft-Hartley banned the closed shop (requiring union membership as a condition of employment), permitted states to pass "right-to-work" laws banning union security agreements, required union leaders to sign non-communist affidavits to receive National Labor Relations Board protection, and authorized the president to impose an 80-day "cooling off" period for strikes deemed a national emergency. The act also prohibited secondary boycotts and jurisdictional strikes and required unions to file detailed financial disclosures. Taft-Hartley was the first major legislative defeat for organized labor since the New Deal and signaled that the postwar establishment would not tolerate the kind of working-class power that had briefly flourished in 1946.
Rather than exploiting Europe's weakness in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States chose a different course: The European Recovery Program, later known simply as the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan provided billions of dollars in aid to war-torn European nations seeking to restore production, rebuild their infrastructure, and revive commerce. Throughout world history, victorious powers had often sought to enrich themselves through the suffering of the defeated. And yet, America instead chose to invest its own wealth to restore small nations devastated by war. The United States rebuilt factories it did not own, repaired railroads it would never operate, and revitalized economies that would eventually become competitors. The Marshall Plan stands today as one of the greatest acts of national generosity ever undertaken by a great power, rooted in the conviction that lasting peace could never be built upon misery and starvation.
In 1947, the United States announced its policy "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." No longer would America stand idle while free nations were consumed by tyranny. This was the Truman Doctrine: Not a declaration of conquest, nor an attempt to establish an American empire, but a recognition that the collapse of liberty anywhere endangered liberty everywhere. The Doctrine rested upon the simple proposition that free peoples possessed the right to determine their own destinies without coercion from foreign powers. In committing itself to this cause, America established the foundation upon which the architecture of the free world itself would be constructed. The doctrine represented the fundamental decency of a nation that had emerged from two world wars with unprecedented power, and yet chose not to annex defeated territories, install hereditary rulers, or demand tribute from conquered peoples. Instead, the United States committed itself to defending the independence of nations struggling to remain free.
The inauguration of the Truman Doctrine also marked the genesis of the Cold War. In 1948, the Soviet Union attempted to force the Western Allies out of Berlin by sealing every road, rail line, and canal leading into the city. More than two million civilians suddenly found themselves isolated within hostile territory. The expectation in Moscow was straightforward: either the Western powers would abandon Berlin or they would provoke a military confrontation that could ignite another world war. The United States refused both options, instead igniting one of the most remarkable humanitarian operations in modern history, known as the Berlin Airlift. Day and night, aircraft flew into Berlin carrying food, fuel, medicine, and every necessity required to sustain the city's population. Through rain and snow, pilots landed every few minutes in an uninterrupted stream of aircraft. These American pilots did not arrive as conquerors as the Soviets had, but as providers. They carried coal for homes, flour for bakeries, and hope for families trapped behind a blockade. After nearly a year, the Soviet Union abandoned the effort, and Berlin emerged free.
The lessons of two world wars convinced the West that true, lasting peace, would require institutions capable of deterring aggression before catastrophe could occur once more. In 1949, the United States joined eleven other nations in establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At the heart of NATO stood the revolutionary principle that an attack against one nation would be regarded as an attack against all. For the first time in history, the democracies of North America and Western Europe formally bound themselves together in mutual solidarity. Through NATO, smaller nations were provided real security against intimidation while creating a framework through which free societies could cooperate in preserving peace. For generations, American soldiers stood watch alongside allies from Canada, Britain, France, Norway, Denmark, Italy, and many more, likely preventing a third world war during the most dangerous decades of the Cold War. As time progressed, NATO became more than a mere military arrangement, slowly evolving into a community of nations, united by a shared commitment to liberty, justice and democracy.
The Korean War of 1950-1953 became the first great test of whether the United States would stand firm against communist expansion on the far side of the globe or shrink away. General Douglas MacArthur executed a daring amphibious landing at Inchon that shattered the North Korean invasion. However, once Chinese forces entered the war in overwhelming numbers, MacArthur demanded authority to expand operations into China itself, including the bombing of supply bases in Manchuria and, if necessary, the use of the atom bomb. President Harry Truman, a representative of the cautious and timid political establishment, refused. MacArthur publicly disputed the administration’s policy, arguing that "in war, there is no substitute for victory." For this act of heroic defiance, Truman removed him from command in April of 1951. MacArthur returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome, greeted by ticker-tape parades and an address to a joint session of Congress that was interrupted fifty times by thunderous applause. Here at home, the battle against communist subversion within the federal government and the nation's cultural institutions found its champion in Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy's 1950 declaration that he possessed a list of known communists working in the State Department, exposed the extent to which internationalist elites had tolerated, and in some cases abetted, the infiltration of American institutions by agents of a hostile foreign power. McCarthy was correct. The American government had been penetrated, and those who should have guarded the nation's security had instead covered up the breach entirely.
As the Cold War raged on, a revolution swept the African American community. On May 17th, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The Court overturned its own 1896 precedent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had enshrined the "separate but equal" doctrine. Writing for the Court, Warren stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal". The Brown decision was a monumental victory for the long struggle against Jim Crow, and it provided both the legal and moral foundation for the Civil Rights Movement that would soon sweep the nation.
The New Deal era had led to the rise of a number of "New Deal Democrats" whose coalition would endure for decades. One of the most notable of these figures was Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a protege of FDR, who viewed the federal government not merely as the night watchman for private capital, but as the steward of the public welfare. Scoop was the "traditional Democrat", a progressive voice strongly tied to labor interests through the AFL-CIO. He authored the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the most important environmental laws in history, boasted one of the most progressive civil rights records in the Senate, and sponsored social welfare and human rights. At the same time, Jackson supported higher military spending, and fought for a hard line against the Soviet Union. In one instance he declared "I'm not a hawk or a dove. I just don't want my country to be a pigeon". Scoop would later support Richard Nixon's Vietnam policies, and rejected the liberal passivity that was consuming the Democratic Party from within. Scoop sought the Democratic presidential nomination twice, both in 1972 and 1976, and ran against the anti-American "Acid, Amnesty & Abortion" platform of his opponents. Despite his failure to secure the nomination, Scoop stands as undoubtedly one of the most important Democratic congressmen in American history.
In 1960, longtime Scoop ally, John F Kennedy, rose to power, elected on the promise of a "New Frontier", declaring that the torch had been passed to a new generation "tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage". Kennedy vowed to pay "any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe" to assure that liberty would survive and succeed throughout the globe. When US Steel announced a 3.5% price hike, Kennedy used every power of the executive branch to force the steel companies to roll back their increase, and his tax cuts (enacted under LBJ) saw the top marginal tax rate fall from 91% to 70%, spurring investment while expanding the social safety net. Kennedy launched the Apollo program, pledging to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Unfortunately, John F Kennedy would never witness the Moon Landing with his own eyes, as his life would be cut short in a brutal assassination on November 22nd of 1963.
At the time of his death, Kennedy had begun to see his Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson as a political liability of the first order. Johnson had been drawn deep into political scandals involving a number of corrupt American politicians and businessmen and was the subject of a developing Time Magazine political expose, which the Kennedy brothers themselves were behind. One of Kennedy's secretaries later confirmed in 1968 that he had decided, by November of 1963, that Johnson would not be the running mate in the 1964 presidential election. On November 22nd of 1963 John F Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. Following his assassination, the Senate investigation of LBJ was dropped, the Life Magazine piece was spiked, the DoJ's pursuit went silent, and the man who had been staring down political oblivion was now President of the United States of America.
Then, on August 4th of 1964, LBJ claimed that North Vietnamese patrol boats had launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Maddox. In response, Congress allowed LBJ to wage the Vietnam War. There was only one problem. According to the captain of the Maddox, the August 4th attack never happened. The result was a war that lasted over a decade and resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 American servicemen. Despite Johnson's so-called "War on Poverty", American poverty fell at a slower rate only after LBJ's "Great Society" initiatives were implemented. Black labor-force participation rates fell, and family structures began to disintegrate under the perverse incentives of welfare dependency curated by LBJ's programs. After 50 years, the programs established by Johnson confront a nation in which 31% of children live in single-parent households, up from 12% in 1960, and where inequality has reverted to levels not seen since the eve of the Great Depression. Mass migration, which had been held in check since 1924, resumed with the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. By 1968, the outrage of the Vietnam War was so consuming, that Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election.
The 1960s saw incredible victories for organized labor, particularly in agriculture. In 1962, Mexican American labor organizer Cesar Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers' Association (later United Farm Workers) organizing the most marginalized workers in the American economy to pressure growers into conceding rights for agricultural workers. In the late 1960s, the UFW's grape boycott became a national cause, forcing corporate agribusiness to finally come to the bargaining table. Chavez's movement asserted that even the poorest laborers had a right to a living wage, safe working conditions, and the dignity of collective representation, under the slogan "Si, se puede" or "Yes, it can be done".
Throughout the 1960s, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister from Atlanta, emerged as the preeminent leader of the American Civil Rights Movement. King first gained national attention during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956, a 381-day protest against segregated seating that ended with a Supreme Court ruling declaring bus segregation unconstitutional. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, which he committed to a strategy of direct action, civil disobedience, and moral witness. From the Birmingham campaign of 1963, where police dogs and fire hoses were turned on peaceful protesters, to the March on Washington that August, where King delivered his immortal "I Have a Dream" speech, to the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965 that led to the Voting Rights Act, King articulated a vision of America that demanded the nation live up to its founding creed. King believed that racial justice could not be separated from economic justice, and in his final years, he launched the Poor People's Campaign, calling for a massive federal investment in jobs, housing, and income for all Americans, regardless of color. Over the course of his civil rights activism, MLK was subjected to extensive harassment and political pressure by LBJ’s FBI, which attempted to “neutralize” King via wiretapping and encouragement of suicide. When King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4th, 1968, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers, the nation lost not only a moral titan but the most effective civil rights organizer of his generation.
Running in the 1968 Presidential election was Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, who had, by the mid-1960s, become a national tribune of the forgotten American working class. Wallace cast himself as the champion of the "average man on the street" against a bipartisan establishment that had abandoned him. His rallying cry was "Send them a message", and it was aimed squarely at the "pointy-headed professors who can't park a bicycle straight," the "briefcase-toting bureaucrats," and the "beatnik crowd that run Washington" who had sold out the working man. He campaigned under the banner of the newly formed American Independent Party, whose 1968 platform called for peace abroad and domestic tranquility at home, job training and opportunity for all Americans, an end to the inflationary spiral, fiscal responsibility, the reestablishment of local governmental authority, and, in a direct appeal to the laboring man and woman, "his fair share of responsibility and reward for the development of the mighty potential of this nation." Wallace campaigned on generous increases for Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, positioning himself as the defender of the social safety net for the working class. On foreign policy, he pledged that if the Vietnam War was not winnable within 90 days of his taking office, he would order an immediate and complete withdrawal of American troops. Wallace demanded that prosperous European and Asian allies bear the cost of their own defense rather than leaning indefinitely on the American taxpayer. His running mate was the retired Air Force General Curtis LeMay, former chief of the Strategic Air Command. At the press conference announcing his candidacy, LeMay declared that if necessary for national security, he would use anything that the United States could dream up, including nuclear weapons.
Wallace won immense levels of support among rank-and-file union members, particularly in the industrial heartland. At Ford's River Rouge plant in Michigan, a sampling of United Automobile Workers members in September 1968 found a striking number openly declaring their intention to vote for Wallace. In UAW straw polls in Trenton, New Jersey, Wallace drew 62% support. What Wallace's supporters shared was a sense of cultural and economic dispossession, and the sense that the distant elites running the country were doing so only for their own benefit. On election day, Wallace drew substantial numbers in working-class precincts of Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, and Illinois.
Despite the challenging race presented by Wallace and Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey, Republican candidate Richard Nixon won the election, and in 1969, he ascended to office as the populist voice against the elitist corruption that had plagued Washington during the LBJ years. In his first year in office, Nixon requested a 10% increase in benefits and the creation of an automatic escalator in Social Security benefits tied with the cost of living. On New Year's Day, 1970, Nixon signed Henry Scoop Jackson's NEPA, and that same year, he signed the Clean Air Act Extension, mandating reductions in a variety of pollutant chemicals. He then signed OSHA into law, establishing the federal right to a safe and healthful workplace. In 1971, he froze all prices and wages for a period of 90 days, asking corporations to freeze shareholder dividends for the same period. Following the freeze, Nixon established a Pay Board and Price Commission to administer Phase II controls, capping wage and price increases. By 1973, Nixon had constructed a system that increased Social Security benefits by more than 50% from the time he took office. Together with his Secretary of State & National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, Nixon pursued a foreign policy that placed America first. During this period, the United States pulled out of Vietnam and opened up to China to drive a wedge against the Soviet Union.
As the Vietnam War tore the nation apart, a dramatic confrontation erupted on the streets of New York City, revealing the deepening chasm between the working class and the antiwar movement of "hippies" and university students. On May 8th, 1970, following President Nixon's announcement of the invasion of Cambodia, an antiwar protest in Lower Manhattan was confronted by hundreds of construction working class Americans wielding hard hats and American flags. The workers charged into the antiwar crowd, beating protesters and tearing down their banners. Over the next several days, thousands of construction workers rallied at City Hall and at the Federal Hall National Memorial, chanting "America, love it or leave it" and demanding that Mayor John Lindsay fly the flag at half-staff for the soldiers in Vietnam, rather than for the dead antiwar protestors of Kent State. The workers of the Hard Hat Riots were members of unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO who saw the antiwar movement as an attack on their sons, their country, and the flag that symbolized their sacrifices. President Nixon welcomed a delegation of hard hats to the White House and posed for photographs with their ceremonial helmets. The hard hat riots marked the public emergence of the "hard hat" as a political symbol of the blue-collar, urban working class that felt abandoned by the Democratic Party and despised by the counterculture.
Following Richard Nixon’s fall from grace in the Watergate scandal, the American people would endure decades of political drift, elite betrayal, and accelerating deindustrialization. In 1977, Jimmy Carter entered office as President of the United States. In 1979, he appointed the neoliberal, Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve. Together, Volcker and Carter deregulated trucking & airlines, and strangled the working class. Carter surrendered the Panama Canal, withdrew from the Summer Olympics in Moscow, and stood passive while the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. His 1979 “Malaise Speech" told the American people that their crisis was one of spiritual exhaustion, as if the people had failed the government. In 1981, Ronald Reagan took office, and within months, he fired all striking air traffic controllers, union members who had endorsed and voted for him. Reagan’s deregulation of savings and loans led directly to the S&L crisis of the late 1980s, a $160 billion taxpayer bailout of corrupt financiers, whilst manufacturing employment fell by nearly 2,000,000 jobs between 1981 and 1985. By the 1980s, the crisis of mass migration which had been increasing since the 1960s, had become painfully acute. Ronald Reagan's Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986 granted amnesty to nearly 3,000,000 illegal aliens while promising “employer sanctions” that were never enforced. The result was a permanent underclass of low-wage labor that undercut American wages, especially for Black and Hispanic workers who had only recently gained a foothold in the industrial economy. The steel mills of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, the furnaces that had won two world wars, went cold. Reagan's handpicked successor, George HW Bush, presided over a recession from 1990 to 1991, and watched manufacturing bleed further while mass migration accelerated to unprecedented levels.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a chorus of Western pundits and academics declared that the great ideological struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had finally concluded. Francis Fukuyama, a State Department official and political philosopher, gave this sentiment its most famous expression in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, proclaiming so ignorantly that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed definitively over Fascism and communism. The future, Fukuyama declared, would be a monotonous convergence toward liberal norms, with no serious ideological competitor remaining on the horizon. The American foreign policy establishment embraced this thesis with enthusiasm, seeing it as a justification for the "Washington Consensus" of free trade, deregulation and privatization. And yet, Fukuyama’s "end of history" never arrived. Instead, the 1990s witnessed the violent unravelling of Yugoslavia, the Bosnian genocide, the rise of Al-Qaeda, and the first of the Russian Federation's humiliations at the hands of NATO. At home, the end-of-history doctrine produced a complacent ruling class that continued to outsource American manufacturing. By the time that the Soviet Union's successor state, Vladimir Putin's Russia, invaded Georgia in 2008 and then Ukraine in 2014, it was clear that history had not ended at all. It had merely entered a new, more treacherous phase, one for which America’s elites would quickly reveal that they had entirely failed to prepare for.
The New World Order
In 1992, Ross Perot ran for office, presenting the most significant independent candidacy since the Bull Moose run of Theodore Roosevelt. Perot, a Texan businessman, captured 19% of the popular vote running as an independent on a platform of reducing the federal debt and opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Perot believed that NAFTA would produce a "giant sucking sound" South, as American jobs would migrate to Mexico, a prediction which proved tragically correct. In 1995, Perot founded the Reform Party as a vehicle for those citizens "disgusted with the state of politics as being corrupt and unable to deal with vital issues". The Reform Party's populist platform of balanced budgets, campaign finance reform, term limits and trade protectionism, appealed to working Americans alienated by both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Despite Perot's prescient warnings, the bipartisan establishment proceeded to enact the very policies that Perot had identified as fatal to American prosperity. The administration of Bill Clinton, which took office in 1993, represented the most thorough betrayal of the working class by a Democratic president in the nation's history. Clinton signed NAFTA into law, accelerating the deindustrialization of the American heartland so accurately prophesied by Perot. The 1994 Crime Bill, which Clinton championed, fueled mass incarceration and devastated working-class communities of all races, while his 1996 welfare reform dismantled America’s social safety net without providing anything to replace the industrial jobs that had been shipped abroad. The crowning act of Clinton's subservience to international finance capital was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act's firewall between commercial and investment banking, paving the way for the reckless speculation that would detonate the global economy less than a decade later in the 2008 Financial Crisis. Clinton's political strategy, which he called "triangulation," was to co-opt the rhetoric of populism while governing in the interests of Wall Street, the Silicon Valley donors, and the cosmopolitan professional class.
Then, on September 11th of 2001, the American people watched in horror as two airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers, killing nearly three thousand people. In response to this atrocity, George W Bush inaugurated the War on Terror, resulting in both the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021) and the Iraq War (2003-2011). Until 2006, the American working class saw the War on Terror as righteous in conception, a necessary and long-overdue response to a gathering storm that the old bipartisan establishment had allowed to fester for far too long. The invasion of Afghanistan was aimed at destroying the Taliban’s terrorist safe haven that had allowed Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda to declare war on the United States. In the same spirit, the Ba'athist regime in Iraq had systematically massacred its own people, while its intelligence services had sheltered and funded the most notorious terrorist organizations of the age. As UN inspectors repeatedly documented, Iraq had never fully accounted for its stocks of biological and chemical agents. Tons of growth media, precursor chemicals, and hundreds of special warheads remained unaccounted for, while evidence of resumed sarin production and nuclear centrifuge concealment was later unearthed from backyard gardens and hastily sanitized military facilities. Saddam Hussein's regime was merely a caged animal waiting for the world to look away so that it could restart its weapons programs, exactly as his son-in-law’s defection had revealed a decade earlier.
The tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan was not the decision to fight. The tragedy was that the wars were handed over to an incompetent, self-dealing class of “boyars”, a permanent bureaucratic and military elite that had forgotten how to win and remembered only how to enrich itself. Rather than a swift, overwhelming victory followed by a national reconstruction under a strong proconsul, the Pentagon and the State Department imposed a sprawling, contractor-fed occupation that alienated local populations and squandered America's good will. In Iraq, the dissolution of the Ba’athist army and the elevation of sectarian politicians loyal to Iran turned a lightning conquest into a years-long counterinsurgency. In Afghanistan, the same generals who briefed success year after year presided over a nation-building fantasy while their subcontractors embezzled billions of American dollars. The result was that two just wars were allowed to drag on until public patience was exhausted by the elite's betrayal of these valiant efforts.
In 2009, Barack Obama took office on a wave of genuine popular hope, promising an end to the endless wars and a reckoning with the financial criminals who had wrecked America's economy. Instead, his administration delivered and even expanded a massive bailout of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks while millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure and their livelihoods to a jobless recovery. Not a single senior Wall Street executive went to prison. The Affordable Care Act, Obama's signature domestic achievement, was a boon to private insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants that did nothing to arrest the spiraling cost of healthcare for working families. At the same time, the national debt exploded, and drone warfare expanded to never-before-seen levels. Obama's administration was staffed heavily by the career politicians of the Clinton years and their protégés, ensuring continuity with the neoliberal project while draping it in the deceitful rhetoric of social reform, just as Clinton himself had done. Eight years of Obama demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the establishment was incapable of reforming itself.
Into the political tradition of Ross Perot stepped Donald Trump, who, in 2000, had briefly flirted with the idea of running for President as a member of Perot’s Reform Party. His 2000 platform was explicitly Perotian, advocating for universal healthcare, the elimination of the national debt, economic nationalism, and protectionism. In 2016, Trump captured the GOP nomination and transformed his Perotian economic nationalism into a governing policy. Yet Trump’s first term was a frustrating spectacle for his supporters. The border wall, his signature promise, remained largely unbuilt, and Mexico never paid a dime. Deportations actually lagged behind Obama‑era levels, as the immigration bureaucracy slow‑walked orders and courts blocked enforcement. Trump’s own staffing chaos, including a revolving door of White House aides and cabinet members who actively undermined his agenda, meant that much of his populist energy was squandered on internal warfare. Though Trump's Operation Warp Speed delivered vaccines in record time and saved countless lives during COVID-19, his administration’s failure to coordinate a coherent national response cost him political capital and public trust.
Despite these headwinds and a relentlessly hostile political establishment, Trump’s first term nevertheless produced a series of historic victories that vindicated the American people’s repudiation of neoliberalism. The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017 doubled the standard deduction and the child tax credit, delivering a tax cut of $2,000 to a typical working family of four. Trump’s USMCA replaced NAFTA with enforceable labor protections, high-wage automotive rules of origin, and digital trade provisions, earning the endorsement of a number of labor unions. New tariffs on steel and aluminum reopened idled mills, while tariffs on China were implemented which were so effective that they were left in place after Trump left office. The Phase One trade agreement compelled Beijing to commit to an additional $200,000,000,000 in purchases of American agriculture, energy, and manufactured goods, while Japan opened markets for American farmers and ranchers. Trump’s First Step Act enacted the most significant criminal justice reform in a generation, reducing mandatory minimums, expanding compassionate release, and reuniting thousands of families. Under Trump, paid parental leave for federal employees was signed into law for the first time. The Abraham Accords shattered the old gridlock of the Middle East, normalizing relations between Israel and a number of Arab nations without a single American shot fired. Iran’s regime was starved of funds for its nuclear program and its terrorist proxies under a maximum pressure campaign, and the IRGC was finally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The Doha Agreement with the Taliban set the first serious framework for ending America’s longest war. Despite opposition from within and without, Trump was able to absorb the remnants of the Blue Dog Democrats, fiscally conservative, culturally moderate Democrats who had been alienated from their party’s leftward drift. The Blue Dog Democrats found in Trump’s economic nationalism and free‑trade skepticism a political home that the post‑Clinton Democratic Party no longer offered.
Joseph Biden assumed the presidency in 2021, presenting himself as a return to normalcy after the turbulence of the Trump years. Despite this presentation, the Biden administration adopted significant elements of Trump’s economic nationalism whilst maintaining the liberal establishment’s foreign policy consensus. Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion package to subsidize domestic semiconductor manufacturing, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, which contained extensive industrial policy provisions, including tax credits for domestically produced electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable energy components. Biden retained the vast majority of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, refusing to roll back the protectionist measures that had been the centerpiece of Donald Trump's trade policy. Despite these achievements, Biden's foreign policy record was a catastrophe. The withdrawal from Afghanistan left billions of dollars of American equipment in Taliban hands, stranded American citizens and Afghan allies, and handed America’s enemies a propaganda victory of immense proportions. The administration then flip-flopped constantly on the subject of the Ukraine-Russia War as well as the Israel-Palestine Conflict, while his administration’s simultaneous courting of Iran (offering sanctions relief and nuclear concessions) revealed an incoherent foreign policy that pleased no parties. Biden’s restrictions upon Israel unnecessarily prolonged the Israel-Palestine conflict, while his General License 8L allowed Russian firms to bypass the nominal sanctions which his administration had superficially placed upon them. Ukraine was restricted from firing deep into Russian territory, and American weapons aid was often comprised of unusable material.
The second Trump administration avoided many of the first term’s mistakes, beginning with the signing of the Big Beautiful Bill, a legislative package that both cut taxes for working Americans and included the largest investment in domestic infrastructure since the Interstate Highway System. The border wall was finally completed across critical sectors, and deportation flights surged to levels unseen since the Eisenhower era. Millions of illegal aliens left the United States, and a sweeping travel ban was imposed covering 19 countries. A 30% tariff on all products from Mexico was announced, alongside a 100% tariff on semiconductor chips, and a tariff order was signed that listed over 45 categories of goods that could receive 0% tariffs if partner nations struck reciprocal Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade deals. The European Union in turn formalized an MFN trade deal applying lower tariffs to natural resources, aircraft, and pharmaceuticals. Fentanyl was classified as a weapon of mass destruction, marking the opioid crisis a matter of national defense. Donald Trump toppled the Maduro regime in Venezuela, seized all Venezuelan oil held in American financial institutions, and imposed sanctions on not only any country importing Iranian oil or petrochemicals, but on individuals tied to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Sanctions were extended to the Ortega regime in Nicaragua and to the military junta in Mali for its alignment with Russian forces. Operation Midnight Hammer destroyed three Iranian nuclear facilities, burying them without a shot fired at American forces.
And yet, for all these accomplishments, the political position of Trump and the movement he leads has become ever more precarious as time has progressed. For nearly a decade, an entire generation of young Americans had come of age in an environment of universal, institutionalized anti-Trumpism. From the classroom, where the history of the Republic has been increasingly recast as an unbroken chronicle of oppression, to the ubiquitous screens of social media and entertainment, where Trump and his supporters are portrayed as a threat to democracy itself, the formative years of tens of millions of new voters has been saturated with a single, unchallenged message: that the 45th and 47th President has been an illegitimate and dangerous figure, and that any association with him is a mark of deplorability. The result has been the emergence of the most lopsided generational political chasm in modern American history, a chasm that no wall, no trade deal, and no foreign victory could unwind. Compounding this challenge from the leftward generations has been an equally consequential fracturing within the GOP. Trump had always presided over a coalition of disparate forces held together by his anti-establishment character. However, for some of his earliest and most passionate supporters, the slow pace of the Trump era was a deep disappointment. These working class Americans saw promises on trade, on the bureaucracy, and on cultural restoration that had been deferred, watered down, or broken outright under the pressure of Congress and the Supreme Court. As the initial euphoria of the outsider’s victory gave way to the grinding work of governance, new ideological currents emerged on the right that questioned the entire vision behind “Trumpism”. Some have sought a more radical economic populism to embrace an outright war on corporate power. Others have insisted that the nation’s salvation lies in a return to the religious public square. Still others came to view Trump’s “hawkishness” on Iran and China as a betrayal of the anti-war sentiment that had first propelled him to win the GOP nomination in 2016. There has also been a profound and widely unacknowledged exhaustion with the man himself. For more than a decade, the American people had been subjected to a news cycle that orbited around Donald Trump with the gravitational pull of a black hole. His name has dominated every broadcast, every front page, and every social media scroll. His tweets, controversies, legal battles, rallies, and feuds have been inescapable. Even many who agree with Trump’s policies have admitted to a bone-deep fatigue of the man. The result has been a slow bleed of disillusionment from the right and the slow disillusion of the once powerful coalition that brought Trump to office.
What Next?
“It is not the critic who counts ... The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt - Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
The United States of America has walked through the fires of the Civil War, the turmoil of the First and Second World Wars, the vigilance of the Cold War, and the long betrayal of the neoliberal age. We have witnessed the heroic ascent of great men of history including Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, men who stood against the concentrated power of finance capital and a complacent ruling class. And yet, as we have seen, the American people are exhausted. The question that hangs over every patriotic American who yearns for a future worth fighting for is simple and urgent: What now? The answer is not to cling to the past, nor to abandon the fight. The answer is to construct a durable, novel, and intergenerational movement of patriotic Americans that can outlast any leader, weather any storm, and carry the banner of Americanism throughout the 21st century and beyond. The New Nationalists of America (NNA) are that movement.
