Publishing a longer piece in Texas Monthly has been a goal of mine since I moved to Austin 14 years ago. So it’s lovely to have this profile of conservative intellectual Gladden Pappin in the January issue. An excerpt:
In the aftermath of the election, Pappin has been puzzling through what path conservatism might take after Donald Trump’s presidency. The endeavor is part of Pappin’s major project of the past four years, ever since he first came onto the scene as one of the pseudonymous writers of the Journal of American Greatness, a pro-Trump blog that launched in early 2016. He’s been using the tools of political theory and history to parse the meaning of Trump and the deep political and cultural forces that brought him to power and continue to support him. He has been plotting out, and even trying to help write, the next chapter of the conservative movement.
What he sees—in Trump’s 2016 victory, in the results of the 2020 election, and in more subterranean shifts in conservative politics—is the possibility of a new kind of Republican party. It is one that is economically populist, culturally conservative, multiracial, cautious about the use of military power, and, above all, comfortable with the exercise of state power. It’s a big-government conservatism in both the economic and cultural spheres, more generous with social benefits, more prudish about sex, and more Christian in atmospherics if not in explicit doctrine. “The base is already there,” says Pappin, who is working on a book on the future of the American right. “It’s broader even than what the Republicans can appeal to right now.”