The Way Back. F. H. Buckley

but an indifference to fellow Americans. And that’s what was dead in conservatism.

      Trump’s Republicanism would be a party of “buy American and hire American,” a party for the laid-off coal miner, the auto worker whose job was sent abroad, the child in a terrible school, those who struggle with crime in their inner-city neighborhoods. At the 2017 CPAC Conference he called it the Republican Workers Party. It would be the jobs party. (In time, I hope, it will also be the health-care party.) What it wouldn’t be is the bicycle-lane party, the transgender-bathroom party. He’d leave those issues for the Democrats.

      The new party wouldn’t blame those who are left behind, as NeverTrumpers did. With a vituperation that recalled Marx’s contempt for the lumpenproletariat, the writers at National Review described Trump supporters as Oxy-sniffing moral lepers who whelped their children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog. Before long, the mainstream media took up the theme, and a redneck-porn literature was born, one that invited upper-class readers to indulge in their sense of superiority by slumming with the underclass.

      How very different this was from the older literature of poverty in America, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Michael Harrington’s The Other America. The earlier writers described the poor with compassion, as fellow Americans. They were the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, honorable people down on their luck. There was no sense of moral superiority in this literature, even with those who might have brought their poverty on themselves. The desperately poor were broken in body and spirit, and while they didn’t belong to anyone or anything they still were our brothers, with whom we shared a common humanity and citizenship. If they lived their lives at a level beneath that necessary for human decency, we were called upon to do something about it. In Harrington’s case, that meant living with them in one of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker hospices, not an experience any of today’s purveyors of redneck porn will have shared.

      Harrington described how poverty had persisted during the boom years of the 1950s. In our day, too, we’ve seen poverty coexisting with spectacular wealth gains for others. Similarly, we’re seeing unprecedented longevity for some, alongside climbing mortality rates for others. With new drugs and better medical providers, we’re saving people who in the past would have died earlier from things like heart disease and cancer. That’s how it is in every other First World country, and that’s how it is for African-Americans and Hispanics. But life expectancy for white, middle-aged Americans has recently declined. Anne Case and her husband, Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton, report that had the rate held at 1998 levels, there would have been 100,000 fewer deaths over the next fifteen years for whites aged 45−54. In much of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, life expectancy is lower today than in Bangladesh or Nepal.

      How did this happen? The NeverTrumper and the liberal blamed the victims themselves. More generously, Case and Deaton said that the increased deaths are largely a result of despair, social isolation, drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide and chronic liver disease, and that all this in turn could be attributed to higher unemployment and lower wages. In Appalachia, in the heartland, white, working class Americans had lost their jobs and were killing themselves, but at our elite colleges, social-justice warriors were asking them to check their privilege, while Hillary Clinton was calling them deplorable and irredeemable.

      If we want to do something about it, Case and Deaton surely pointed us in the right direction. The best remedy for an opioid crisis is jobs. People don’t lose their jobs because they smoke Oxy; they smoke Oxy because they’ve lost their jobs. By voting for a person who called himself the “jobs president,” Republican voters showed that they understood this. They evidently looked past Trump’s moral lapses, and had little interest in a state-led moral rearmament crusade. With David Hume, they likely thought that “all plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary.”

      The voters defined the policy challenges for the Trump administration: create jobs and restore economic mobility. That in turn will require the reforms in education, immigration policy, the tax system and the regulatory regime that I describe in this book. Nothing much else ascends to the level of policy. Trump intellectuals said they wanted to make America great again, but “stop being a loser” isn’t a policy; “stop doing stupid stuff” isn’t a reform. Through all of Trump’s self-induced crises they defended him, like Jonahs inside the belly of the whale, swept wherever it might take them. But they didn’t tell us what the way back might be, which was the point of my book. They never told us what to do about decline.

      For what, after all, is American greatness? Is it cultural superiority, to match that of France? Is it military might, such as the Soviet Union once had? Is it a foreign policy of liberal imperialism, riding in triumph through Persepolis? Those are the dreams of other people, other candidates, but they weren’t Trump’s dream, or the American Dream, that of a country where one isn’t held back, where all may get ahead, where our children will have things we never had.

      And now? As I write, the papers are full of stories about special prosecutors and Russian sabotage. The Democrats talk impeachment, and Republican NeverTrumpers lick their lips at the prospect of a President Pence. It’s more than a little hysterical, but in truth the dream of a Republican Workers Party has faded a little, and that’s not surprising. Everything begins in mystique, said Charles Péguy, and ends in politics. Still, we’ve seen what doesn’t work, the politics of heartless conservatism and hypocritical liberalism, and we know that that’s all over and done with.

      —F.H. BUCKLEY

       May 26, 2017

       Acknowledgments

      A GOOD MANY PEOPLE HELPED ME WITH THIS BOOK, AND I am very grateful. For his comments, and for our long conversations about Abraham Lincoln, I am greatly indebted to Allen Guelzo, the leading scholar on the sixteenth president, and who if pressed can provide a very credible imitation of Lincoln’s accent.

      Jonathan Clark, the eminent historian of the long British eighteenth century, gave this book a close reading and his wise advice on British constitutional history was most helpful. Jeff Broadwater has written the best biography of the never-too-much-to-be-praised George Mason, and kindly helped me with questions I had about my school’s namesake.

      My colleague, David Levy, was extremely helpful on regression analysis and for tips on where I might find bluegrass music. Dartmouth’s Jason Soren’s also gave very useful advice on the empirical portions of the book.

      For their comments and help on questions of income inequality and immobility, I am indebted to Sarah Buckley, Miles Corak, Tyler Cowen, Chris DeMuth, Frank Fukuyama, Robin Hanson, Glenn Hubbard, Bob Levy, Tom Lindsay, Tom and Lorraine Pangle, and John Samples. Brian Lee Crowley and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute brought me to Ottawa to debate Chrystia Freeland, now the Candian Minister of International Trade, on the subject of income inequality, and we also debated on CBC. She and I gave it as good as we could, as proxies for Laurier and Macdonald, respectively.

      For his advice on U.S. tax law I am indebted to my colleague, Terry Chorvat.

      Academic lawyers are quick to pick up on whatever is trendy in other disciplines, and twenty years ago there was a spurt of interest in evolutionary biology. We’re due for a revival. As we age, and the “me” generation becomes the “them” generation, we’ll be taking a greater interest in who comes after us, especially our children. Evolutionary biology is not my field, but I was lucky enough to be able to meet Robert Trivers at a program I organized. Five hundred years from now, when everyone else around today is quite forgotten, he’ll be remembered.

      Long talks with Tom Lindsay helped inform the chapter on education, and George Borjas has for many years been the person to whom I turned on questions about immigration policy. Ron Maxwell, the director of Gettysburg and Gods and Generals, is an astute student of politics and I enjoyed many helpful discussions with him on immigration matters. On criminal law matters, I was happy to rely on Jeff Parker and Ewan Watt, as well as Norm Reimer, the very able Executive Director of the National Center for Criminal Defense