July 3rd Jeremiad

I find plenty to criticize as we approach the 250th.

I.

As we prepare to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, there will undoubtedly be countless essays published that rekindle our patriotism, remind us of the unprecedented success and moral victory America represents, and so on. I, however, was always taught that criticism is one of the highest forms of patriotism. And there is plenty to criticize here today.

It is easy to criticize the left, and I do. The Democratic party remains as unpopular as ever, but continues to reorient more and more by the day toward the idea that the American project—and indeed America itself—is a mistake and it must be re-founded.

Of course, this is not a new realization. It has in fact been a common refrain on the political right for my entire life. And through it all, one thing has proven practically self-evident: the political right was not spouting cheap talking points when we shouted that the political divide was never really about tax policy, or even the culture war. It was always a struggle over what America is, has been, and is permitted to become.

This context is, honestly, deeply frightening. Even a charitable interpretation is that our country is being changed for the worse, but truthfully is at risk of being rendered unrecognizable. For precisely the reasons that every other publication will list in their rah-rah America essays, our country is worth defending. And it goes unsaid, though I will say it anyway: we have a civilizational duty to defend it.

It is that sense of duty which compels me to now criticize my own side.

II.

So—congratulations! The conservatives were right.

A socialist governs the largest and most important city in America. The DSA holds municipal and now federal office and keeps building the infrastructure to hold more, with its membership surging and its political momentum reaching a fever pitch. Conservatives warned America about this, we always do.

Now: what did being right—for decades—get us? What did we create with all that foresight?

We built the conservative political machine, of course. We built think tanks, and magazines, and fellowships, and white papers, and donor retreats, and podcasts whose collective output is a single point: the left is bad, the institutions are captured, the country is in danger, and we saw it coming. That is the work. The finished product of the entire apparatus is correctness itself, sold back to us as content—a recurring, consumable satisfaction of having been correct, the outrage and the vindication packaged on loop, forever.

This is not a new observation, and there are plenty of explanations floating around. Maybe the movement is “captured,” or fundamentally cowardly, or content to lose in comfort. I don’t think that these explain it, and I don’t think we need a villain at all. I simply think the conservative political machine is producing exactly what it was built to produce, and producing it very well.

Beneath all of it, our fundamental failure is that we glorify the man who explains the problem and never the man who solves it, so the most talented young men read the room and become explainers. The bench of people who actually make things stays thin because every incentive in the entire system, reputational and financial alike, quietly suppresses it. We built an economy to produce correctness and content, and it works.

III.

The correctness economy extends beyond the directly political. Media too, though nearly inseparable from politics, falls into the same trap. I work in local journalism, and if there is a bigger wasteland in the conservative project I have not yet found it. Last week I read about a paper that shuttered in a small town, and a leftist NGO paid fifty thousand dollars to a university newspaper to cover that town’s city council. Working journalists volunteered as mentors and university staff ran the coordination. When was the last time you heard of anything like that on the right? You could argue that we just don’t have the “patronage system” to support it but this is pure cope. We just aren’t interested. We could do it tomorrow.

The Daily Wire, arguably our largest media organ outside the cable networks, is rumored to be raising up to a hundred million dollars against a two-billion-dollar IPO, even as its subscriber base falls and it doubles down on the decisions which seemingly led it to where it is. Number of student newspapers supported? Zero. The most we manage is to take the twenty-two-year-old who could have edited that student paper and funnel him back into the content farm. Why do we have Campus Reform when we could capture all of the university papers? Because the content is the end-all, and the people who want to produce something beyond it are pushed elsewhere.

We watched this happen to Charlie Kirk in real time. For his entire career the movement categorized him as a content creator and a sort of camp counselor—campus debater, youth influencer, media personality—when what he had actually assembled was the only serious national youth-organizing machine we had. And from my direct experience, it did not make him universally liked. He fought enormous institutional inertia, plus the jealousy and general dislike of many of the names who have since honored his memory. It took his assassination to place him, overnight and unanimously, on the movement Mount Rushmore. Only with him dead did we finally see that what we had been half-watching all along was critical infrastructure. And when it came time to replace him, the bench behind him was nearly empty, because our recognizable talent flows elsewhere. Who even IS the next biggest organizer? Scott Presler? Incomparable—there was no replacement because we had none.

Whatever you think of every choice he made, Charlie understood that the most important elements of politics are recruitment and belonging. He was, fundamentally, an organizer, one of the few on our side who make things instead of describing them. That is why he spent so much of his time showing up in places that the broader conservative D.C. based ecosystem ignored and sometimes denigrated, and why he recognized that his constituency was a product. There are zip codes with more Turning Point infrastructure than local GOP infrastructure, and they are often in heartland communities where other grassroots organizations couldn’t get purchase even if they tried. It was this network which does the recruiting and the belonging and the showing up—community—that the rest of the movement only describes.

The left’s prestige institutions understand the importance of these elements instinctively. Its media, academia, and its political figures of note consistently refer back to, and platform, the organizers, the student groups, the local newsrooms, the campus activists, the nonprofits, the movement infrastructure, as critical parts of one shared project. On the right, the person who actually makes things is too often treated as secondary until he is useful, threatening once he is successful, and the bulk of his work is abstracted into media content. Even Turning Point has proven no exception, itself becoming a notable arm of the content farm. But their content and organizing have a symbiotic relationship. Ultimately, many of our grassroots groups only have a true grassroots program to check a box, while the actual function of the organization is to attend events in Washington, promote their leadership, and lobby the Hill.

So why does our recognition flow to the explainers and not to builders? Apathy can’t be discounted. But mostly because many of those in a position of influence are explainers themselves, and as such approach the political economy, and especially the attention economy, as mercantilists. In this dynamic, the scarce resource is not really money but distribution and attention, and the people who hold those guard them as a limited resource to be preserved. To lend a rising project your audience or your platform reads to the mercantilist as handing market share to a potential rival.

IV.

The greatest mistake of all of this isn’t that the wrong people are platformed, though they are and that makes it difficult to break the cycle. It isn’t even that our vast D.C. based infrastructure wastes its time in a content farm, though it does and prevents it from accomplishing core responsibilities. The greatest mistake is that this is all a fundamental misunderstanding of power.

We picture the country and its system of power as a pyramid with Washington at its summit. The federal government is the great prize and the largest single font of sovereignty, the hardest thing to take and therefore the thing worth all our effort, with the local sitting at the base as trivial, downstream, beneath our attention.

But the federal government is a single point of capture, and the executive, the lever we fight hardest for, is fragile. It is subject to a hard reversal every four years, and an entire branch of government with it. Indeed, a pyramid without its base would simply fall over, and we are ignoring the base. We consistently mistake the four-year scramble for the presidency, and the endless war over Congress, for the whole of politics—a war whose main organizing product, if we are honest, is an army of clever young people who “study policy” and “work communications” and take no ground anywhere unless they move back home and get involved.

Contrast that with the geographically expansive network Turning Point stitched together, which added more value and more power to the conservative cause than nearly any D.C. prestige trap. We forget, in the digital age, that the real political foundation of the country is local and distributed across ten thousand offices with no single pressure point. And it is foundational in the literal sense: the national political ecosystem is actually downstream of it. Sovereignty, in practice, stems from local bodies willing to enforce a political decision, or willing to refuse.

I am not arguing the local matters more than the federal, only that you need both, and that we have been trying to win with just the one. When the left holds federal power it is ruthlessly centralized; when it holds local power it nullifies from below. It understands, in both directions, that a decision on paper is meaningless until someones enforces it, and that willing local enforcement is just as substantive as federal power.

We have half-learned this. We are contending federally right now, and hard. Trump is a real speedbump for the status quo despite his many flaws. But a speedbump is not a solution, and another Heritage Foundation would not change the picture. Truly, what exactly would it solve? The federal front is manned. The local front is not merely undermanned, it is floating adrift: there exists on the right today no true network whose purpose is to platform, connect, and recognize the people holding those ten thousand offices. The left runneth over with dozens.

The left’s machine took the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and made him a presidential contender and then cabinet secretary. It took a twenty-seven-year-old elected as Harris County Judge, a Texas office so obscure that the rest of the country hears the title and thinks of a courtroom, and made her a progressive star. It has installed a socialist with no private sector experience as Mayor of New York, and the whole apparatus, the magazines and the political incumbents et al, treated every step of his ascent as a political earthquake.

The whole time, our answer has been to produce more content. Look everyone—we were right! But we certainly haven’t been competing locally. You likely couldn’t name a nationally recognized mayor or county commissioner. Our prestige floor is the governor’s mansion, maybe their cabinet, and even the governors we support are celebrated mostly as foreshadowing for a presidential run. The nearest thing the right has to a famous local officeholder is the occasional sheriff who goes viral for filming glorified TikTok videos. The content door is the only door we have.

V.

All of which exposes how the currently fashionable idea on our side—build a “real patronage system,” fund the influencers, create the sinecures, staff a better rapid-response operation—is fundamentally misplaced. It is just the explainers union advocating for more funding. We already have sinecures. We already have institutions, a political class, a cornucopia of nonprofits, real money, and real people. We are not poor. Our total political GDP is less than the left’s, yes, but we are nowhere near as poor as we act. A movement swimming in donors would still produce content if content is what its institutions are built to sell, and no amount of fresh funding for the correctness economy will buy back the country.

The fix for all of this is recognition partially rerouted towards those most deserving. Recognition is the one resource, whatever the mercantilists say, that the movement has at its disposal, and the entire correction is to spend it differently: platform the organizers and the officeholders the way the left platformed Mayor Pete, treat backing a builder as a high-status act. The talent will follow the flow of prestige. It is not a binary choice, there will always be explainers, but we need to take a hard look at their proportions relative to people building something real.

VI.

The digital age itself works against us here. Social and digital media have contributed to the degradation of community, local and otherwise, as people outsource it online. Similarly, our political and economic capital pours into the digital while our communities are ignored. A mirror of capital leaving main street for new markets. If we could vote entirely digital, I think the country would be lost, truly.

But the necessary redirection is not a mystery. The development we need is local, because the local is fundamental in a way that nothing else can be. It is thick and fundamental. As such, community will always be more powerful than audience. And I pray to God that obligations should be more important than takes.

And notice what the local domain asks of a man: the oldest instinct on the right, that a man is responsible for his own family and his own land before he leaves to fix anything far away. The online right has spent a decade romancing sovereignty and lordship—it’s in your backyard. The comptroller is sovereignty. The sheriff’s office is sovereignty. There is real power in real life.

VII.

We carry an obligation to this country that we do not choose and cannot set down, and I would not set it down even if given the opportunity. I have personally carried it in uniform and out of it, and it has settled for me every serious question of my life. This is the reality of being American. Two hundred and fifty years of other men’s work sits in our custody for a few decades, and then it sits in our children’s, in whatever state we leave it.

I would rather not write any of this—America doesn’t need another explainer, and the essay is the explainer’s instrument. But the correction required is immediately available. And I know the explainers will not preserve or improve that obligation.

The explainer’s safety is kept by other men’s sons. His children are taught by schools with boards he has never noticed and his water arrives courtesy of a district board with two vacancies. His politics is a subscription—he produces & consumes the correctness economy’s product, is right about everything, and answers for nothing.

On America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, he will be correct again.