The future of American conservatism - An interview with Julius Krein, the editor of American Affairs journal

Adriel Kasonta: As you probably know, traditional conservatives (or as they call us in Britain - High Tories) are very sceptical about bankers or, in broader sense, “economic men”. What made you then quit your career in investment banking/finance and start a new journal, which is aiming at making an intellectual case for the new doctrine called ‘Trumpism’?

Julius Krein: Well, I would say most conservatives in America are not sceptical or economic men at all, which is maybe part of the problem. Actually, the original thing started as an ad hoc, simple, silly, little synonymous blog called the Journal of American Greatness, which attracted a lot of attention and readership, and proved that there is a lot of interest in this stuff, as well as desire to do something more. So it started with that, and originally real thought that Trump would lose and then the Republican Party would go back to the old Romeny-Ryan kind of consensus of the entire post-Cold War period, and would not take seriously at all the critique Trump would raised (which obviously let him to win). We were thinking to preserve that after Trump loses but actually Trump wins, which presents its own sort of very interesting challenge, because Trump managed to win this political victory without having any group of people in place to really define his agenda in a more coherent way, much less to implement and defend it. So it is very strange political situation. The challenge for us is that we are sometimes seen as a pure apologists for the Administration and not having any independent voice (which isn’t really true), but the benefit of that is that we have an opportunity to be much more influential and relevant than most of these things are.

Kasonta: As you’ve mentioned, the American Affairs journal emerged from the Journal of American Greatness, which hosted thinkers loosely associated with the so called West Coast Straussian school of thought, who put strong emphasis on realpolitik thinking. Having said that, is it one of the reasons why you’ve decided to risk and go against the mainstream liberal logic of the current times, and drew conclusions from the Pazzi conspiracy evoked by Nicollo Machiavelli?

Krein: Haha… Well, I mean it is interesting because a lot of the media attention is focused on the West Coast Straussian stuff, but aside from Michael Anton there were actually no West Coast Straussian contributors in the Journal of American Greatness. I myself, although I did a two-week fellowship program at Claremont a long time ago, would not really consider myself a West Coast Straussian. And really, there was no conspiracy at all. It all kind of happened very accidently.

Kasonta: Is American Affairs journal going to be “an inside joke” as its blog predecessor?

Krein: No, it is an outside joke [laugh]. One of the reasons we decided to move on from the Journal of American Greatness was that when you are writing and resume, there is a kind of a ceiling. We definitely hit that in terms of the popularity, and eventually people are sort of like ‘OK, who are you? Come out. Defend your views. Be part of the conversation more openly.’ However, I am not going to say we will never publish anonymous contribution, because to get an author from, to say, corporate world, he almost always have to publish anonymously or not publish at all. As you see from the first issue, all of our authors are writing under their own names and making their own case. This will be a pretty formal venture. Minimum word count is 3000 words, and some essays are much much longer than that. You know, humor is also important (and as we know American politics is far too humorless), but this is a serious effort to try a new course in domestic policy, economic theory, and foreign policy, and our position to, what I would consider, a failed policy consensus for the last 20 years.

Kasonta: What would differ American Affairs journal from other conservative publications in the US? Or is it going to be an another face of neoconservatism with the new make up on?

Krein: Well, it’s certainly not neoconservative in terms of foreign policy. It advocates for much more Realist (to use the overused term) foreign policy based on concrete American interest, rather than sort of abstract notions of freedom agenda. That would be the most obvious difference. And interestingly, I would say that the first generation of neoconservatives were actually hard line anti-Communist, but they were very much opposed to sort of idealistic foreign policy notions, dictatorships, and double standards. They were also less enthusiastic about the sort of purely libertarian, free market economics. They originally made their name by offering sort of a realistic approach to the kind of New Deal and things like that. There is actually a fair amount of consistency with the first generation of neoconservatives, but for whatever reason that’s actually in complete opposition to this. And another thing I think will differentiate us is that a lot of conservative publications and thinkers have really been stuck in the kind of post-Cold War Reaganist consensus, which may worked very well on Reagan’s time, but I think we are very open to realizing that the conditions for that success no longer apply. We are living in a different world, and David P. Goldman who contributed to the first issue described the difference as the “Small-ball conservatism” versus “Long-ball conservatism”. So we would probably be less sceptical of using the Government to advance an economic agenda (even if there is some interventionism in that), as opposed to others who are also more concerned about the play of the working class, but their only solution seems to be a child tax credit or just refurbishing aspects of the old kind libertarian conservative agenda, which I would say most of our features are pretty sceptical of.

Kasonta: What conservative schools of thought will be involved in co-shaping the tone of your journal?

Krein: I don’t know that there are many conservative schools of thought anymore in the United States. I think all the categories have kind of been scrambled, so I guess it’s a conservatism kind of in opposition to what you would call “fusionist conservatism”. However, I don’t know if that category has really been defined or articulated, and we are hoping to provide something new and different in a way it’s less about being purely conservative project than more of a broadly realigning around what I would call a more communitarian consensus, rather than a neoliberal consensus. We actually will also be publishing some voices from the Left, who are interested in a lot of these things like trade policy and so on. They may not like the Trump Administration, but they are interested in the general neoliberal approach to these issues. So I’d like to think that we can unite some interesting people from the Left and the Right, and provide a new policy direction, which hopefully works better.

Kasonta: What is your opinion on Disraeli’s “one nation conservatism”? Is it something which is needed in America at the moment? And if so, is American Affairs journal going to re-introduce this political philosophy to the American people?

Krein: You know, I have to confess that I’m not well read enough in Disraeli to be able to comment on his specific approach with any authority or confidence. If you ask what constitutes an American people, an American sense of the future, I don’t know if there is a sort of sense of the common future or the common principles anymore. I think that a lot of that has been lost. I think that a reasonable person can make a case for a borderless world (even though they usually don’t), but people have forgotten that if you go that direction the only remaining sources of institutions of democratic accountability are national ones. So if you want to get rid of the nation state you are also going to end up getting rid of democracy, as I think the Europeans are much more familiar with the EU, but you also see in the US an increasing shift to sort of an unelected bureaucracy and an international institutions, rather than sort of democratic sovereignty as expressed through an elected legislation contestant. So you know, the word “nationalism” is very complex and it obviously has some negative connotations, but we shouldn’t forget the importance of these national institutions, and at the very least we need to think through what kind of role we want them to play, and remember the good things, as well as the bad.

Kasonta: Do you aspire to be the new William F. Buckley Jr. for the intellectual conservative movement in America, or you would rather avoid this comparison?

Krein: That comparison came up because I was talking with one reporter and she asked how old I was. At time I was 30, although I am 31 now, but then she said something like: “Wow! Aren’t you too young to start a magazine?”, and I said “William F. Buckley was 30 when he started the National Review, so you know it can work out.” So you know, I don’t really think too much about that. I want to create the most interesting and thoughtful magazine that we can. William F. Buckley was of course an extraordinary successful historically, but for the past 20-25 years his fusionist project has actually not worked, and the conditions that underlined during the Cold War no longer apply. So I am not interested in recreating that, but if we are able to recreate a new kind of consensus and coalition that would be very exciting. However, I wouldn’t claim that that’s the way to happen. I am just trying to bring out some interesting writers with new opinions and hopefully make a contribution to improving the quality of the debate, and hopefully bring in some new ideas and new perspectives.

Kasonta: What are the intellectual influences, which had the most profound impact on Julius Krein’s way of thinking?

Krein: Well, I studied a lot of political philosophy in college. My degree is in social studies, which is kind of very badly named Harvard equivalent of the Oxford PPE degree. It combines sort of social science, philosophy, and economics, but I focused mainly on political theory and philosophy, and have read pretty widely on everything from the pre-Socratics to postmodernism. That’s what I know the most. It’s funny, cause a lot of people are pointing out now that maybe my views overlap more with palecons (which superficially at least is probably true in trade and foreign policy areas), but actually my greater inspirations in conservatism were the early necons - Irving Kristol and people like that. And then finally I would say working in finance and investing. I did a lot of stuff in Africa and frontier markets, and had an opportunity to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan, and sort of see the difference between the rhetoric and what was actually happening. I think that was very important in my development, and also just in general investment world, which enabled me to understand that modern capitalism is very different from Adam Smith’s capitalism, from the Founding Fathers’ capitalism, and I think we need to spend a lot more time thinking about that. We through around terms like capitalism very casually, but there are actually a lot of differences between what we call capitalism today and what Adam Smith would call capitalism. So that’s another inspiration for me.

Kasonta: Due to the fact of publishing by Daniel Oppenheimer his new book last year titled “Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century,” I’ve decided to interview Peter Hitchens, whose older brother is one of the main characters of the publication. His take on Christopher’s role presented in the book was the following: “My brother never joined anything which could be called ‘the Right’. He remained a Marxists and an admirer of Leon Trotsky till the day he died. People who classify him as having been on the right do not understand the ways in which revolutionary Marxism has altered since the collapse of the USSR. Intelligent revolutionaries, whose main aims have always been internationalist, globalist and multicultural, now seek to pursue their aims through supranational bodies, such as the EU, and interventionist liberalism, such as that now practised by the USA.” On that note, do you think that the same rule could apply to James Burnham (mid-century Communist turned conservative), to whom you’ve dedicated an essay published in the very first volume of the journal?

Krein: Burnham certainly broke with political Marxism. He did not think that history was moving toward a classless society in a classical Marxist take, and that socialism and communism wouldn’t triumph. He substituted this with his own view, which he called a “managerial society”. And he continued to move away from Marxism throughout much of his life, but there are important ways in which the sort of Marxist approaches to history and economics he never really left, and he always saw a role of economics at least partially determining culture and politics, which I think you see throughout his books (even the latter ones, when he identified that he is a conservative). It is very interesting today that a lot of people on the Left, who are very sympathetic to our approach, tend to come from an older Labour Left economics focused Left. Myself came from a place where Marxist was considered the worst possible thing imaginable to now recognising that in some cases at least it has a lot to offer in thinking about certain things like the way economy works, inequality, as increasingly a lot of working-class workers been rendered economically and superfluous by the economy. So that is an on trend, where in the past you had kind of Marxist moving Right, and now I think you see actually a lot of people from the Right maybe moving Left and back to Marxism. I think you see it to in the social conservative world, where it’s increasingly clear that if you want to have a classical social conservative kind of family then people also need to be able to make a living. And if your economic model is having both parents working 18 hours a day, that’s not really a pro-family policy. The categories have been scrambled, and I don’t know that we ever fully appreciated intellectually the significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Obviously we did it politically, but intellectually I don’t think that was really thought through, and how its changed not only the fusionist Right in sort of rendered it kind of irrelevant, but I think it has also changed the Left. Increasingly we are going to see a divide between economics focused Left, which tends to be fairly communitarian. So I think that is an important part of the realignment.

Kasonta: Damon Linker from The Week magazine wrote in his piece dedicated to your journal the following assessment of Donald Trump’s “phenomenon” (as some like to put it): “Trump himself seems to understand intuitively that he's part of something bigger than himself. Hence the cheerleading for Brexit, support for the National Front's Marine Le Pen in France, criticism of Germany's Angela Merkel, praise for Russia's Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians, and more far-reaching mischief-making with regard to NATO and the European Union.” Do you agree with that?

Krein: I mean, the overall article that Linker wrote was pretty fair and decent toward our Journal. I don’t really agree with that statement though, because at the extent of Donald Trumps’ praise of Putin has been to say that he got good ratings on TV with him and that it would be nice if the US could have a better relationship with Russia, which hardly constitutes “high praise of Putin” -personally. One can sort of criticize Merkel without necessarily being a big supporter of Le Pen, and I don’t actually know any comments that Trump (maybe I missed them, but I am not aware of any particular praise) has offered about Le Pen. I think on NATO, I mean the idea that we need to reform NATO and make it sort of more relevant to existing challenge – this was created as a response to the Soviet Union, so the underlying reason for NATO no longer exists. Now that doesn’t mean that we need to get rid of it, and I don’t think anyone wants that, but you have to sort of recognise what has changed to think how to make it better. And it’s been a lot of talk about Trump’s comments on NATO and so on, but if NATO collapses it’s not going to be because Trump pointed out some of the weaknesses. These weaknesses are widely known to everybody (especially the Russians), and really the only way to make NATO survive and make it stronger for the future is to kind of be honest about its shortcomings and try to fix them. So I would disagree with the sense that Trump wants to get rid of NATO, or that he is some kind of Putin’s stooge and all of that. I don’t think neither that is true. But certainly, there has been a lot of failed policy in the US and elsewhere with respect to NATO, and a lot of failed policy with respect to Russia. So there is room for improvement. Whether the Trump Administration can actually accomplish to improve these institutions? It’s too early to say.

Kasonta: He also added that “until the intellectuals involved with American Affairs can provide a satisfactory explanation of the trend, there's little chance they'll be able to fashion a politically effective response.” On that note, is American Affairs journal going to diagnose, instead of ridiculing or demonizing (like most of the mainstream press does), the mentioned trend? And if so, then is it going to join its forces with non-American writers from Europe to jointly address the issue?

Krein: American Affairs is always going to be focused on American policy, up to the extent we address Europe that would be from the sense of what it means for America and what we should do about it. You know, there has been actually an extraordinary amount of interest from Europe in the Journal. I think almost every major European newspaper from Norway to Germany, to Italy, in France, either have written or are writing something about it. As someone who is interested in the world I try to stay abreast of developments in Europe and am happy to talk to anybody from the most part, as long as they are not crazy. One has to be careful with some of the European far right movements, and there is also of course some fringe lunatic elements in the United States and also elsewhere, but I am not particularly well versed necessary in European politics. I am very careful to not getting close to the wrong people. The idea of global nationalism on its face doesn’t make any sense. So I think we are very interested in rethinking again the place of the nation state, going forward, and what it means, and very interested in entering into a dialogue with people who are critics of the EU and going through similar issues in their own countries, but I don’t see anything much more for American Affairs than that.

Kasonta: What is your take on Brexit?

Krein: I was emotionally very supportive of it, but I don’t claim to know all of the issues. I don’t claim to know as much about UK politics or the EU as someone who lives here does, and therefore don’t expect my opinion to be worth much. But I think in general the EU is a tremendously problematic institution, and I think most of its members would probably be better off (the UK in particular) having their own laws made by their own elected officials, not by a group of people in Brussels, which have no democratic accountability. The UK is in the specially unique spot, just given its position today and its history to actually be better able to fashion its own trade agreements etc. outside of the EU. Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist, had an interesting comment, and I was really taken by it. It says something about the larger picture. He basically said that “Britain lead us into neoliberalism, and it would be a wonderful thing if they could lead us out”.

Kasonta: What is your take on Russia and Putin?

Krein: It is a kleptocracy, it is very corrupt, and in a lot of cases is quite undemocratic and so on. But I think a lot of the critics of Putin haven’t really grappled with the fact that there is not much of an alternative. Putin is the President of Russia and he is the dominant political figure in Russia, and Russia is very important. I think in general our policy towards Russia has been extremely confused. It’s one of these impotent rhetorics, which is conducive neither to containing them (if you believe they are hostile enemy that must be contained), nor toward cooperating with them, as we’ve tried to do in Syria and elsewhere. It’s just a lot of hot air. And if you want to have a stronger stance towards Russia then we need to find areas where we actually have leverage, rather than going around and lecturing them. And if we want to cooperate with them, then we need to have much more realistic view of the fact that they are major world power, they are influential in Syria and elsewhere, and we should just deal with them and find where our interest conflict and where aligning, and that’s it. Obviously, it is tremendously complicated thing, but in general I think our policy towards Russia is almost been worst since the 90’ than our policy in the Middle East. We’ve completely destroyed any potential for a better relationship, at the same time treating NATO as a substitute for the G20 or something, not as a serious defence pact that would need to be defended till the end of the nuclear war if necessary. We expand it without really thinking much about it and how Russia is going to respond to that. And then when Russia does something like in the Ukraine we actually have no real response, and there is no political will to do anything, and we haven’t organized the Europeans to do much. Now we have just threatened the credibility of the entire thing by having such a weak response. So our policy towards Russia has been a disaster, and I think that in order to going forward we need to be much more realistic about our own aims, as well as the realities on the ground, and political situation in Russia.

Kasonta: Do you believe that American Affairs journal will be able to contribute to the “rethinking of the entire post-Cold War policy consensus”? If so, how is it going to achieve it?

Krein: That’s the goal. It comes both in terms of scrambling the categories of Left and Right, on economic issues (as I’ve already discussed), on foreign policy. On the Right we had the sort of Bush freedom agenda and democracy promotion, and on the Left they call it “responsibility to protect”, but it leads to the same thing which is sort of ill-advised foreign adventures that however well-intentioned end up doing more harm than good. We can unite the part of the Left that doesn’t like “responsibility to protect” and the part of the Right that doesn’t like “freedom agenda”, and put them together to form more coherent foreign policy based on real American national interest, rather than sort of abstract ideological intensions that often are counterproductive.

Kasonta: Is American Affairs journal going to be the future of American conservatism?

Krein: That’s not for me to judge, but we will try.