American Enterprise Institute

Resurgent American nationalism: Conservatism, foreign policy, and beyond

Opening remarks: Colin Dueck, AEI

Panel discussion

Panelists: Jonah Goldberg, AEI Henry Olsen, Ethics & Public Policy Center Matthew Spalding, Hillsdale College John Yoo, Berkeley Law; AEI

Moderator: Colin Dueck, AEI

2:00–3:00 p.m. Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Event Page: https://www.aei.org/events/resurgent-american-nationalism- conservatism-foreign-policy-and-beyond/

Colin Dueck: Okay, good afternoon. My name is Colin Dueck. I’m a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute.

One way to think about the Trump phenomenon over the past three or four years is that it represents a kind of resurgence of American nationalism. But there’s surprisingly little agreement on what that means. What exactly is American nationalism, past and present? What are its implications for US foreign and domestic policies? Is what we’re seeing dangerous, or is it actually an opportunity? And should we think of it as a phenomenon that’s only temporary, or is it more likely to be lasting?

I’m delighted to have an excellent panel of discussants here on this topic. They’ve all written widely on these exact subjects, books and articles that I recommend to you. I won’t go into a very lengthy set of introductions, but I’ll just say briefly, in alphabetical order: Jonah Goldberg is the Chair in Applied Liberty here at AEI, a senior editor at National Review, and a columnist at the Los Angeles Times. Henry Olsen is senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a columnist for The Washington Post. Matthew Spalding is dean of education at Hillsdale College here in Washington and executive editor of “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution.” And John Yoo is professor of law at Berkeley, a visiting scholar here at AEI, and served as a deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003. Please join me in welcoming our panelists.

So I’m going to begin with a series of questions. First of all — and this is particularly for both Matt and Jonah, but I’ll ask all of you your take on this. The question is: Is there a kind of nationalism built into the American founding and into American national identity, and what does it look like? Jonah, let’s start with you.

Jonah Goldberg: Sure. First of all, delighted to be here.

Yes, I think there is an inherent nationalism and a particular nationalism that’s inherent to the American identity. I typically fall into the William F. Buckley camp on this and prefer to emphasize issues of patriotism over nationalism because I see patriotism as something that constrains behavior in alignment with our ideals, rather than nationalism, which gives sort of an open-ended warrant to do whatever one thinks is in the national interest. William F. Buckley famously said that he was — it’s a very flowery quote, I can’t do it justice — but he says, “I’m as patriotic as anybody. I salute the flag and sing the songs on the 4th of July, but there’s not an ounce of nationalism in me.” Now, at the same time, I think there are lots of people who distinguish — whose definition of nationalism is different from mine, and therefore they see it as sort of synonymous with patriotism.

But to get to the heart of your question, I think one of the reasons that I believe in American exceptionalism — which used to be an analytical term that described how America was just an outlier from other nations. It wasn’t necessarily this, you know, cheerleading concept that people have turned it into. You know, America was more violent than other countries. That was part of our exceptionalism as well. We are more religious than any other advanced country.

And inherent in the benign nationalism of the United States was a certain understanding that this country stood for certain principles, that it was, you know, America is more than an idea, that it is a nation that subscribed to the idea that it was in part an idea. And it gets to the heart of what American exceptionalism is about. It gets to the heart of why Werner Sombart would ask, “Why is there no socialism in America?” It’s because we didn’t have feudal past that we

inherited. We didn’t have notions of class that racked Europe and the rest of the world the way they did.

And so therefore, I’m sort of an Augustinian in the sense that I think that calls for nationalism are problematic insofar as we’ll know when we need to rally nationalism. Nationalism is useful to rally the spirit to fight a war. But other than that, we should practice the rule of inessential to unity and everything else, liberty.

And when we talk about — as a conservative, when we talk about nationalism as this new idea, my problem with it is it becomes very difficult to disassociate from things that conservatives used to consider socialism or progressivism. Because at the end of the day, if your ideal is whatever is good for this mystical, organic body politic we call the nation, then that is going to give power and authority to the only institution that speaks to the entire nation, which is the central government in Washington, which is not an approach that traditional conservatives usually favor.

Colin Dueck: Matt, how does that track with your understanding of American nationalism and the American founding? What’s your take on this issue?

Matthew Spalding: Well, again, it’s great to be here, especially with this good group of friends.

Yeah, just, I mean, kind of to build off what Jonah was just saying, but I’d probably start by making an important distinction I think that’s inherent in the way the founders looked at this question, which is important for us to think about in the midst of this debate. I mean, nationalism has today become a hate word associated with racism and all sorts of other aspects, partially because it fails to distinguish or draw out the fact that this idea of nationalist depends upon and turns on the nation, what is to say, “What is the particular nation?”

What I’ve found, what’s most compelling about the American founding is the sense in which it combines a — when we read the Declaration of Independence, it combines a universalism of great power, the truth that all men are created equal. But it does so immediately and in all circumstances as a particular nation. And it puts the two of those together. And we have always gotten off on the wrong foot when we go too far in one way or the other, not keeping those two things very closely connected. But more generally, it draws a very important distinction to understand between American nationalism or that thing of nationalism we associate with the American nation.

I tend not to like isms, precisely because they tend to be abstractions. But this American idea is different from other countries. And we need to ask the question: Well, why is that? The notion of being against or for nationalism is actually not the right question at all. There’s an inherent and important difference between Soviet nationalism or Chinese nationalism or, say, German nationalism circa 1934, right? Why is that? And it has something to do, I think, with the very definition of what this nation-state is all about.

So I emphasize that because it’s that balancing of those ideas of a universalism in a particular nation, which I think is the heart of the American idea. It is what makes America exceptional in a serious way. But it also gives it a rubric, if you will, or a way to think about such questions which don’t merely become traditionalism or populism.

But on the other hand, it doesn’t become kind of a narrow doctrinal-ism. And we tend to be focused on those two extremes, in my opinion, today, in many things, including this debate on nationalism. We were talking earlier about our common friend Yoram’s book on nationalism, which strikes me as very good on the nationalism side of it, kind of the idea of a sovereign independent nation. But it begs the question, “What are the ideas undergirding the thing?” Because it turns out those are the distinction that determines where this is all going.

I think we’re actually kind of weak on that understanding. Conservatives have lost that understanding. I think from the beginning, they were always kind of weak on how they understood America, the American idea. And I think it’s been revealed, or it’s kind of pulled back. The curtain is pulled back, and we need to rethink a lot of things we had taken for granted for a long time, precisely at a time that the modern left is going very rapidly down a different path of a different nation.

So I think properly understood the idea of nationalism, I think, coheres very closely to this idea emanating out of the American founding. But I think precisely we’re having a debate today about — really having a regime debate, in the midst of a regime change, debating, “What kind of nation are we?” in the midst of all this.

Colin Dueck: John?

John Yoo: I’ll just make some comments on Jonah and Matt’s presentation, because I disagree a little bit with both of them.

First, I think America is unusual or exceptional in that the nation comes before the people. You look at the European countries. There’s the French people, the British people before there’s the nation-state that existed long before. And the nation-state is a relatively new appearance in terms of organization and human history. The United States is unusual. You know, you read the Federalist Papers, they don’t actually define what the American people are in terms of characteristics. Right? They just refer to the people constantly.

So one area I’d just like to disagree with is I think of the nationalism that comes out of the founding, and interesting is that the founders created a nation before there was actually a unified American people. You could make the argument, it’s not until the Civil War that we really settle that question of what kind of people we are. But it’s also maybe that’s why we also have these panels in America. Maybe they don’t have panels in France about “French nationalism, what is it?” Right? Because they are all eating escargot and speaking French, so they know what it is to be the French people. But here, because we’re a nation of immigrants, “Who and what are the American people?” are constantly contested and in flux.

And then the little bit exception with Jonah is — but on the other hand, I’m really glad there’s nationalism in the world, because you’re quite right to contrast it with — which I think has always really is — nationalism, I think, stands in opposition to theories or ideas that are global. So communism, socialism, or the multiethnic empires before those. Those produce a lot of harm and death in the world. And it’s nations, right, the United States with its allies that stopped national socialism, that stopped communism. I worry when you have these kinds of cross-national ideologies that people will — you know, that you said there. You know, Jonah said, “People do bad things perhaps in the national interest.” But I think they do even more terrible things in the service of ideology or religion or belief. And nation- states are the ones that have, not perfectly, of course, but have been the last readout to stop those things from taking over and make the world much worse off.

So I think the interesting thing is the United States is now in the position of being the guardian of what we used to think of as the values of the West and that a lot of people want to have. But we, interestingly, are not really a nation like the rest of the nations in the world because our nation is composed of people from everywhere else. And so that’s why I think, in the end, we look at the Constitution and the founding as —

Matthew Spalding: But what defines, “What are those values?”

John Yoo: I think this is the interesting thing, right? If they come out of the Constitution —

Matthew Spalding: — other than merely a diversity of many people?

John Yoo: No, I think they come out of the Constitution. So this is the thing I think that does make people come here, become Americans, is fidelity of the Constitution. That’s why it’s so weird. I mean, we don’t change the Constitution, right? Everyone comes here, becomes an adherent to our national instruments of government, which is weird. I bet that would sound really strange to someone from France, right? Like, “You’re a Frenchman because you believe in the Fifth Republic.”

Matthew Spalding: Right. No, I think that’s what distinguishes us. But it kind of begs the question, “What’s behind that? Why should we have allegiance to the Constitution?”

Henry Olsen: I think that, first of all, when we talk about nationalism outside of America, it changes over time. The first German nationalists were the liberals of the 19th century, who wanted to create the idea of a German people as opposed to a Brunswickian people or Hanoverians. And so a century later, German nationalism becomes a rallying cry for one of the greatest evils in human history.

So even outside of America, the idea of the creation of a people and then how it is interpreted in action changes. And I think one of the things that makes us — not unique in a historical sense, because there are other nations with many immigrants, Argentina, Canada, Australia. But we were the one that started, if you read Federalist No. 2, from a common stock. That’s something John Jay points out is that we’re fortunate to have a common language, a common background, a common history and laws, that then absorbed many peoples and created one nation out of many peoples. And that can only be understood because our nation is identified not by where we came from or who gave birth to us, but rather by a set of principles. And I agree that that is actually what we’re debating over.

And to try and say that there’s not an idea of American nationalism is to try and say that there’s no idea of an American nation that has a set of principles that keep these many peoples together. And in the absence of something that keeps us together, the natural tendency of man — man meaning human beings — is to separate on the basis of the things that they’ve always separated on, which is nativity, birth, ideology, faith, and that means conflict rather than unity.

John Yoo: Probably what Colin’s about to ask next then is these two comments. How would you define what the American national character is as distinguished from other countries in the world? What is it?

Henry Olsen: One of the things that strikes me meeting, you know, going around and talking to a lot of other people, is we have a fundamental understanding in our bones of

human equality, human liberty, and self-government and rights. And we debate among ourselves, which —

John Yoo: Those are all things that come out of the Constitution, or at least I would say those are all in the document.

Henry Olsen: I would say all those things are enshrined in the Constitution because they’re part of the national character, that the Constitution becomes the effective means of actually putting in a system of government that allows those principles to be worked out through deliberative processes, as opposed to, “We didn’t believe these things before and then, you know, Moses came down from the Sinai with 10 laws, and James Madison came down with seven articles. And consequently, we now believe in the tablets.” I think it’s got it reversed.

And that’s one of the ways I’ve always differed and disagreed with my — I’m a recovering lawyer. You never lose the virus. You can only keep it in check. But it’s something I’ve always disagree with.

John Yoo: Have you tried amputation?

Henry Olsen: Well, the one thing that would succeed. The amputation above the shoulders is one I’m unwilling to accept.

But I’ve always disagreed with Burkeanism in the sense that the Constitution is the source of our nationalism as opposed to that the Constitution is an effective means that enables and embodies something that preexisted before it and exists outside of it.

Jonah Goldberg: Yeah, I agree largely with Henry on this. One of the reasons that America became America is that the original founders, before they decided to revolt, considered themselves Englishmen whose ancient rights and liberties were not being respected by the Crown. And if you look where American culture comes from, it comes in — not entirely, obviously, but certainly in the founding area it comes largely out of English culture. And the English were, to borrow a phrase from social science, really weird. You know, the Fourth Amendment begins in the seventh-century England, from notions that a man’s home was his castle. And it works its way up through the common law, and eventually becomes the — it gets sort of purified and abstracted into the Fourth Amendment.

Same thing with notions of tolerance. John Locke’s “Treatise on Tolerance,” you know, he makes all these wonderful arguments about how you have to have freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, at the very least, as a social compromise. But not for the Catholics, right? You know, like, “The Catholics, they can’t have that.” You know, because they were seen as sort of like agents of a foreign power by that lot. And then Jefferson takes the internal logic of what Locke was writing and puts it in a centrifuge and purifies it even more and turns it into his notes on toleration, which says, “Not only do Catholics have freedom of religion, but so do Hindus, pagans, and everybody else.”

And so I think the Constitution is really important. But in many ways, what is great about it is simply that the founders wrote it down. It reflected a certain cultural orientation that was inherent in the American nation that predated the founding of the country as a nation-state. And one of the best things they did was made it really hard to change the Constitution. And so subsequent generations buy into that culture that I think is superior to the one that the English had at the time. And the nation sort of emerges out of that.

But this gets into one of these — to respond to something that John said, I agree we need a little nationalism. My analogy, which some people get tired of me saying, is that nationalism is a little bit like salt. If you know anything about cooking, you need a little salt in the meal to bring the dish together. It brings the ingredients together. It ties them in. A little too much, it ruins the meal. Way too much, it’s literally toxic.

And when people like Yoram Hazony and others who write about the virtues of nationalism, a big chunk of their argument is, “Really, it should be called the virtues of nation-ism,” that the nation-state, the Westphalian nation-state, should be the fundamental block — unit of the international order, and we shouldn’t have trans-global or pan-global institutions, like the EU or the UN, that diminish American or any country’s sovereignty to a certain extent. I’m very sympathetic to all of that. But that’s not necessarily nationalism.

Colin Dueck: Well, let me bring it up to the Trump phenomenon. Starting with Henry, you’ve written on the Trump coalition as an example of a more blue-collar conservatism. And not that populism is exactly the same as nationalism, but I think these are overlapping. And then beginning with you and then going down to the other speakers, what is your sense of — you know, does this administration or this coalition represent a more nationalist kind of Americanism? What does that mean for policy? What does that mean politically and coalitionally?

Henry Olsen: Yeah. Well, I think that the slogan “Make America Great Again” is crucial to understanding Trump’s appeal. But it also is — you have to understand that it means different things to different parts of that coalition. That the initial group that people have focused on, the blue-collar voters who are not necessarily traditional Republicans or not necessarily traditional primary voters, this is Trump’s core, you know — is that if we want to look at different — the way to look at a Trump coalition is think of there’s a core, and then there’s different circles of attachment that remain within that. The first group of people who cotton to him are not movement conservatives. They’re not the most loyal Republicans. They’re people who may have voted Republican, or often voted Democrat, but they see something in that.

And I think for a lot of those people, nationalism, or the sense of America, expressed a sense of estrangement that they had begun to feel from the leading institutions that were expressing national identity. That if you are somebody who’s in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, your way of life isn’t celebrated. It’s often denigrated. Your jobs and communities are considered to be backwaters, from which the faster you move, the better it is. And you’re often called epithets and names if you try and protest. And Donald Trump comes up, and he says, “Hey, you’ve always been the backbone of the American nation. I’m going to express your concerns, and that will help make America great again.” So for these people, it’s a sense of regaining a sense of being part of the American dream.

For religious conservatives, it’s kind of the opposite, which is that they feel in America that they dominated, in an America that has its roots in a very distinct English Protestant history, which was never formally Americanized but was always a moral backbone of much of American cultural life. They felt that slipping away very quickly after Obergefell, particularly felt threatened. Not simply that their dominance was going away, but they no longer felt that they could be secure in an area — in a place that actually they feel. They have no other home but America. So for them, making America great again is subscribed in the commitment to religious liberty, that there’s always going to be a place for you as you define it in this country.

So I think American national identity is very important to the Trump coalition. But again, it means something different to different parts of it. But one of the things I think that’s pretty clear if you actually look at the data is that what’s often ascribed to Trump-ism, which is some degree of American version of “blood and soil” Central European nationalism, is a very tiny element of what motivated people. I can show you data on that.

But, yes, as in any place, there are people who have a bigoted viewpoint. And some of those people are attracted to different parties, and some of them end up in the Trump coalition. But it’s actually a very tiny part of that coalition. And that’s not what the — most of, like 95 percent or 98 percent of the voters who supported Trump, interpret. They are concerned about the identity of America and their place in the future America and America’s connection to its past principles. But they are not embracing the fearful type of nationalism that Jonah talks about.

Colin Dueck: John, if what we’re seeing is a reassertion of the idea of national sovereignty, then what are some of the implications of that for, you know, multilateral cooperation or border security, immigration policy, different areas you’ve written on?

John Yoo: I think you could see a confluence of interests, I think, based on what Henry’s talking about, which are different communities in the United States that feel left out because of cultural change and want to see a reassertion of some kind of national identity.

And then Trump’s foreign policy, because I think — and our former colleague, John Bolton, is the national security adviser. He built his career, I think, around the idea of restoring American sovereignty. It’s not the same thing as nationalism, but they’re very similar in their output. So this is an idea that the United States should not join any permanent international institutions, or that it should seek ad hoc cooperation. And so you see us pulling out of the Paris accords, of course. You see threats to break up different trade organizations, which, again, is very similar to what I think people in Henry’s coalition that he’s talking about would want, maybe for different reasons. You know, pulling out of the Iran nuclear accords. So there’s just a kind of suspicion of international institutions and the idea that you could transfer authority. I think that’s really John’s view, and this is where it really is. The idea that you could transfer parts of American sovereignty to other bodies at a global level that would cure problems.

So I think the version of nationalism I’m talking about with Jonah, I think, does really characterize how the Trump administration thinks about it, which is the best system to rely on in solving global problems is going to be reliance on independent nation-states cooperating on an ad hoc basis. And we have made a mistake over the last 70 years to put our faith in sort of institutions which have no nation. So they don’t have anybody who would really fight or even die for them, and so they became empty. And we were wrong to place our faith in them because then we didn’t take the measures we needed to, using our own sovereignty and those of other countries, to deal with threats like the rise of China or Russia or whatever you want to say.

And I think that, you know, my sense of it, that the portion of the American population that is in support of global institutions is going to be a very small portion. I think of this is as probably one of the more popular aspects of the Trump platform because it does includes people who were worried about nationalism, but also the sort of traditional national security part of the Republican Party too.

Colin Dueck: Matt, is it accurate to say that American nationalism is on the rise? And is that something you view is more of a danger or an opportunity with this administration? Different policy areas?

Matthew Spalding: Well, I think, to go back to earlier, the conversation, I don’t think there’s nothing inherently good or bad about nationalism. It depends how you define it. And there has been, through the American tradition, a large element of nationalism, both good and bad. So it really depends on the thing.

I think what’s interesting right now is the degree to which we have to understand, “Where does Trump come from?” He’s clearly a reaction to something. And there’s been a long debate over the course of the 20th century about essentially, now, at this point, as we’ve grown past the progressive and the moderate liberalism, you know, different views about how we should govern ourselves, and those have become well established.

And our politics, and especially our political elites, have not really addressed those questions, which left the opening for someone like Donald Trump to come along, precisely on the grounds that Henry described. A lot of people thought they had been left out of that politics, and he addressed them as part of the “forgotten man,” to pick up on FDR’s phrase that he has used. And so it’s important to understand how he comes into that.

Now, having said that, I think it’s less of a worry. I think it’s more just a practical recognition that, you know, he is — for all the ways in which he’s crass and inarticulate, you know, there’s a certain way in which I think he has touched on aspects of what we would consider to be an Americanism. I mean, you know, raising questions about how can you have a country without borders, jobs, and trade. A lot of his key issues actually have touchstones back to that. The very fact that he wants to make America great again implies there is an America, and he wants to put it first. Which, despite the baggage of the term, is a perfectly reasonable thing to argue.

I think at the end of the day, we also have to recognize that Trump is a — he’s more of a deconstructing figure. He’s a de-aligning figure. He’s not an aligning figure, right? Victor Davis Hanson’s book on Trump refers — Victor. He’s a classicist. He refers to him as he’s more of a tragic hero. He’s the guy who comes in and does what needs to be done to reset things. But he doesn’t actually correct things in the full sense of the term.

John Yoo: He’s a tragic hero after you read those tax returns.

Matthew Spalding: He is his own tragic hero.

John Yoo: Yeah, how do you lose a billion dollars?

Matthew Spalding: But there’s a —

John Yoo: For 10 years, it’s a tragedy.

Matthew Spalding: But I think there’s a certain quality to which our politics at this point actually needed someone like Trump. But that doesn’t imply that he’s the solution, which means a lot of these questions, I think, are unanswered, and I don’t think they will be answered by him in particular. But I think that our politics are such that we are going to have to address these questions going forward.

Colin Dueck: Jonah, is it fair to say that in practical policy terms on issues like trade or immigration, are you more struck by the dangers than the opportunities?

Jonah Goldberg: I guess I would rephrase it differently. There’s a lot in what Matt says that I agree with, but I generally blanch at theories that suggest or could be interpreted as suggesting that Donald Trump has anything remotely approximating a coherent vision or ideological approach to anything. I think that he pick things up — he picks up major policy proposals by testing them on rallies. And if they get big applause lines, then all of a sudden, they become big policy proposals. Which is not necessarily — as someone who does not like populism, that is not my ideal form of doing these things.

He has been consistent. One of the very few areas where he’s been consistent over the last 40 years is on issues of trade. And if you can go back and you can replace the word “Japan” with the word “China” in his interviews from the 1980s, and they are almost exactly what he says today.

And so I take Matt’s point that, you know, there’s a certain amount of, you know, “you have to destroy the village to save it” logic in some of that. And it is certainly true that Trump has been an interesting stress test for a lot of our institutions.

But if you actually believe, like my colleague at National Review, Rich Lowry, if you actually believe that nationalism is an important and valuable thing, it can be a very difficult problem if someone like Donald Trump takes up your cause. Because in an era of negative partisanship, where if Trump’s for it, half the country is going to be against it, you are now making nationalism seem like it is part of a partisan agenda rather than this appeal to what unifies us all as the American people and whatnot.

I mean, right now, free trade has never been more popular among liberals, and it has never been more unpopular among conservatives. I don’t think that the liberals went back and read their Basquiat and Adam Smith before they changed their minds on it. Nor do I think that the conservatives went and had a discovery of Justus Möser and Friedrich List and decided that “Yeah, no, protectionism is a wonderful thing.”

And so one of the problems that you get when you start making these kinds of issues part of a partisan program is that you immediately buy opposition to it. And if one party claims that it is the party of patriotism and the other party isn’t — or nationalism — you start having them define themselves oppositionally to it. And — which is why to the extent nationalism and things like it are benign, they should probably best be taught as a matter of civics, rather than as part of a program.

And for conservatives who complain greatly about — to get to your point, you were asking about trade. You know, my position has really been remarkably consistent. I was against crony capitalism and picking winners and losers when Barack Obama did it. And I’m against it when Donald Trump does it. And there’s a certain sense in which what Donald Trump is doing — and a lot of the Trump-ism is doing — is basically saying, “Yeah, we’re going to have a sort of corporatist, restrictionist, protectionist policy, because that’s what the Democrats were doing. But we’re just going to do it for right-wing ends and for our coalition, instead of their coalition.” And that leaves out people who have sort of a classical liberal bent from the conversation. And I think it’s going to be a while before neutral rules about how power is used in this country that are in line with the Constitution have a party that is going to be particularly interested in championing it.

Colin Dueck: John?

Matthew Spalding: Can I? Yeah, it strikes me as is interesting to which extent we would love to sit around and have a nice conversation about civics and, you know, kind of write all these things off. We don’t want to be partisan. When actually, you know, this is what politics is all about. I mean, what Trump is in many ways is a 19th-century politician, right? In an odd way, right? A lot of those guys who were good on a few things, not good on a lot of things, and weren’t necessarily on our short list.

Jonah Goldberg: Andrew Johnson comes to mind.

Matthew Spalding: A lot of them come to mind. And actually, that’s the norm in American politics.

But to not recognize that we’re in the middle of a political debate about the fundamental questions that are at the heart of what America is, you know, I fear sometimes that gets us detracted, you know, whether we like him or don’t like him or wish he had never come along.

I mean, the fact of the matter is a debate has been engaged. And it seems to me that the better thing to do is to see what he did pick up on, which a lot of other candidates did not, and allowed him to have some success. And how do you build from that back toward something? Because whether we like it or not, that debate’s not going to go away, unless we intend to just lose it and go, you know — and ignore it and hope it goes away.

Jonah Goldberg: I don’t want to lose it. I want to win it. And one of the ways I think that you win it is by actually not abandoning the positions that you had —

Matthew Spalding: Completely agree.

Jonah Goldberg: — five minutes before Donald Trump showed up on the scene, which some people are doing.

Matthew Spalding: I completely agree with that. But, I mean, the fact of the matter is you got what you got. So, you know, you try to make of it what you can and recognize the actual political realities on the ground. It’s what I meant earlier by, you know — so many of conservatives either want to just have an abstract conversation, which has no political reality to it, or they become too crass and they’re just narrow politically. How do we somehow try to bring those two things together? And it seems to me that’s the prudent thing to do in this situation.

Jonah Goldberg: I thank that’s what Colin convened this panel for.

Colin Dueck: John?

John Yoo: So I think this discussion of Trump and presidential power — not necessarily trade. I was going to raise immigration as a good way to think about this question. Is there really a set of American national characteristics that are pre-constitutional? Because most presidents, when they did engage in broad uses of presidential power, they’re usually saying, “I’m defending the constitutional order. I’m defending certain —” They don’t really say,

“I’m defending the American character or the American people as separate from that Constitution.”

So, you know, you don’t even hear Donald Trump, when he wants to impose immigration restrictions, he doesn’t say, “We’re getting too many people from a certain part of the world. They’re changing the American people. They’re bringing values that we don’t want there.” It’s always expressed as, “They’re terrorists who are national security threats.” Or, “They’re harming parts of our economy, different constituencies. They’re part of American people, certainly, but they’re cheating on the economy. They’re depressing wages,” and so on.

The thing that would worry me, but I don’t think Trump has crossed that line yet, is to say, “I have a vision of America. And I’m going to use presidential power and the Constitution to change things to preserve that,” whatever that is.

And I think that good presidents have generally resisted this. You know, Lincoln doesn’t say, “There’s an American people with these certain values from the start of the framing, and I’m going to use the Constitution to try to preserve it.” And, in fact, Lincoln, you know, radically changes politics and society to really open it up and include a people, slaves, who were not considered part of the American people before and includes them.

Matthew Spalding: Right. In order to restore the principles of the Declaration, which preexisted the nation.

John Yoo: No, but see, I think the principles are in the Constitution themselves.

Matthew Spalding: It’s a much more complicated answer. I think you want to write that off too quickly because of your nervousness that somehow this is an abstract appeal to universals or something. But it is inherent in the way we understand the Constitution. Is it really — you can’t fully understand the Constitution unless you look behind it to the underlying philosophical ground of it. And that’s what gives American nationalism its unique sense. You don’t want to set that aside.

John Yoo: No. I just think it’s mutable. I think it changes over time. I mean, that’s why —

Matthew Spalding: But the principles themselves change over time.

John Yoo: It can, aside from the ones that are in the Constitution and maybe the Declaration. That’s what you were trying to get in there.

Matthew Spalding: Well, maybe the Declaration. Okay, so —

John Yoo: But what worried me is if you had a president come along then and say — and this is really triggered by Jonah talking about trade, but he wanted to swap out Japan and China. Swap out trade and immigration. Then aren’t you worried about a president saying, “I do have a vision, what the nation is. I am going to use my, as the Supreme Court said, very broad powers in immigration to preserve a certain vision of the character of the American people. And so I’m not going to allow people in from different parts of the world where they’re too alien to what’s —” Right? European countries do this all the time. They have a view of what it is to be French or German.

Matthew Spalding: And we’re not a “blood and soil” country. Absolutely. But you need the Declaration to make that argument.

John Yoo: You stress and you say, “Don’t stop.”

Matthew Spalding: But you do need both. You need both.

Henry Olsen: Yeah. Matt will tell you about the esoteric meaning of Article III, Section 2, later. But two things I’d just like to say.

First of all, the concept of Americanist has always been at the heart of American political debate in our democratic system. Henry Clay’s economic platform was called the American system. Franklin Roosevelt tried to cast — denigrate Republicans in the 1936 election as economic royalists and Tories, people outside of the American system. And Karlyn would probably remember, but I forget which speaker in the 1984 convention said, “The Democrats have moved so far left, they’ve left America.” But that was a modern conservative attempt to do the same thing.

So in extremis, it’s something to worry about. But one of the things that distinguishes us, in some part, from other political debates is that question is exactly what we talk about, as opposed to letting that sense lie in the background and then we discuss pure policy implementation. But as far as, you know, the point Jonah has about classical liberalism, I very much respect intellectual consistency. But I think it’s just a matter of political reality that consistent classical liberals are a very tiny part of the American electorate. They’re a very tiny part of the Republican coalition.

And I wrote a book about that, “The Four Faces of the Republican Party,” where you break into factions. And you can see that the people who actually are moved by this devotion to classical liberal economics is the smallest of the four factions now with Trump, five factions of the Republican Party. And, in fact, what we have is a broad commitment to an idea of classical liberalism in a moderate way. And in a way so that even Ronald Reagan, who would be the person who is most identified with popularizing those sorts of themes in later part of the 20th century, conducted constant trade battles with Japan during his administration, levying tariffs, war times, forcing the revaluation of the yen. And arguably, set that nation on the course to its real estate bubble, as he fought to close off their ability to manipulate trade rules to capture larger shares of the American market.

So if you have somebody who could be, at one time, hugely devoted to classical liberal ideas and at the other hand, in touch with where the American body politic was, which is to say, principles of classical liberalism moderately applied, depending on the circumstances of the national advantage. I think that’s where we actually have where America was and where America is. And Trump was about the only Republican who still grasped that balance going into the 2016 campaign.

Jonah Goldberg: I agree with a lot of that. I would just sort of push back. First of all, I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that I am outnumbered. I grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan for God’s sake. But —

Matthew Spalding: Outnumbered on what?

Jonah Goldberg: Outnumbered as a classical liberal. Outnumbered, I’ve never lived anywhere where my vote wasn’t canceled out at least seven to one. You know, I have a podcast called “The Remnant” for a reason.

But the only thing I would say is about Reagan. I agree with you entirely that prudential questions about trade and economics require deviating from the ideal from time to time. One of the reasons why we call ideals ideals is because they are, by definition, unattainable, but they give you a true north to follow. And while Ronald Reagan veered from the ideal, he never stopped praising the ideal.

Now we have a debate on the right, and large chunks on the right, where the idea of classical liberalism as an ideal is under assault from a lot of people on the right. My friend, Tucker Carlson. You know, there’s a couple of pretty good books on this stuff. Where there is a move on the right now to move towards a managed capitalism model, or a corporatist model, or whatever you want to call it. Because there’s this notion that is being peddled around there rhetorically, and I think rhetoric matters a lot, that the ideal itself should no longer be an ideal.

And I think that is the key distinction between — I mean, as Yuval Levin pointed out in 2016, Donald Trump’s indictment of Washington was very different from the classical conservative indictment of Washington. The classical conservative indictment was that Washington is too big and too powerful. And Donald Trump’s indictment was that it was too weak and too stupid. And that he was going to come in: “I alone can fix it. I know how to manage the economy.” You know, “I am Friedrich Hayek’s worst nightmare, because there’s no knowledge problem for me, because I know more about everything than anybody.”

And a large chunk of the right has conceptually bought into that, either in smart waves like Oren Cass. I mean, not about Trump, but about this idea that experts and technocrats can run things from Washington. Or they bought into that as a literal personality cult about Donald Trump. You know, there are people out there who honestly believe that he’s the world’s greatest negotiator. And I think both of those things are going to require a lot of cleaning up on the right for a very, very long time, if they could be cleaned up at all.

Henry Olsen: I think, as a minor combatant in these battles, I think you’re mischaracterizing a lot of our positions. That, you know, we’re not in favor of managed capitalism. But we are opposed to a degree of fundamentalism that doesn’t permit the sort of prudential choices to reflect circumstances. And most of the people I know who are on that side are in that camp, you know, which is not to replace classical liberalism, but rather to make the sort of prudential choices that allows the sort of market — free, liberal democratic market-based system to thrive in real political circumstances, as opposed to an idealized political world.

Jonah Goldberg: Yeah, I’m sympathetic to a lot of those efforts. You know, the Reformacons did a lot of great things. One of my great frustrations was that all these people, like Yuval and Ramesh and you, for a long time, wanted to do these perfectly consistent with Reaganite principles public policy reforms. And a large number of sort of high priests of conservatism, or self-anointed high priests of conservatism, said, “No, no, no, no. No deviation. No deviation from sort of Ronald Reagan’s 1982 program.”

And then along comes Trump, who wants to completely throw away that program, and a lot of people all of a sudden say, “Well, we got to go with Trump because he’s the only one speaking to these people who are suffering.” And maybe if more people on the right had

listened to people like you, and to Yuval and to Ramesh, when these proposals could have made incremental prudential change in the lives of ordinary Americans without blowing up the system, we would be in a better place. And we wouldn’t have to turn to essentially a demagogue to be the bull in the china shop that Matt describes.

Colin Dueck: We have a few minutes left for questions. So what I’m going to ask you to do from the audience is introduce yourself briefly, ask a question, and specify which panelist, or all of them, that you’d like to answer. Yeah? Got a mic coming around here.

Q: Thank you for coming. My name is Mitsuo Nakai. Japan native, US citizen. Nationalism, in my opinion, is something that every country has got, including in Japan. Japan is monarchy, and there’s emperor there. My dad went to war for Hirohito. So every country has got them. But somebody talked about the difference between nationalism and patriotism. But nobody actually talked about Americanism. What’s Americanism? I’m getting more confused.

Colin Dueck: Thank you. Anyone want to take a crack at that? What is Americanism?

Matthew Spalding: Well, I think we kind of argued a little bit about that, in the sense that Americanism — even though I’ll add the caveat in there: I don’t like isms. But Americanism is that particular form of nationalism that exists here that is this interesting combination of — and here I’ll grant John his argument, right? It’s a very interesting mix of the forms of the regime, especially in terms of the Constitution, and the ideas underneath it and its history that kind of comes together to shape that thing.

Q: They’re based on the Constitution?

Matthew Spalding: I think it’s based on the Constitution, as the Constitution is a practical manifestation of the principles of the Declaration. And to which we add other aspects of history where we’ve had to work out that relationship, right, that creates this sense of an Americanism, which, you know, I think is actually somewhat distinct from patriotism, right? There’s a certain, obviously a love of country, but it’s a little more particularized.

Jonah Goldberg: I think culture explains what Americanism is to a large extent. Seymour Martin Lipset, who was the one of the greatest sociologists of the 20th century, he used to love to point out that one of the great natural experiments in political science wasn’t, you know, West Germany versus East Germany or North Korea versus South Korea, but America versus Canada. Yeah, these two populations that were basically of the same genetic stock, right, the same cultural stock. But if you were a royalist or a loyalist at the time of the American Revolution, you either move to Canada or you stayed there. And if you were on the side of liberty and all the rest, you either moved to the 13 colonies or you stayed there.

Fast-forward to the 1970s, both countries at the same time announced that they were going to switch to the metric system. And the Canadians, because they have this — they’re wonderful people, but they have this rich culture of deference to the throne, said, “Okay.” And up there, it’s all, you know, kilometers and meters and all that witchcraft. And in the United States, they said, “Are you kidding me? We’re not doing that.” And they just simply refused. Because there’s something about the American culture, Americanism, that is just resistant to that kind of top-down authority.

Colin Dueck: We had a question here. Yeah? Can you bring the mic up here, please? Thank you. Right here.

Q: Thank you. Jerry Hyman at the Center for Strategic International Studies. I wonder if we could turn a bit to the idea of conservatism, which is, I think, what was kind of the core of the panel. It seems to me that if you ask yourself, “What happens after President Trump leaves office?” whether it’s a year and a half or five and a half years from now, there’s no inherited — he’s not going to leave anything, no vision, as you said. There’s nothing going to be left. It’s all an individual. So if you say, “What happens after President Trump?” It’s blank. There’s no obvious ism that comes after that.

And seems to me that the problem of conservatism in the last decade or two is that it didn’t quite grasp — or we didn’t quite grasp — these fundamental social changes that were taking place in our country that Trump latched onto. And we didn’t appropriately address those issues from a conservative perspective. So what I think a conservative perspective is some combination of Burkeanism, in which, you know, you don’t just change things around all the time. You have some deference for tradition on the grounds that, you know, maybe you shouldn’t just willy-nilly make changes without thinking them through. And liberty, liberty being part of the tradition, but not fully.

And it seems to me that when I was in high school, which was almost a century ago, we talked about, even then, the American experiment. And the question was whether self- government could work as the founders said, you know, as Benjamin Franklin famously said. And it seems to me that the question that needs to be addressed, not just in foreign policy but in domestic policy, is: Can conservatism recover its relevance for a post-Trump world? And is there going to be a conservative alternative to what seems to me to be a whole set of problems on the, quote, “progressive” side of things?

Colin Dueck: Good question.

Henry Olsen: I write a lot about that. And my view is that a conservatism that is fundamentally based on those two stools, of caution to change and liberty, is fundamentally an unstable conservatism. And it’s unstable because it doesn’t respond to what I think is the missing stool of conservatism, which is an appreciation for human dignity. That when you think about the ways in which conservatism has lost over the last century, it is almost always reducible to some group of people who claim that liberty is depriving us of some degree of dignity, and caution to change is unnecessary because the deprivation is too great.

And you can look at that as being the claims of the person dispossessed during the Great Depression, when — I’ve read Hoover’s speeches, where he says, basically, summing down, Hoover’s argument against Roosevelt is, “It doesn’t matter how many of you are out of work. We can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Only 25 percent of the people are unemployed, and 50 percent of the people have experienced unemployment. They decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, precisely because you couldn’t lead a dignified life if you couldn’t find work that can support yourself. And the same is true of a lot of the social groups.

And I think what that means is that a conservatism that is not only going — and the other thing to recognize is that if the Republican Party’s in some way identified with those principles, and I think it has been since the Great Depression, regardless of the degree to which one interprets its fidelity to it, it’s been the minority party. It has been the second-

place party in polls for 87 years now. You can elect presidents, but we’re always fighting uphill. And I think it’s precisely because a conservatism that doesn’t incorporate the use of limited but effective government power to protect and enhance human dignity is fundamentally out of step with an interpretation of the American identity — that is, the regnant identity — and has been for over a century. So if we go back to where we were, we go back to where we were. But the demographics of America means a conservatism that shrinks in influence and then ultimately shrinks into becoming a shadow of its former self.

Colin Dueck: John.

John Yoo: You’re at CSIS. You probably think about this, too. I think one thing that will survive Trump is part of the conservative agenda. And it’s happened so quickly. I’m amazed and impressed about it. And it’s becoming a bipartisan consensus — is our attitude towards China. I mean, I think most people now are putting aside the notion that was held for a long time in Washington that we were going to liberalize China, free trade, international alliances. China will become a middle-class country, eventually become a democracy, and be a responsible member of the American-led international system.

And I think this is sort of related to nationalism, but we are going to be in a long struggle confronting another nation, which has a very strong sense of national identity, that has survived over for almost 3,000 years with lots of different kinds of governments. And we are opposing them because — this is where I’m different than my friend Matt — because we see the ideals that China has, not in its Constitution or its political — it’s in the Chinese people and its government and the way they’re oppressing other regions around them. We see them as fundamentally dangerous to the kind of values we have.

Matthew Spalding: I agree with that.

John Yoo: If it was the British doing what they were doing, it’d be, “Fine. Go ahead, you know, have a British Empire.” We’re fine with the British Empire.

Matthew Spalding: Up to a point.

John Yoo: Yeah. But, you know, it’s because we not only are worried about Chinese expansionism, but the values that the Chinese people through their government tolerate, and I think that’s going to survive Trump. I think that’s something he actually did come along and shook up the system so much that people realize what our national interest in foreign policy really should be. And we put aside these kind of — these illusions I think we were living under for at least the last 10 years.

Henry Olsen: But one thing I would just add to that. What that necessarily also means it’s going to place tensions on the Atlantic Alliance. Because we’re not going to go back to spending 6 percent of our GDP on defense. And that means we can’t meet our commitments to both the Pacific and the Atlantic. And if the Atlantic partners are not going to increase their spending so that they can take up a larger share against an adversary who we feel less threatened by, so that we can divert our resources to the adversary that we do feel more threatened by, then that’s going to create a existential question for the Atlantic Alliance. Because we are going to put our nation first. And we are threatened by China in a way that Germany and France and the United Kingdom are not. And that’s ultimately going to survive Trump as well. Even though there will be the rhetorical commitment, there will be not the

practical commitment unless the Atlantic Alliance decides to look at itself as part of a global alliance.

Colin Dueck: Matt, last word.

Matthew Spalding: I would just like to add, though, I think the one thing that’s clear is that we’re not going to return to the conservatism of old. And I think that’s probably a good thing. And I’d say that as somebody who spent a lot of time in another conservative institution.

And the idea that think tanks and others are going to — we spent too much time arguing about what conservatism is as opposed to what to conserve. And I think that the assumption that academics are somehow going to define this new conservatism, I think, is not going to be the case.

One thing I think that will continue, which is a great accomplishment, is the record of judicial appointments and what’s going on the courts. At the end of the day, I don’t think the courts are going to save things, but you could have a great holding maneuver, if you will, as things like Chevron and other things go their way. And I think that will have the effect of putting increased pressures on Congress and the political institutions to try to resolve some of these things and deal with some of these problems in a way that they’ve been passing the buck on. And if that’s the case, then you can revive a very healthy sense of politics, which would point us toward what I always like to call the Madisonian solution of reviving a healthy institutional politics that, in my opinion, has a great conservative effect.

Colin Dueck: Okay. It’s been a great discussion, and please join me in thanking our panelists.