In the 2015 movie Hail, Caesar!, a conspiracy of communist screenwriters sets out to undermine the capitalist system with a program of kidnapping, sub rosa propaganda, and dialectics. The plotters refer to their study group–cum–crime ring as “The Future.”
Here at The American Conservative, we have only limited use for communists, let alone screenwriters, but we do take a strong interest in the future. The American people issued a mandate for change on November 5; how can the new administration deliver on it? Can the new administration deliver on it?
These are the central questions of many of the pieces in this issue. Drew Holden writes about one paradigm for a fresh national program, the “abundance agenda,” and asks the question: Is “more” for its own sake necessarily an improvement? Phillip Linderman takes a look at the concrete steps the new administration can take to take the State Department and American diplomacy out of the hands of unaccountable technocrats. Andrew Bring examines the tools to set American trade policy on the right track, particularly everyone’s favorite: the tariff. The American Conservative’s own Curt Mills reads the tea leaves of the new administration’s personnel appointments, while the irrepressible Sumantra Maitra sits down for an interview with one-half of the brain trust behind the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Of course, talking about the future often requires expeditions into the past, both recent and far-off. In our cover story, Ryan Girdusky dissects Donald Trump’s electoral victory to see whether there is a durable coalition to be found in it. Joseph Addington, TAC’s ISI fellow, makes his print debut with a survey of Javier Milei’s whirlwind transformation of Argentina’s government and economy. Abiy Ahmed also set out to transform a nation, his own Ethiopia, and succeeded in a dark way. Brad Pearce examines how the self-described “Bay area kind of guy” ushered in an era of ethnic balkanization and state collapse.
The future often recapitulates what has gone before: It has often been said, but that makes it no less true. This is the judgment that emerges from Rob York’s outline of the recurring themes of Russia’s relationship with North Korea; also from the look TAC’s political editor, Spencer Neale, takes at Ridley Scott’s “then as farce” sequel to Gladiator. But the past is not solely a dataset to be mined for actionable insights; it also provides its own pleasures. Peter Tonguette reviews a memoir of the cause celebre of yesteryear, the Brooke Astor trial, and finds many delightful portraits from the twilight of New York’s old high society. No less delightfully, one of our esteemed founders, Taki Theodoracopulos, returns to our pages with a tribute to our learned friend R. Emmett Tyrrell, the founder of the American Spectator. Welcome back, Taki.
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