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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Rich ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry Throws A Public Snit

Late Night Open Thread: Rich ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry Throws A Public Snit

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Not that I normally read anything by, or if I can help it about, the National Review editor who wrote the first public paean to Sarah Palin’s charms. But Mr. Boie’s tweet sent me in search of explication…

“You know what I am?” U.S. President Donald J. Trump said at a rally in October 2018. “I’m a nationalist.” Rich Lowry’s The Case for Nationalism can be seen as a way of working through, and defending, what the president meant. As the editor of National Review, the prominent conservative magazine, Lowry is an intellectual gatekeeper on the American right. He was one of the speakers at the National Conservatism conference in July 2019, an event that brought together such thinkers as J. D. Vance and Patrick Deneen, with keynotes by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, along with a notorious intervention on the perils of immigration by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax.

Lowry’s central claim is that Americans are, and have been from their country’s founding, a nation and not a community of universal ideas. Although intellectuals and left-wing pundits are openly hostile to expressions of national sentiment, the United States has a unique national tradition that is today obscured by fissiparous identity politics. If Americans reacquaint themselves with their true national heritage, they will be better equipped to overcome dangerous tribalism, protect their borders, and make their country great again. To the degree that the United States has a global role, it should be as “vindicator of the prerogatives of other democratic nation-states”—in other words, a defender of the idea that a world of culturally defined nations is humanity’s state of nature…

…[T]he United States, like any other country, does not have a single identity or history, at least not of the unproblematic kind that Lowry has in mind. What does have such a history is American nationalism. It is a line of thinking and a political program that includes John Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and Andrew Johnson, all of whom saw themselves as the inheritors of the American founding and considered white supremacy the natural order of American society. It runs through post-Reconstruction historians who forged a narrative of white-to-white reconciliation after the Civil War. It encompasses writers such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who in the early twentieth century worried about the rising tide of immigration from southern and eastern Europe and its effects on what they viewed as the Christian, northern European essence of American identity. It winds through George Wallace’s inaugural address as governor of Alabama in 1963, with its evocations of the Anglo-Saxon legacy and the foundational right not to be forced to amalgamate into “a mongrel unit of one.” It flows into William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s 1965 debate with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union. (The great danger of black empowerment, Buckley said, was that it could end up promoting “less the advancement of the Negro than the regression of the white people.”) It slides directly into the Republican Party’s “long Southern strategy,” as the political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields have called it: the successful uniting of evangelicals, antifeminists, and non-college-educated whites into a hard bloc of cultural and racial grievance. And it threads through the essays in such outlets as Lowry’s own National Review, American Greatness, and The Claremont Review of Books, which published Michael Anton’s influential 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election.” Embracing Trump, Anton wrote, is the last chance to stop “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners” and restore “what used to be the core of the American nation.” Any use of “American nationalism” as a phrase entails an acknowledgment of this genealogy…

The Case for Nationalism is an exemplar of America’s original identity politics: white, male, and Anglo-Saxon, with the occasional black jazzman making his contribution and with women kept safely offstage. More than anything, it is proof of a settler society’s ability to produce its own ethnonational chauvinism. Those who worry that the world is spinning out of their control often come up with schemes for corralling us all back into one melodrama with a single set of heroes. But history offers an outlook on life and a method for living it, not a catechism…

Even his fellow conservative white men are unsympathetic!

Of course, Lowry’s got one satisfied reviewer, although perhaps not the kind of thoughtful intellectual he was hoping to persuade…

Reader Interactions

44Comments

  5. 5.

    Amir Khalid

    @Gretchen:
    Fewer than 600 readers is still a bigger audience than Halperin deserves. I wonder if he thought about taking the E out of his surname on the cover to, um, help with sales.

  6. 6.

    opiejeanne

    @Amir Khalid: And change the “a” to an “e”. “A Winter’s Tale” was an interesting book, the movie was only a slight glimpse of the story.There was no reasonable way to turn the book into a movie.

  8. 8.

    Sab

    When my stepson oversleeps, we just think he fucked up again and overslept.

    When my dad’s nurse’s aide oversleeps, I think he overslept and fucked up. His mother thinks he somehow got murdered by cops.

    We live in the same country but completely different worlds.

  9. 9.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Conventional economic models don’t necessarily capture the spiritual benefits of a wealth tax which would help the richest among us to benefit from enjoying the dignity of work.

    -Matthew Iglesias.

  10. 10.

    JoyceH

    In a few years, Trump’s mind will be so decayed he can only verbalize grunts and hoots. And bright young Republican thinkers will write books explaining how those grunts and hoots outline the most profound philosophy.

  11. 11.

    My Side of Town

    I hope Hannity and Carlson are subpoenaed by Adam Schiff to testify what they know and when they knew it about the extortion of Ukraine. Yeah Rupert Murdoch, too.

  12. 12.

    OzarkHillbilly

    When the shouting would not subside, Trump Jr tried – and failed – to argue that taking questions from the floor risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would abuse and distort. Nobody was buying that.

    In minutes, the entire argument put forward by the president’s son – that he was willing to engage in dialogue but that it was the left that refused to tolerate free speech – crumbled.

    “I’m willing to listen…” Trump began.

    “Q and A! Q and A!” the audience yelled back.

    “We’ll go into the lion’s den and talk …” Trump tried again.

    “Then open the Q and A!” came the immediate response.

    Guilfoyle, forced to shout to make herself heard, , told students in the crowd: “You’re not making your parents proud by being rude and disruptive.”

    She and Trump Jr. left the stage moments later.

  15. 15.

    JWR

    That Rich Lowery, as well as Hugh f*cking Hewitt, have regular gigs on the “MSM” Sunday shows really gets under my skin / pisses me off. I wonder, have any of the people booking these clowns actually listened to Hewitt’s radio show? The man is dangerous! (Answer: “Why yes, yes we have listened to his show, and have determined that booking him is how we achieve “balance” on our show, dontcha know? My goodness, have you never listened to that Socialist AOC say anything?”) Fuckem.

  16. 16.

    JGabriel

    My Side of Town:

    I hope Hannity and Carlson are subpoenaed by Adam Schiff to testify what they know and when they knew it about the extortion of Ukraine.

    I’m curious to see what kind of arguments Trump and his legal team would advance to keep people who don’t work for him or the gov’t from testifying. I don’t think Executive Privilege cuts it in that scenario.

  17. 17.

    JGabriel

    @Baud:

    I wouldn’t mind nationalism so much if the nation they chose was America.

    To be fair, it’s not America they hate so much as it is Americans.

  18. 18.

    JGabriel

    @JoyceH:

    In a few years, Trump’s mind will be so decayed he can only verbalize grunts and hoots.

    I think we’ve already been there for a few years.

  20. 20.

    JGabriel

    The Guardian via OzarkHillbilly:

    When the shouting would not subside, Trump Jr tried – and failed – to argue that taking questions from the floor risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would abuse and distort.

    Donald Trump, Jr. (or any of the Trumps really) has the intellectual heft of a Cheez Doodle™. Why is anyone even giving him the time of day?

  21. 21.

    Ladyraxterinok

    Can I read the takedown review of the nationalism book without subscribing to the journal??

  22. 22.

    David ??Booooooo?? Koch

    @JWR: Sunday shows are sponsored by defense conglomerates.

    Boeing Co., targeting an audience of military executives, is the exclusive sponsor of the [Meet the Press]’s online content as well as its apps; it is also a major broadcast sponsor. Other advertisers include the American Petroleum Institute, Citigroup, General Electric Co. and Xerox.

  23. 23.

    Elizabelle

    @My Side of Town:
    @JGabriel:

    I hope Team Adam Schiff is thinking about this, too.

    Could be way interesting for FoxWorld to see some of its premier spokesjackholes hauled in for some serious questioning.

    At the very least, they will have to spend some of their exorbitant salaries on actual lawyers.

  24. 24.

    JGabriel

    Tom Nichols via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    So far, Lowry’s effort seems to be to define away all the stuff that makes nationalism so nasty, and then rechristen what’s left as nationalism to stay jake with the rubes and their vanguard, who know exactly what they mean by “nationalism” when they use it.

    What makes Nichols think Lowry isn’t one of those rubes?

  26. 26.

    RAVEN

    The dust has settled, the family is gone and, even though it’s past peak, I think we’ll head up to the mountains for our vets day drive.

  28. 28.

    JWR

    @David ??Booooooo?? Koch:

    Sunday shows are sponsored by defense conglomerates.

    Oh, I know. I also know how ineffectual it is to rant my little rants on a blog in the middle of the night, but it sure makes me feel better. ;)

  32. 32.

    JGabriel

    @RAVEN:

    Waltzing Matilda (with lyrics and explanation) – Rolf Harris

    And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda – The Pogues

    I tend to prefer The Pogues version. Shane MacGowan’s delivery has an anger to it that feels more appropriate than Bogle’s rueful melancholy.

    Maybe it’s because I heard The Pogues version before Bogle’s, but it feels more like it belongs to The Pogues now – kind of in the same way that RESPECT belongs to Aretha Franklin now instead of Otis Redding.

  35. 35.

    Barbara

    @OzarkHillbilly: I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. They were being lambasted by a group that thinks Trump isn’t sufficiently isolationist.

    Also, Peter King is retiring. That brings the departing class of Republicans up to 20, a year out.

  36. 36.

    Butter Emails!!!

    @Barbara:

    I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. They were being lambasted by a group that thinks Trump isn’t sufficiently isolationist.

    It’s the same as it always was. There’s actually a group of Republicans who are blood and soil white ethnonationalists out of some sort of “principle” as opposed to the group that supports blood and soil ethnonationalism as a path to power and wealth but doesn’t want to actually injure the bottom lines or otherwise piss off their sugar daddies/mommies. Hence, we they’re all good with locking kids in cages, pissing on our historical allies and fucking over farmers in a trade war, but the undocumented immigrants, oil and arms must flow.

  40. 40.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    At first, Trump and Guilfoyle tried to ignore the discontent, which originated with a fringe group of America Firsters who believe the Trump administration has been taken captive by a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.

    Well the Trumps are starting to reap the whirlwind he called down.

    “A number of the loudest voices at Sunday’s event were supporters of Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old ”

    Interesting name for a white nationalist.

  42. 42.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    Interesting name for a white nationalist.

    One of the very, very few benefits of Twitler crushing the Thuglican pretenders in the 2016 primaries is that we were spared the Bush League’s great project to solidify their Thuglican Party’s grip on power by minting “certificados de blancura” for any Hispanic types sufficiently rich, deferential to Anglo culture, & willing to throw their poorer, darker linguistic brethren debajo del bus.

    Don’t laugh – it worked like a charm with Italian-Americans. The descendants of immigrants derided as swarthy bomb-throwing anarchists were “godfathered” into Whiteness post-WW2 – & turned (as a group) into the worst bigots in the country. It only took two generations to go from Sacco & Vanzetti to Joe DiMaggio to Don Corleone to Tony Soprano. My father lived through it all, from enduring taunts of d*go/w*p/gu*nea to the whitewashing of the Mafia as the “Mothers’ and Fathers’ Italian Association” standing for spaghetti, meatballs, & good old Murkan family values. Gesummaria, my people…{facepalm}

  43. 43.

    Neldob

    Lowry is shining up his fascist badge so he can hang out with all his fascist friends worldwide. There hasn’t been a decent Republican since Eisenhower, except maybe Bill Clinton and they turned on him.

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