Dr John C Hulsman is President and Managing Partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk consulting firm. A life member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, his most recent book is The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism.
It is time to put away the smelling salts. Remove the fainting couch from your parlour. Emerge ever so tentatively from your ‘safe space.’ To hear much of the center-left foreign media talk, the return of Donald Trump to power signals the end of days, the coming of the apocalypse.
This is worse than wrong; it is intellectually lazy.
Instead of furthering this fairy tale, that absolves the reader from actually thinking about what is going on in the United States in general (and the Republican Party in particular), we aim over the next few weeks in ConservativeHome to make sense of the Trump Revolution and what it means for both the United States and the larger world.
To begin, we must look at what the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian base of MAGA World, the two allied Republican tribes that are now calling the shots in the party, after a generation of neoconservative establishment failure. For only by understanding the seismic, decisive shift in the party can the Trump phenomenon begin to make sense.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, we will draw on the never-bettered US foreign policy typology put forward by Walter Russell Mead in his masterpiece, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Mead’s particular genius, beyond shrewdly detailing the major American foreign policy schools of thought belief systems, is to organically imprint each with an American historical figure who most epitomizes what each school of thought is actually about.
For the purposes of these articles (though I strongly advise you to read the whole of Mead’s groundbreaking work), we will ignore the left-leaning Democratic Party-based Wilsonians and centrist Hamiltonians. Now that Donald Trump has usefully exiled the shoot-first-and-ask-questions later neoconservatives to their proper home in a Democratic Party that is all about social engineering, we will instead focus on the two major foreign policy strands of thought currently dominating the Republican Party, the Jacksonians and the Jeffersonians, and the foreign policy realism that they share.
The first thing to say about the Jacksonians and Jeffersonians is that they are surely not the same. Jeffersonians like Johnny Cash; Jacksonians are Johnny Cash. Jeffersonians adore the First Amendment (speech rights); Jacksonians are passionate about the Second (gun rights). Jeffersonians support populism, but much like their namesake, from an elitist perch; Jacksonians are truly of the people. Beyond these social and cultural differences, over policy the two tend to divide over free trade, with Jeffersonians being enthusiastic supporters while Jacksonians are inherently more protectionist.
But for all these differences, there is more that unites these two schools of thought than divides them. Above all, they are fused together by a common if unacknowledged adherence to realism, which serves as the new cement for this new, dominant foreign policy orientation of the Republican Party. With neoconservatives fleeing conservative circles with the advent of Donald Trump (witness the Cheneys haplessly campaigning for Kamala Harris) and with neoconservatism increasingly discredited in general after the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the GOP can at last return to its traditional realist heritage.
The Jacksonians
The dominant Jacksonians share with their Jeffersonian allies a suspicion of unfettered federal government power, preferring such government as is necessary to reside closest to the people; that is, with the states and the localities. Their common ancestors doubtless carried the famous serpent flag of the American War for Independence, ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ as both schools are fearsome defenders of individual liberty.
Originally, in line with their formidable namesake, Andrew Jackson, Jacksonians were pre-revolutionary Scots-Irish settlers, who quickly moved as far away as possible from coastal elite control, inhabiting the Old West of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and parts of the South.
Jacksonians absolutely hate today’s leftist woke movement, both because they despise its self-loathing and deprecation of an America they love and because they believe absolutely no one has the right to tell a self-reliant Jacksonian what to say, what to think, or what to do. The same holds true for the United States in general, as in this honour culture the US must not meekly submit itself to lectures for unelected foreign technocrats of any kind. The American people do not need to be educated (let alone socially engineered) by the country’s coastal elites, and especially not arrogant foreigners.
As such, Jacksonians and Jeffersonians fear rule from far away, being particularly suspicious of globalist do-gooding by unelected foreigner-run international institutions, such as the United Nations and International Criminal Court, as well as international agreements which bind Americans, such as the various environmental protocols. Jacksonians are particularly vociferous about this, wanting no international institution or treaty to constrain America’s freedom of maneuver.
For Jacksonians, there should be no such thing as a limited war. As former President Eisenhower’s administration had it, either the stakes are important enough for the US to fight for—in which case you commit to total war—or they are not and you should stay home. As such, Jacksonians resent any effort to stop short of victory.
For all these reasons, Jacksonians were staunchly opposed to recent western Humanitarian Interventions in places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya, where there were no significant American interests at play. For Jacksonians, countries—like families—should first and primarily take care of their own.
In line with standard realist thinking, Jacksonians believe the international system is anarchic and violent and will remain so forever. America must be ever-vigilant and have a strong military always ready to defend the country itself. For all this, Jacksonians are not ‘isolationist,’ as so many of their simplistic detractors allege. Aggressive when they perceive primary American interests to be at stake, Jacksonians are simply far less so when they perceive they are not, as in the multiple interventions in the 1990s in then-collapsing Yugoslavia.
It is the Jacksonians who form the crucial core support for the Trump Revolution, which swept away the old, discredited GOP establishment. The old elite’s cardinal sins were that they did not really care about illegal immigration, spent trillions of dollars on wars not in the primary national interests of the country, focused more on their business friends than on US workers over trade deals, and never attacked woke politics. All of these things made the Bush-era Republicans highly suspect in Jacksonian eyes.
To the contrary, Trump has assiduously tended to his Jacksonian base, starting no new wars of choice, focusing on law and order, attacking wokeness in society, promoting government deregulation and tax cuts, and establishing a proactive energy policy based on fracking and increased drilling. Rarely has a politician so kept faith with his core supporters, which explains their fervent loyalty to Trump, come hell or high water, in return.
The new political reality, which will endure even after he leaves the stage, is that the base of the Republican Party will remain solidly Jacksonian and Trumpist well into the future.
Dr John C Hulsman is President and Managing Partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk consulting firm. A life member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, his most recent book is The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism.
It is time to put away the smelling salts. Remove the fainting couch from your parlour. Emerge ever so tentatively from your ‘safe space.’ To hear much of the center-left foreign media talk, the return of Donald Trump to power signals the end of days, the coming of the apocalypse.
This is worse than wrong; it is intellectually lazy.
Instead of furthering this fairy tale, that absolves the reader from actually thinking about what is going on in the United States in general (and the Republican Party in particular), we aim over the next few weeks in ConservativeHome to make sense of the Trump Revolution and what it means for both the United States and the larger world.
To begin, we must look at what the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian base of MAGA World, the two allied Republican tribes that are now calling the shots in the party, after a generation of neoconservative establishment failure. For only by understanding the seismic, decisive shift in the party can the Trump phenomenon begin to make sense.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, we will draw on the never-bettered US foreign policy typology put forward by Walter Russell Mead in his masterpiece, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Mead’s particular genius, beyond shrewdly detailing the major American foreign policy schools of thought belief systems, is to organically imprint each with an American historical figure who most epitomizes what each school of thought is actually about.
For the purposes of these articles (though I strongly advise you to read the whole of Mead’s groundbreaking work), we will ignore the left-leaning Democratic Party-based Wilsonians and centrist Hamiltonians. Now that Donald Trump has usefully exiled the shoot-first-and-ask-questions later neoconservatives to their proper home in a Democratic Party that is all about social engineering, we will instead focus on the two major foreign policy strands of thought currently dominating the Republican Party, the Jacksonians and the Jeffersonians, and the foreign policy realism that they share.
The first thing to say about the Jacksonians and Jeffersonians is that they are surely not the same. Jeffersonians like Johnny Cash; Jacksonians are Johnny Cash. Jeffersonians adore the First Amendment (speech rights); Jacksonians are passionate about the Second (gun rights). Jeffersonians support populism, but much like their namesake, from an elitist perch; Jacksonians are truly of the people. Beyond these social and cultural differences, over policy the two tend to divide over free trade, with Jeffersonians being enthusiastic supporters while Jacksonians are inherently more protectionist.
But for all these differences, there is more that unites these two schools of thought than divides them. Above all, they are fused together by a common if unacknowledged adherence to realism, which serves as the new cement for this new, dominant foreign policy orientation of the Republican Party. With neoconservatives fleeing conservative circles with the advent of Donald Trump (witness the Cheneys haplessly campaigning for Kamala Harris) and with neoconservatism increasingly discredited in general after the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the GOP can at last return to its traditional realist heritage.
The Jacksonians
The dominant Jacksonians share with their Jeffersonian allies a suspicion of unfettered federal government power, preferring such government as is necessary to reside closest to the people; that is, with the states and the localities. Their common ancestors doubtless carried the famous serpent flag of the American War for Independence, ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ as both schools are fearsome defenders of individual liberty.
Originally, in line with their formidable namesake, Andrew Jackson, Jacksonians were pre-revolutionary Scots-Irish settlers, who quickly moved as far away as possible from coastal elite control, inhabiting the Old West of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and parts of the South.
Jacksonians absolutely hate today’s leftist woke movement, both because they despise its self-loathing and deprecation of an America they love and because they believe absolutely no one has the right to tell a self-reliant Jacksonian what to say, what to think, or what to do. The same holds true for the United States in general, as in this honour culture the US must not meekly submit itself to lectures for unelected foreign technocrats of any kind. The American people do not need to be educated (let alone socially engineered) by the country’s coastal elites, and especially not arrogant foreigners.
As such, Jacksonians and Jeffersonians fear rule from far away, being particularly suspicious of globalist do-gooding by unelected foreigner-run international institutions, such as the United Nations and International Criminal Court, as well as international agreements which bind Americans, such as the various environmental protocols. Jacksonians are particularly vociferous about this, wanting no international institution or treaty to constrain America’s freedom of maneuver.
For Jacksonians, there should be no such thing as a limited war. As former President Eisenhower’s administration had it, either the stakes are important enough for the US to fight for—in which case you commit to total war—or they are not and you should stay home. As such, Jacksonians resent any effort to stop short of victory.
For all these reasons, Jacksonians were staunchly opposed to recent western Humanitarian Interventions in places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya, where there were no significant American interests at play. For Jacksonians, countries—like families—should first and primarily take care of their own.
In line with standard realist thinking, Jacksonians believe the international system is anarchic and violent and will remain so forever. America must be ever-vigilant and have a strong military always ready to defend the country itself. For all this, Jacksonians are not ‘isolationist,’ as so many of their simplistic detractors allege. Aggressive when they perceive primary American interests to be at stake, Jacksonians are simply far less so when they perceive they are not, as in the multiple interventions in the 1990s in then-collapsing Yugoslavia.
It is the Jacksonians who form the crucial core support for the Trump Revolution, which swept away the old, discredited GOP establishment. The old elite’s cardinal sins were that they did not really care about illegal immigration, spent trillions of dollars on wars not in the primary national interests of the country, focused more on their business friends than on US workers over trade deals, and never attacked woke politics. All of these things made the Bush-era Republicans highly suspect in Jacksonian eyes.
To the contrary, Trump has assiduously tended to his Jacksonian base, starting no new wars of choice, focusing on law and order, attacking wokeness in society, promoting government deregulation and tax cuts, and establishing a proactive energy policy based on fracking and increased drilling. Rarely has a politician so kept faith with his core supporters, which explains their fervent loyalty to Trump, come hell or high water, in return.
The new political reality, which will endure even after he leaves the stage, is that the base of the Republican Party will remain solidly Jacksonian and Trumpist well into the future.