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Gladden Pappin

Gladden Pappin is the deputy editor of American Affairs. He is associate professor of politics at the University of Dallas and visiting senior fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.
Articles by Gladden Pappin

Requiem for the Realignment

As Republicans rubbed their eyes on the morning of November 9, it became painfully clear that the much-predicted red wave had turned out to be a mirage. A slew of unremarkable Republican candidates lost their bids to unseat Democratic congressmen, and prominent “MAGA-style” Trump-backed candidates lost as well. Both groups within the GOP blamed the…

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From Conservatism to Postliberalism: The Right after 2020

In 2016, voters on both sides of the Atlantic shocked the political establishment by voting for Brexit and Donald Trump. In the eyes of their critics, these movements represented the resurgence of dan­gerous forms of populism and nationalism. Combined with earlier “nationalist-populist” victories in central Europe, and rising support for populist parties elsewhere, commentators at…

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Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century

Ask voters about American politics, and they typically respond that it is ever more polarized, fragmented, divisive, and hyper­partisan. A recent report indicated that 78 percent of voters are un­happy with increasing partisan divisions. Beyond the issue of polar­ization, there is also a problem of performance. Satisfaction with American political institutions is decreasing. The dominant…

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Affirming the American Family

Family policy brings into focus the importance of direct, govern­ment-driven measures ordered to achieve outcomes in accordance with the common good. For too many years in the United States, however, family policy has, in effect, been caught in the middle between Republican Party libertarianism and Democratic Party welfarism—both out of step with the broad wishes…

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Toward a Party of the State

As critiques of liberalism have become more pronounced, alarm bells about possible alternatives to liberalism have grown louder. These alarms, ironically enough, have often been sounded most emphatically by American writers who otherwise describe themselves as conservatives. In response to the recent challenges to liberalism, conservatives have generally dropped the pretense that they are anything…

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Baudrillard’s Revenge

The book that shaped the political culture of the 1990s appeared, in 1992, fast on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Almost simultaneously with The End of History and the Last Man, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard published a slender reply that never so much as mentioned the name of his target. L’illusion de la…

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The Anxieties of Conservatism

The conservative movement is understandably in a state of anxiety. Donald Trump was not their candidate. The key issues of his campaign were not those in which the Right’s leading thinkers had invested their efforts. The major organs of conservative opinion distanced themselves from his candidacy, only allying with him tactically, and in many cases…

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