The Atlantic: The Architect of the Radical Right

Why does all this matter today? Well, we might begin with the first New Yorker elected president since FDR, a man who has given new meaning to the term copperhead (originally applied to Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War). Lost amid the many 2016 postmortems, and the careful parsing of returns in Ohio swing counties, was Donald Trump’s prodigious conquest of the South: 60 percent or more of the vote in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, with similar margins in Louisiana and Mississippi. And the message is still being missed. We’ve heard much about the “older white men” in the administration, but rather less about where they come from. No fewer than 10 Cabinet appointees are from the South, in key positions like attorney general (Alabama) and secretary of state (Texas), not to mention Trump’s top political adviser, Steve Bannon, who grew up in Virginia. [...]

Today we remember ferocious civil-rights struggles waged in Birmingham and Selma. But ground zero for the respectable defense of Jim Crow was Virginia, where one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., ruled with the authority of an old-style feudal boss. His notorious “machine” kept the state clenched in an iron grip; the oppressions included a poll tax that suppressed black voter turnout so that it was on a par with the Deep South’s (and kept overall turnout under 20 percent). Byrd had allies in the president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, and the newspaperman James Jackson Kilpatrick, who, long before his lovable-curmudgeon TV role on the “Point-Counterpoint” segment of 60 Minutes in the 1970s, was a fanatical and ingenious segregationist. [...]

That was Buchanan’s view, too. It wasn’t enough to elect true-believing politicians. The rules of government needed to be rewritten. But this required ideal conditions—a blank slate. This had happened once, in Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. A vogue for public choice had swept Pinochet’s administration. Buchanan’s books were translated, and some of his acolytes helped restructure Chile’s economy. Labor unions were banned, and social security and health care were both privatized. On a week-long visit in 1980, Buchanan gave formal lectures to “top representatives of a governing elite that melded the military and the corporate world,” MacLean reports, and he dispensed counsel in private conversations. But Buchanan said very little about his part in assisting Chile’s reformers—and he said very little, too, when the country’s economy cratered, and Pinochet at last fired the Buchananites.

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The Atlantic: Why Trump’s Republican Party Is Embracing Russia

Through his public statements and presidential appointments, Donald Trump is remaking Republican foreign policy in two fundamental ways. The first concerns Russia. Previous GOP leaders like Mitt Romney and John McCain described Moscow as an adversary. Trump describes it as a partner. The second concerns Islam. Previous GOP leaders—most notably George W. Bush—insisted that the U.S. had no beef with Islam, or with the vast majority of Muslims worldwide. Trump and his top advisors disagree. They often describe Islam itself as a hostile force, and view ordinary Muslims as guilty of jihadist sympathies until proven innocent. [...]

To understand this shift, it’s worth distinguishing two different strains of conservative foreign-policy thinking during the cold war. Civilizational conservatives like Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan saw the cold war as a struggle between two countries defined primarily by their view of God: The Judeo-Christian United States versus the atheistic Soviet Union. Ideological conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, by contrast, saw the cold war as a conflict between two countries defined primarily by their view of government: the liberty-loving United States versus the totalitarian USSR. (A third group, composed of realists like Henry Kissinger and George Kennan, saw the cold war as a traditional great power conflict between two countries defined primarily by their geopolitical heft.) [...]

Partly, they’re aping Trump. But there’s something deeper at work. Ideological conservatives loathe Putin because he represents an authoritarian challenge to the American-backed order in Europe and the Middle East. But many civilizational conservatives, who once opposed the Soviet Union because of its atheism, now view Putin’s Russia as Christianity’s front line against the new civilizational enemy: Islam. Among the alt-right, Putin is a very popular man. He’s popular because he resists the liberal, cosmopolitan values that Muslims supposedly exploit to undermine the West. Richard Spencer, who was until recently married to a pro-Putin Russian writer, has called Russia the “sole white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, another prominent figure in the alt-right, recently told Business Insider that “Russia is the leader of the free world.” In 2013, Pat Buchanan penned a column entitled, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?”

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Politico: How Russia Became the Leader of the Global Christian Right

As Moscow swamped Ukraine’s peninsula, holding a ballot-by-bayonet referendum while local Crimean Tatars began disappearing, Buchanan clarified his query. The former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and intellectual flag-bearer of paleoconservatism—that authoritarian strain of thought linking both white nationalists and US President Donald Trump—wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today[.]” Despite Putin’s rank kleptocracy, and the threat Moscow suddenly posed to stability throughout Europe, Buchanan blushed with praise for Putin’s policies, writing, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.” [...]

It’s no coincidence that Buchanan’s column, which outlined the players within the “cultural, social, moral war” between Russia and the “hedonistic” West, mentioned a semi-obscure group called the World Congress of Families. As Buchanan wrote, the WCF listed Russia’s emergence as a “Pro-Family Leader” as one of the “10 best trends” of 2013. Indeed, in order to outline how Russia challenged—and supplanted—the U.S. role as a clarion for Christian fundamentalists, you have to parse the WCF’s role, and the group’s attendant impact on Russian policy over the past few years. [...]

But the WCF isn’t a wholly American export; this isn’t simply some effort to push Christian extremism alongside baseball and apple pie for foreign consumption. Rather, the WCF is a product of joint Russian-American homophobic ingenuity. As Christopher Stroop, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of South Florida, recently detailed, the WCF was the brainchild of Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, a pair of sociology professors at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Allan Carlson, WCF’s current president emeritus. The two Russians, according to Mother Jones, were casting about for a means to stave off their country’s looming “demographic winter”—the idea that progressive legislation, from birth control to LGBT rights, will precipitate civilizational collapse—and stumbled over Carlson’s prior work. Gathering in the apartment of a “Russian Orthodox mystic,” the trio outlined an organization that would help oversee a global Christian right—and restore Russia to a position abdicated during the atheistic Soviet period.

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FiveThirtyEight: Our Worst Presidents Came In With A Lot Of Experience

These arguments suggest that which offices and roles presidents have previously held matter in getting elected. The amount of experience is important, but so is the type, and neither work suggests that long years in Congress or in a previous president’s administration are an advantage. [...]

There’s a slight correlation between years of experience and a worse ranking. It’s hardly a clear trend, but it’s not a ringing endorsement for the importance of political experience, either.

So does having lots of national governing experience make you bad at being president? Here’s where the “correlation doesn’t equal causation” warning comes in. Lots of things could be driving the relationship between the kind of politicians that get elected and their success as president. Parties could gravitate toward more experienced politicians when the coalition has been in power awhile and is starting to fray. Also, two of the experienced-but-terrible presidents, John Tyler and Andrew Johnson, became president through succession (they weren’t elected). And for presidents who took office at times of crisis, like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, it might have been an advantage to be unencumbered by political baggage. [...]

But perhaps some of the trouble in drawing a connection between presidential success and experience is difficulty in assessing presidential success in the first place. Buchanan was sympathetic to Southern claims about states’ rights and slavery and is dead last in our aggregate rankings. But while we excoriate Buchanan, slave owners, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (along with notorious racist Woodrow Wilson), grace the top 10. Evaluating presidential success often ends in tying oneself in moral knots over slavery, segregation, war or something else. Or it leads to the question, for conservatives looking at FDR or liberals looking at Ronald Reagan: Does effectiveness matter if he was effective at something you think harmed the nation?

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The Atlantic: What Is Trump Trying to Hide in His Tax Returns?

The habit of candidates universally releasing tax returns runs back to the 1970s. Even before then, there’d been some releases. George Romney famously released 12 years of returns ahead of the 1968 election. During the 2012 election, George’s son Mitt dragged his feet on releasing returns, earning some unflattering comparisons. At the time, Politifact investigated and found that since 1972, only seven presidential nominees had refused to release their returns: Democrat Jerry Brown (1992); Republicans Pat Buchanan and Dick Lugar (1996), Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and Romney (2008), and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader (2000).

One thing sticks out about those candidates: None of them won a major-party nomination, or for that matter really came especially close. Trump, as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, is a different situation. [...]

Moreover, Trump appears to already be lying about his taxes. He claims that he can’t release them now because he is being audited. Yet that claim is false: The IRS says there’s no reason a citizen can’t release returns that are under audit. If Trump stands behind the returns he signed, why not just put them out there?

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