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The Struggle for Power in America
Politics
The Struggle for Power in America
The problems of the 21st century are echoing those of the 18th—and the solutions will, too.
Credit: image via Shutterstock
I’m on record that this election campaign, scheduled to end on November 5, is just a prelude to a saga of litigation and negotiation—likely punctuated by violence—and that the next president won’t be known for a good long while.
So that’s why I don’t spend much time following campaign horse-racing—how many times Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have been to Michigan, who made the latest Burchardesque vote-boomeranging utterance, and so on.
Instead, I’ve been poring over Theodore Draper’s A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution. The 1996 volume looks back to the 17th and 18th centuries, and yet that distant history rhymes with events of today: A capital city seeking to exploit far-away provinces; meanwhile, the provincials realize that their loyalty to the central metropole is misplaced—and that they can do better on their own.
During his long life as an independent scholar, Draper (1912–2006), wrote on many topics, including a remarkably granular, day-by-day chronicle of his U.S. Army unit in the Second World War, the 84th Infantry Division, which fought in France and Germany. Over the course of his illustrious career, Draper abandoned his youthful leftism for a mature realpolitik.
Such hard-nosedness is manifest in A Struggle for Power. The author is fully mindful of the intellectual currents floating around on both sides of the Atlantic—Locke, Montesquieu, Paine, and, not least, the Bible—yet he dwells on, well, power. That is, who had dominion over whom: the brawn to win a pitched battle, and the brain to pull off an epochal bait-and-switch.
As Draper details, the geopolitical question confronting Britain and its American colonies in the mid-18th century was the disposition of spoils from the Seven Years’ War, concluded in 1763.
Britain had defeated France in that fighting, and so could claim some, but not all, French overseas possessions. In the New World, for instance, the British had a choice: Did they want Quebec, or the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe? Back then, sugar-rich Guadeloupe was deemed to be more immediately valuable than Quebec, with the rest of Canada being an ill-perceived hinterland.
So the London money was for grabbing Guadeloupe. Yet the Americans, who had developed a continental consciousness during the recent conflict, were eager to see Britain take Quebec. Why? Because if the British owned Quebec, the threat to the colonies from France would, perforce, disappear. Whereupon, the Americans, freed from a foreign threat, could begin to separate from the mother country, just as a child grows up and separates from the family household.
In fact, as early as 1647, the Englishman John Child speculated that the colonies, then just a few decades old, would eventually conclude they didn’t need Britain. A century later, as the colonies grew prosperous—more prosperous, in fact, on a per capita basis—that apprehension spread wide in London.
In that imperial city, the debate was carried on mostly in pamphlets, bearing such lengthy titles as this one, from 1761: “A Detection of of the False Reasons and Facts, Contained in the Five Letters, (entitled, Reasons for keeping GUADALOUPE at a Peace, preferable to CANADA, from a Gentleman in Guadaloupe to his Friend in London.) in which The Advantages of both Conquests are fairly and impartially stated and compared.” We might think of such pamphleteering as the pre-digital equivalent of tweet-threads on X.
Draper quotes extensively from wizened documents, preserving their quaint spellings and constructions; to read them today, even with Draper’s careful annotations, can be a slog. Yet it’s ultimately a satisfying exercise for the reader, being able to visit the past as it was actually written.
One of those pamphlet-warriors was Ben Franklin, then living in London. Franklin, always an American first, rushed into print, assuring the “pamphlerati” that Britain had no reason to fear that the colonies would ever seek independence. A bigger and richer America, Franklin cooed, would stay humble, becoming just a larger market for British exports.
The British fell for it. The Empire took legal possession of Quebec in 1763, allowing Guadeloupe to stay in France’s hands.
With the coast thus cleared, just a dozen years later, Franklin and the Americans rebelled. In this North American Great Game, the Americans had tricked the British. The Yanks inveigled the Brits to evict France from their neighborhood, and then, in turn, they evicted the Brits.
Okay so where’s the rhyme? What’s the parallel to today? Perhaps this: Republicans figuring out that they don’t need Democrat-dominated institutions, including the humongous federal government, to protect them. And so GOPers move toward greater—much greater—autonomy within the United States.
This is happening already, because many red-staters have been, to borrow a term from the movie The Matrix, red-pilled. That is, they perceive that the national government has been captured by not just partisan Democrats, but the forces of wokeness, DEI, green elitism, and “Crossfire Hurricane”–type sneakiness. By this reckoning, Team Blue owns the federal government, and is wielding it as a hammer against Team Red.
We can add that all this is happening when the federal government is more imposing—and to many, threatening—than ever. In addition to everything else you can do with $7.3 trillion, today’s feds see their mission as including, for instance, supervising bathrooms in local schools, making sure they are transgender-friendly. Which is to say, open to boys and men. (Is any of this why Washington crossed the Delaware?)
The hugeness of the federal edifice in peacetime is actually ahistorical. Through most of U.S. history, the federal government was small, growing large only in wartime—and then, after the war, it shrank back down again. This was the pattern after the War of 1812, the Civil War, the First World War (post-Woodrow Wilson, Uncle Sam’s spending fell 80 percent during the under-appreciated presidency of Warren G. Harding), and the Second World War.
Then came the Cold War, and the surge in the welfare state. And then the Great War on Terror and various sandy quagmires. The new regime ratcheted up spending, and general fed-grandizement, on everything. For Washington, D.C. powercrats, there’s always some new foe to fight: poverty, climate change, racism, transphobia, Covid-19.
We were, of course, warned about such permanent dragooning. Back in 1918, Randolph Bourne published a searing commentary, “War is the Health of the State.” In despair he lamented: “The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives.”
That’s been an apt enough description of the last century, and yet nothing lasts forever. Today, red-pilled Republicans see that all this mobilizing—this spending, this regulating, this lecturing and hectoring—has been for the benefit of the D.C. Beltway and affiliated blue dots, not the red states.
In fact, the data show that most Americans agree that something has gone wrong—trust in government is at an all-time low, as is overall confidence in the direction of the country.
Yet these data do not portend a Republican sweep in 2024. Plenty of Americans are mad about something, but they have no intention of voting Republican, let alone voting for Trump.
Instead, grumpy public opinion suggests we could be entering into a new chapter in the struggle for power, as common skepticism about national projects opens up space for specifically red, and specifically blue, responses.
Perhaps most pertinently and urgently, Republicans might be tired of being, as Bourne put it, being regimented and coerced by a central state that uses wars, and pseudo wars, to justify its suzerainty. Hence conservative antipathy to Ukraine aid, spearheaded by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), an embittered veteran of an earlier “endless war.” Rightly or wrongly, Vanceans see Ukraine as just one more excuse for the continuance of the costly, even counter-productive, Blob.
Yet the new thinking on the right is more than just a revival of Buckeye isolationism: It’s a wholesale rejection of Big Government.
To put it in Draper-esque terms, once the colonials—and red staters, especially in the fed-owned West, often feel like colonial subjects—have achieved a common consciousness, they will scheme to get out from under federal hegemony.
The foundational argument for the status quo is that the 50 states must stay subservient to DC for the sake of common defense. If that argument wears thin, traduced by overuse, then the red states will think emancipatory thoughts.
Speaking of out-of-the-box thinkers, there’s Elon Musk. Once a conventional Obama-ish neoliberal, he’s been red-pilled big time. Having moved to Texas, he and X are now free of the Deep State, all the better to inveigh against the “woke mind virus.” (Even as the feds are still encroaching on his other companies.)
Musk now seeks to shrink the federal budget by $2 trillion, which is nearly a third. The tycoon has, of course, worked wonders in the past: In his Carlylean way, he proves that great figures can bend, maybe even break, historical inevitability.
Yet past heroes have tried to roll back the federal tide, with only modest success. For instance, back in 1975, the presidential candidate Ronald Reagan proposed almost exactly what Musk is proposing now—a one-third cut in federal spending—and got nowhere; even most Republicans opposed him. (Reagan did, of course, become president in 1981, where he put into effect much smaller reductions, even as he succeeded in energizing the economy.)
So if Trump wins and Musk has a place at the table, we’ll see whether a wizard of tech can transfer his wizardry to human affairs. Politics is, after all, the slow boring of hard boards. And the fate of Project 2025 suggests that Trump isn’t necessarily down with every right-wing wishlist.
Still, smart politicians, if they’re smart enough, can stir revolutions. Draper dwells on one patriot pol: James Otis Jr. (1735-1783), a Harvard-trained lawyer sharpie. “He was capable of giving his advocacy an ideological cast that set him apart,” Draper writes. The ideology, that is, not just of winning at jurisprudence, but of winning American independence.
What Otis wrote in 1762 has a timelessness to it: “The world ever has been and always will be pretty equally divided, between two great parties, vulgarly called the winners, and the loosers [sic]; or to speak more precisely, between those who are discontented that they have no Power, and those who never think they can have enough.”
Such shrewd us-against-them thinking can clarify the choice, making it binary enough for both a brainiac geek, and an ordinary voter, to grasp.
The blue states—Joe Biden carried 25 of them, plus the District of Columbia, in 2020, and whether or not she prevails, Harris will carry roughly the same roster—will probably never agree to the sort of ideas that Musk and his red-state friends will put forward.
So we come to a suitably binary solution: Apply Muskovite ideas to willing states, and not to unwilling states. It’s worth keeping in mind that in politics, half-solutions can count as good outcomes. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, Britain boasted 26 colonies in the Americas: Of these, exactly half stayed loyal; after the Revolution was over, they, too, had what they wanted.
So today, whoever emerges as President 47 next year, we can imagine a new system evolving in the red states, and the old system perduring in the blue states. The power of choice.
Okay, but how would more autonomous states actually operate within an eased-up U.S.?
Some issues are relatively easy to resolve, as they are inherently local—for instance, education. Where it’s been allowed, school choice has been improving schools, and there’s more improvement in the pipeline. For instance, the venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale has spearheaded a new startup, the University of Austin. We can only guess where competition and innovation—AI and all that—will take education transformers in the future.
To be sure, the same principal of local control will allow some schools to keep getting worse. Yet as Chicago proves, the federal Department of Education plays no helpful role whatsoever—it merely subsidizes whatever incompetent system might be in place. If some blue schools wish to wallow while red schools soar, well, that’s the price of freedom.
Other issues are harder and would require new thinking—for instance, Social Security. It’s the most popular federal program, and yet it’s projected to run out of money in the next decade. Many remedies have been put forward, but here’s the one that Trump and Vance are moving towards: using America’s oil and gas wealth, which can be measured in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Nothing like a new dollop of cash to keep granny happy.
To be sure, the blue states, green as they are, will likely reject this resource-based financing mechanism. In fact, Blue is largely committed to the policy of leaving carbon fuels in the ground. As an aside, yes, that’s been a kind of economic warfare against Red. Folks in West Virginia know this well: Having lost the battle over coal, Mountaineers shifted from Democrat to Republican.
Appalachian grudges notwithstanding, there’s no need to have an actual combat over carbon fuels. In a United States where the struggle for power has been fairly resolved—which is to say, where the federal government has waned, and the 50 states have waxed—we can declare that blue states should have their way, and the red states should have their way.
So now let’s apply this principle of opt-in abundance to Social Security: Today, it’s a national program, but in the future, Red could finance it from carbon-fuel revenues, while Blue can make some other provision. To be smart about it, Red can clean up and carbon-capture its underground fuels, which would, of course, render them more palatable to energy-hungry Blue. (With enough cleantech, coal, too, can get back on the menu.)
Still, we can’t minimize the bitterness of this medicine in the mouth of Blue. For decades, Blue has plotted to put Red into permanent submission, obsolescing carbon energy and imposing, instead, solar and wind—with the grid run by Al Gore and Google. (Bankrupting the Oil Patch-y Republican Party would be, of course, a bonus.)
To be sure, Blue has cloaked this machtpolitik in the high-minded rhetoric of sustainability and polar bears. Yet the matrix has glitched. The sedated have been jolted out of their slumber, and are now adjusting to reality.
This destiny has been charted, but it hasn’t yet been trod. So in the meantime, we study history, to suss out the secrets of statecraft.
Theodore Draper, that menschenkenner, is one keen guide. As he wrote, “The Revolution was a struggle for power—between the power the British wished to exercise over the Americans and the power the Americans wished to exercise over themselves.”
So it is with us with today: If Red wishes to live according to a different vision than Blue, canny strategy will be needed to embrace the opportunity—and stave off the tragedy.
The post The Struggle for Power in America appeared first on The American Conservative.
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