I struggled to discern a distinct thesis in Kevin Slack’s War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, so I must rely on the book’s title and subtitle for guidance. Perhaps Slack wants to show how liberalism slid into despotism, undermining the very fabric of our constitutional order. If that is the project, though, then his own book subverts, rather than establishes, his thesis. If Slack is right, then progressives, liberals, radicals, and neoliberals have done their best to destroy America, but America perseveres. If the resilience of the American people and the strength of the American experiment have endured such persistent opposition, why the furrowed brow?

Slack’s critique is not from the left, but from the right. But for Slack, the true believers of the right may really be quite a small collection of thinkers. In his introduction, he criticizes multiple organizations as insufficiently conservative: the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Acton Institute. Let me be clear: I have worked with or have friends at all these places. I even read the book’s introduction while traveling to Acton University. So Slack may say I have been duped into complaisance like so many other conservative intellectuals (his phrase). Conversely, perhaps I am just the person to write this review, since I know the conservative movement so well.

Regardless, if I understand him correctly, not just Acton, AEI, and Heritage, but also Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush are part of the problem from a conservative point of view. Free trade, immigration, and foreign wars seem to be particular causes for concern. 

War on the American Republic proceeds chronologically, so this review will do the same. 

Chapter by Chapter, Year by Year

Slack covers some interesting historical ground, such as a discussion of black suffrage in the United States in the late eighteenth century and the years before the Civil War. He also discusses immigration and industrialization. He then turns his attention to declining Christian orthodoxy, the rise of the social gospel, and the beginning of social engineering, especially as it relates to education, health, and the family. He covers controversies over vaccinations, school closures, and eugenics; he highlights the rise of expertise and efficiency. “The greatest casualty,” he writes, “was republican government and the rule of law.” Slack then explores progressivism not as a hodgepodge of policies, as it had been previously, but as an ideological movement called liberalism. Social scientists had increasing confidence they could turn anyone into anything. Pluralism, free trade, and ever-expanding bureaucracies promised to make the world new. Then comes racial conflict, feminism, and homosexuality. Slack describes the progress the radicals made through institutions, especially the federal government, public schools, universities, and the judiciary. Slack sees even Ronald Reagan as a neoliberal problem—and that’s before he gets to Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

Slack tells the story of the 1980s through early 2000s as one of Grapes-of-Wrath style woe, but instead of drought and tumbleweeds, it’s free trade and compassionate conservatives: “The price for small gains at the grocery store, like cheaper avocados, was the devastation of American rural communities.” (This claim seems peculiarly strange, since the places where one can actually grow avocados—i.e., the warm ones—have not had the kind of depopulation seen in places where one cannot grow avocados, e.g., the rust belt.)

Cosmopolitanism gave way to identity politics, which provided the theoretical backdrop for the “Great Awokening.” Slack then focuses on “the crises of 2020–21 that should never fade from American memory.” He observes that we have new “priests of body and soul,” the healthcare and public education sectors. But he has even greater concern for “the 3,000 Tyrants” (his capital T), “a ruling class of kleptocrats who ally with, stroke, tax, or intimidate the monopolies they secure.” Though he does not divulge his list of tyrants, he does mention more than half a dozen people by name, saying they “openly purchase political influence for both profits and policies like open borders and outsourcing.”

According to Slack, the idols of identity politics and systemic racism—alongside the myth of meritocracy—allow kleptocrats to abuse everyday Americans for their own private advantage while making the people they rob feel like they are the problem, instead of the victims. In the concluding chapter, Slack encourages us to have hope, which seems odd, given the book’s claims. Even still, Slack emphasizes the importance of the Constitution, and he praises legal justice at the local level. Perhaps if he had written the book after several Supreme Court decisions this summer, he would have been more inclined to praise justice at the federal level, too.

Slack also stresses the importance of citizenship. Predictably, citizenship in his hands means a border wall and an immigration freeze; perhaps less predictably, citizenship also means dissolving monopolies, ending free trade deals, and—if I understand him rightly—an end to military engagement overseas.

Sound confusing? Yes. Let me suggest briefly how the book could have been framed. Instead of starting with the eighteenth century, Slack could have commenced with the twenty-first. People may think today’s conflicts have no pedigree. The riots were a response to George Floyd; the lockdowns happened in the face of a global pandemic. But Slack could have argued that, on the contrary, we must look behind current events to previous cultural trends in order to see how each pathology of the left depended upon something preceding it. He could have organized his historical work within this topical framework, making clear his concern (if I understand him correctly) that each contemporary problem, seemingly coming out of the blue, actually came from a longstanding attack by the left (or something like that). Instead, he gave us what we have.

The Revolutionary Abyss

Now to the scary bits. In his concluding chapter, Slack says we must “heed the founders’ warning that great diversity threatens liberty.” Au contraire: The founders saw diversity as a support to liberty, not a threat, as James Madison makes clear in Federalist #10. One way to curtail diverse factions is to destroy the liberty that provides room for them, but that is an impossible task—and often a bloody one.

It gets worse. Slack encourages the Right (his capital R) to “confront whether it would be willing to leap into the revolutionary abyss.” This breathless phrase, upon closer reflection, actually says little. He is not asking the Right to leap into the revolutionary abyss. He is not asking the Right to be willing to leap into the revolutionary abyss. He is asking the Right to confront whether it would be willing to leap into the revolutionary abyss. Surely the answer must be yes, depending upon the circumstances, just as the truthfulness of the sentence I should confront whether I would be willing to cut off my big toe depends crucially upon the circumstances. 

Here the best guide is William James’s analysis of a genuine option in “The Will to Believe.” If I am confronted with a genuine option—that is, a forced, living, and momentous decision—then yes. If not, then no. Slack could have framed his book as an argument making the case that conservatives do not have much time left (the decision is forced) to save the whole country (it is momentous) before it is too late (it is living)—but he does not. Consequently, sentences such as this one come across as mere bluster rather than weighty exhortation: “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd.” 

Let’s be clear: I live in Arkansas, where one can safely assume that almost any crowd is an AR-15 crowd. But if I am in a crowd of people that declares itself to be an AR-15 crowd, I will want to go—and quickly. Even as a conspiracy theory, this advice is misguided. If the tyrants are coming for you, you and your stockpiles of AR-15s should be as far as possible from the publicly visible AR-15 crowd. But I digress.

Towards the end of the book, Slack offers a series of lessons for conservatives, but these lessons are not deliverances of Slack’s historical analysis—as one would expect—but are instead something like creedal statements. “The first lesson for conservatives,” Slack writes, “is the construction of a militant language necessary for a return to politics, meaning, literally, the education in beautiful speeches, and honor and shame, rather than the education in pleasure and pain.” No. Without virtue—which includes taking pleasure in the right things and being pained by what is bad—beautiful speeches, honor, and shame are demagoguery, sophistry, and blind self-satisfaction. We must honor what is in fact honorable, and be ashamed of those pleasures that debase us.

I assume Slack believes in virtue. But if so, why does he focus on superficial details? He claims that “the New Right has a monopoly on beauty, praising masculine men and beautiful women instead of the unnerved, deformed, ugly, corpulent, gender-fluid cosmopolitans.” Really? Hollywood offers plenty of masculine men and beautiful women, and few of them, I assume, are part of the AR-15 crowd. Conversely, I assume the New Right has its share of ugly, corpulent people—or is the movement only for beautiful people?

His second lesson—“all morality is aggression” (his emphasis)—is also false. Thomas Hobbes may have thought moral obligation was just the threat of aggression by a superior power, but Hobbes was wrong. Reducing morality to aggression generates an insurmountable problem, best posed as a question: If morality is aggression, what distinguishes morality from other forms of aggression? There is a difference between paying a toll to drive on the tollway and paying the highwayman for the right to drive on his stretch of the road. Seeing morality as aggression obscures this important moral distinction.

The third lesson: Conservatives should be forthright and bold in the public square. Here I agree with him, though I return to my discomfort when he speaks of the New Right’s discussion of “a Red Caesar” whose “post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” 

To his credit, Slack says he fears the use of actual violence in defense of natural rights. But he offers this prognostication: “Our first civil war was between states, but this new terrible war would be city against country, neighbor against neighbor, in the aisles of grocery stores, restaurants, and churches.” Forgive me, but a new American Civil War will never include gunfights in grocery stores. Why would someone fight over an aisle—even the avocado aisle—of a single grocery store?

I learned from War on the American Republic that the right is more fractured and more deeply troubled than I had thought. Even with every attempt at being charitable, Slack’s discussion of race strikes me as disturbing. I want to make every allowance for infelicitous speech on his part and uncharitable reading on my own. Even still, I would fail in my duty as a reviewer if I did not voice my concerns.

Slack says, “By the 1820s, Americans viewed Indian assimilation as a romantic dream,” and he speaks of the Indian Removal of the 1830s as a question of “whether a sovereign people may determine its citizenry and thus who may live within its borders.” No one should characterize the Trail of Tears as a disappointed wish or an interesting theoretical question.

Writing about the first half of the twentieth century, Slack says, “Racial conflict grew with diversity.” Here’s one such example: “After a black man was accused of rape in Tulsa, blacks organized for armed conflict, getting the best of whites in several armed exchanges before whites torched the black side of town, thirty-five square blocks.” This description of the Tulsa Race Massacre does not capture the sheer horror and injustice of the event. And saying “racial conflict grew with diversity” leaves room for us to think white Tulsans were less culpable than they really were.

Slack later writes that “Northern Democrats and Republicans compromised to punish the Jim Crow South with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination for reasons of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.” Was punishment of the South really the impetus? Did segregation have anything to do with it?

Slack says that, after World War II, “Nazism became synonymous with evil, its supporters inhuman, and the Holocaust a sacrifice that justified the liberal postwar order.” Can we agree that Nazism was evil? Slack writes of Jews “placing Holocaust victimhood at the center [of] their identity” but later speaks of “white Jews” as “the most overrepresented group” in the Ivy League, in contrast to the “most underrepresented group,” the “white gentiles.” Why this fascination with the Jews? (And another possible conflict of interest: Dartmouth College let this “white gentile” into “the halls of power.”) 

War on the American Republic foresees the possibility of actual war. On one side, Slack describes the “palaces at the center of a rotting kingdom.” On the other, he exults in “able-bodied men . . . returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry.” Yes, “the despots surround themselves with harems, catamites, and vicious eunuchs.” But the able-bodied men are “buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.” This view of a future conflict sounds like it should feature in the fantasies of the “private armies” of “paintball, video games, and . . . mixed martial arts” formed by the dropout men Slack mentions earlier in the book. Instead, I think he claims it as his own: “Only when Christians remember their long tradition of just war will mobs reconsider destroying their churches and schools.” We must never confuse appropriate self-defense with vigilante justice.