Neo Mug

In the new Atlantic I champion the half-forgotten, half-despised Mugwumps of 120 years ago.

This may seem really, really far off the beaten path, but in the new Atlantic I champion the half-forgotten, half-despised Mugwumps of 120 years ago.

Twenty-first-century America abounds in problems that ought to galvanize a modernized conservatism: excess government debt, onerous taxation of savings and investments, a dangerous overinvolvement of government in banking and finance, increasing dependence on energy from unfriendly sources, immigration policies that degrade the average skill and productivity of the American workforce, the strategic challenge from an emerging Chinese superpower. How are we to develop answers to these problems of tomorrow if in our minds it is forever 1969?

The causes that animated the Mugwumps are tinged with sepia. But the demand those reformers articulated should resonate as loudly today as ever it did: it is the demand for a politics based on realities, not phantoms.