American Affairs

The Thinking Dissident's Magazine

After Jacobin, American Affairs has exerted the most influence on the current era of the dissident magazine. The relative depth of its mission statement compared to other dissident publications signals its intellectual ambitions. This is not a venue for brief articles on the news of the day, but rather “a quarterly journal of public policy and political thought” in which serious thinkers explore at length “topics in domestic and foreign policy, as well as broader debates in economic theory, political thought, and social criticism.” In short, American Affairs has carved out a role as the thinking dissident’s magazine, and the hub of a supposed intellectual renaissance on the right.

This publication projects more gravitas than those that have followed, yet it tells the same basic story as the rest, with a statement of purpose that is only a more thorough elaboration of the dissident magazine’s familiar narrative of “the promise of America” betrayed by decadent elites. Within this template, liberal capitalism used to work according to plan before those in power fell from grace and lost touch with their constituents. Now, “misguided and complacent” elites in both parties “have subscribed to the same woefully inadequate policy consensus,” one which fails to confront “the most pressing challenges facing American institutions”: the rise of inequality and social discord and the decline of economic mobility, trust in government, the family and community.

In the trademark move of dissident media, American Affairs sources this failure to “our so-called elites,” whose incompetence and insularity lead them to “ignore these problems” they would address if they could only see the error of their ways. It’s not that these elites are a logical, inevitable byproduct of the social system they exist to serve and maintain, but that there is something deviant about them that is perverting the society and forcing it off its true path.

Indeed, the issue is that “our elite is not truly elite.” They are undeserving frauds, products of a corrupt political culture that rewards “partisan loyalty over genuine insight” and promotes “careerism at the expense of good governance.”

“American Affairs rejects this degradation of our political discourse,” believing that if only benevolent intellectuals can dislodge the stale elite consensus with fresh policy ideas, they can stem the decay and make America great again. Liberal society has gone off the rails because the thoughts inside the heads of elites are outdated and need to be refreshed. Therefore, American Affairs seeks “to provide a forum for the discussion of new policies that are outside of the conventional dogmas.”

This emphasis on our “desperate need” for “more rigorous policy analysis” gives the game away. Despite their rhetoric of populism and animosity toward elites, these dissidents hold the technocratic position that the problems of the world can be solved by smarter, more efficient and capable leaders implementing policy fixes achieved via more robust debate. The discord and instability they bemoan does not result from the class society and its inherent contradictions but rather a “paucity of substantive debate,” something American Affairs aims to provide.

Like good liberals, they harmonize class antagonisms at the level of ideas, believing the common good can be achieved by free intellectual exchange. From this class-blind view of universal humanity working together to solve its shared problems, they claim: “There are many debates that need to happen if the United States is to revive its economy, society, and government, and chart a new course in foreign affairs.” When their utopian debate club produces the right policy solutions, American revival will be at hand.

Dissident magazines like American Affairs criticize out-of-touch elites for persisting under a false impression about what is really happening in their country, yet those pinning their hopes on policy debates are much more deluded about the way the system really works. According to their civics-class fantasies of “good governance,” incompetent elites are failing the common good with inadequate policy and stale ideas. Of course, those in power don’t exist to ameliorate any of the problems they describe, nor are they deviating from their proper function: the maintenance of existing social relations, something no amount of debate or policy analysis will disrupt.

In conclusion, the dissident intellectuals exemplified by American Affairs believe in the ideology of capitalist society—“The promise of America”—more than the “out-of-touch” elites they claim are asleep at the wheel. They feign an oppositional posture, but they are not opposed to the social system in general; they only want to save it from itself, to make it “do better” and live up to its propaganda. They complain that our leaders have lost the plot, that our pseudo-elites are no longer accountable to the people, but this is just the illusion of the true believer who idealizes a prior moment of the social order that has produced present conditions.

“Revival and realignment” may be “critically needed” as selling points for dissident magazines, but not for the class in control, which continues to do just fine.