I was once a revolutionary. Well, not really, not in the sense that I sought the overthrow of a political system. But in a marketing sense. When it came to the “Republican Revolution of 1994,” I was all in—and in the end, that revolution was transformative. For me personally.
The idea that Washington was changing in a historic way gave me the idea that would change my life. The new magazine I conceived and then co-founded in 1995 was called the Weekly Standard. It came into being in 1995 and was an instant success. But “the revolution” that midwifed it turned out not to be a revolution at all.
The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 may have been a turning point in American politics, but the changes that were wrought as a result turned out to be incremental, not transformative. The Democratic Party under Bill Clinton came to its senses, moved sharply to the right, embraced welfare reform and a balanced budget, and, as a result, Clinton remained in power after the sex scandals of 1998. Instead, the failure to topple him led in part to the self-exiling of Newt Gingrich, the chief Republican revolutionary and the inspiration for the magazine I had begun.
Indeed, my callow embrace of the idea of “revolution” is now something of an embarrassment to me. I fell for the marketing. Like most people on the right, I wanted a certain type of political change. Its urgency seemed unquestionable to me, as did the wondrous possibilities change could open up. But America was in no need of a revolution. Actually, it was deserving of a victory lap. We had won the Cold War. We had reversed Iraq’s evil ingestion of a neighboring country in the most successful military campaign in the history of the planet. We had plenty of problems and plenty of soul sicknesses, but a nation is nothing more than a collection of human beings and, as the Book of Job says, “man is born unto trouble, just as sparks fly upward.” Considering all that had gone wrong and could go wrong, we were in a reasonably good place.
Certainly we were in a better place than we are today. But even so, just like the old joke has it when a man is asked how his wife is, “Compared to what?” Trump and his most devoted acolytes think America is rotted to the core and they are triage surgeons on a bloody battlefield. And that is why I fear they are charting a course for disaster.
These revolutionaries want to upend the nation-al and international order. But America does not believe it needs a revolution in consciousness—indeed, I think it chose Trump in 2024 to bring to an end the revolutionary period that kicked in with the Covid emergency and the Stalinist show-trial passions after the killing of George Floyd.
What America needs are better policies and more competent execution of reasonable ideas. What it’s getting instead is chaos, which is what Edmund Burke—a supporter of the American Revolution—saw in the French Revolution. Burke said of the radicals in Paris, “They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity [and] all precedents.”
You say you want a revolution? Well, we don’t all want to change the world. That’s what I learned after my own embrace of the word as a young man. I’m not young now; like Coleridge’s wedding guest, I am sadder and wiser, and it looks like I’m just going to get even more sad as the second Trump term goes along.
Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images
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