What Trump Sees in Doug Burgum

Donald Trump knows how to run a talent show. He’s built a career out of them — in addition to careers as real estate mogul and president of the United States. What he learned from Miss Universe beauty pageants and the breakout success of “The Apprentice” he’s now applying to the tryouts for vice president. No one watches if competition isn’t tense: Contestants all need a moment to shine, even if their chances are dim. Dark horses make a good storyline — underdogs an even better one. So now the spotlight turns to a contender nobody would have guessed would be under serious consideration: the governor of North Dakota. Who? Is that the one who shot the dog? No, that’s Kristi Noem, governor of the other Dakota. And her hopes are as dead as that poor pooch. The governor on the rise is Doug Burgum. Who — or rather, why? Burgum ran for president last year and participated in the Trumpless Republican debates nobody watched. He had so little support he offered $20 gift cards for $1 donations just to keep up his donor numbers to qualify for the debates. He dropped out when even that wouldn’t cut it anymore. Burgum’s unknown to anyone but nerds and North Dakotans, and his state isn’t in danger of defecting to Joe Biden. If Tim Scott or Marco Rubio might just help Trump with Black or Latino voters, or a woman might get more women to vote Republican, what does Burgum bring? Ohio is safely red, but Sen. J.D. Vance reinforces Trump’s populist rhetoric and could boost him in rust-belt battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Michigan. But Doug Burgum? Yet he’s getting an audition — even a push, appearing alongside Trump at a huge New Jersey rally last Saturday. Trump sees personal, ideological and financial angles to the North Dakota governor. The last is most obvious: Burgum is rich in his own right and does more for the ticket’s bottom line than any other VP contender. It’s hard to know just how rich the governor is, but the most modest estimates put him above $100 million, and he could easily be worth many times that. Trump was outspent in 2016 and 2020, and Biden’s fundraising has far outpaced his this cycle. The endless civil suits and criminal cases lodged against Trump haven’t torpedoed his polling, but they’ve drained him of dollars his election effort can’t spare. Burgum wouldn’t be the first running mate added to a ticket for the millions he can personally contribute: The Libertarian Party nominated the billionaire David Koch for vice president in 1980, hoping his money would propel presidential nominee Ed Clark to victory, or at least a respectable showing. That hope was in vain: neither Ronald Reagan nor Jimmy Carter, nor the electorate, took notice of the Clark-Koch ticket, which won about 1% of the popular vote. This year another contender outside the two-party system, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is pursuing a similar strategy. His running mate, Nicole Shanahan, the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is estimated to be worth several hundred million dollars — not enough to buy the election but plenty to help an independent like RFK over the costly hurdles involved in getting ballot access. Do Burgum’s bucks bring enough bang for Trump? The ideological rationale for considering the governor is simply that he reassures the GOP’s capitalist wing, which is troubled by Trump’s populist tendencies and extravagant personality. Eight years ago, Trump picked Mike Pence to cement the loyalty of evangelicals and old-guard conservatives who’d had reservations about the New York tycoon throughout the primaries — Republicans more excited by Ted Cruz than Trump. Today Trump expects enthusiastic evangelical turnout. So he might look to secure his flank on the other side of the party, with libertarian-minded and business-oriented Republicans. And on a personal level, Trump likes old-fashioned archetypes of executive authority — military men and corporate leaders, like his ill-fated first secretary of state, the ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Trump’s an impresario, but when the cameras are off, he wants to be surrounded by suits and uniforms, not wannabe celebrities. Burgum’s a vice president for corporate America; Trump’s the only star his administration needs, as far as the man at the top is concerned. Even so, Burgum probably won’t be Trump’s pick. Yet he’s plausible enough to extend the season an episode or two. The contest isn’t really about the contestants anyway; it’s about investing the audience in the drama of choosing and the man making the choice. Every hopeful gets his or her moment, but the hour belongs to Trump. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com

Nationalists of the World, Unite?

The historian John Lukacs used to say all the old “isms” of politics were defunct. They’ve become “wasms,” except one — nationalism. Lukacs died five years ago, but the relentless anti-Israel protests on America’s campuses today testify to the truth of his insight. So does the attempt by authorities in the capital of the European Union bureaucracy to quash a “National Conservatism” conference two weeks ago. The mayor of Brussels was quick to order police to shut down the conference that brought speakers such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage to his city. Naturally, he claimed he was only doing this to protect everyone from the threat of radical protesters wreaking havoc on the conference and city alike — as if preemptively censoring National Conservatives with government power was the only alternative to letting violent leftists silence them through private intimidation. Yet some might wonder why a “National” Conservative conference was being held in Brussels in the first place, with a distinctly multinational lineup of speakers from Britain, Poland, Hungary, France, the United States and elsewhere. Critics of National Conservatism — both the conference and the coalition associated with it since the first “NatCon” gathering in Washington, D.C., in 2019 — have often claimed there’s a contradiction in nationalists from different nations working together. Isn’t that really internationalism? The founder of the National Conservatism conference, the American-Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony, answered that in the closing chapter of his 2018 book “The Virtue of Nationalism.” There he relates how in the aftermath of World War II — a conflict widely seen as originating in nationalism, though Hazony finds it a product of imperialism instead — two opposing responses to the problem of aggression arose. The European intelligentsia, and eventually many educated Americans as well, chose to reject nationalism in principle and place their hopes in new international institutions: the United Nations, the European Union and the abstract “international community,” as well as what’s now called the “liberal international order.” The other response was to reaffirm a defensive and lawful nationalism, above all the effort to create a Jewish state — Zionism. Hazony came to perceive the continuing growth of anti-nationalist ideology in elite European and American institutions (including our colleges and universities) as a long-term existential threat to Israel. Zionism is a form of nationalism, and if all nationalism is bad, then Zionism must also be rejected by the international community and the well-credentialed Westerners who think of themselves as its leaders. Yet the opposite was really true; if Israel was to survive as a nation-state, defenders of the Jewish state would have to affirm not only Zionism but nationalism in general. And Israel’s best allies wouldn’t be liberal internationalists but rather nationalist conservatives in different places. Even in democratic Western nations that fought the Nazis in World War II, such as Britain and the United States, liberals demonized nationalist-minded conservatives as bigots of every kind: xenophobes, racists and, of course, antisemites. Hazony recognized that the greater antisemitic danger now came from the left — the radical activists in the streets and the genteel bureaucrats in control of institutions like the European Union and U.N. agencies. His vision has been vindicated in the years since he published “The Virtue of Nationalism”: Not only has the left shown its antisemitic as well as anti-Zionist inclinations, but the nationalist right in much of Europe and elsewhere has proved to be strongly supportive of Israel in its time of crisis. Nationalist leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, not to mention Donald Trump and Hungary’s Orban, are staunchly pro-Israel. Just as important, in Hazony’s analysis, they are in favor of the nationalist principle that makes Israel possible. On the other side of the ledger, the same frenzied students and cold-blooded bureaucrats who think Israel is worse than Hamas think Western nations are exceptionally wicked in comparison to the rest of the world. Today’s protests against Israel are part of a larger campaign against the nation-state itself: against national borders, sovereignty, the right of self-defense, cultural continuity and assimilation, and well-defined citizenship. Leftists long for a post-national world of administrative zones — not nations in any meaningful sense — overseen by enlightened experts whose authority doesn’t rest on the consent of any specific people, but who are ritualistically maintained in office by a well-managed fluid voting pool of identity constituencies and broken individuals. The French political scientist Pierre Manent argues that without nations, without some specific people in a particular place, there can be no democracy. Nationalism has its defects, and National Conservatism may not always remedy them. But if there’s going to be any democracy in the 21st century — in America, Europe, Israel or anywhere — there must be nations and nationalists willing to stand for them. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com

Foreign Policy Splits the Parties

In 2024, foreign policy doesn’t pit Republicans against Democrats so much as it pits Republicans against Republicans and Democrats against Democrats. For Joe Biden’s party, Israel is the fault line, with Democrats split between supporters of the Jewish State and those of Palestinian sympathies. For the party of Donald Trump, the internal conflict is over Ukraine, and the bitterness of the battle risks costing Mike Johnson his speakership. These crises in the Middle East and on NATO’s frontier are catalysts for tensions that have been growing in both parties’ coalitions since the end of the Cold War. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world, by far; what obligations does that impose on us for using our power to promote our values? And what are those values anyway? The anti-colonialist left thinks America is too wicked to do good on the world stage. The anti-interventionist right thinks the world is too unlike us to benefit from our crusading — which instead only undermines what makes us special and strong at home. The more internationalist right, on the other hand, sees greater danger to our institutions and way of life arising from insufficient engagement with a dangerous world, which will turn away from our values and interests if we don’t actively promote them. That requires, they say, supporting friends and allies around the globe and confronting hostile states, ultimately, if necessary, with military force, and by every means short of that in the meantime. The interventionist left, for its part, has the same confidence in government’s ability to improve the world outside our borders as it has in the competence of government at home. And if engaging with the world erodes American distinctiveness, as some on the right fear, that’s a benefit rather than a drawback as far as these progressives are concerned. These are basic dispositions. They’re complicated by several hard realities that can’t be avoided no matter what one’s ideal policy might be — external threats, for one thing, and the limits of America’s unprecedented but not unlimited wealth and power for another, as well as the limits of national morale and political will in support of any long-term project. There are serious debates to be had both on the left and the right. Yet on the left, as is typical for that side of politics, protest often takes the place of serious discussion, especially on college campuses. To judge by social media, one might think the right can’t have an adult conversation about foreign policy, either. But an event I recently moderated suggests that conservatives can grapple intelligently with their differences. The University of Texas at Austin held a debate — organized by UT’s Civitas Institute and my employer, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — on the proposition “Resolved: America’s Defense of Ukraine Is Vital to Upholding the Liberal International Order,” with National Review’s Noah Rothman affirming the proposition and former Trump administration national security official Michael Anton opposing it. Although Rothman and Anton didn’t come to a meeting of minds by the end of the debate, each made points that arguably worked in the other’s favor. After an audience member asked Rothman how his fears of further Russian aggressions beyond Ukraine differed from Vietnam-era “domino theory,” Anton added that Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew was reputed to have said that America really won the Vietnam War. How so? The resolve America showed in fighting the war signaled to the wider Indo-Pacific region that Communism could not expand easily and without resistance, even if Washington proved unable to save South Vietnam. That message fortified the willingness of other states to resist Communism, including Singapore. I asked Anton if this lesson applied to Ukraine. Would it mean that even if American support wasn’t enough to defeat Russia, the heightened cost of Putin’s war would still discourage further depredations by Moscow — or anyone else — and strengthen other nations’ inclinations to resist them? Anton wasn’t convinced the precedent would apply in today’s circumstances. Nevertheless, in sharing Lee’s opinion, he helpfully complicated the debate. In turn Rothman acknowledged that his support for Ukraine did not extend to sending American troops to fight for Kyiv, even if Anton proved correct in his contention that nothing less than that would secure victory for Ukraine. Rothman believed, however, that supporting Ukraine was the best way to keep America out of a European conflict, as Russian success would foment chaos on NATO’s borders and weaken the alliance architecture that kept Europe at peace. There were no concessions on either side, yet the debate showed how conservatives with starkly different views could compare them productively. It also showed a college campus can still hold a mature debate, not just another protest. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com