F.H. Buckley - The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed

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I give thanks to the many people whove helped me, to Howard Anglin, Michael Anton, Larry Arnn, David Azerrad, Ken Bauerlein, Darren Beattie, Dan Bonevac, Nick Capaldi, Chris Buskirk, Angelo Codevilla, Lionel Chetwynd, Mark Cunningham, David DesRosiers, Allen Guelzo, Alex Hoyt, Doug Jeffrey, Robert Jeffrey, Rob Koons, Tom Lindsay, Ron Maxwell, Dan McCarthy, Jim Piereson, Stephen Presser, Al Regnery, Richard Reinsch, Rusty Reno, John Samples, Roger Simon, Matthew Spaulding, James Taranto, Peter Thiel, Ben Weingarten and my old friend Bob Tyrrell. Sadly, Ron Rotunda, whose comments were always most helpful, passed away in March 2018.

My research assistant, Bob Minchin (Scalia Law 2020), was of enormous help. Youd do well to hire him.

I received very useful comments when presenting my ideas at the Cato Institute, Florida Southern College, the Fund for American Studies, Hillsdale College, James Madison College, the John Locke Foundation, the Manning Center, the McDonald-Laurier Institute, Saint Vincent College, the University of Detroit Law School, the University of Wisconsin Law School, the Women of Washington and Washington and Lee Law School.

Portions of this book were taken from my writings at the American Conservative, the American Spectator, Fox News, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, the Wall Street Journal and the UCLA Law Review.

I also thank George Masons Scalia Law School for its generous support. Esther Koblenz at the Scalia law library and Susan Birchler were extremely helpful.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone at Encounter Books, to the production team of Heather Ohle and Katherine Wong and the marketing team of Sam Schneider and Lauren Miklos, to Carol Staswick for her superb editing and especially to Roger Kimball.

This book would not have been possible without the encouragement and invaluable organizational and editorial assistance offered by my wife, Esther Goldberg, whose help I cannot adequately acknowledge.

F.H. Buckley

Alexandria, Virginia

April 10, 2018

APPENDIX 1

INCOME GROWTH IN THE UNITED STATES

APPENDIX 2

INTERGENERATIONAL IMMOBILITY

An immobility rating of zero indicates perfect mobility, with no correlation between the income bracket of parents and that of their children. A rating of 1.0 means theres absolute immobility, so that children always fall into the same income bracket as their parents. With a rating of 0.47, America is relatively immobile and nearly as aristocratic as Great Britain.

In Britain, with a rating of 0.5, a father earning 100,000 more than the average for his peers can expect that his son will earn 50,000 more than the average in his cohort. In more mobile Denmark, with a rating of 0.15, a father earning Kr100,000 more than his peers can expect that his son will end up closer to the mean, with a salary only Kr15,000 above the average. Canadian sons revert to the mean almost as quickly as Danish sons.

In the United States, as in Britain, the earnings advantage for a rich family will persist over several generations. If we start with a father whose salary is $400,000, which is $350,000 higher than the average, his son could be expected to earn $214,00 a year, his grandson $127,000 and his great-grandson $86,000. Bhashkar Mazumder suggests that the family might remain above average for longer than that. Using more sophisticated estimation techniques, he reports that the intergenerational mobility rating might be 0.6 and not 0.47, and even higher than 0.6 in top income brackets. That rate might not seem so very high, but it amounts to roughly the same slow pace of regression to the mean that can be observed in the seedy great-grandchildren of nineteenth-century British grandees.

Bhashkar Mazumder, The Apple Falls Even Closer to the Tree Than We Thought: New and Revised Estimates of the Intergenerational Inheritance of Earnings, in Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, ed. Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Melissa O. Groves (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 80; Bhashkar Mazumder, Fortunate Sons: New Estimate of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States Using Social Security Earnings Data, Review of Economics and Statistics 87.2 (May 2005), 23555.

APPENDIX 3

INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

Earnings Deciles of Sons Born to Bottom-Decile Fathers, U.S. and Canada

The horizontal axis shows the income deciles of sons born to bottom-decile fathers: lowest decile on the left, highest on the right. The vertical axis indicates the percentage of sons who end up in each decile. Among American sons of fathers in the bottom 10 percent in earnings, around 37 percent will end up in the bottom decile themselves, while for Canadian sons of bottom 10 percent fathers the proportion is only about 16 percent. Conversely, a bottom 10 percent father in Canada is much more likely to have a son in the top 10 percent than is a bottom-decile American father.

Earnings Deciles of Sons Born to Top-Decile Fathers, U.S. and Canada

Among the sons of top-decile American fathers, nearly 30 percent will end up in the top decile themselves, versus about 18 percent in Canada. Few sons of American top 10 percent fathers will descend to the bottom of the ladder, while a substantial proportion of the Canadian sons will do so.

Sources: Miles Corak, Lori J. Curtis and Shelly Phipps, Economic Mobility, Family Background, and Well-Being of Children in the United States and Canada, in Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting: The Comparative Study of Intergenerational Mobility, ed. Timothy M. Smeeding, Robert Erikson and Markus Jntti (New York: Russell Sage, 2011), 73, 7678; Tom Hertz, Rags, Riches, and Race: The Intergenerational Mobility of Black and White Families in the United States, in Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, ed. Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Melissa O. Groves (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 165, table 5.10.

APPENDIX 4

PISA STUDENT PERFORMANCE SCORES, 2015

Everything begins in mystique, and ends in politics.

Charles Pguy, Notre jeunesse

A mericans are the most generous and admirable of people, and among the worst governed in the First World. Can our problems be fixed? I dont know. How did they come about? That is a question I think I can answer.

I arrived in America in 1989, an immigrant from Canada. My America was the country of John Fords westerns, a country of people hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Though they lived in a heartless world, Americans were secret romantics, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, who never abandoned their illusions. Theirs was a country touched by grace, as Dallas and the Ringo Kid were in Stagecoach, one that always gave people a second chance. It was a country of loud exuberance and quiet nobility.