Hello, On the Right readers — and welcome to another one of our reading lists!
Before we get started, a quick programming note: I'm going to need some time to work on longer projects, so this newsletter will no longer be coming in regularly on Wednesday mornings. But never fear — On the Right will continue, just at less regular intervals. I'll make sure to keep sending you the good stuff.
Now, on to readings! First up is Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 to 1848. It’s one of the best-regarded works on this era in US history, and one I’ve been meaning to read for ages. It was first published in 2007, and has been sitting untouched on my bookshelf Kindle Library for about a decade. I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, and it definitely lives up to the hype.
One thing I appreciate about the book is that, unlike some histories, it doesn’t feel like an exercise in mapping today’s politics onto past events. It was thus striking how much Howe’s harshly negative portrayal of Andrew Jackson resembled Trump; if his book had been written today, as opposed to nearly 20 years ago, Howe would certainly be accused of some kind of liberal bias.
The echoes have weirdly made me a bit more optimistic about American democracy. Howe’s Jackson is a vindictive, lawless bully; if that’s right, we’ve made it through a version of this before.
Next is a piece by economist Maia Mindel on her Substack, Some Unpleasant Arithmetic, about the current state of Argentinian President Javier Milei’s libertarian experiment. While the results of Milei’s policies initially seemed quite impressive, things took a turn in September — when his party’s poor performance in the Buenos Aires provincial elections kicked off a collapse in confidence in his governing model. The country is now in the midst of a real crisis; its stock market is to date 2025’s worst performer on the planet.
Mindel’s piece explains — with fun verve — what happened, and why Milei is looking for a bailout from Trump. (For example: Apparently, angry Argentinian voters have lobbed vegetables at their president?) But I also appreciated her very technical explanation of Argentina’s structural economic policies, why the country is facing a tradeoff between preventing short-term pain and moving to long-term sustainability, and why Milei — famed for his outrageous rhetoric and penchant for wielding a literal chainsaw — is suffering from a surprising “lack of ambition” in economic policymaking.
Third, we have a new essay by political theorist Matt McManus in the progressive Catholic magazine Commonweal. Matt is a friend, in part because we write about similar things — he has a deep and serious interest in the ideas of the political right. His latest is about Sam Francis, the paleoconservative gadfly widely seen as the intellectual progenitor of Trumpism, and it pulls no punches.
“It’s pointless to make an inventory of Francis’s bad arguments, because he was not particularly interested in logical consistency or coherence,” McManus writes. “For him, the point of political argument was not to play fair but to win. He did not claim to be motivated by an angelic desire for the truth, whatever that might mean, but by an undisguised libido dominandi, and he congratulated himself for his lack of pretense.”
Finally, we have a short piece in the tech-right publication Pirate Wires in defense of shopping malls. This one is just fun.
The author, Harris Sockel, focuses on the thought of Victor Gruen — an Austrian-Jewish socialist architect who, after fleeing the Anschluss in 1938, went on to invent the mall as we know it. Gruen intended malls to be a kind of mini city, one designed not to exacerbate the ills of our atomized car-focused cities but to cure them. While actual malls fell short of Gruen’s ideal vision — he quipped in 1970 that “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments” — Sockel thinks they came surprisingly close.
“What Gruen did, on a core level, was worldbuilding. He created a universe where life was fundamentally pleasant, and beautiful, with majestic fountains and ornate statues and arcing skylights. Millions of years from now, when an alien civilization discovers the ruins of America, they’ll probably wonder what went down in these marble halls. I wouldn’t be surprised if they think they were temples,” Sockel concludes.
