Gladden Pappin

In the launch issue of American Affairs, Pappin criticized the dominance of neoliberalism over the American Left as well as Right:

What has passed as political centrism in recent years was a mixture of social liberalism (at least, limited resistance to social liberalism’s further advance) and economic globalization. This platform earned the name centrism only as a description of the overlapping portion of the Venn diagram of positions held by Washington-based policy experts and their coastal backers. Democrats offered participation in the further advance of progressive social arrangements for a constituency mixed of urban elites and legacy working-class voters. Republicans offered rhetorical objection to the progressive social agenda and deployed patriotic rhetoric in defense of economic policies primarily benefiting the business elite. The constituency supporting this form of centrism is small when considered geographically, and smaller than it seems even in the coastal regions dedicated to it. The forms of argument deployed to defend this centrism never appeal to the political interests of most Americans because their goals lie beyond the scope of national politics: borders must be erased for the sake of global humanitarianism and for the needs of global business.[15]

Pappin has argued that American conservatism is dominated by skepticism of state power, and has argued instead for a robust conservative role for the state.

Rather than asking the question “What should conservatives/progressives do?” considerable advances can be made through certain purely practical considerations: “How can the integrity of the national political community be assured?” “How can commercial activity and technological development continue to be turned toward the common good, and toward our own strategic advantage?” “What can we do with the reins of power, that is, the state, to ensure the common good of our citizens?” Questions such as these are not “antiliberal”—they are simply questions that one asks when one’s political thinking isn’t distorted by liberal limitations on the scope of politics.[16]

Since 2019, Pappin has advocated for a family policy modeled on the Hungarian example. He wrote in American Affairs:

Republicans and Democrats alike are looking for ways to support stable family structures, in order to facilitate the choice to start or grow a family for Americans who wish to do so. The modest, existing forms of family support, chiefly in the form of tax credits, have not and almost certainly will not achieve these goals. A more robust proposal would include a mixture of direct cash transfers . . . credits toward child-related expenditures . . . and possible investment toward future expenses.[17]

At Postliberal Order, Pappin has written:

The most striking feature of the new "multipolar" world is that Western liberals no longer believe in the power of commerce to turn the rest of the world toward liberal democracy. Given that, we might ask: is it not more important for nations to take a practical approach to the emerging circumstances, rather than fall in line with our increasingly brittle liberal empire?[18]