American Affairs is a quarterly American political journal founded in February 2017 by Julius Krein. Krein is the journal's editor. Gladden Pappin, a University of Dallaspolitical science professor, is the journal's assistant editor. The editors describe the journal as blending the literature and philosophy of the Claremont Review of Books with the political interests of National Affairs. American Affairs was initially considered by some as a "pro-Trump journal in an effort to give the Trump movement some intellectual heft". But in 2017, Krein wrote an opinion article in The New York Times publicly acknowledging his regret in voting for the candidate. Jennifer Schuessler of The New York Times writes: "the magazine seeks to fill the void left by a conservative intellectual establishment more focused on opposing Mr. Trump than on grappling with the rejection of globalism and free-market dogma that propelled his victory." Its project has been described in Tablet as: "a dense, technically sophisticated form of neo-Hamiltonianeconomic nationalism, pushed in various forms by Michael Lind, David P. Goldman, and Krein himself," based on the contention that "a short-sighted American elite has allowed the country’s manufacturing core—the key to both widespread domestic prosperity and national security in the face of a mercantilist China—to be hollowed out," just as "Production and technical expertise have shifted to China and Asia, domestic capital has flowed into unproductive share buybacks or tech schemes, and America has become a country with a two-tiered service economy, with bankers, consultants, and software engineers at the top and Walmart greeters and Uber drivers at the bottom."
History
Predecessors to American Affairs include the Journal of American Greatness, a 2016 political blog, and American Greatness, the 2016 political blog best known for publishing "The Flight 93 Election," a widely read political essay about the 2016 presidential election by the pseudonymous author Publius Decius Mus, later revealed to be Michael Anton.
