Nat Bacon, scion of immigrant Tidewater, is considered one of America’s first successful political opportunists, a forerunner of Andrew Jackson and like characters who today are loosely called populists. That is because back in the 1670s he was one of the first to smell the potential for mobilising the great unwashed – in this instance, the po’ whites, as they were later known – into a political force that would send the governing cabal fleeing, literally, in one or two cases, back to England.
Today’s would-be Bacons – Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, Governor Ron DeSantis, and another improbable defender of the white trash heap, a Yale-educated lawyer called JD Vance – are busy polishing rhetorical spoons. In contrast to Bacon, none was born with a silver one in his mouth; they are all self-made men of the best and worst kind. They have toiled so that they may take every benefit the American ruling class has to offer. And they are therefore more disciplined than the previous celebrity cohort – the Palins and the Trumps – whose role model was more Silvio Berlusconi than General Jackson.
They are not alone. Populist-styled constituents around the world, as predicted, have grown weary of antics and have begun turning to harder, more methodically-minded, figures. Nayib Bukele in El Salvador is a good example.
Yet, they have two problems in the USA. The first is that they and their politics derive strength from bellicosity. But the American Zeitgeist and the mood of the American people have reverted to their traditional isolationism, or, to be more accurate, ‘non-interventionism’.
That is not because the USA will stop intervening hither and yon any time soon but because there is no longer much political advantage to be got in celebrating armed intervention, or, for that matter, in opposing it; the predominant American attitude towards the vast external realm has reverted to form: reflexively neither bellicose nor pacifist, but just plain uninterested. And these men are all by necessity radical Republicans. For now establishment liberals (and ex-liberals, ie neoconservatives) still constitute America’s war party, and will probably keep doing so bar another attack on American soil that re-opens the political tent. If today’s Baconites are to imitate the successes of past War Hawks, they will have to apply their martinets elsewhere – most likely inward.
The second problem they have is, well, themselves. Each one, with the partial exception of Hawley, who by way of Stanford and St Paul’s has fashioned himself the Alcibiades of the Ozarks, is rather unattractive to anyone with even the slightest aesthetic sense. Talleyrand has nothing against ugly politicians – the Dantons of the world have their uses – but generally speaking, political success demands some aesthetic appeal on the inside if not on the outside. These men lack charm. None is a Bacon.
That doesn’t mean they still can’t do a great deal of damage.