The MAGA New Right

Gladden Pappin

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Gladden Pappin

Political philosopher; University of Dallas; member of the Osage Nation; Harvard BA 2004, Harvard PhD 2012 (under Harvey Mansfield); co-founder of American Affairs and Journal of American Greatness (as “Manlius Capitolinus”); associated with Catholic Integralism and Postliberalism

Who He Is

Gladden Pappin is one of the most distinctive figures of the New Right’s intellectual orbit. He combines an unusual background — Catholic household, Osage Nation membership, Harvard education under Harvey Mansfield — with a trajectory that has moved him firmly into the Catholic integralist wing of postliberal politics.

He wrote for the Journal of American Greatness as “Manlius Capitolinus” — a choice Field notes with some irony: the historical Manlius Capitolinus defended Rome against the Gauls, then took up the cause of the plebeians, and was executed for allegedly aspiring to monarchic rule. A proto-Caesar populist sort.

Intellectual Profile

Pappin’s main preoccupation in JAG was economics and anti-technocracy. His posts expressed frustration with technocratic liberalism’s colonization of politics:

“The political realm requires personal judgment. Where there is no judgment there is no politics. Where there is no politics there is no judgment.”

This Schmittian-inflected claim — that genuine politics requires personal decision rather than technocratic procedure — links Pappin’s JAG writings to his later integralist work, where the question of who decides the common good is central.

For Pappin, as for Julius Krein, Trump represented a reassertion of the properly political against “a stagnant and deterministic technocratic liberalism.” He praised Trump for breaking with Weberian charisma models, demonstrating the failure of Obama-style “Big Data” campaigning, and opening space for a politics of substantive human judgment.

Catholic Integralism

After JAG and the founding of American Affairs, Pappin moved toward explicit Catholic integralist political philosophy. He teaches at the University of Dallas (a Catholic university), joined its faculty in 2017, and received tenure in 2021.

He is a Hungarian citizen via his wife — giving him a personal connection to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which National Conservatism figures have looked to as a model of illiberal democratic governance.

American Affairs

Pappin co-founded American Affairs with Julius Krein in 2017. The journal became a major venue for postliberal and integralist ideas alongside serious economic heterodoxy. Its inaugural issue included Integration from Within by Adrian Vermeule — the founding document of practical Catholic integralism in America.

The Budapest Connection and Hungarian Institute

In August 2022, Pappin and Patrick Deneen published a “Dispatch from Budapest” — “Notes on a Conversation with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.” They wrote of Orbán’s “remarkable candor,” his “remarkable analytic and even philosophical depth,” and claimed: “Without question, Hungary is a singular example of such success in recent years.” They praised Orbán’s turn away from “the liberal conception of freedom” and return to a Christian framework. Nowhere did they question the illiberal measures through which Orbán had gained and consolidated power.

In the spring of 2023, Pappin published “Requiem for the Realignment” in American Affairs, conceding that the conservative turn toward genuine economic populism was a mirage. He argued that Trump had basically followed the standard GOP model of massive tax breaks for the rich; apart from pandemic-era measures, Trump’s GOP had passed no major, lasting socioeconomic legislation helping the working class. “President Biden, on the other hand, had.”

Shortly after declaring the US populist realignment a failure, Pappin took a job as president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs — the state-owned think tank advising Viktor Orbán. Field: those measures are entirely consistent with “Common Good Constitutionalism,” “Aristopopulism,” and using “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” Presumably Pappin approved.

The Corporatism Project

Per Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley, 2025): Pappin’s “Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century” (2020) is the wiki’s central single document for the contemporary postliberal corporatist program. The position:

  • Out-of-control free-market capitalism and globalism have failed the common good
  • The Right “must become more corporatist in its approach to directing business activity in the national interest, and more Integralist in its view of the link between government and the common good”
  • Pappin advocates “a state-led program to establish the corporate bodies of society and bring them to negotiations” — interest representation by sector, mediated by the state, in pursuit of substantive consensus rather than electoral competition

The wiki’s structural reading: this is Estado Novo corporatism (Salazar’s Portugal, 1933–1974) in 21st-century vocabulary. The political-form Pappin advocates has its closest historical analogue in the institutional architecture Salazar built. The Hungarian-Institute appointment is consistent: contemporary Hungary under Orbán retains corporatist-administrative-state features Pappin views favorably.

The wiki notes — following Hawley’s caution in Iberian Vistas and The Moderate Majority (2024) — that the constituency for Catholic-corporatist transformation in the U.S. is shrinking demographically. Pappin’s project is intellectually serious and operationally well-resourced (the Hungarian Institute, American Affairs, Postliberal Order) but the political base required to enact 21st-century U.S. corporatism is not currently in sight.

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