Julius Krein
Journalist and editor; co-founder of American Affairs journal; wrote for Journal of American Greatness as “Plautus”; Harvard BA 2008 (student of Harvey Mansfield, mentored by Bill Kristol); hedge fund worker turned intellectual; notable for publicly disavowing Trump in 2017
Who He Is
Julius Krein is one of the most intellectually serious figures of the early Trump intellectual moment — and one of the few who publicly recanted. He was not trained as a political scientist or philosopher: he has a BA from Harvard (2008), was a student of Harvey Mansfield, and counts Bill Kristol (the neoconservative editor) among his early mentors. He worked in finance (hedge fund in Boston) when he started writing for JAG.
His trajectory — from neoconservative-adjacent Harvard finance guy to Trump intellectual to Trump disavower to editor of a serious heterodox journal — is one of the more interesting individual arcs in the New Right story.
Intellectual Background
Krein’s primary intellectual inspiration for his JAG writing was James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (1941), as interpreted by Sam Francis. Burnham’s argument: that ownership is ceasing to be the key to power; that a new “managerial class” — corporate managers, bureaucrats, technocrats — is displacing both capitalists and democratic publics from real control of society.
Francis took Burnham’s analysis and racialized and nativized it: the managerial class is cosmopolitan, hostile to traditional communities, and actively seeks the destruction of intermediary institutions (family, community, nation). “The managerial class is inevitably impelled by its internal logic to seek the destruction of any intermediating institutions, ultimately and especially the family.”
Krein used the word “managerial” 29 times in his first JAG post. His programmatic conclusion: “The political project of supreme importance is therefore the transformation of passive Middle Americans into a new ruling elite, while the ideological project of supreme significance is the formulation of a new nationalism which will justify that political project.”
The Sam Francis Problem
Krein’s first JAG post drew explicitly on Sam Francis, who Field describes as “the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time.” Krein offered a disclaimer — Francis had some disreputable views but his thought shouldn’t be entirely disregarded — but Field notes that the white nationalism is not peripheral to paleoconservatism; it is central.
Krein’s attempt to disentangle “particularist nationalism” from white nationalism while citing Francis as an intellectual authority is characteristic of the early New Right’s rationalization strategy. To his credit, Field notes, he would acknowledge the problem within a year of Trump’s inauguration.
American Affairs
After JAG, Krein co-founded American Affairs in 2017 with Gladden Pappin. The journal takes seriously both the economic heterodoxy of left-wing political economy (industrial policy, labor economics, monopoly) and the postliberal political project. It published Integration from Within by Adrian Vermeule in its inaugural year.
The Disavowal
Krein’s New York Times op-ed shortly after Trump’s inauguration — “I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It” — was one of the most widely read recantations of the period. He argued that Trump had betrayed the intellectual promise of Trumpism, governing not as a nationalist reformer but as a conventional (and corrupt) Republican.
Cross-References
- Journal of American Greatness — wrote as “Plautus”; co-founded the blog
- American Affairs — co-founded the journal
- Gladden Pappin — co-founder of both JAG and American Affairs
- Paleoconservatism — the intellectual tradition Krein drew on
- MAGA New Right — the movement he helped intellectualize and then disavowed
- Adrian Vermeule — published in American Affairs