For as long as I can remember, the American Right has celebrated “statesmanship” while striving to drown the state in a bathtub. Under appeals to the wisdom of the ages, it has pursued utopian projects at home and abroad that have done immense harm to the American polity and its people. The Left, on the other hand, built the modern American state, but has little use for statesmen, preferring activists, journalists, “experts,” and bureaucrats, or maybe harmless radicals like Bernie San...
