For a personal reflection on why someone else has joined Maximum Republicans, see Priya’s piece.
I am a Maximum Republican (there are also Maximum Democrats, and Maximum Independents). It is a party faction born of Maximum New York’s ideals, and manifest across the partisan spectrum in different ways.1
I believe that parties are indispensable to healthy American politics, but only if they are filled with people who are good partisans. Right now, New York is a one-party state with an uncompetitive political ecology. This is bad for all of us, and bad for the quality of both of our parties.
And so: Maximum New York is layering on partisan training to its core technical offerings. To get better partisan life in America, we must become better partisans.
I am becoming, publicly, a Party Man. This Substack will remain substantially the same, but I’ll be writing more about the mechanics of all political parties. All the questions some of you might have will be answered in subsequent posts. This one tells you what kind of party I am working toward.
Philosophy and Platform of Maximum Republicanism
America. It is our home, and it is the most vital guardian of human prosperity, liberty, and the good life. We love it because it is worth loving on the merits, and because America cannot be saved, maintained, or improved by those who do not love it. This is both a sincere position, and a strategically correct approach.
New York City. It is the crown of American urban life, which is our chosen way of living. While we love every way that Americans and fellow New Yorkers choose to live, we want to live in a dense, large, urban cosmopolis. And so: we pursue the policies necessary to make it earn, not just inherit, the title “Greatest City on Earth.”
A city for families and children. New York should prioritize being friendly and accommodating to families and children. This means building enough housing to fit families at all stages of their growth; making public space and transit free from crime and disorderly conduct; and providing quality education options for children. A city that is safe and welcoming to children is safe and welcoming to everyone.
Economic growth is a top priority, and a governmental imperative. Economic growth makes our entire political economy sustainable, and lets one generation live better than the next. It is the engine of progress, and the province of entrepreneurs and established firms alike. The local rate of wealth formation matters.
Educational quality. New York City Public Schools have some great institutions, but the system as a whole needs vast improvement and cost management. Children and educators should be held to high standards.
Public order and beauty. This means many things to many people, but to us it means that the public deserves cathedrals. Public space should be free of crime, highly erratic behavior, and ugliness.2 It should be filled with peaceful interaction, beauty, and the enjoyment of the public for which it is intended. This has implications for many policy areas, including criminal justice, mental health, and architecture. And New York presents a permanent tension here that must be tolerated: our city is boisterous (think Showtime on the L), and all of the small fires of urban spirit should not be extinguished. This must exist in balance with the broad public’s right to its space. Good politicians hold the tension, and chart a course through it that accommodates New York’s spirit and its public realm.
Techno-optimism. More than ever, technology and industry can help us all to live a better life. Maximum Republicans believe in embracing technology, helping others to understand technology, helping others to improve their and their families’ lots with technology, and improving the standard of living in New York and America with technology. Optimism here does not require naiveté nor ignorance of trade-offs, just the recognition that technology, used well, is a boon for us all. This applies especially to AI, which has still not really begun its transformative effect on our society.
State capacity. We believe in the power of government, particularly city and state government, to enhance human flourishing. But it cannot do this if it cannot hire good talent, if it cannot move expeditiously, or if it cannot be evaluated wisely. A new subway line should be able to be completed within the tenure of the mayor and city council who fought for it. A government should anticipate, rather than react to, changes wrought by AI, and it must have the ability to move at sufficient speed to do this. Or, as TR put it: “What is normally needed is the concentration in the hands of one man, or of a very small body of men, of ample power to enable him or them to do the work that is necessary; and then the devising of means to hold these men fully accountable for the exercise of that power by the people. This of course means that, if the people are willing to see power misused, it will be misused. But it also means that if, as we hold, the people are fit for self-government—if, in other words, our talk and our institutions are not shams—we will get good government.”
Fiscal stewardship. New York City’s most recently passed budget was $126 billion, and we are not getting our money’s worth. Despite an enormous education budget, many schools are (and have been) failing, all while they get outperformed by Mississippi. This overspending for under-delivery is common throughout city and state government; look to the Second Avenue Subway for another example; but we can fix it, and we know how. Fiscal stewardship is also essential for any kind of city moonshot program, which will need fiscal space our current spending denies.
New York Maximalism. By all rights, New York should be a state of 30 million, rather than 20 million. And New York City should be a city of 12 million, rather than 8.5 million. If the city and state were governed to a level that matched the state’s natural and incumbent advantages, it would provide so much opportunity that this vastly increased population would have a higher standard of living than we do today. A well-governed New York is a healthily growing New York.
Abundance and supply. Many of our problems result from simply not producing enough of the things that we need—not because we can’t, but because it is disallowed or made infeasible by bad law. New York City needs more energy, housing, transit, and more. We must build, and embrace all-of-the-above strategies!
If you want to know more about how I think about policy, scroll through this Substack’s back catalog.
Priorities
City and state first. We have views on federal issues, certainly, especially insofar as they intersect with the city and state. But city and state issues take explicit priority, and we regard city and state issues as severely neglected relative to their high impact on every area of life we care about. We are explicitly distinct from the federal party, we are New York Republicans first, and we are non-MAGA Republicans. But we do not harp on the latter, because doing so would be organizing the party around a negative (what we aren’t), rather than a positive (what we are). And we believe in working in a pragmatic fashion with all three of our executives to achieve results for New Yorkers: the mayor, the governor, and the president.
Economic growth, opportunity, and infrastructural issues are primary. “Culture war” issues are explicitly de-emphasized in the priority list. To put a firm point on it: it doesn’t matter how socially welcoming a state is if no one can afford to live there. We prioritize finding unity across the party and with other parties on economic opportunity and state capacity over cultural issues. We have a diversity of views on cultural issues, and we are content with that as long as everyone is on the same page about our primary goals and norms.
Maximum Republicans’ View on Culture
Properly, people should find their meaning and wider sense of social belonging outside of partisan politics. It is healthy and ideal to have a full life, with many overlapping—but distinct—social circles and connections. If someone relies on their partisan politics for most of their meaning and social connection, both they and their political cause are unhealthily transformed.
In the case of the individual, their partisan views become core to their identity, which means changing their mind, or hearing disagreement, becomes a challenge to it. This makes it hard for them to pursue truth, and it turns them into a purity-testing scold who cannot tolerate disagreement without their identity incuring damage. It also means that they cannot solve the problems at the heart of their politics, or acknowledge when they’ve been solved, because that would remove their source of identity. They will portray the world as worse than it is to justify their partisan identity. Their disordered source of meaning will disorder their politics.
In the case of the partisan group that holds itself out as the core source of people’s identity: it will attract people who demand of politics what it should not properly give. This group will drive out anyone else who desires truth above all, nuance, charity, and some degree of pluralism and synthesis of differing ideas. The partisan group will be overrun with a politics of complaint.
Maximum Republicanism explicitly recognizes this, and rejects it. As a partisan political movement, it does not want to be the heart of its adherents’ identity, even if it is part of it. It needs good citizens, and the best citizenship is, first, living well.
Where is this on the left<>right spectrum?
I and others have used the following terms, and I’d generally accept all of them as a left-right approximation of a much more squirrelly, high-dimensional politics:
The liberal right
Center-left Republican
High-openness conservative
Roosevelt-Rockefeller Republican
Bloomberg center-right
Abundance Republican
Etiquette
An etiquette is a legible, explicit set of norms, whereas manners are the more informal standards of behavior that prevail in a social sphere. Maximum Republicanism sets forth the following rules of etiquette; they are a codification of its existing social sphere’s manners.
We join a political party for positive reasons—for what we agree with, for what we think we can accomplish in the future, and because we think our talents and individual context allow us to best serve our city, state, and nation through one party over another. We focus on what we want to see more of in the world, even as we keep things we don’t like in view too. This is important. If one joins a party for negative reasons (“we hate the other party, here are the things we hate”), one tends not to cultivate the technical expertise, governing pragmatism, and personal virtue required to govern seriously and well. It’s easy to throw a tomato at someone else. It’s hard to articulate and defend a positive vision of governance.
We do not do partisan blackmail: “How could you be a member of that party? [X] is a member of that party, and they are a monster! You are guilty by association, and are a monster too!” Political parties are unilateral opt-in; they cannot control who is a member. “Guilt by association” does not work strictly on the basis of partisan enrollment, because all parties contain monsters, parties can’t keep them out, and monsters love to drag parties into hell to serve themselves. The only question is whether good people will join all parties and fight for the good version of them. I am a Republican, but I know there are good people who, for good reasons, are Democrats—even if they have substantially the same policy views as me. I do not hold their party affiliation against them, just as my good Democratic friends do not hold mine against me. Further: partisan blackmail is an attempt to get people to join a party based on dislike of the other party. This violates the previous rule of etiquette—to join parties for positive reasons. Partisan blackmail is a race to the political bottom, and a frenetic lurch from increasingly terrible lesser of evils.
We are first dedicated to the improvement and maintenance of the Republican Party, and our focus is there. We have a “get your own house in order first” attitude about partisan politics. This doesn’t mean we don’t voice partisan disagreement, but our identity is Republican, not not-Democrats. We believe the New York Republican Party needs more of this, and must do sufficient internal work to become an electorally competitive party in a way it currently is not.
It is important and good to say what your political views are, to say and lay them out beautifully and effectively, and to encourage the same in others. It is bad to exist within a social scene where you have “forbidden views” that would get you exiled from by of your friends, and for this reason Maximum Republicans encourage a larger life beyond the partisan realm. It is bad to be terrified to discover what your friends’ politics are. It is good for a partisan social scene to tolerate and accommodate diversity of opinion, as long as there is fundamental values alignment.
We prize technical expertise in politics, policy, government, history, and law. We encourage others to rise above the baseline level of political knowledge in the general population. We strive to be the best-informed political faction. We strive after concreteness. Self-government requires a people equipped for the task, and a people who award status and cultural welcome in the face of such equipment.
We are a do-ocracy, and it is better to do, and find a way to do. All who substantially agree with Maximum Republicanism’s ideas are welcome within it. But full credit goes to those who enter the arena of politics to do the hard work of making their ideas a reality, or who help others to do so—which is easy to do! We need more active doers in politics, and far fewer spectators. The spectators do not understand the reality of the arena, and by their practical ignorance harm even their allies within it.
We like being Party Men and Party Women. Political parties are the mechanism of our politics, and they are an exciting opportunity and puzzle, even as they might be frustrating at times. Regardless, they are essential. I often go back to Burke on this point: “Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that any one believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of Government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect.”3
Compromise is not just good, it is required in large, self-governing societies like America and New York. Achieving practical results in politics on behalf of ourselves and our fellow citizens requires working those same fellow citizens, who will not always agree with us. It is good to become sufficiently skilled in politics to strike deals for the common good with them. It is bad to remain so unskilled that one cannot do this. Compromise brought us America itself.
The Maximum Republican Club
The Maximum Republican Club is the social organization for Maximum Republicans. The formal launch is coming soon, and it will be the base of operations, education, and socializing for like-minded individuals.
Independents and Democrats who substantially agree with Maximum Republicanism will be welcome as associate members of the club!
Finally, there will be a basic knowledge exam for anyone to finalize their membership. Each member will have to correctly describe the basic budget breakdown of New York City, New York State, and the federal government. The club will host events to help people through the breakdowns (it’s easier than you think!), and then to administer the expeditious knowledge exam.
Get Involved
If Maximum Republicanism sounds like something you like, something you’ve been waiting for, or just something you’re curious about, you have plenty of options to get involved.
You can come to events! Come to the first “Ask a Republican!” event on Saturday, November 7. Ideally you will have voted earlier in the week, and we’ll have plenty to talk about. If you aren’t registered to vote in New York, and you want to be, I will help you (you don’t have to be voting a straight Republican ticket). Just shoot me a DM/email.
Register interest in the “How to be a good party member” salon that will start in November. (Use this form.) The salon will be open to those of any party or none. We will cover the technical aspects of politics parties at all levels of government, relevant points of their historical development, the current New York landscape, and how to think creatively about what you can get done in a party.
Email me (daniel (at) maximumnewyork.com) if you want to support the mission of Maximum Republicans, and want to discuss seriously and in depth.
Host a salon at your apartment with your social circle, and invite me to discuss Maximum Republicanism. This is open to Republicans, Democrats, and anyone else who is curious.
Register your intent to join the Maximum Republican Club! (Use this form.)
Switch your registration to Republican! If you think “but then I won’t be able to vote in Democratic primaries,” watch out for a subsequent post on that argument, which I don’t think applies as widely as people think. And in the final instance, you have to ask yourself: are you going to engage in sufficiently potent partisan competition to achieve your worldview, as we have seen done so successfully in so many ways throughout America, or not? Are you content to live your one life in lukewarm triangulation through the partisan status quo? We have parties for a reason, and it is an affirmative good to align well with one, and use it to offer a competitive political vision to voters. It is not nearly as good to remain in a party one has no fire for, as a technical hostage to an electoral calculus that can be changed with concerted effort. Let’s get coffee and talk about it.
You can be a Maximum Democrat or a Maximum Independent. What does this mean? It means you substantially agree with what I’ve written here, and you agree that New York needs two functioning parties to achieve the best possible political result for New Yorkers. You can think the same way that Maximum Republicans do on policy, but still have other factors that move your partisan affiliation elsewhere. No problem. We’re on the same team.
If you are a Maximum Republican, or an aligned Maximum Democrat or Independent, or you think any of these is a positive development, write about why publicly! Link to this piece!
I’m undertaking Maximum Republicanism and other partisan activities entirely in my personal capacity. They reflect my views, and only my views.
While overall aggregate crime in New York City is down, we still have a big violence problem. Assault is up, and crime effects scale.
Thoughts on the Present Discontents, Edmund Burke, 1770.
Very cool. I’m desperate for a general election ballot with more than one candidate for every legislative and judicial seat.
Wonderful!