Stephen Miller Is Such a Hack

During my youthful days as a Model UN dork, I wrote and read a lot of position papers, resolutions and such, and this was before I leveled up my nerdiness with a political science degree. I even edited younger students’ papers in my later college years as a side gig, scarring me for life through a consistent exposure to tryhard airheadedness and rank naiveté.

I bring this up because the Trump administration released a clearly Stephen Miller-authored National Security Strategy last night, and like my WWII veteran grandfather watching Band of Brothers, my brain flashed back to a darker, more traumatic time as I read it. A time filled with thousands of needless words. A time where kids exposed their birdbrains while smarmily lecturing you how they’re more advanced than they prove themselves to be. A time where I really learned how to become a better writer by being inundated with bad writing.

Bad writing looks like Stephen Miller’s writing. He makes Olivia Nuzzi’s repetitive barrage of run-on sentences look clever by comparison. We live under the everyone-is-twelve tyranny, and Miller and his writing may be the figurehead for this movement. A boy wielding the most powerful toys on the planet in his own Weekend at Bernie’s Beltway sequel, trying to show the world how Very Serious he is, all while his own writing proves that he has never advanced beyond that stunted high school boy ranting about janitors. Stephen Miller is many things, but above all else, never forget that he is a childish and unserious hack. That he has this kind of immense power to essentially be America’s shadow president while Trump plays the part on TV is an indictment of our fragile political system, not a compliment to his one-dimensional grievance-based skillset.

“And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty,” wrote above-ground Gollum without any hint of irony for what his own movement is trying to do to dissolve individual state sovereignty through its own network of international institutions. Miller is critiquing the “elite” Americans who created and maintained the post-WWII international order around entities like United Nations, setting up his final solution for America to come in the following paragraphs. This document is very explicit: it believes the post-WWII successes of the international order were failures, and it is this administration’s job to push America in a more nativist direction rooted in a time before women had the right to vote.

“Achieving these goals requires marshaling every resource of our national power. Yet this strategy’s focus is foreign policy. What are America’s core foreign policy interests? What do we want in and from the world?”

If you gave me those sentences told me I was back in college, helping some freshman write their first big paper, I wouldn’t question it. This cute rhetorical “yet” trick is “the dictionary defines X as”-level hackishness. Treating the reader as someone who would think national policy is divorced from foreign policy just exposes the writer as someone unlearned in how foreign policy gets made. For just one example, Hollywood has produced some of the most effective foreign policy in the history of mankind, buying America immense cultural soft power around the entire globe that Stephen Miller is now trading on and trying to destroy in order to replace it with an industry that only makes films starring James Woods, Dennis Quaid and Kevin Sorbo. This is all genuine high school-level writing that is far too impressed with itself, and before Miller even gets into this case of how to strengthen America’s foreign policy, he exposes his one-track mind that betrays his entire supposed complex and thoughtful argument. He’s a neanderthal.

This document’s first major bullet point for baby’s first Model UN conference gives the whole game away, writing that “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.” His third of five bullet points he labels as “core, vital national interests” is “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” This document advertises itself as high level foreign policy that operates on multiple fronts and has already ended eleventy billion wars, but before it even begins, it proves it’s all just poorly dressed up 19th-century gutter racism, sponsored by America’s pointy-headed and tweaked out tech oligarchy.

“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories,” pens Santa Monica’s most aggrieved failson. The “differs widely from their traditions and histories” is another high school-level intellectual giveaway, tacitly acknowledging that the shocking European section to come is an exercise in hypocrisy per this paragraph’s own rules, save for the white nationalist Calvinball cutout he inserted at the end. Those of us who have studied this craft are far from perfect and we all have aspects of our writing that suck, but there is a deft rhetorical subtlety that all effective writers develop, and once you hone this skill, it is very easy to see who is not like us. Stephen Miller is constitutionally incapable of being like us, mainly because good writing requires a level of honesty with yourself and your own limitations that he clearly cannot achieve without several lifetimes of therapy.

“Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness,” wrote the failed freshman, thinking they were establishing a logical base of reason for their next rabidly biased paragraph. Fun fact: Europe’s GDP is declining because their population is aging and unlike America who has robust immigration that ensures our economy has enough working age people, they are entering something of a demographic spiral that MAGA wants to mirror. The future Stephen Miller wants for America is like Europe, where investors are terrified to buy 30-year government bonds due to how old the population is.

“But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” It’s starker, Stephen, not “more stark.” Good Lord. You don’t even have to know how to write to fix that. The edit suggestion is right there in the doc, you dumbass.

“Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

***eternal fart noises***

Miller’s writing is a sledgehammer that thinks it’s a laser cutter. It’s so fucking annoying. I would rather read 10,000 pages of Nuzzi’s insanity before 10 pages of Miller’s smug self-satisfaction. His head is ten miles up his own colon, and you can practically smell his own farts wafting off the previous paragraph where he says we should impose democratic and social change on Europe while threatening to end a century of alliances that have served America’s interests.

Trumpism tries to advertise itself as a political movement that is both radical and rooted in tradition, as evidenced by “The Strategy” section. Miller will wrap himself in the flag and its history by claiming to “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine” in one sentence, then write a bunch of meaningless drivel far too impressed with itself like “President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’ It is not grounded in traditional, political ideology. It is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, ‘America First.’”

None of this means anything. It’s hackish pablum trying and failing to mask Miller’s lone coherent ideology: a reactionary id derived from 19th century racist ideals.

I will say one thing in defense of Miller’s horrific writing. That tryhard paragraph in “The Strategy” section is the most honest part of the document. Characterizing MAGA as a bunch of inherent contradictions sloppily and sweatily cobbled together under a famous white nationalist rallying cry from the Jim Crow era is the most accurate description of it that I’ve ever read.