Gladden Pappin

Gladden Pappin (born 1982) is an American political scientist. He was the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, Hungary's foreign policy research institute of state, from 2023 to 2026.

Quotes

Trumpism after Trump: The Future of the Right

Conversation with David Leonhardt, in The New York Times (October 6, 2025)

• The Republican Party that came out of the Cold War had identified the winning features of America with the winning features on the anti-Soviet side. They’re the country of centralization; we’re the country of free markets. Socialism failed in the Soviet Union, and therefore, more radical free markets are needed here. . . . In foreign policy, emerging from the end of the Cold War, was the thought that there’s only one political system in the world. It’s liberal democracy, and it needs to be spread everywhere in the world — this was the neoconservative interpretation. . . . By the late aughts, deindustrialization in the heartland is clear. After admitting China to the World Trade Organization, people begin to say: Are we creating a monster rival, which has all of our stuff?

• At some point, mass immigration became presented by those in favor of it as a moral obligation . . . . Many ordinary people in the United States and Europe feel that somehow, even though they live in a democracy, they weren’t really consulted on this. They were berated into it. It was presented to them as rational.

• In Europe, . . . you have real countries with real historic multi-thousand-year identities. In some way, the injury to the national identity of France or Germany or England by suffering, in effect, uncontrolled mass migration and being told that it’s good, has led to a . . . deep social dysfunction. It’s like the loss of the city that you were in and your grandparents were in, which was French, is not so French anymore.

• Many on the left accuse opponents of immigration of racism, whether or not that is the motivating factor. . . . I think you’ve unfortunately begun to see the phenomenon where some young people’s response is: Yeah, you’re right. You’ve just been telling me my entire life that I have a moral obligation to accept mass immigration, and if I don’t accept it, then I’m ipso facto a racist — so, yeah, whatever.

• When people feel that the political option doesn’t exist, then they become radical.

• The feeling on the new right is that the liberal democratic side — I’m using little “l” and little “d” — became not a neutral playing field but a heavily freighted ideology.

• The Trump administration engaged Harvard over its foreign student population. . . . And in The New York Times, there was an interview — I’ll have to paraphrase it — but there was a history professor at Harvard and she said: This is outrageous because Harvard University is a global research institution that happens to be located in the United States.

• If you control your borders, then you can open them, you can close them, you can do whatever you want, but you get to decide.

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Gladden Pappin on Wikipedia