The Power of American Originals

“In the US, voters just loosed a genuine bull into the china shop of the ruling class.”
BACKBONE: Maverick Essays in Middle America: Why American Populism Should be Welcomed, Not Feared is a collection of short essays about America’s spine, and everything that entails. Like a backbone, this collection of short essays runs through our nation - describing the unique virtues that keep America standing tall on the global stage, while supporting the organs of our familial, civic, and economic lives. BACKBONE tells true stories of everyday people, provides humanizing anecdotes of several historic American giants, and shines a light on the common thread of historically uncommon moral, military, and small business courage that ties Americans together.
Zinsmeister’s choice of essays was undoubtedly informed by his experience going into the White House every day as George W Bush's Director of the Domestic Policy Council. However, that experience is not mentioned a single time in this book. Rather, Zinsmeister tells stories of meeting enlisted soldiers on the front lines in Iraq, talking T-Bills (and other investment tools) with Jim the House Painter as they work on a remodel (my favorite chapter), and his visits, as editor of a national magazine, to cities like Dallas, New York, Nashville, and small towns and suburbs like the ones you live in — or fly over.
A common populist energy runs through all eras of American history, occasionally bursting to the foreground, as Zinsmeister shows, around characters like Andrew Jackson, presidential candidate George Wallace, and others. Zinsmeister excels at bringing to life a broad range of American characters, some alive today and many long-deceased. He jumps easily from Lewis and Clark surviving 45-degree-below-zero temperatures on “roots, wolf meat, berries, and the flesh of their own horses,” to modern soldiers, to abstract virtues made tangible.
The titles of the introduction and epilogue, “Today’s Populist Rebellion Shouldn’t Alarm Us,” and “The Real Danger Isn’t Populism, It’s Centralism,” neatly sum up his thesis. American populism is part of a long tradition—not an anomaly. It is the quiet and steady heartbeat of our national character, pounding loudly only when our national body needs defending. The bull we’ve unleashed has a clear job to do.
Dismantling the tools of brahminical power, not just selecting new centralizers, Zinsmeister argues, is the task at hand. This book may even convince some current institutional managers to join the effort, should they take the time to read it - which they should. As Zinsmeister states:
“In truth, many of the brahmins who push for top-down management of society recognize the clumsiness of their approach. Yet they proceed anyway. Why? Because they prefer the security of control to efficiency and freedom. Grassroots decision-making may work better, but it cedes power to a bunch of unsocialized mavericks who may stubbornly resist orchestration and tasteful outcomes.”
Zinsmeister believes that ordinary people with extraordinary character, not just “managerial brahmins at the top of society,” have always shaped our nation.
BACKBONE: Overview
Zinsmeister’s essays cover a range of people, but he isn’t afraid to show himself. He opens with a personal account of his grandmother, and the major changes she saw in her life beginning in 1900 and ending in 1996. He closes the book with a personal story of his own “downsizing” from a job, with a pregnant wife and a mortgage - a common experience for many Americans.
Readers will enjoy how Zinsmeister weaves his grandmother’s characteristic character directly into national economic growth, “It was unstinting labor and high character that powered the skyrocketing quality of life experienced by my grandmother,” and then straight into the personality of a founding father. George Washington, whom Zinsmeister tells us was “cool,” used the silent, subtle positioning of his body, his literal backbone, to direct the conversation of the Second Continental Congress in 1775, which formed the US military.
Apart from the familial and the familiar, BACKBONE highlights the civic responsibility of dozens of American individuals, serving as archetypes - including the American soldier, the American plumber, the Cuban-American neo-traditionalist architect, the American Wall Street nerd, and many more. The essays bring to life the timeless beat of the American heart, and the electrical impulses and lifeblood that travel our spine.
The 21 essays, speeches, and interviews that make up BACKBONE are well-selected to speak to today's citizenry despite being 2-3 decades old. Zinsmeister seems playfully aware of his prescience. For example, his October 2004 essay, “Goodbye “Regular Joe” Democrat” ends:
“So we’re in an interesting new era. The Right is now dead set against political elitism and cultural snobbery, and the working and middle classes they have attracted are bracketed by an overclass and an underclass that the Left dominates. The old way of thinking about U.S. politics — party-of-the-people Democrats vs silver-spoon Republicans — is about as accurate and relevant today as a 1930s weather forecast. New fronts have moved in. Expect some exciting squalls ahead.”
Zinsmeister praises the character of those who defend our nation, as well as those whose business fuels it - whether born here or immigrants. For example, he shares a great story of Nashville’s Thomas Nelson Publishers, whose eponymous founder began selling books in Scotland in 1798 before coming to America. His company was the largest seller of bibles, the first book company to use salesmen, and invented their own rotary press. By the 1960s, Thomas Nelson Publishers had fallen from its former glory, only to be rebuilt in Nashville by a Lebanese entrepreneur who’d come to the US for bible college. “That is a story of American recombination, renewal, and improvement of an inherited legacy.”
Zinsmeister speaks of visits to the largest gay church in the world, then in Dallas. He interviews Patrick Moynihan, a former US Senator about his upbringing in New York. He looks at the variety of subcultures in the New York finance world, from the highly-networked rich kid, the aggressive jock, the first-generation striver, and the computer nerd. That section includes an interview with a young, “jittery, intense” Robin Hanson, whose ideas on prediction markets sounded outlandish in 2002, but undoubtedly influenced sites like Polymarket.
BACKBONE: Potential Impact on National Dialogue
BACKBONE covers a collection of people whom Zinsmeister calls American Originals, “strong, quirky men and women… our national treasure. These free thinkers and bold actors grow in amazingly thick crops in communities across our nation. They are our hope for the future, because a country is ultimately defined not by its laws or its economy or its geography, but by the quality of its people.”
Were Zinsmeister’s book read open-mindedly by every college professor, venture capitalist (VC), New York financier, and technologist - the course of the American fleet could turn on a dime. This is partially because, as I’ve seen first-hand through friendships with members of each of those professions, many of that class are American Originals as well. One of my favorite college professors, Timur Kuran, taught a handful of us Middle East Economic History, using the lens of his important ideas on preference cascades - the sudden shift when people begin to reveal where they stand. As Professor Kuran has recently noted on X, we are in the middle of a preference cascade now — which is only picking up speed.
Marc Andreessen, a well-known VC, recently went on Lex Friedman’s podcast and articulated one of the most populist visions of education I’ve heard to date - and I’ve heard a lot about education. He also referenced Kuran’s work. Several friends in New York finance, and similar professions, secretly share their heterodox views on a number of issues - and then vote with the brahmins, for fear of losing their “good person” card. It need not be that way going forward.
The essays in BACKBONE offer a potent push to the ongoing preference cascade.
BACKBONE: Inspires Reflection
There will be something familiar, and many new perspectives, for the reader who picks up this book. Zinsmeister’s essays brought me back to my high school summers in Michigan, as a teenager working on a rough carpentry crew of men, whose cigarettes were, undoubtedly, as strong as Zinsmeister describes Jim the Painter's. Butch, our crew leader, told me on no uncertain terms, between drags on his Marlboro Red, that I wasn’t to smoke - because my mom would kill him if she found out.
There is something remarkable about apprenticeship-style learning, especially in manual labor. I started learning to stack lumber properly (harder than it sounds), then constructing a sawhorse (more fun than it sounds, especially with a nail gun), on to sawing lumber to the architects’ drawings, putting up the actual frame, and beyond. That job brought me far more meaning than the AP classes, sports, or Model UN competitions that meant something to the college admissions officers. Nothing against those activities, they were great, but there’s something about creating value for others, and getting paid for it, that tastes sweeter than tests or play.
It’s a shame that we’ve allowed the brahmins of society to take some of the dignity from those professions. Zinsmeister’s book laments the brahmins’ views on military service, but the rot goes much deeper. Many brahmins’ critically theoretical, faux-concern for “fair” wages and safety, and equally faux-concern for those working illegally for less than minimum wage is a subprime worldview - and, hopefully, no bailouts are coming.
On Virtue: “We are the land of the rich and free precisely because we have been the home of the brave.”
Zinsmeister writes clearly about values and virtues, showing similarities across people and time, without begrudging us our differences. One of Zinsmeister’s strengths is tying historical principles and large-scale trends to digestible anecdotes. “Under Rudy Giuliani, homicides were reduced by 65 percent (translation: 1,500 fewer dead bodies on New York sidewalks each year.”) Notice how much punch Zinsmeister’s “translation” delivers compared to the average newscaster. Such productive punches are sprinkled throughout BACKBONE.
American leaders, Zinsmeister describes in his 4th chapter, “The Power of One Person,” are not just the result of genes, luck, and circumstance - as subprime academics would have us believe. Leaders have common traits, including:
BACKBONE: In Context and In Action
Unlike Ben Horowitz’s excellent book on virtues in the tech world, What You Do is Who You Are, which also draws on parallels across history but centers on tech leaders, Zinsmeister’s bite-sized stories speak up in praise of “When Ordinary Americans do Extraordinary Things,” the title of Chapter 3.
Unlike self-described populist Steve Bannon, who seems to be, from his recent Matters of Opinion appearance, drawing battle lines against “techno-feudalists,” Zinsmeister’s essays are constructive in nature, while leveling indirect attacks on modern feudalism itself. “America was brilliantly constructed to thrive without rulers.” Bannon, on the other hand, seems to be concerned over what the rulers do with our money, “What I want is a public discussion and debate over the biggest issues of the day, particularly the size and scope of the federal government and how we spend money and where we spend it and who’s taxed and who’s not taxed.”
Zinsmeister’s prior book, The Brothers (2024) on the under-appreciated Tappan Brothers of New York and Ohio, looks at the invention of credit scoring. Rather than discuss who should be taxed, let’s discuss who gets to invest in, lend to, credit score, and insure private companies.
As American Original Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey recently, correctly, and boldly noted, “The U.S. government has taken a very un-American position in saying that you need to be an accredited investor to invest in companies like Anduril. I think that’s totally bogus and anti-American. The only thing being an accredited investor means is that you have money already. I know a lot of people who have money who you would never say they’re accredited to do anything and vice versa.” These rules don’t just block Americans from investing in companies like Anduril, they limit our ability to even start companies. This isn’t just about tech, these rules are meant to control, constrain Americans across a range of businesses, and prevent us from expressing our true culture and drive.
There are many ways we could imagine financing the kind of “neo-traditionalist” communities architected by American Originals like Andrés Duany, whom Zinsmeister interviewed for BACKBONE. Not only is doing so currently illegal, but the grassroots, internet-era market systems that could inform and protect Americans diving into them are smothered by regulation and condescension—or banned outright.
Bannon and other leaders wishing to prove they aren’t neo-feudalists would do well to focus more on removing those barriers, and less on what to do with tax money.
Many well-intentioned technologists and financiers are now remembering that Americans aren’t just “users” of software products or tax-paying underwriters of misguided adventures in subprime lending. Americans are talented, virtuous, and hard-working. We are patient - until we’re not. Like Bruce Lee’s water, the electorate can flow - or it can crash.
Americans are always bubbling with entrepreneurial and patriotic energy - and woe be it to the domineering hands trying to mold the pot, pressurizing it to boiling point.
Populist Fights: Today and Yesterday
Zinsmeister’s book doesn’t focus primarily on populist leaders, whether 13th century “Braveheart” William Wallace or 19th century Andrew Jackson. Zinsmeister rather hints at why normal people, just minding their own business, would take up arms, risking life, limb, and reputation, to follow Wallace, Jackson — or Trump. Many of the populists who voted in November share the literal DNA of Wallace’s Scottish followers. This includes our Vice President, JD Vance, who proudly proclaimed in Hillbilly Elegy, “To understand me you have to understand I’m a proud Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”
Wallace’s fighters, like the 19th century Zulu warriors, were under-funded and under-equipped, but fought off the English regardless. As the racial makeup of Trump’s followers continue to shift, the American Originals populists are less and less defined by the color of their skin, and more by the contents of their character. A character that is the focus of Zinsmeister’s BACKBONE.
And the common threads across history are not just theoretical. Today’s USMC follows a similar organizational structure as Wallace’s fighters and indeed shares a similar gene pool. Zinsmeister quotes General Charles Krulak, the then-Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, “Why does America need a Marine Corps? The truth is, we don’t. Everything the Marine Corps does could be replicated by the other services. America has a Marine Corps for one reason…because the grassroots of our country believes that Marines are downright good for the nation, that the Marines are masters of a form of unfailing alchemy which converts unoriented youths into proud, self-reliant, stable citizens into whose hands the nation’s affairs may safely be entrusted.”
CONCLUSION: Painting Our Future
As Zinsmeister’s conversation with Jim the American House Painter illustrates, Americans have always been able to learn about complex financial instruments when given the opportunity. The internet, which was just a baby when most of the articles in this book were written, has now thoroughly changed the discourse and laid bare, once again, the moral bankruptcy of brahminical rule.
As we stand at this pivotal moment in 2025, with Donald Trump’s team fully in the fancy, and apparently very expensive, china shop, we must remember that the task at hand is not merely to replace one form of centralization with another but to dismantle the very structures that allow for such control. The real danger, as Zinsmeister articulates, isn't populism but the centralism that seeks to smother it.
The future of America hinges not on who sits in the Oval Office but on whether we continue to foster the conditions where "American Originals" can thrive—those mavericks and innovators whose contributions are the backbone of our society. Let this book be a call to action: to honor, empower, and trust the unassuming heroes among us, for they are the custodians of our nation's legacy and the architects of its future. Our collective journey is not just towards a new hilltop but towards maintaining the integrity of the communities we've built together, one act of courage, one entrepreneurial venture, one grandmother’s home-cooked meal at a time.
Zinsmeister pulls the focus, appropriately, off of Donald Trump, the phenomenon that is the center of tens of millions of American minds, and billions of minds around the world. Zinsmeister centers the story from the face of populism back into the body and BACKBONE - the average American citizen - the true hero of the past 250 years, and hopefully the next 2,500.
Jay Larson is a technology entrepreneur and amateur economic historian. His most recent publication is a 2017 book chapter co-authored with Michael Munger of Duke University, "Reimagine What You Already Know: Toward New Solutions to Longstanding Problems" (ch 5 of open access "Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making"). Jay recently returned home to the US after a few years abroad. You can find him on X @johnjaylarson