[6] He attended Harvard University, where he received AB magna cum laude in history in 2004, and later his AM and PhD in government (2012), under Harvey Mansfield.

[8] From 2017 to 2024, he was a permanent research fellow and senior adviser of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he joined Julius Krein and Michael Anton as one of the pseudonymous writers for the blog the Journal of American Greatness.

[9] After the blog closed in summer 2016, Pappin joined Krein in cofounding American Affairs, a quarterly journal of policy and political thought.

This platform earned the name centrism only as a description of the overlapping portion of the Venn diagram of positions held by Washington-based policy experts and their coastal backers.

Democrats offered participation in the further advance of progressive social arrangements for a constituency mixed of urban elites and legacy working-class voters.

[16] Pappin has argued that American conservatism is dominated by skepticism of state power, and has argued instead for a robust conservative role for the state.Rather than asking the question “What should conservatives/progressives do?” considerable advances can be made through certain purely practical considerations: “How can the integrity of the national political community be assured?” “How can commercial activity and technological development continue to be turned toward the common good, and toward our own strategic advantage?” “What can we do with the reins of power, that is, the state, to ensure the common good of our citizens?” Questions such as these are not “antiliberal”—they are simply questions that one asks when one’s political thinking isn’t distorted by liberal limitations on the scope of politics.