It sounds like an absurd riddle, or perhaps a kindergarten-level math problem: the median male full-time worker earned $314 per week in 1979, while his counterpart at the median in 2018 earned $1,026; who was better off? In fact, the question proves fiendishly difficult, even as its answer lies at the heart of understanding America’s economic progress...| American Affairs Journal
The Evolution of China’s Semiconductor Industry under U.S. Export Controls| American Affairs Journal
“Extremism” in America: Biased Research, Bad Policy, and the Sources of Antidemocratic Tendencies| American Affairs Journal
It’s So Over, We’re So Back: Doomer Techno-Optimism| American Affairs Journal
For hundreds of years, friendly nations have agreed among each other to use tariffs, and not domestic income or sales taxes, to favor domestically made products over imported versions. Unfortunately, American tariffs have atrophied to almost zero since 1934, when Congress handed the State Department authority to cut tariffs via international agreements. As producers offshored…| American Affairs Journal
When American politicians start talking about “liberation,” it is usually not a good sign, at least in recent decades. Prior to President Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcements on April 2, many of my generation associated the term with the George W. Bush administration’s insistence that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” after the invasion of Iraq. The latter proved to be a catastrophic blunder. And while it is still too early to gauge the full effects of Trump...| American Affairs Journal
The massive rents to be wrung out of the attention economy have acted as a black hole, pulling nearly every tech startup or utopian innovator into the orbit of surveillance capitalism, addictive algorithms, and a culture of increasingly unproductive device dependence. Wherever AI goes over the longer term, in the near term it has already begun running into the same ruts. Continue reading Beyond Safetyism: A Modest Proposal for Conservative AI Regulation on American Affairs Journal.| American Affairs Journal
Men in our society, especially young men, are in the position of not knowing who they are, what they want, or how they are supposed to live, and of being, in an anthropological sense, exampleless. The cliché of American masculinity, widely disseminated in the academy, is that masculinity is in a crisis. This is the exact inverse of the truth. Masculinity is desperate for a crisis. It is docile, unsure, and formless. At most, it is at the germinal phase of crisis, lacking a catalytic agent to...| American Affairs Journal
Like the civil rights movement, the successes of the women’s movement have bent the moral arc of the universe. That, however, is not the question here. Our focus is on what feminism’s effect has been on American party politics. And from the standpoint of what feminists and Democrats have wanted to achieve, the answer is decidedly mixed. Beginning in the 1970s, as Republicans wooed the religious Right, and continuing through the Donald Trump era, feminism has brought women into the Democra...| American Affairs Journal
To try to be a meaningful bridge from Europe to America, that’s a daunting project for even the most agile of European leaders. Understandably, most do not even try. The United States, after all, was born in revolt from Europe—from the “Old World.” The great exception proves the rule. Winston Churchill was a fellow member of the Anglosphere who came to power at a time of crisis, the Second World War, that begged for close cooperation between Europe and America. As for Thatcher, she wa...| American Affairs Journal
Any solution to the Cuban conundrum, therefore, will require more pragmatism from both sides. But until the old orthodoxies can be rejected and replaced, citizens on the island will remain hostage to the pointless and counterproductive machinations of neoconservative grandees in Miami and party apparatchiks in Havana, both fighting a Cold War without end... Continue reading The Cuban Conundrum: Fear, Loathing, and Stagnation in Havana and Miami on American Affairs Journal.| American Affairs Journal
With the return of the Trump administration, the worst of America’s self-induced border crisis ended abruptly. Trump’s new National Defense Areas and personnel increases have made the U.S.-Mexico border more secure than ever. The Biden-era programs that encouraged asylum fraud and immigration parole have been eliminated. But challenges remain. Continue reading Turning the Tide in America’s Border and Fentanyl Crises on American Affairs Journal.| American Affairs Journal
How to describe decadence? It is easier to agree on its features than to arrive at a consensus conceptualization: economic decline, low productivity growth, withered state capacities, and a social landscape characterized by high inequality and crumbling infrastructure—but also fused with high-tech innovations, often directed to surveillance and control. But what could it all mean, other than “down”? The concept du jour is premised on the notion that we are leaving capitalism and enterin...| American Affairs Journal
Democracy is messy, complicated, divisive, compromised, emotional, and prone to disappointment. Most democracies suffer periods of overbearing executive domination alternating with periods of diffuse oligarchy. This does not make an authoritarian regime, unless one is convinced that democracy actually means that one’s partisan side (who are naturally smart, well bred, and morally just elites) can or should never lose. In at least two periods in U.S. history, for example, we have seen major ...| American Affairs Journal
Nearly seventy years after its creation, the S&P 500 may be fit for purpose, but it is clearly no longer the narrow one of the 1950s. While the S&P was initially a tool for measurement and understanding, it has over time become a central actor in shaping investor behavior. The widespread use of S&P-based products now actively influences the market the index was intended merely to observe. Though not a true observer paradox in the quantum physics sense, the feedback loop between measurement an...| American Affairs Journal
Twenty years ago, allegations that a large corporation was facilitating sexual predation of children would have been widely disseminated and the perpetrators punished, or at least noticed. But today, it goes largely unremarked, unnoticed. There have been dozens of scandals involving Facebook, everything from political censorship to a UN report accusing the firm of aiding genocide in Myanmar to Mark Zuckerberg offering to let Xi Jinping name his firstborn child. It’s evident that Meta is a t...| American Affairs Journal
Darryl Campbell’s Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software seeks to explain the unexplainable digital webs around us. Campbell is both a veteran of the tech world (having worked at Amazon, Uber, Tinder, and other firms) and a chronicler of it (as a former reporter at The Verge). Armed with this experience and perspective, he tells the story of the rise of “managerial software” and the takeover of the tech industry by a class of narrow-minded, bungling elite ...| American Affairs Journal
A new consensus is emerging, or maybe an old consensus is reemerging, within the Democratic Party: namely, that “it’s the economy, stupid.” The party can no longer win on “defending democracy,” protecting rights to abortion and same-sex marriage, and modest defense of preexisting welfare and entitlement programs. The neoliberals who once trafficked in cultural policing have returned to insisting that, when Democrats open their mouths, it should be to say something about the economy....| American Affairs Journal
Smith despaired of ever returning to a premercantile system precisely because of the problem of corporate capture. Thanks in no small part to his own efforts, he was wrong. But in reducing The Wealth of Nations to a polemic against tariffs, we have managed to end up exactly where he did not think we should be: allowing corporate interests to wield too much influence over government and undermining the public interest as a result. Nearly a quarter of a millennium after Smith first identified...| American Affairs Journal
U.S. trade deficits measure the gap between the income generated at home and the amount spent on consumption and investment. Without the U.S. government’s deficits, spending demand would have been lower and, unless the trade deficit fell by the same amount, domestic output and employment would have fallen. As the United States had a structural liquidity trap, either the trade deficit had to fall, unemployment had to rise, or the United States had to run a large persistent budget deficit. Th...| American Affairs Journal
In the end, Trump listened to Altman not out of loyalty but utility. Altman didn’t need to donate, because he designed the game. He didn’t work for the state; he just rerouted it. And in doing so, he turned America’s postliberal twilight into a launchpad for an AI empire.| American Affairs Journal
Liberalism against Itself| American Affairs Journal
Too often, discussions of housing policy and land use ignore families—which are increasingly disappearing from cities—and focus on studio apartments for young urban professionals. At the same time, conservatives focused on cultural issues can sometimes overlook practical policy interventions such as zoning reform that might attract broad popular support and support families. Can these factions find common ground on…| American Affairs Journal
It’s So Over, We’re So Back: Doomer Techno-Optimism| American Affairs Journal
Prophets and their warnings arise in times of peril, and the arrival of the doomer techno-optimist discourse is fortunate. Simply put, we needed the wake-up call. Yet, if the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, then the second step is actually doing something about it. To that end, what is needed from the next phase of contributions to this discussion are proposals to reboot science and generate breakthroughs, policies to create an environment in which transformative gro...| American Affairs Journal
In this sense, tech today is less Jeffersonian than the first Californian Ideology suggested, celebrating the hacker, the dropout, and the lone builder, with the profound skepticism of centralized power entailed by these archetypes. It is arguably more Hamiltonian, focused on building state capacity at the national level. Whereas the old Californian Ideology captured the liberating power of technology, the new one affirms its constructive power. Tech’s social capital may be uneven, but its ...| American Affairs Journal
Following her defeat in the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton published a book titled What Happened. While that tome is not considered a classic work of political analysis, its implied titular question animates a good deal of writing about politics these days, including two books released over the past year: Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards. Both books are attempts to grapple with the significance of the political energies of which Trum...| American Affairs Journal
The Democratic Party has lost its way. A party whose very purpose has been to fight for working families has forfeited their trust and confidence. The losses are most obvious among white working-class voters. The self-flattering story Democrats have told themselves is that rising white racism explains the defection of white working-class voters. But that simple story was always undercut by data showing white racism has declined, not increased, in recent decades. And the fable was further unde...| American Affairs Journal
Today’s consumer capitalist societies present us with a paradox: We are told year in and year out that living standards are rising, but many people—especially younger people—can feel their quality of life decline as time goes on. This feeling is palpable and can be seen in the hardest of the quality of life indices, such as the suicide rate and the rates of drug addiction and overdose. Noneconomic measures show a large decline in quality of life in recent years, but economic metrics sho...| American Affairs Journal
Can consumer data be treated as a “strategic resource,” as the most recent National Counterintelligence Strategy asserts, from both the commercial and security perspectives simultaneously? Or will one necessarily come at the expense of the other? As the age of “Big Data” and advances in computing have birthed the Artificial Intelligence era, these questions require urgent attention from policymakers. From OPM to Equifax to Salt Typhoon, the issue is now less that a single sensitive pu...| American Affairs Journal
The debates over the Department of Government Efficiency have revealed, if nothing else, that the federal budget is obscure even to the political combatants ostensibly responsible for developing and overseeing it. In the executive branch, Elon Musk highlights that billions of dollars of payments are processed by the Treasury without even a memo line. Meanwhile, in Congress, Republican politicians highlight the incompleteness of the bureaucracy’s spending records, while Democrats bemoan the ...| American Affairs Journal
The American grid is in trouble. For years, our country has been retiring reliable power plants and building unreliable wind and solar resources. Moreover, most of the country’s power gets allocated in complex power markets where decisions are made beyond the public eye. And areas without markets still fall beneath the aegis of utilities, leviathans who toss their weight around in state politics and often get caught up in corruption schemes. These were problems when America’s power demand...| American Affairs Journal
Zeal for reinvigorating manufacturing, coupled with fears that AI can leave workers behind, are generating a rare moment of political and policy unity where such a new workforce development strategy and an American apprenticeship renaissance could finally gain traction. Silicon Valley’s history offers important lessons for the industrial future U.S. policymakers are looking to realize. The innovators working on advanced technologies and the workers with good secure jobs in manufacturing wer...| American Affairs Journal
China’s rise as a strategic adversary and maritime power has finally triggered much-needed introspection and shaken America out of a multigenerational hibernation. The U.S. maritime industrial base (MIB) faces a Chinese counterpart hundreds of times larger in both shipbuilding capacity and commercial orders. Revitalizing America’s maritime industry to compete and win in a global economy saturated with nonmarket actors requires dramatic and rapid changes. Rather than chasing politically ex...| American Affairs Journal
Because the federal government refused to engage in a subsidy competition to finance the massive costs of new semiconductor fabs, no new leading-edge logic fabs had been built in the United States for over a decade, and no new leading-edge memory fabs for roughly two decades, before the chips Act. Congress passed the chips Act in recognition of this major security vulnerability. But the chips Act is only authorized for five years, expiring in 2027, and it is not at all clear that it will be r...| American Affairs Journal
When American politicians start talking about “liberation,” it is usually not a good sign, at least in recent decades. Prior to President Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcements on April 2, many of my generation associated the term with the George W. Bush administration’s insistence that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” after the invasion of Iraq. The latter proved to be a catastrophic blunder. And while it is still too early to gauge the full effects of Trump...| American Affairs Journal
American capital knows how to read a room. This January, ensconced in the Capitol rotunda, America’s business elite gathered to pay homage to a man they had deemed radioactive just four years earlier. Even among those at the pinnacles of American wealth and power, to be seated in the rotunda was a special privilege—and one…| American Affairs Journal
Social forms decay. This truism often elicits sweeping historical narratives that resurrect ancient names and obscure metaphysical disputes, while ignoring the most relevant social units—the organizations we interact with on a regular basis. Many of today’s most powerful organizations, from nonprofits to corporations, have been insulated from the immediate repercussions of decay by monetary policy, or the financialization of the economy. This results in the proliferation of unproductive o...| American Affairs Journal
While America is battling exhaustion and political polarization at home, it is now facing something it’s never faced abroad: it is locked into a security competition against multiple opponents who, when taken together, are in fact vastly superior to America in terms of industrial capacity. This on its own would be an incredibly tough row to hoe, even at the best of times. The times, however, are not particularly good: the U.S. military currently finds itself in a state of acute crisis, bese...| American Affairs Journal
For years, it seemed, digital technology was the ultimate one-way ratchet. There was no going back—only onward and upward (for the optimist), or onward and downward (for the doomer). Not only was digital technology here to stay (where else could it be?), but it seemed destined to inexorably colonize every corner of our lives and our attention, from cradle to grave. The average age of first smartphone fell steadily (it now stands at ten). Smartphones and smartwatches were soon augmented with...| American Affairs Journal
Since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has transformed. From a party rooted since the New Deal era in both “developmental liberalism” and a version of social democratic class politics, it has grown into a broad but precarious canopy beneath which shelters a fractious mix of political interests and formations, from finance-friendly fiscal policy to redistributionism, and a fragile barbell-shaped electoral coalition. The 2024 U.S. elections underscored the difficulty that American liberalism...| American Affairs Journal
During the Cold War, opposition leaders like Václav Havel were able to point to the West as a guiding star. Navalny clearly hoped to do the same. But over thirty years after that conflict came to a close, Americans and Russians alike no longer wish to be forced to walk down an imaginary arc of history. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians already learned that such an arc goes on forever, until it is no more. It is a lesson they are unlikely to forget anytime soon...| American Affairs Journal
Against the backdrop of Sino-American tensions, the Philippines is also confronting a brewing civil war between the country’s two most powerful political dynasties. Since the return of the Marcoses to the Malacañang Palace in May 2022, they have wasted no time in rehabilitating their political image both at home and abroad. But Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s attempt at projecting a more “reformist” image—and his decision to reverse some of the most authoritarian policies of his immediate p...| American Affairs Journal
With hindsight, one might consider Brexit, consummated after long haggling in 2020, the last, and lost, opportunity for the European Union to mend its ways and become a viable political entity, if not community. The departure of the United Kingdom did not register as a warning that the Union had become too internally diverse to hold together, having rapidly expanded both territorially and functionally. To the contrary, Germany under Merkel and France under Macron saw an opportunity, or preten...| American Affairs Journal
The long-standing neglect of American technological strength stems from the fact that neither technological innovation nor industrial capacity have preoccupied America’s political culture for some time. This presents a significant hurdle as this coalition seeks to affect enduring changes in policy. Fortunately, history offers instructive models for overcoming such obstacles. The challenge before America’s techno-industrialists today resembles that confronted by generations of Chinese refo...| American Affairs Journal
How can the United States quickly build secure, domestic supply chains for critical resources? It’s a question on minds in Washington, especially in the shadow of China’s tightening restrictions on the export of critical minerals, battery technology, and drone inputs to the United States. In early December 2024, Beijing announced a ban on the sale of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States—minerals critical for semiconductors, fiber optic cables, and solar cells. Fortunate...| American Affairs Journal
America wants to decarbonize. Tackling climate change has broad public support. The primary avenue we’re pursuing to achieve this goal is the decarbonization of our electricity system and “electrifying everything.” This is more than achievable; indeed, we have historical precedents. France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history; since…| American Affairs Journal
Beijing’s primary response to U.S. technology controls involves developing new structures to provide better support for the domestic semiconductor industry. These tools and policies continue to be designed, built, and fine-tuned across the government at all levels. Developments during 2024 demonstrated a much higher degree of involvement of domestic industry than ever before in complex long-term industrial policy planning, in addition to high levels of cooperation across multiple industry s...| American Affairs Journal
Nietzsche’s continued presence and resonance in America suggests that he never forgot his Emersonian inheritance. Although Nietzsche’s self-creating individuals and free spirits take their bearings from man’s deepest spiritual yearnings and conflicts—rather than the shallow self-interest of anglophone classical liberalism—his characters are immediately and perpetually recognizable to American democrats, pragmatists, and entrepreneurs. Nietzsche’s followers in America, therefore, a...| American Affairs Journal
In elaborating this critique, Todd is among the few European intellectuals to echo a diagnosis of technological stagnation similar to those of Americans such as Robert Gordon, Peter Thiel, and Tyler Cowen. The extraordinary development of information technology should have sparked a Promethean sense of agency across society and among elites. Instead, both leaders and people have, each in their own ways, lost faith in the future, with definite optimism giving way to debilitating passivism. Tod...| American Affairs Journal
Pocock’s point would be that democracy, while exceedingly worthy of esteem, is not a nation. It is a type of regime, not a political point of view. He would diagnose the breakdown of referential coherence within American political discourse—with democracy’s self-styled saviors perennially contesting electoral outcomes—not as a failure of civic education or basic political theory, but rather a cultural (or, per Bakhtin, chronotopic) collapse of the political “we”: of the desire...| American Affairs Journal
Metaphors about turning back clocks, telling history to stop, going back in time, and so on tend to obscure the reality behind political ideology, which is that people tend to have reasons for their beliefs and actions, and avoiding genuine disagreement cannot make those reasons go away. The mere passage of time does not resolve political problems or coordinate divergent interests. Time, as the Smashing Pumpkins said, is never time at all...| American Affairs Journal
Casey Michel’s Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy around the World explores the growing problem of foreign funding of U.S. nonprofits in order to exert political influence. Addressing this issue might be the best initial opportunity for cross-ideological, bipartisan cooperation toward meaningful nonprofit-sector reform—perhaps leading to broader, bolder efforts against Big Philanthropy and its increasingly stretched definitions of charity...| American Affairs Journal
At the heart of the present predicament is an unraveling of the two primary forms of political legitimation familiar in the postwar world, “input” and “output” legitimacy: the first looks to the processes by which policies are made and takes something like “the consent of the governed” as the basis of legitimacy; the second looks to whether policies, however produced, generate desirable outcomes...| American Affairs Journal
Liberalism, Judge explains, disavows the problem of distributive conflict. When the postwar growth engine began to slow, finance—which appears to extend distributive shares without requiring taxation or redistribution—promised a way out of the resulting political impasse. Elected officials were not captured or co-opted: they willingly embraced financial solutions to their political problems. Finance, naturally, exacts a price, however: subjecting government to the financial imperative t...| American Affairs Journal
In the long run, it is talent that drives technological supremacy. Yet as we recognize the vulnerabilities in our strategic industries—where even substantial subsidies and stringent export controls are insufficient without leading-edge production capabilities—it becomes clear that the very bedrock of innovation, our human capital, needs fortification...| American Affairs Journal
Restoring large-scale, competent manufacturing in the United States will require a higher level of labor-management conflict than the country has seen since the early 1940s. Although it may be surprising to most readers, that’s actually a very good thing, so long as that conflict is about effort and reward in the context of higher productivity...| American Affairs Journal
Financial losses for today’s start-ups are much more common than they were decades ago, and the losses are much bigger. VCs are making back less from their initial investments than at any point since the global financial crisis of 2007–9. According to a study by Jay Ritter, only 22 percent of start-ups were profitable in 2021, the year of peak IPOs, versus 80 percent in the early 1980s. And today’s start-ups are not...| American Affairs Journal
Something changed in America in the 1990s. The U.S. federal funds rate began a decline from above 5 percent to reach the effective zero bound by 2009. U.S. ten-year Treasury yields declined from above 6 percent to levels not even recorded during the Great Depression. Credit to the U.S. nonfinancial corporate sector rose from 56…| American Affairs Journal
For as long as I can remember, the American Right has celebrated “statesmanship” while striving to drown the state in a bathtub. Under appeals to the wisdom of the ages, it has pursued utopian projects at home and abroad that have done immense harm to the American polity and its people. The Left, on the other hand, built the modern American state, but has little use for statesmen, preferring activists, journalists, “experts,” and bureaucrats, or maybe harmless radicals like Bernie San...| American Affairs Journal
On October 1, 2018, the newly christened Klarman Hall opened to much acclaim on the campus of Harvard Business School. The stunning $120 million building houses a conference center as well as a gleaming auditorium built around a 32-million-pixel, 1,250-square-foot video wall and a state-of-the-art, modular design that seats up to a thousand attendees. To mark the opening, the school held a daylong series of speeches and lectures, headlined by the building’s namesake and one of the school’...| American Affairs Journal
When the rich get richer, they do not spend more—or at least in the right way to stimulate the economy. And low interest rates after the financial crisis benefited the rich disproportionately, keeping the economy sluggish and backfiring as a policy measure. Those are the primary lessons from Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game, an economics course for our time masquerading as an updated mixture of Liar’s Poker and Good Will Hunting...| American Affairs Journal
What do we talk about when we talk about the frontier? For more than a century, Americans haven’t been able to avoid using that term to describe our society’s past, present, and future. It may be time to find a better one. A new conceptual frame is needed to examine the political, social, and economic logic of the periodic upheavals in American life that result from these dynamics. We might call this process filibusterism, after its protagonists...| American Affairs Journal
It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Rothbard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we…| American Affairs Journal
Today, many self-described liberals in the professions—including in my world of academic political philosophy—inhabit what the historian Darrin M. McMahon calls “a kind of egalitarian plateau,” convinced that the orienting value of their lives is equality. Yet liberalism’s relationship to equality has, historically, been far from a warm embrace...| American Affairs Journal
In this era of heightened racial and ethnic tension, few academic concepts have enjoyed as much success as “settler colonialism.” This approach has been used to explain conflicts taking place in Israel-Palestine, Australia, Russia-Ukraine, Latin America, and the African continent, as well as within the Western world. Yet the most fervent “anticolonial” regimes have generally done little to improve the lives of the oppressed...| American Affairs Journal
Byung-Chul Han is one of most popular figures in contemporary German philosophy. More a derivative than an original thinker, he applies ideas of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc., to such facets of modern life as professional burnout, dating apps, and social media. His work mostly announces the disappearance, decline, or death of some previously cherished aspect of human existence...| American Affairs Journal
As a cultural subject in, and by extension of, hypermodern America, you cannot believe in Rousseau’s return to nature, or Winckelmann’s return to the ancients, or the late Romantic insistence on the imaginative power of the poet. The closest you’ll get to the sacred is liking pictures of cathedrals on X, and the only way you’ll approach the infinite is through the secularized infinity of the scroll...| American Affairs Journal
Early in my teaching career, I sat in a meeting at my public school district; projected up front was a colorful graphic with the word “equity” placed at the very center. It was the conceptual cornerstone and guide star of this governmental entity—justifying and affecting every one of its policies, practices, curricular decisions, even down to the organization of classroom desks (rows were said to create a hegemonic power structure wherein the teacher is oppressor and the student is op...| American Affairs Journal
Eskom’s recent history can teach us many things. It illustrates what happens when the power sector fails—not in one heaping collapse, but gradually through diminished reliability, with a resulting social stratification between those able to privately do something about it and those who cannot. It is a warning about a politics of energy that debates attachments to particular technologies and fuels...| American Affairs Journal
The power of big corporations and other large private interests has attracted more attention from within a conservatism that’s refining or redefining itself, occasionally contentiously. For example, Compact magazine cofounder and editor Sohrab Ahmari explores private tyranny and countervailing power in his new book Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do…| American Affairs Journal
Big Philanthropy is now on the defensive, however. Increasingly aggressive critiques of it often, though not always, focus on alleged violations of the Grand Bargain. These critiques are cross-ideological. Many progressives and activists think the bargain’s terms have come to allow too much latitude for anti-democratic oligarchs, for example. Meanwhile, some populist conservatives...| American Affairs Journal
In the jargon of finance, America is suffering from a capital allocation problem. The country seems incapable of making the necessary investments to fuel future productivity and growth, or to ensure widespread prosperity. At the government level, public spending on basic research and development as well as infrastructure investment has declined significantly over the past…| American Affairs Journal
In short, if we have learned anything from the competing antitrust approaches of the Biden administration, it appears that an expanded consumer welfare standard, incorporating non-priced harms, is likely to win out. Neo-Brandeisian critiques may be more theoretically exciting for some antitrust advocates, and perhaps have helped to raise public awareness. The FTC has also taken meaningful action in other areas, such as recently banning noncompete agreements. But the DOJ’s enhanced consume...| American Affairs Journal
In recent years, pandemic-related supply chain failures, oil shocks, and China’s growing dominance over critical materials has forced policymakers to reckon with the limits of free market orthodoxy. In 2018, President Trump bucked the Republican party line on trade by imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum. The Biden administration has made “Build Back Better” the…| American Affairs Journal
Liberalism as a concrete sociopolitical order rests upon a series of invisible hand systems: free competition in explicit economic markets, free competition in the marketplace of ideas, institutional competition among branches of government, and so on. Yet liberal faith in these systems far outruns any of the social-scientific mechanisms or evidence adduced to support...| American Affairs Journal
Last year, a cascade of books came off conservative presses, each taking turns striking at the recent phenomenon of “wokeness.” These offerings include polemics and instructional manuals such as Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom, School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them,…| American Affairs Journal
At least, the timing of the redefinition of “woman” is convenient. At the exact moment that we are implicitly evaluating the results of a century’s worth of upheaval on sexual roles, the key demographic in question has become almost impossible to describe. Still, I never found the “transgender question,” as Todd calls it, particularly interesting. It seemed like a red herring on the quest to understand women. But I came back to it, because there is something, certainly, going on wit...| American Affairs Journal
Last October, I made my way down to St. Lucy’s Church in Newark’s North Ward, as I do every year. I waited in a seemingly endless line of cars to cram into a makeshift parking lot, and I looked in my rearview mirror to see a diverse crowd of people under bright decorative lights intertwined…| American Affairs Journal
Precisely at this moment when the world is converging toward de Gaulle’s ideas, France is abandoning them altogether. Instead of embracing industrial policy, France has liberalized its economy. Instead of doubling down on republican ideals, France has weakened its conception of citizenship. Instead of celebrating judicial restraint, France has empowered judges at the expense of voters...| American Affairs Journal
Imagine a multiracial populist movement composed of middle- and working-class voters. Now imagine that they sweep into power on a platform of lower taxes, less government debt, and better schools, and once in office, they manage to accomplish this agenda. To many, it sounds like such a movement is too good to be true. The…| American Affairs Journal
The world remains restless under the yoke of a dictatorship of no alternatives. The last great moment of institutional and ideological refoundation in the rich North Atlantic countries was the institutionally conservative social democracy presaged before the Second World War and fully developed in those countries after the war. Its counterpart in the United States…| American Affairs Journal
How did illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border become the mess that it is? U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) encounters with migrants averaged under 600,000 in fiscal years 2010–20, but tripled in fiscal 2021, the year Biden took office, to a record of nearly 1.9 million, and reached 3.2 million in fiscal 2023. What…| American Affairs Journal
Much is said these days about manufacturing, but what about meatpacking? Chicago, the big-shouldered city of Carl Sandburg’s America—before toolmaker or player with railroads—was hog butcher for the world. As John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira note in last year’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, working in meatpacking paid 25 percent more than a mean...| American Affairs Journal
In the final analysis, the Left became the last defender of neoliberalism, not its undertaker. For all its denunciations, was it incapable of imagining anything else? Too many of its practices reflected back some of the worst features of the current order: short-termism; a bias against political programs, mass organization and institution-building; and reliance on media and charismatic leaders. This is why the 2010s are a historic missed opportunity: when amid signs of mass revolt for the fir...| American Affairs Journal
China’s domestic semiconductor industry landscape has changed considerably. The Biden administration has continued to impose export control restrictions on Chinese firms, and the October 7, 2022, package of controls targeted not only advanced semiconductors (such as GPUs used for running artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads) but also expanded significantly on controls over semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME). One goal of the U.S. controls is to prevent Chinese fi...| American Affairs Journal
In a recent essay for Social Science & Medicine–Mental Health, epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and coauthors identified a significant gap in depressive attitudes between liberal and conservative teens. This gap was present in all years observed in the study (2005–18). It grew significantly starting in 2012, however, as depressive affect unilaterally spiked among liberals. Three years…| American Affairs Journal
Woke capital has many nascent theorists whose accounts emphasize factors external to the corporation: the pressure of woke consumers; the demands of woke investors; a need for political and cultural legitimacy from the woke public or perhaps a narrower woke elite; the social justice demands of the woke state. While not exactly wrong, each of these falls short by failing to look deeply inside the corporation. Woke capital is the result of an interaction within the corporation between the profe...| American Affairs Journal
Most emerging markets have not found an engine of durable growth comparable to manufacturing—most have indeed grown over the last few decades, but dependence on services and commodities exports has not made them rich. Thus most “developing” countries—we are skeptical of that euphemistic label—are in a worse structural position than they were a few decades ago...| American Affairs Journal
The tensions introduced by the prominence of a still partially medieval institution in modern society can only be resolved in two possible ways: the creation of institutions of education and knowledge production on a more modern model; or a partial neo-feudalization of the modalities, if not the class structure, of modern society, a process already underway...| American Affairs Journal
Samuel Moyn’s latest book, Liberalism against Itself, begins and ends by invoking my 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed. Moyn employs my book as a bookend in order to refute its thesis: “liberalism failed because it has succeeded.” Moyn seeks to counter, in effect, “liberalism has failed until now because it hasn’t really been tried.” In spite of a fundamentally opposite view of how to understand the current travails of the liberal order, Moyn and I, and our respective books, shar...| American Affairs Journal
“They’re not all crypto-fascists and right-wing nut jobs,” comments Kendall Roy, the scion of his late father’s media empire on the show Succession, the night before he and his kid brother enthrone a politician answering to that description as America’s newest president. “We also have some venture capital Dems and centrist ghouls. Dad’s ideological range was . . . wide.” So was the ideological range of the Republican Party over the last fifty years. And so it still is...| American Affairs Journal
Gone are the days when corporate giving was confined to Little League, food banks, and other traditional causes. On today’s corporate websites, politically charged initiatives to end social or economic “inequity” or advance racial or environmental “justice” have largely replaced references to noncontroversial charities serving the common good. From the 1960s until a decade or…| American Affairs Journal
Population aging is proceeding apace across the world, but there is little agreement on what to do about it or even whether it is a bad thing at all. On the upside, older, smaller societies will have a correspondingly smaller climate impact, will be able to invest more per child, and will suffer less congestion…| American Affairs Journal
On September 11, 2023, Chile marked the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that toppled Socialist president Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet, who presided over nearly two decades marked by human rights abuses and radical economic reforms, making the country a laboratory for neoliberal policies...| American Affairs Journal
Do we live in a world of “ever-increasing change” characterized by “disruptive innovation”? Is “technology moving faster than ever before”? Are these, in fact, “unprecedented times”? Contra the bromides of TED-talkers and Davos men, a growing chorus of contrarian scientists, scholars, and investors hold that the pace of innovation has slowed, not increased...| American Affairs Journal
Before student loan forgiveness, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, and the Inflation Reduction Act, something called the CHIPS Act was a major news story for a few days in late July. CHIPS was essentially a bill to support semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, and the final version that passed into law, which added basic research…| American Affairs Journal
With increasing income inequality and social stratification reminiscent of the Gilded Age, talk of an “establishment” has returned to our political discourse. As in the past, the word is typically used as a pejorative describing an incumbent power structure that needs to be overturned. Yet today’s sociopolitical regime is vastly different from the establishment that…| American Affairs Journal
In a time in which generations struggle to understand each other, everyone, young and old, is nevertheless in agreement that something has happened to the young. Young people are now consistently more distressed than our elders, a fact whose daily confirmation through experience is the only thing keeping us from recognizing its utter historical perversity. Youth has been stripped of its natural tendencies to energy, autonomy, and subversion. In our turning away from life, the generation chr...| American Affairs Journal
One of the central themes of Tocqueville’s thought is that a political movement, or (at a later stage) a political regime, may be undone by its very success. University of Notre Dame professor Patrick J. Deneen shows himself to be a worthy successor of Tocqueville...| American Affairs Journal
