Quote of the Month
“But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
’Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.”
- Lord Byron, Don Juan, III.88
My recent scribblings:
Check out the Liberal Patriot, the new Substack I’ve started with three friends and colleagues.
“Concrete Unity” with John Halpin
“Up From Meritocracy: A Review of Michael Sandel’s ‘The Tyranny of Merit’”
“Missing the Mark: A Review of G. John Ikenberry’s ‘A World Safe for Democracy’”
1. Why America needs to manufacture the things it invents
Why you should read it: In the New York Times, University of Toronto political economist Dan Breznitz and industrial policy writer David Adler argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the perils of allowing the manufacturing of things invented in America to take place overseas and offer recommendations to revive domestic manufacturing.
“In the past two decades, the U.S. economy has been lulled into following a path of offshoring, driven by an ideology celebrating short-term financial gains above everything else. The country, once a manufacturing powerhouse, is populated by corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas and lost their ability to produce domestically, leaving little behind except shell companies that employ relatively few people. The United States no longer produces even the essentials, from personal protective equipment to our smartphones and laptops… Production has shifted overseas so extensively that the United States is now dependent on other countries, particularly China, to supply many of our necessities, from medical supplies to 5G to the simplest of screws: 95 percent of surgical masks and 70 percent of respirators used in the United States are produced abroad. The last domestic penicillin plant closed in 2004.”
“The United States has fallen behind in many areas of advanced manufacturing, like 5G and the most cutting-edge computer chips. Instead of creating these manufacturing jobs, the economy is adding poorly paid service jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the occupation that will add the most jobs over the next decade will be for ‘home health and personal care aides,’ which pays about $25,000 a year. Other high-wage countries such as Germany and Switzerland have increased their high-end manufacturing. The United States should aspire to do the same…But one glaring thing is missing: powerful, sustainable demand for goods made in the United States.”
Why it matters: “Covid-19 has brutally exposed national weaknesses. The task is difficult and will take years to bear fruit. However, there is also the chance to secure prosperity for future generations of Americans, as well as ensure that the next crisis will not find us so vulnerable. It is time that the United States believed in itself again.”
2. Why we shouldn’t worry about inflation
Why you should read it: New York Times senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin details the emerging consensus among economists that the United States can probably run high deficits and achieve significant growth without risking higher interest rates.
“During Mr. Trump’s time in office, it has become clear that the United States economy can surpass what technocrats once thought were its limits: Specifically, the jobless rate can fall lower and government budget deficits can run higher than was once widely believed without setting off an inflationary spiral… But the experience of his presidency — particularly the buoyant economy before the pandemic began — shows what is possible. It may not have been the best economy ever, as he has repeatedly claimed, but it was easily the strongest since the late 1990s, and before that you have to go back to the late 1960s to find similar conditions.”
“Since the 1980s, recessions have been rarer than they were in the immediate post-World War II era, but they have been followed by long, ‘jobless’ recoveries… It turns out that when you try to choke off the economy whenever it is starting to get hot, American workers suffer… From 1948 to 1969, the unemployment rate was at or below 4 percent 39 percent of the time. Since 1980, that has been the case less than 8 percent of the time.”
Why it matters: “In effect, the last four years at the Fed have made clear both how much things have changed and how much they needed to. Ms. Yellen (now President-elect Biden’s Treasury secretary nominee) started the first of a series of interest rate increases in late 2015…But the logic kept breaking down. Inflation kept coming in below the 2 percent target the central bank aims for, even as the jobless rate kept falling… ‘It is hard to overstate the benefits of sustaining a strong labor market,’ [Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell] said, and the central bank’s new policy language ‘reflects our view that a robust job market can be sustained without causing an outbreak of inflation.’”
3. How America’s democratic decay accelerated under President Trump
Why you should read it: Prolific social science polymath Francis Fukuyama writes in Foreign Affairs that America’s ongoing democratic decay deteriorated “at a startling pace and on a scale that was hard to anticipate” under President Trump.
“…the underlying conditions that brought on this crisis remain unchanged. The U.S. government is still captured by powerful elite groups that distort policy to their own benefit and undermine the legitimacy of the regime as a whole. And the system is still too rigid to reform itself. These conditions, however, have morphed in unexpected ways. Two emerging phenomena have worsened the situation enormously: new communications technologies have contributed to the disappearance of a common factual basis for democratic deliberation, and what were once policy differences between ‘blue’ and “red’ factions have hardened into divisions over cultural identity.”
“But the same checks that constrained Trump will also limit any future effort to reform the system’s fundamental dysfunctions. One of the most important institutional defects is the crucial advantage held by Republicans due to the Electoral College and the makeup of the Senate, which allows them to hold power despite winning fewer popular votes at both national and state levels. Changes to the U.S. Constitution, such as elimination of the Electoral College, are simply off the table, given the incredibly high bar set for passing and ratifying amendments. The Democrats’ bare majority in the Senate takes away the Republican veto over mundane issues such as cabinet appointments, but bigger reforms—such as statehood for the District of Columbia or a new Voting Rights Act to counter Republican efforts at disenfranchisement—will run up against Republican filibusters. President-elect Joe Biden will need luck and skill to push through even relatively unambitious legislation, such as a new stimulus package and infrastructure spending. The transformational structural changes envisioned in the reform package that Democrats in the House of Representatives recently proposed will remain for the most part out of reach.”
Why it matters: “Where the country goes after Biden’s inauguration is anyone’s guess… How this ultimately plays out will have significant consequences for global democracy in the coming years. Trump has handed authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping a huge gift: a United States divided, internally preoccupied, and contradicting its own democratic ideals. Biden winning the White House with a bare Democratic majority in Congress won’t be enough for the United States to recover its international standing: Trumpism must be repudiated and delegitimized root and branch, much as McCarthyism was in the 1950s. The elites who establish normative guardrails around national institutions must regain their nerve and reestablish their moral authority. Whether they rise to the challenge will determine the fate of U.S. institutions—and, more important, the American people”
4. How President Biden can make good on his pledges of unity
Why you should read it: For the online journal Arc Digital, Vanderbilt political philosopher Robert Talisse contends that President Biden can fulfill his inaugural promises of national unity by meeting pressing challenges head-on rather than calling for unity to meet pressing challenges.
“Although citizens say they want a less divisive politics, they also tend to see their partisan opponents as the instigators of the divisions. Citizens blame only their political opponents for uncivil state of our democracy. In seeking reconciliation, they long for the other side’s resignation; in calling for cooperation, they seek capitulation. Our collective yearning for unity is itself a manifestation of our bitter divisions… This means that we strongly tend to see partisan rivals as depraved, untrustworthy, immoral, misguided, and dangerous, even when it comes to behaviors that are arguably nonpolitical. Consequently, we tend to judge nearly everything those on the other side do as objectionable, even in the case of actions that we approve of when committed by our allies.”
“Hence the paradox of unity. In urging the nation to unify, Biden must either specify what he means by ‘unity,’ or leave the term vague. Either way, the call for unity incites our partisan divisions. Biden’s exhortation is self-defeating… To be clear, Biden is correct that the country needs to restore the political common ground. We must reaffirm our commitment to the idea that, despite our divisions, we remain equal partners in the shared task of perfecting our democratic republic. Sharing that reaffirmation is a kind of unity.”
Why it matters: “But unity in that sense is elusive precisely because, like other important interpersonal goods such as friendship or love, it cannot be summoned, demanded, or exhorted. We realize goods like these only by striving together for other things. Friendship, for example, forms among people who join together for purposes other than making friends. Treating ‘making friends’ as the objective of an interaction is surely the worst way to go about making friends. Similarly, striving for unity can’t bring us together… Despite its rhetorical force, [President Biden’s] claim that we must unify in order to defeat our common foes actually puts things backwards. It is by taking decisive steps towards meeting the present challenges that the country can unify.”
5. How victim complexes came to dominate politics on right and left
Why you should read it: Linguist and The Atlantic contributing writer John McWhorter observes that neither the MAGA right nor the woke left have a monopoly on “theatrical exaggeration”- and that they’ve come to increasingly resemble one another in mindset and attitude.
“The right often accuses the left of exaggerating victimhood, turning a blind eye to reality, and distorting language to do so. The left, it’s often said, harbors “snowflakes” and the like who are beset by a victim complex. Lately, however, this frame of mind knows no party or political affiliation. Especially since the Capitol riot, assorted conservative figures have embodied a fragility of the right… The right parallels the excesses of wokeness also in denying sheer logic when it’s inconvenient to a larger ideology… Anyone who takes issue with these logical failings [of the woke left] should attend to the more extreme anti-empiricism—and with a violent streak added on—of the Trump supporters who believe that the election was stolen from the president, but nevertheless affirm the validity of the House and Senate elections on the same ballots. They will not accept the reality, apparent to anyone who can put common sense before politics, that Trump lost. These supporters fiercely and implacably resist logic in the name of a greater good: battling the left.”
“On both the left and the right, this brand of exaggeration and anti-empiricism seems rooted not in politics but in the alienation of modern life. Humans were minted in small bands of people nested in lifelong intimate relationships of kin and marriage. The ideal of atomic individualism remains alien to perhaps most persons on Earth. Mass movements offer a sense of belonging that modern life often does not provide, as well as the delicious feeling of having it all figured out.”
Why it matters: “The upshot is that the right has no grounds for supposing itself immune from the contemporary pathologies of the left. At this moment, the right must also reckon with the fact that while the left’s victimhood complex gets people fired and creates a lot of social grief, the right’s victimhood complex can end in members of Congress huddling under their desks as five citizens lose their lives.”
6. Why America needs fewer PhDs
Why you should read it: Economist Noah Smith notes in Bloomberg that the United States produces far too many PhDs, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, for the labor market to absorb.
“But the problem starts when the Ph.D. students collect their degrees and go out into the world. The academic jobs they're accustomed to pursuing have been drying up. The end of the big 20th-century university building boom was the first death knell for this pipeline. Since many professor jobs are tenured, there just aren’t many open spots for young scholars unless the country is building more universities — which it no longer is… This condemns many would-be scholars to a bleak existence of low-wage, contingent work. Like waiters hanging around Hollywood hoping for their big break, many stick around year after year, forgoing health insurance or living in shabby apartments while their qualifications for jobs outside academia decay.”
“Even more fundamentally, many doctorates are simply not worth it in purely private-sector terms. A history Ph.D. can go into a corporate personnel department or marketing or consulting or launch their own startup or do a million other things — but it’s highly questionable whether they’ll do much better than they would have if they'd just taken a job straight out of college or acquired a master’s degree. So while computer science or statistics Ph.D.s can probably hop up a few rungs on the corporate ladder as a result of their degrees, and engineering and biology Ph.D.s can go get a job in a private lab, doctorate holders in the humanities and social sciences are often going to be underemployed… That’s a recipe for societal dysfunction. Many historians have advanced some version of the thesis that dashed expectations among elites can lead to social unrest. Most recently, historian Peter Turchin has warned that overproduction of elites is a harbinger of discord in modern America. There’s evidence that Ph.D. school, never a particularly fun experience, is becoming increasingly stressful thanks to growing worry about careers.”
Why it matters: “A handful of angry, downwardly mobile English Ph.D.s aren’t by themselves enough to overthrow the institutions of society, but they can make hugely outsized contributions to unrest and discord if they are so inclined. Remember, these are very smart people who are very good at writing things, and well-schooled in any number of dissident ideas. Those are the kind of people who tend to lead revolutions.”
7. Why pandemic-induced boredom fuels radicalism on both right and left
Why you should read it: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat makes the case that pandemic-induced isolation and boredom have supercharged extremism on both left and right by driving people down Extremely Online rabbit holes.
“On one level, this objection is reasonable; on another, though, it misses what’s been happening in America over the last year. It is precisely because the city’s public school classrooms are closed, precisely because normal educational tasks and interactions have been suspended, that radical projects [like stripping Abraham Lincoln’s name from San Francisco public schools] find themselves more easily and naturally fast-tracked. If there’s anything we’ve learned about pandemic life, it’s that suspense of ordinary life creates a vacuum that ideology rushes in to fill.”
“For the last month, we’ve been focused on the particularly poisonous way that’s happened on the American right: how the online drama of QAnon and its stepchild #StoptheSteal became powerful enough and immersive enough to help inspire a riot at the U.S. Capitol. Yes, QAnon predated the pandemic and Trump would have claimed voter fraud no matter what. But the pandemic months still felt like they worked a fundamental change on many conservatives’ relationship to political reality, pushing normal people deeper into certain kinds of very-online fantasy.”
Why it matters: “So an interesting question is which sort of radicalism is more likely to persist once the pandemic is gone and semi-normality returns… Both forms of radicalism, it’s worth noting, are currently presiding over broken systems. The liberal city, in the time of a radical ambition, has been disfigured by a homicide spike and devastated by the collapse of in-person education. The Republican Party, under an ascendant conspiracism, has lost its hold on the Senate and the White House… In a healthy society that brokenness would weaken radicalism’s appeal. In our society — well, we can live in hope.”
8. How and why the Arab Spring failed
Why you should read it: On the tenth anniversary of the popular uprisings that toppled dictators and instigated civil wars across the Middle East, journalist Hisham Melham surveys the results.
“The initial impulse behind the uprisings, the very impulse that led [Tunisian street vendor Mohamed] Bouazizi to self-immolation, lay in the fact that humiliated peoples, suffering from economic dislocation, political repression, and denial of basic human rights had grown impatient with their status as subjects and had risen, demanding their rights as citizens. Wealth redistribution, social justice, and good governance were as equal for those demonstrating en masse as regaining their lost karama — their dignity… For a fleeting moment of enthusiasm, the uprisings appeared for many Arabs and outside observers as signaling the end of generations of political stagnation and cultural decay, giving way to tumultuous weeks of swift and at times dizzying change. The old, former lefties among us dusted off their old books by Vladimir Lenin and Antonio Gramsci in search of great quotes to encapsulate the epic times we felt we were living in. None was more popular or more accurate than Lenin’s insightful observation: ‘There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.’ Others hailed the end of what modern Arab poets called ‘the wounded time’ or the end of the ‘time of the assassins.’ But that was not meant to be.”
“The states that faced their people’s wrath have few characteristics in common; the majority of their people speak Arabic, they are mostly Muslims, and some of them have had similar historic experiences. But socially, culturally, and demographically they are not alike. After all, what is there in common socially and culturally between Yemen and Tunisia? And yet, the repressive regimes shared one thing in common: All reacted with brute force to peaceful calls for empowerment and accountability… From the start, the trajectories of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings differed from those of Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen. Given the relative homogeneity and stability of both countries, a modern history unmarred by widespread communal and political violence that has afflicted heterogeneous countries like Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Sudan, and Yemen, a more developed sense of national identity, and a relatively developed civil society, their descent into civil war was not preordained. Yet even they were not spared.”
Why it matters: “The political, social, and cultural maladies afflicting Arab societies that were supposed to be swept away by the young activists have proven to be immovable. Of all the countries swept by the uprisings, only Tunisia escaped physical ruin, maintained a robust if tired civil society, and is still struggling to strengthen its wobbly polity and weakened economy. Syria is a land of desolation. Yemen is still tearing itself apart with a little help from its cynical neighbors. Bahrain has essentially become a Saudi province. Libya, abandoned by the international coalition after Gadhafi’s overthrow, finds itself an arena where two rival authorities are battling each other for control, supported by regional and international actors including Russia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, either seeking to exploit its resources or determine its political future. Libya today is a vast theater of proxy wars. Egypt emerged from the uprising more sullen and more repressive than at any time in its modern history. These scarred and broken societies, ruled or controlled by merciless men, will remain in constant ferment for the foreseeable future… It is clear that the Arab ancien régimes have proven to be more resilient than many had thought. The uprisings faced not only entrenched ruling classes but also deep-rooted patriarchy and religious and cultural traditions that are not amenable to swift and significant social and cultural change. It appeared that decades happened in a few weeks in Tunisia and Egypt, and later in other countries when the tip of the ancient tyrannical pyramid was blown away. Ben Ali, Mubarak, and others have gone, but the pyramid — more broadly the political, economic, and security structure and the cultural superstructures that supported these modern-day pharaohs and allowed them to torment their societies — is still intact. None of the uprisings managed to seriously shake these immovable structures. The tyrant has gone, but his tyranny lingers on.”
9. How obscurantist progressive jargon leads Democrats astray
Why you should read it: Harper’s Magazine columnist Thomas Chatterton Williams posits that the embrace of esoteric identity politics jargon by progressive politicians left them unable to reach working-class voters of any background.
“The disagreement over such progressive jargon may seem like inside baseball to those who aren’t extremely online, but it is worth considering seriously, emblematic as it is of deeper fissures in the always tenuous patchwork of identity groups and economic classes that constitutes the contemporary Democratic coalition. The lives of progressive, college-educated, predominantly white ‘coastal elites’ have become far removed from those of white Republicans, but more significantly from those of the nonwhite voters their party depends on to remain electorally viable—and whose validation lends them an air of virtuousness. The battle over ‘Latinx’ might be understood as an instance of what the conservative commentator Reihan Salam has called “intra-white status jockeying’—an opportunity for ‘those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites . . . to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites.’ What [Arizona Democratic Rep. Ruben] Gallego knows, and can’t help but bristle at, is the fact that this semantic gatekeeping is ultimately not even about Latinos… In a year of inescapable talk of racial identity and white supremacy, mass protests against systemic and interpersonal racism, and a fifteen-thousand-person rally in Brooklyn for black trans lives during the height of the pandemic, the extraordinary irony was that one of the very few groups whose support for Trump declined even modestly was white males.”
“Fashionable narratives about the Democratic coalition and its members’ goals and ambitions can efface what many minorities think is in their best interest. Such misreadings are not just insensitive but dangerous. They can lead Democrats to pursue ill-conceived, poorly articulated policies that backfire to the benefit of conservatives, or worse, inflict harm on vulnerable communities… Like the niche semantic preference for ‘Latinx,’ but with far more direct and dire consequences, viral slogans such as ‘abolish the police’—created by people of color, but powerfully amplified by whites situated at a considerable remove—have been foisted on black communities that have a far more equivocal relationship with policing than is often acknowledged.”
Why it matters: “If it was not clear already, one stinging lesson from 2020 is that our countrymen are not buying what the online activist class is trying to sell, no matter how morally righteous their doctrine may be. Whether this will somehow change, and the country can be governed like a graduate seminar on critical race theory, remains to be seen. What is apparent is that, should that profound shift come to pass, significant and growing numbers of nonwhite, non-straight, non-Christian people will ardently oppose it.”
Odds and Ends
How NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (aka TESS) discovered a "sextuply eclipsing sextuple star system..."
Why and how the sixty-year-old B-52 bomber will fly for the U.S. Air Force until at least 2050…
How North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford quietly broke with other segregationist Southern Democratic governors in his 1961 inaugural address…
How 3D scans of fossils revealed that baby tyrannosaurs were the size of border collies when they hatched…
Scientists describe how electric eels hunt in packs of up to 100…
Music of the Month
“Prayer of St. Francis” by Sarah McLachlan, on her 2008 album Rarities, B-Sides, and Other Stuff, Vol. 2.
“Mission Statement,” “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young-style send up of corporate consultant-speak from his 2014 album Mandatory Fun.
“Showdown,” an Electric Light Orchestra cover recorded by Chris Cornell and recently released on the posthumous album No One Sings Like You Anymore, Vol. 1.