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The Village tends toward risk aversion, as evident in its Covid caution and its increasing wariness about free speech (which very much can have sticks-and-stones consequences). It tends to make decisions by consensus, with dissenters punished by ostracization

The River has been on a winning streak in terms of its impact on society and our economy: Its core industries, tech and finance, continually grow as fractions of the economy, and Las Vegas is bringing in record revenues

So far in the 2024 election, the Village has been making better risk-management decisions — out-Rivering the River. The presidential race remains close, but at least for now it looks like the Village is winning.

At least the Village got the most important decision right: kicking President Biden to the curb. In so doing, they roughly doubled their chances of winning

To understand why, it helps to know that the River can be prone to contrarianism. As the Village has become bluer and bluer, some communities within the River have rebelled by becoming, to varying degrees, red-pilled in response.

It’s much harder to see the upside for Mr. Trump’s choice of Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

The poker player in me would have played the percentages and taken the calculated risk in Mr. Shapiro. The choice of Mr. Walz has grown on me as Ms. Harris has sustained her momentum in the polls — but Pennsylvania still looms large.

But the River is by no means a bloc, whereas the Village’s penchant for consensus helped it, when Mr. Biden stepped aside, to consolidate quickly around Ms. Harris

Mr. Trump himself straddles the River-Village boundary awkwardly as a former casino magnate (though not a successful one), but he’s more intuitive than analytical and obsessed with his news coverage in the Village.

The Trump campaign made two classic mistakes with his V.P. choice, though Silicon Valley’s conservatives cheered. One was counting their chickens before they hatched.

The second error was a failure to practice strategic empathy, meaning a willingness to put yourself in your opponent’s shoes.

This is generally something that people in the River are good at; it’s essential in poker.

There’s another term from the poker world that describes Mr. Trump’s recent decision-making:

He may be on tilt, the condition of making suboptimal choices because your emotions get in the way. Every poker player has seen it: An opponent builds up a huge stack, looks forward to treating himself to a steak dinner and bragging to his buddies. But then he loses a big pot — and before he knows it, the rest of his chips are gone as he tries to chase his losses.

Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.

As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.

Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.

In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).

These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.

adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.

Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.

Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.

“Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”

They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.

Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.

they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.

Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.

Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.

Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,

scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”

the projects began collecting data in 2004 at the earliest, which isn’t enough time to draw firm long-term conclusions. “It is extremely difficult to look at a short record for the ocean overturning and say what it is going to do over 30, 40 or 50 years,”

Musk and other right-wingers who bemoan a coming “population collapse” tend to oppose foreign immigration. Musk—once an immigrant himself, and possibly an illegal one, for a time—consistently emphasizes the ways in which immigrants weaken or threaten American society. He’s even trafficked in conspiracy theories, such as the story that President Joe Biden was secretly flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country. Musk has publicly affirmed his belief in core aspects of Great Replacement Theory.

These positions have led Musk into obvious contradictions. Despite claiming the world is “basically empty of humans,” Musk has also posted, “America will fail if it tries to absorb the world.” Why would America “fail” if there’s nothing to absorb?

Instead, the new pronatalism of the hard right is exclusionary and authoritarian. Instead of being portrayed as equal partners with men in building stable families, women in this paradigm are understood as either mere tools for reproduction or targets of sexual violence who require men’s protection. Family is not a good in itself, in this picture: It receives its value instrumentally, as a method of achieving the deeper goals that underlie right-wing cultural politics.

All this makes clear that Musk’s interest in raising birth rates is about producing not more people per se but more of what he considers the right sort of people. It’s why he claims that “the culture of Italy, Japan, and France will disappear” if the women of those countries don’t have more babies. In today’s right-wing pronatalist picture, children, like women, are demographic tools.

Musk has become a leading voice of right-wing pronatalism in the United States. Malcolm and Simone Collins, the oddball couple described by the Guardian as “America’s premier pronatalists,” celebrate Musk as one of their most important allies in spreading their vision for a genetically selective, IQ-focused, eugenics-adjacent pronatalism. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support. Our politics are very aligned,” Malcolm told a profiler just after interrupting himself to smack one of his children in the face.

The demographic anxieties that give rise to these sorts of concerns also shape right-wing pronatalist views of white women. On Wednesday, Dave Rubin implored Taylor Swift to rethink her endorsement of Harris, invoking the threat of sexual violence from immigrant men: “You are a young pretty girl, do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain’t pretty!”

Attractive, white American women are not fellow subjects or citizens so much as sexual prizes that must be protected from the threat of violence by foreign men. Men like Musk might offer, seriously or not, to give them a child. Rubin might act as if he’s protecting them from sexual savages. The common thread is that the role of women in all of this is to be beautiful, to produce children, and to remain unsullied by foreigners. There’s nothing pro-family about any of that.

Nationwide, college professors report steep declines in students’ willingness and ability to read on their own. To adapt, instructors are assigning less reading and giving students time in class to complete it.

I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort

For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes.

Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide.

Even in the ostensibly true depictions of working life that students see, like the “day in my life” videos that were popular on TikTok a couple of years ago, intellectual labor seems optional and entry-level corporate positions seem like a series of rooftop hangouts, free lunches and team-building happy hours — less a job than a lifestyle.

All in all, it looks as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies.

Once students graduate, the jobs they most ardently desire are in what they proudly call the “sellout” fields of finance, consulting and tech.

And of course the ultimate lifestyle job is being an influencer, a tantalizing prospect that seems always just one viral post away.

If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read? For that matter, how will any effort in school prepare them for careers in which, apparently, effort is not rewarded?

Universities themselves offer little solace. They constantly promote the idea that a degree is about earning power above all else. They embrace influencer culture

The fact is, not all students aim to sail on vibes. Some want to do work that makes more than money. Some finance majors do, too. And others, God bless them, just want to learn what they can and worry about work later.

It’s up to students to decide whether they’ll resist intellectual inertia. All I can do is demonstrate that it is worth it to read, to pause, to think, to revise, to reread, to discuss, to revise again. I can, in the time students are with me, offer them chances to defy their incentives and see what happens.

I need to get back to assigning books. Nine is too many. But one? They can read one. Next semester, they will.

Vladimir Putin can’t restore the old superpower parity with the US, but he can make European democrats fear Moscow again. He can proselytise for a vicious strain of authoritarian nationalism that suffocates liberal norms and undermines multilateral institutions wherever it takes hold

That malevolent spirit has usurped orthodox conservatism as the driving force of rightwing politics on both sides of the Atlantic

If it works, Trump’s inauguration will be remembered as the setting of a sun that rose over Berlin 35 years ago. The ideas that won the cold war will no longer prevail in Washington. The Trumpian right still sometimes identifies itself with something called “the west”, but in its mouth it is a crusade to protect white Christendom from mass migration, not liberal pluralism or the rule of law.

Trump will enter the Oval Office with a more systematic programme of constitutional subversion than he had the first time around. He has tech oligarchs onside. He can nobble referees in the information arena.

The governing doctrine of the new administration will be a hybrid of ideological faith and corruption, held together by favours, a personality cult and paranoia. It will be a dogmatic kleptocracy where people who know how to spout the right beliefs to the right people will get lucrative jobs and contracts. Such regimes normalise the hypocrisy of plundering a nation while claiming to make it stronger. There are no contradictions or shame when submitting to the will of the leader is synonymous with doctrinal correctness.

American democracy won’t suddenly perish. The system that put Trump in power can remove him, as it has before. Resistance to tyranny is enshrined in law and embedded in US culture, but fastidious political vandalism can dismantle those protections.

The abrasive reality of a post-west America will take some getting used to. It represents an acute crisis for Britain, which counts the US as its paramount defence and security partner, while relying on European trade for its prosperity.

Once upon a time, that was a geopolitical balance with huge benefits. The UK was Washington’s best friend in Brussels and Europe’s hotline to the White House. Surrendering that status made Brexit a terrible idea in 2016. It hasn’t aged well.

It leaves Britain badly exposed in the trade war that Trump is poised to start. He will also make Europe less secure. The variables are quite how little he cares for Nato, how much he will appease Putin, how spiteful he will be to EU leaders and how contagious his politics will be in continental elections.

This puts Keir Starmer in an invidious position. Powerful currents of realpolitik demand intimacy with any US administration, regardless of how repulsive the incumbent president might be. Righteous decoupling is not a serious option when national security interests are densely interwoven. But as the price of keeping that relationship sweet, Trump will demand vassalage, which will complicate Starmer’s ambition for closer European ties.

Britain could carry on pursuing a new security deal with the EU, while grovelling for special exemption from US tariffs. Maybe Starmer has steady enough hands to thread that needle. But just the hint of alignment with Trump will sour any conversation about easing UK access to the single market.

there is a cost to pretending that not much has really changed. No one buys it. Labour’s foreign policy blew up on 5 November. Plan A was a version of the old mid-Atlantic bridge role that wasn’t wholly convincing to begin with. It relied on the pretence that Brexit was something that happened once in the past, a page that has been turned. In truth, it is a nagging, self-aggravating injury to the country’s strategic position. Without some acknowledgment of that reality, it is impossible to give a meaningful or honest account of the choices that lie ahead.

Trump’s victory reinfects the wound. It leaves Britain looking friendless in the post-western world. The shortage of good options isn’t a reason to pretend there isn’t an emergency. Squirming and cavilling around Britain’s biggest strategic blunder in a hundred years is not a sustainable path.

it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.

Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.

By comparison, here is Barack Obama in 2016, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation — the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”

It would have been nice if the Democrats could have triangulated their way into the hearts of enough educated and affluent suburbanites to make up for the working class voters they’ve lost over the years, but somehow that strategy rarely works out

For a short time in the last few years, it looked as if the Democrats might actually have understood all this. What the Biden administration did on antitrust and manufacturing and union organizing was never really completed but it was inspiring. Framed the right way, it might have formed the nucleus of a strong appeal to the voters

Speaker after speaker at the gathering in Chicago blasted the Republicans for their hostility to working people. There was even a presentation about the meaning of the word “populism.” At times it felt like they were speaking to me personally.

The administration’s achievements on antitrust were barely mentioned.

Then, once Ms. Harris’s campaign got rolling, it largely dropped economic populism, wheeled out another billionaire and embraced Liz Cheney.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. From free-speech guys to book-banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-immigration zealots everywhere. “Trump Will Fix It,” declared the signs they waved at his rallies, regardless of which “It” you had in mind.

clucking liberal pundits would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of “grievance,” as though discontent itself was the product of a diseased mind.

Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.

I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.

Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage.

It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.

Want to make images of giant Quarans and Bibles? There’s a guide for that. Optical illusion AI Jesus? Poor children? Poor people making intricate things out of plastic bottles? There are guides for them. Tricking people into clicking offsite? Avoiding bans? Getting an account unbanned? Posting automatically? There’s always a guide that explains every single phenomenon that I have seen while wading through AI-generated Facebook slop

These influencers are teaching people to use Facebook as a job. They are essentially penetration-testing Facebook, finding ever-changing vulnerabilities in its content moderation systems and in its recommendation algorithms and then exploiting them and instructing others how to do so at scale.

Meta does not make its payment rates public, even to people in the program. But YouTube influencers regularly show their payment dashboards. Payments for single images that I have seen vary wildly, from a few cents per photo to hundreds of dollars per photo if it goes megaviral. The “$100 for 1,000 likes” that influencer Gyan Abishek mentioned in one of his videos seems to be greatly exaggerated, based on the various payment portals that I have seen.

“If you can figure out how to post content at scale, that means you can figure out how to exploit weaknesses at scale,” the former Meta employee said.

. A Meta spokesperson told me that the company has 40,000 employees working globally on security and trust and safety today, compared to 20,000 in 2018.

The most popular way to make money spamming Facebook is by being paid directly by Facebook to do so via its Creator Bonus Program, which pays people who post viral content. This means that the viral “shrimp Jesus” AI and many of the bizarre things that have become a hallmark of Zombie Facebook have become popular because Meta is directly incentivizing people to post this content.  

One former Meta employee with direct knowledge of its content moderation and ad approval systems, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed an NDA at Meta, told me that Facebook is often aware of these loopholes but layoffs have left its content moderation teams so spread thin that they cannot actually keep up with how quickly people are exploiting them.

Much like similar programs at TikTok and Twitter, Facebook’s Creator Bonus Program makes direct payments to people who successfully go viral on Meta platforms, and is meant to incentivize influencers and content creators to post high-quality content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta’s bonus program is “invite only,” but countless of the instructional videos I saw show that consistent posting over time will eventually get an account or page invited to the program. 

for Vanity Fair, James Pogue did a good job summarizing the tech billionaire Peter Thiel influence nexus and the Thiel-funded coterie that Vance ran with online in a long feature two years ago. Pogue notes: 

In general, it’s the point of view of someone who takes Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire painting cycle to contain a subtle and profound truth about society, one best expressed in a familiar maxim: Strong men make good times; good times make weak men; weak men make . . . (I need to yawn and will let you fill in the rest).1

Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics, are not anti-intellectual. Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.

the man doesn’t just have cracked beliefs but cracked instincts. Almost endearingly, he and his pals seem to think that workaday politics is an opportune context for doing a bit of grand theory,

Stern, again: “They condemned or prophesied, rather than exposited or argued, and all their writings showed that they despised the discourse of intellectuals, depreciated reason, and exalted intuition.” As Stern makes clear, this is the style of thinking that did so much to pave the way for the “revolutionary conservatism” that emerged in the Weimar era.

The purpose of journalism is to get the story and tell the story.

Now the cavemen turn to the tribal elder. “What should we do?” “Short term, climb a tree if you see a wolf,” she says. “They don’t like fire and noise, so we should keep lit torches and scream. In the longer term, wolf packs are seen in the west, so we should go east to high ground.” That is the authentic sound of commentary, of editorials and columns. Advice, exhortation—they’re part of the news too. People will always want it, question it, disagree.

It is as if journalism is no longer about Get the Story but about Meeting People Where They Are and helping them navigate through a confusing world. But do you really think current editors know where people are? Do you think they know how to navigate? It all feels presumptuous.

The great news for journalism is there will always be a huge market for this. The need for news is built into human nature. Tech platforms change, portals change, but the need is forever.

The past two decades, accelerating over the past four years, newsrooms have increasingly become distracted from their main mission, confused about their purpose. Really, they’ve grown detached from their mission

the journalistic product now being offered has become something vaguer than it was, more boring, less swashbuckling, more labored, as if it’s written by frightened people. There’s an emphasis on giving the story “context,” but the story doesn’t feel alive and the context seems skewed

But even cavemen who eat bugs and wear hides are not always grim. Man wants not only to be informed but to be amused, entertained. He wants humor, wit, mischief, a visual tour of the latest cave paintings. Cave man want cooking app. And word games and reporting on the richest tribes: “Most Expensive Cave Dwelling Sells in Malibu.”

More disturbing, major stories go unreported because, the reader senses, they don’t relate to the personal obsessions of the editors and reporters, or to their political priors.

Facebook and social media can’t get the story. They can amplify it, give an opinion, comment. But they don’t have the resources and expertise; they don’t have trained investigative journalists and first-class experienced editors and a publisher willing to take a chance and spend the money. Social media has opinions, emotions, propaganda.

And the great thing for newspapers is if you get the story—if you are known to get the story, like the Washington Post in the Watergate years—you will be read.

In early 2023, Len Downie and Andrew Heyward, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post and president of CBS News, respectively, wrote a paper about how modern journalists see standards within their professions, and it seemed to me not only confused but a kind of capitulation. There had been a “generational shift” in journalism, and the many editors and reporters they interviewed think objectivity is more or less “outmoded,” a false standard created by the white male patriarchy.

What was really striking was there was no mention, not one, of the thrill of the chase, of getting the story—of journalism itself. It was all about the guck and mess, not the mission, and made them look like news bureaucrats, joyless grinds, self-infatuated bores.

They were obsessed with who’s in the newsroom when their readers are obsessed with what comes out of the newsroom.

current ways of encouraging diversity seem to yield a great sameness in terms of class and viewpoint, and in any case diversity is a mission within a mission, it isn’t the mission itself, which is: Get the story, tell the story.

easy money. In an eye-opening new book, “What Went Wrong With Capitalism,” he makes a convincing case.

“When the price of borrowing money is zero,” Sharma told me this week, “the price of everything else goes bonkers.”

To take just one example: In 2010, as the era of ultralow and even negative interest rates was getting started, the median sale price for a house in the United States hovered around $220,000. By the start of this year, it was more than $420,000.

Nowhere has inflation (in the broad sense of the term) been more evident than in global financial markets. In 1980 they were worth a total of $12 trillion — equal to the size of the global economy at the time. After the pandemic, Sharma noted, those markets were worth $390 trillion, or around four times the world’s total gross domestic product.

But the worst hit is to capitalism itself: a pervasive and well-founded sense that the system is broken and rigged, particularly against the poor and the young. “A generation ago, it took the typical young family three years to save up to the down payment on a home,” Sharma observes in the book. “By 2019, thanks to no return on savings, it was taking 19 years.”

First, there was inflation in real and financial assets, followed by inflation in consumer prices, followed by higher financing costs as interest rates have risen to fight inflation

For wealthier Americans who own assets or had locked in low-interest mortgages, this hasn’t been a bad thing. But for Americans who rely heavily on credit, it’s been devastating.

Since investors “can’t make anything on government bonds when those yields are near zero,” he said, “they take bigger risks, buying assets that promise higher returns, from fine art to high-yield debt of zombie firms, which earn too little to make even interest payments and survive by taking on new debt.”

The hit to the overall economy comes in other forms, too: inefficient markets that no longer deploy money carefully to their most productive uses, large corporations swallowing smaller competitors and deploying lobbyists to bend government rules in their favor, the collapse of prudential economic practices.

“The most successful investment strategy of the 2010s,” Sharma writes, citing the podcaster Joshua Brown, “would have been to buy the most expensive tech stocks and then buy more as they rose in price and valuation.”

In theory, easy money should have broad benefits for regular people, from employees with 401(k)s to consumers taking out cheap mortgages. In practice, it has destroyed much of what used to make capitalism an engine of middle-class prosperity in favor of the old and very rich.

The social consequence of this is rage; the political consequence is populism.

“He promised to deconstruct the administrative state but ended up adding new rules at the same pace as his predecessor — 3,000 a year,” Sharma said of Trump. “His exercise of presidential authority to personal ends shattered historic precedents and did more to expand than restrict the scope of government. For all their policy differences, both leading U.S. candidates are committed and fearless statists, not friends of competitive capitalism.”

We are wandering in fog. And the precipice is closer than we think.

It was a revolutionary power that wanted to end capitalism everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union but all over Asia and Africa, North America, South America. They were gaining a lot of support in the decolonizing societies of Africa and Asia. America was not confident in the ability of its economy to have a permanent recovery from the Great Depression.

When I teach young people today, it’s hard for them to grasp the magnitude and the seriousness of the Cold War and how it shaped every aspect of American life. And the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to the United States.

What coheres to the New Deal is that the Republicans eventually submit to it. And that happens when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower beats Senator Robert A. Taft. So tell me a bit about the counterfactual there that you think almost happened. What led to Taft losing prominence in the Republican Party, and what might have happened if he hadn’t?

he was slow to get on the bandwagon in terms of the threat of China, the threat of Communist expansion, and that opened up an opportunity for another candidate, by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to enter the presidential race in 1952 and to present a very different vision.

He was a Republican in a classical sense — small central government, devolved power to the states, suspicious of foreign entanglements — believing that America was protected by the two vast oceans and thus did not need a strong standing army, did not have to be involved in world affairs. And he was opposed to the New Deal.

He thought it was a form of tyranny. It was going to lead to collectivism, Soviet style. And he was poised in the 1940s to roll back the New Deal, and he was looking forward to the postwar period after the war emergency had passed. Of course, the war emergency would require a very strong state to mobilize armed forces, to mobilize the economy for the sake of fighting a world war.

They needed foreign markets. America wasn’t sure whether it would have them. And the capitalist class in America was scared to death by the Communist threat, and it had to be met everywhere, and America mobilizes for the Cold War to contain Communism everywhere where it appeared. And that required a standing army in quasi-peacetime of a sort that America had never experienced before, and Taft was profoundly uncomfortable with this.

my counterfactual is that, absent the Cold War, the New Deal, which we now regard as such a juggernaut, would be seen as a momentary blip like so many other progressive moments in American politics. And we would see it as a blip and not for what it became, which was a political order that dominated politics for 30 years.

So there’s been this conventional story of the New Deal era, which is that the fear of Communism, the fear of being painted as soft on Communism or soft on socialism, leads progressives to trim their sails, moderates the sort of left flank of New Dealism. You argue that that story misses what’s happening on the right.

the imperative of fighting the Communists caused Republicans to make even larger concessions than the Democrats did.” What were those concessions?

Well, the biggest concession was agreeing to an extraordinary system of progressive taxation.

The highest marginal tax rate in the 1940s during World War II reached 91 percent, a level that is inconceivable in America of the 21st century. Eisenhower wins the election in 1952. He has both houses of Congress. And quite extraordinarily, Eisenhower maintains the 91 percent taxation rate

I think what mattered to him was the Cold War. The Cold War had to be fought on two fronts: It had to be fought militarily — international containment of Communism — and that required enormous expenditures on national defense, which meant not simply a conventional army but the nuclear arms race.

Eisenhower understood that in order to win the ideological struggle of the Cold War — which was not simply an American-Soviet struggle, but it was a global struggle to convince all the peoples of what was then called the Third World to come with the capitalist way, to come with the American way. In order for that to happen, America had to demonstrate that it could give its ordinary citizens a good life.

America had to prove that it had the better system, and that meant you could not return to unrestrained American capitalism — you had to regulate it in the public interest.

And the other aspect of that, which he appreciated, was that in the 1950s, it was not clear whether the Soviet Union or the United States could provide a better life for its average citizen. The Soviet Union was still doing quite well in the 1950s.

And that meant taking money from the rich and redistributing it, narrowing the inequality between rich and poor. It meant supporting powerful labor movement and not trying to roll back the Wagner Act, which the labor movement regarded as its Magna Carta, a very strong piece of federal legislation that gave it unambiguous rights to organize and obligated employers to bargain collectively with them.

He felt that this had to be the way that America went. Maintenance of Social Security — really all the key New Deal reforms — he ended up maintaining because he thought this would be a critically important instrument for convincing not just ordinary Americans but people around the world that this would prove the superiority of the American way.

That is why he acquiesced to the New Deal order.

It’s a pervasive recognition among America’s business class. You say, “The fear of Communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order.”

And you say it wasn’t just here; this was also true in many of the social democracies in Europe after World War II. Tell me a bit about that class compromise and the role the Cold War played in it.

It is often said that socialism was weaker in America than it was elsewhere. And in many respects, that has been true.

The corollary of that is that the American business class historically has been bigger, more powerful, more unencumbered than the business classes of other nations, especially in Western Europe among America’s industrial rivals. There was no shortage of labor protest in America, but rarely could labor achieve what it wanted to achieve because the resistance was extraordinary, the resistance was legal, it was extralegal.

The national security argument is crucial to getting large segments of the Republican Party on board. For them, the greatest threat, both internationally and domestically, was the Communist threat. And thus, they were willing to extend themselves beyond a point where they otherwise would have gone

I argue that it was the fear of the Soviet Union. And what did the fear of the Soviet Union represent? The expropriation of all corporate capital in the world. That was the Communist dream. And that was deeply felt. And it was felt not simply in a global setting. It was felt within the United States itself,

The history of industrial relations in America was very violent. The business class in America had a reputation of being very powerful and aggressive and unwilling to share its power with its antagonists. So what was it that got them to share that power?

it’s really remarkable to look at how closely the R. and D. state was designed and sold, in terms of its ability to keep America ahead for national defense. It has its roots in World War II, and it continues building much off that rhetoric.

so there’s this interesting way, I think we think of the New Deal in terms of Social Security. We think of it in terms of some of these individual programs. But it is this thoroughgoing expansion of the government into all kinds of areas of American life. And the thing that allows the Republican Party to get on board with a lot of that is this idea that if you don’t do that, well, the Soviets are going to do it

And the business class felt that it was in its interests to compromise with organized labor in a way that it had never done before. That was the grand compromise. It was symbolized in a treaty in Detroit between the three automobile makers, then among the biggest corporations in America, and the United Auto Workers — the Treaty of Detroit — purchasing labor peace by granting unions, good wages, good conditions, good pensions, good health care. Absent the threat of Communism, I think that grand compromise either would not have been arrived at or it would have been scuttled much sooner than it was.

they’re going to have the highways, or they’re going to have the technological or scientific superiority, they’re going to make it to the moon, etc., and then America is going to be left behind.

The vast education bills that are going to propel the tremendous growth of American universities in the 1960s and 1970s — which you mentioned about R. and D. — has a similar propulsion

the scale of this would not have reached the point that it did without getting a lot of Republicans on board. And the critical argument for them was national security, and a critical event was Sputnik, when Soviet Union shocks the United States by putting into orbit a satellite before the United States had done it.

that is a shocking moment: Oh, my God, America is falling behind. We must bend every muscle to beating the Soviet Union in every way, and that requires tremendous investments because of satellite technology and R. and D., and also that becomes the foundation of what is going to become the I.T. industry and the I.T. revolution — also a product of the Cold War.

How does that order end?

There are three factors that pull this order apart. The first is race, the second is Vietnam, and the third is the major economic recession of the 1970s.

Every political order has tensions within it in the United States. And the great contradiction in the New Deal Party of Franklin Roosevelt was the treatment of African Americans. In order to have a new political economy of a big state managing private capital in the public interest, Roosevelt had to get the South on board, and the South meant the white South.

And the entire promise of Western Europe prosperity and American university had been premised on the flow of unending supplies of very cheap Middle Eastern oil — most of them controlled by U.S. and British oil companies. And Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations in the 1970s say: No, these are our resources. We will determine how much is drawn out of the ground and the prices that they will be charged.

That was then complicated by Vietnam, a vastly unpopular war — inaugurated and presided over by Democratic presidents who were perceived by their own constituents to not be telling the truth about this awful quagmire.

It also inaugurated trade-offs between funding a war and funding Johnson’s beloved Great Society. Inflation began to take off.

the third element was profound changes in the international political economy. One of the reasons why America was able to enter its grand compromise between capital and labor and pay labor very high wages was that America had no serious industrial competition in the world from the ’40s to the ’60s.

Most of the industrialized world had been destroyed. The U.S. is actively helping the recovery of Western European economies, Japan, promoting development in Southeast Asia, and in the 1970s, these economies begin to challenge American supremacy economically. The symbol of that is the rise of Japanese car manufacturers

Roosevelt assented to that. But this was also a time, especially in the 1940s, when African Americans were migrating in huge numbers to the North, and they were becoming a constituency in the Democratic Party. This was the first point of crisis, and the Democratic Party found itself unable to contain the racial conflicts that exploded in the 1960s.

The quadrupling of oil prices leads to a profound economic crisis, along with competition from European nations against the United States. And this plunges the United States into a very unexpected and profound — and long — economic crisis known as stagflation. Inflation and unemployment are going up at the same time

None of the textbooks say this should be happening. The tools are no longer working. And it’s in this moment of crisis, the Democratic Party — this is the third strike against it — opens up an opportunity for alternative politics, an alternative party, an alternative plan for American political economy.

that sort of leaves out something that is happening among Democrats at this time. There’s a movement inside of liberalism. There’s the New Deal Democratic order, but you develop this New Left, and there is a movement of liberals against big government — young liberals for reasons of self-expression, for reasons of civil rights, for reasons of this feeling that they’re being fed into a bureaucracy and giant soulless organizations and eventually into the meat grinder of Vietnam

older liberals who are angry about the sort of reckless growth and the poisoning of streams and the building of highways through their communities and the sort of ticky-tacky rise of these suburbs. And this predates Reagan

Yes, the New Left erupts on university campuses in the 1960s, and the two primary issues in the beginning are race and Vietnam. But they also quite quickly develop a critique of the established order.

What was called at the time the system

what was the system? The system was large American corporations who were no longer under control. And one reason they were no longer under control is they were being aided and abetted by a large federal state that was supposed to manage them in the public interest

the system was meant to identify not just the corporations who were doing ill in America, but it was meant to identify a federal state that was birthed in the optimism of the New Deal and had been corrupted. So you have this fissure within the Democratic Party itself.

The other element of this is this profound search for personal freedom and autonomy that was intensely felt by members of the New Left.

The computers were these enormous machines, mainframes, and they were seen as stultifying to human creativity. The personal computer movement was born on — as part of the New Left. Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand imagined a personal computer that would be free of the IBM mainframe, free of big corporations, big corporate power — that it would be the authentic voice of only every individual who would be using that machine.

It was a profound expression of a desire for personal autonomy, individuality, expressiveness — unconstrained by larger structures. This cry, or cri de coeur, came from the left. It was a very powerful part of the New Lef

ne can see how it might suit the purposes of a rising neoliberal order because the rising neoliberal order was also intent on deregulating, freeing individuals from the grip of large institutions and allowing them to go their own way.

Neoliberals believe that the best economic program is one that frees capitalism from its shackles, that allows people to truck, barter and exchange goods, that gets the government out of economic life. And the only role for government is to ensure that markets can function freely and robustly. So it runs opposite to the New Deal. If the core principle of the New Deal was: Capitalism left to its own devices would destroy itself. The core principle of neoliberalism: Remove the shackles from capitalism. That will bring us the most productive and freest world we can imagine.

I have a shorthand for describing the neoliberal world that was envisioned by neoliberal thinkers and brought by policymakers into existence. It’s what I sometimes call the four freedoms of neoliberalism: freedom of movement, people; freedom of goods to move across national boundaries; the free flow of information; and the free flow of capital across all boundaries.

In a perfect neoliberal world, people, goods, information and capital are moving freely without constraint. If we can imagine a perfect world that The Wall Street Journal wants, this would be pretty close to it.

I do not want to suggest for a moment that the New Left intentionally created neoliberalism. But it turned out that the cries of freedom, personal freedom, personal autonomy that were emanating from them turned out to be very conducive to the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.

Jimmy Carter is an heir to suspicion of excessive federal power. But I also think he’s grasping at this moment a point of transition in the American economy and a sense that government policy as set forth in the New Deal was not working as well as it should have been. I think it mattered that he was an engineer and he was doing a lot of cost-benefit analysis: What kind of yield are we getting for the bucks that we’re investing?

so he’s open to this fertile moment of dissent. He’s channeling new thinkers and imagining a different Democratic Party that you are correct in saying precedes Clinton by 20 years. And the key figure in this movement is a man by the name of Ralph Nader.

I think as I evaluate the Carter presidency, I see a man really caught in the throes of a moment of transition, able to glimpse what is coming but unable to master what is coming

what defines his presidency, for me, is uncertainty, vacillation and, thus, failure. He’s a classical transitional figure, more controlled by than in charge of the moment.

Nader is a man of the left, but he doesn’t fit in the old left or the New Left.

We might call him a man of the consumer left. For him, the key figure in American society was the consumer, and he wanted to champion the consumer. And his contributions — in terms of automobile safety, occupational safety, food safety — were immens

But he also executed a profound shift in ideology, and I’m not even sure how aware he was of the consequences of what he was generating. Because in the process of making the consumer sovereign, he deflected attention, I would say, from what was and what remains the core relationship in a capitalist economy, and that is in the realm of production and the relations between employers and employees

And he was reluctant, in some respects, to challenge corporate power if corporate power was serving the consumer in a good way. He anticipates, in some respects, a profound shift in antitrust policy, and the key figure in this is going to be Robert Bork in the 1980s and 1990s.

It had been an article of faith in American history that no corporation should be allowed to get too large, because they would inevitably exercise power in an undemocratic fashion. So antitrust meant breaking up big corporations. Under Robert Bork, the question changed. Big corporate power was OK as long as it served the consumer with cheap goods.

he and his supporters and his organizations deserve a lot of credit for holding the government accountable and making vast improvements in a whole host of areas — regulating the environment and other matters, regulating food — and compelling government to do the service that it does.

But it also distracts from understanding part of that which powers the rise of large corporations and gives them the ability to control government and capture regulatory agencies. And I think the results of his attacks on government have been ambivalent, in terms of their consequences: in some respects really accelerating the process of delivering goods to the American people and American consumers that they want but, on the other hand, contributing to an atmosphere of thinking the government can’t really do much that’s right.

As you move toward Reagan, certainly part of Ronald Reagan’s appeal is his anti-Communism.So how do you describe the role of the Soviet Union in this period of political time?

The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 is one of the most stunning events, I think, of the 20th century and arguably much longer.

What were its consequences? First, it opened up the whole globe to capitalist penetration, to a degree that had not been available to capitalism since prior to World War I. And this generates a tremendous amount of belief and excitement and expansion and a good deal of arrogance and hubris within the capitalist citadel, which is the United States. So that’s one major consequence.

The second major consequence is: What does it mean for Communism no longer to exist as a threat? And what we begin to see in the 1990s is capital in America regaining the power, assurance, authority, belief in its unilateral power that it had, across the years of the Cold War, if not sacrificed, then moderated.

hat the Soviet Union had promised, what Communism had promised, was that private enterprise could be superseded by rational planning on the part of an enlightened set of rulers who could manage the economy in a way that benefited the masses in extraordinary ways.

That whole project fails, and it fails in a spectacular fashion.

Ronald Reagan had insisted that there was a continuum between Soviet government tyranny and what he regarded as New Deal government tyranny. They were on the same spectrum. One inevitably led to another. He and other Republicans, George H.W. Bush, the party as a whole take this as a great vindication of their core beliefs: that capitalism, which, under the New Deal, was sharply constrained, should be freed from constraint; its animal spirits allowed to soar; venture capitalists encouraged to go everywhere; investments made easy; lower taxation; let capitalists and capital drive America and the world economy, unconstrained by regulation.

these were the core ideas of neoliberals, which have been incubating for decades. And now suddenly these ideas seem to be vindicated. This is the moment of free market triumph.

it intersects in a very powerful way with the ongoing I.T. revolution, which is also bound up with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Because the Soviet Union was very hostile to the personal computer because it required a degree, at that time, of personal freedom that the Soviet Union wasn’t willing to allow what the I.T. revolution represented in the 1990s. And this is one of the reasons that Democrats get on board with it. What it represented was a belief that market perfection was now within human grasp, that there may have been a need for strong government in the past, because knowledge about markets was imperfect, it was limited, it took time for information about markets to travel, a lot of it was wrong, not enough of it was available instantaneously.

Well, suddenly in the 1990s, you have this dream, this vision of all economic knowledge in the world being available at your fingertips instantaneously and with a degree of depth and a range of statistics and figures that had been unimaginable, and a techno-utopianism takes hold

it’s the intersection of these two vectors — a sense that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicates free market thinking and the I.T. revolution — that allows people to think market perfection is within our grasp in ways it never has been before, that pours fuel on the fire of neoliberal free market thinking.

You described Bill Clinton as the Dwight D. Eisenhower of neoliberalism. What do you mean by that, and what are some of the, for you, core examples?

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, no Democratic U.S. president had been elected since 1976. Sixteen years is an eternity in electoral politics in the United States. And the question becomes: Will he roll back the Reagan revolution of the 1980s — massive efforts at deregulation — or will he follow a path that Dwight Eisenhower followed in the early ’50s?

Clinton, in the beginning, is a little uncertain about what he is going to do. And he has some ambitious proposals in his first two years — most notably a vast program of national health insurance, which crashes spectacularly.

And then he gets punished for that venture severely in the 1994 congressional elections, which bring Newt Gingrich and a very right-wing group of Republicans to power — the first time that Republicans control both houses of Congress since 1952. It’s a huge achievement for the Republicans

Clinton reads that moment as signifying that the older Democratic Party of the New Deal, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, really had to be reworked and revamped.

the only way for him to win re-election, and the only way for the Democrats to hold on to national power and to regain it in Congress in 1996, is for him to acquiesce to some core Reaganite beliefs. And at the center of the Reaganite project was deregulation — which is a code word for getting the government out of economic affairs or curtailing government power.

Archived clip of President Bill Clinton: We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.

so Clinton signs off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which effectively deregulates the burgeoning I.T. sector of the economy, makes possible an unregulated internet. He signs off on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

The Glass-Steagall Act had divided investment from commercial banking and had imposed a kind of regulation on Wall Street that brought an end to the crazy speculation that had brought about the Great Depression in the first place. It was a core principle of the New Deal

He does not seek to revive the Fairness Doctrine, in terms of regulating public media, which had guided successive Democratic administrations: the idea that if a news outlet put out one side of a debate on a policy matter, they were obligated to give the other side equal access.

He becomes an advocate of deregulation and, in some respects, pushes deregulation further than Reagan himself had been able to do. And in that sense, he acquiesces to some of the core principles of the Reagan revolution rather than seeking to roll them back, and it is in that respect that I think it’s appropriate to think of him as a Democratic Eisenhower.

what one remembers most about those battles is how much Clinton and Newt Gingrich hated each other’s guts. And they were seen as being polar opposites.

Clinton, the representative of a New Left America: cosmopolitan, open to the liberation movements, looking for new ways of creating a new and diverse America, embracing sexual liberations — his embrace of gay rights was somewhat limited but still significant. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, representing traditional Victorian America, wanting to reassert the patriarchal, heterosexual family, men at work, women in the home, religious.

one of the surprises, to me, in working on this book, because I remember those days very well, was the degree to which they worked together — on telecommunication, on reform of Wall Street, on welfare.

Clinton would claim, and his defenders would claim, that he was triangulating. He was trying to make the best of a bad deal, that popular opinion was running with free markets, was running with the Republicans. And to some extent, that was true.

the lesson that I draw from that moment is that one must refrain from always getting sucked into the daily battles over cultural issues.

“cosmopolitanism.” Something that was fresh, to me, in your book was this argument that in neoliberalism, you’re looking at more than just what we typically think of it as, which is an economic theory. You argue that there is a moral ethic that came alongside it, that is part of it. You talk about it as, at various times, cosmopolitan, individualistic. Tell me about it.

“Neoliberalism” is often defined, as you say, simply as being about markets and freeing them up

And “neoliberalism” is also defined as something that’s profoundly elitist in orientation, and it’s a device and an ideology used by elites to implant market ideology on a society in ways that deepens economic inequality and has the ability to strangle the democratic rights of the masses.

I also say that in America, it had a profound popular base. Reagan was an enormously successful president, and by “success,” I mean he was able to excite the imagination of majorities of American voters, and his core message was freedom.

half the time he meant freedom in terms of a free enterprise economy, but the other half of the time he meant freedom in terms of giving individuals the autonomy to go their own way.

he was not a fan of the liberation movements of the ’60s. But when Clinton becomes president in the 1990s, he has a profound connection to those liberation movements of the 1960s — to feminism, to sexual liberation, to civil rights.

he detects in a world in which everyone can travel to wherever they want to go. He valorizes immigrants. He valorizes diversity. These are all values that are profoundly compatible with the neoliberal vision. The opportunity to travel anywhere, to seek out personal adventure, to seek out different cultures.

This is a world that neoliberalism makes possible, and it’s a thrilling moment for many people who have the opportunity either to mix in the world of American cities, which have filled up with immigrants, or to travel abroad and experience other cultures.

A single global marketplace enables and encourages the kind of cosmopolitanism that people on the left-center side of the political spectrum in America have so deeply valued.

you locate the end of this era in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Why?

The promise of neoliberalism was that it would lift all boats. There was an acknowledgment about those who were freeing the energies of the market economy that it would probably increase inequality, the distance between the rich and the poor, but that the increase in inequality wouldn’t matter because the forces of production that would be unleashed on a global scale would be so powerful and so profound that everybody would have more and everybody would have a better life.

And what the 2008-9 financial crisis exposed was first a lot of the market freedom that neoliberalism had unleashed had led to corrupt banking and financial practices that had brought the world to the edge of financial abyss of unimaginable proportions. We ended up skirting that abyss — but not by a lot.

on the other hand, it brought into view a sense of how profoundly unequal the access to power was under the neoliberal regime. And here it’s not so much the financial crash itself but the nature of what governments did to promote recovery from the financial crash.

The object in the U.S. and also in Europe became to save the banks first. The culprits of this financial crisis were the ones who were bailed out first. If you were an American in 2009, 2010, 2011, who had assets in the stock market, you had pretty much recovered your position by 2011, 2012. If you were not one of those fortunate Americans and you were living week to week on a paycheck, your recovery did not occur.

You didn’t reach pre-2008 levels until 2016, 2017, 2018, and people understood, profoundly, the inequality of recovery, and it caused them to look with a much more scrutinizing gaze at the inequalities that neoliberalism had generated and how those inequalities have become so embedded in government policy toward the rich and the poor.

one of the identity crises in the Republican Party — one reason the Republican Party is not held together better — is that the Soviet Union was fundamental to what made its various factions stay in place. And it was also, I think, fundamental to what kept the Republican Party, which at its core has a real anti-government streak, committed in any way to real government.

hen I think there’s a sort of casting about for another enemy. I think they end up finding it after 9/11, or think they have, in what they try to turn into global jihadism, and then it falls apart — both as the antagonist and as a project and just feels to me like another part of the sort of wreckage of this period that opens a way for something new.

That new thing, I think, is more Donald Trump than it is anything else.

I think it discredits what had been a core project of the Republican Party, which was to spread market freedom everywhere. When I teach the Iraq war, I tell my 20-year-old students that this is the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, that it’s going to take the U.S. and the world 50 years to recover from. And it’s imbued with a neoliberal hubris that everyone in the world is simply waiting for the wonders of a market economy to unleash, to be unleashed upon them.

OK, if that era ended, what is being born?

there’s also new zones of agreement that have emerged. When I think about the way I covered politics in 2010, the legitimacy of elections could be taken for granted, and the legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act could not.

I think it’s useful in this moment of acute polarization to look at some of what lies beneath the polarization.

you’re right: On a series of issues there are intriguing conversations going on between Democrats and Republicans. China and tariffs are one area of agreement.

Ironically, immigration is becoming another area of agreement, regardless of who wins the election. One can imagine that the bill agreed to in the Senate late in 2023 could easily be implemented in some form.

here is an area of convergence on antitrust. Josh Hawley and Lena Khan seem to like each other and are finding some common ground on that. And the national security hawks in the G.O.P., people like Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell, have converged with what we might call the industrial policy doves in the Democratic Party — people like Bernie Sanders — on the importance of reshoring critical sectors of manufacturing and on improving in dramatic ways the nation’s infrastructure.

we can see here a new political economy taking shape, one that breaks with the central principle of neoliberalism, which is that markets must lead and the only role for a state is to facilitate markets.

another element of that, which has been crucial to the ideological reorientation, is a new understanding of the relationship of free markets to democracy.

for the longest period of time, Americans and Europeans were willing to give China a blank check on their democracy, or on their violations of democracy, because of the belief that if market freedom and capitalist practices set down deep enough roots in China that people with economic freedom would want to add to that political freedom and that democracy would begin to flourish and that the Communist Party that rules China would either have to profoundly reform itself or see itself ushered from the political stage.

It’s hard to convince people now of how deeply rooted that belief was. No one in the Democratic or Republican Parties believes that anymore, and that has intensified the fear along with this “Oh, my God” sense that China is not simply producing ordinary goods. It’s producing very sophisticated goods. It’s cornering markets on electrical vehicles and batteries and solar panels that seemed unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago. And it has had the effect of profoundly shocking both parties.

that has completely transformed and the word “protectionism” is not being used because it’s such a negative term, but the sentiments that lie behind protectionism, which might be described more positively as fair trade, are profoundly with us and shape conversation about U.S. economic relations with China every day of the week.

So the change has been profound in both parties, and one of the surprises of the Biden administration, although in retrospect, it’s not so surprising, given the Biden administration’s commitment to industrial policy, is the continuity we see between Trump tariffs and Biden tariffs.

hey’ve also come, in many cases, to the view that we should have much more industrial policy: the sense that if you leave it to the market, China might, by using the government to foster and supercharge certain kinds of market pursuits in China, just lap us. I think it’s become the dominant view in both parties.

I would agree with that, although I think the Republican Party is probably more deeply split on this than the Democratic Party is. The Democratic Party arranged another kind of grand compromise between the left, represented by Bernie Sanders, and the center, represented by Joe Biden, which led to a profound commitment symbolized by Build Back Better, a $5 trillion project that was going to insert industrial policy into the heart of government economic relations in a way that marks the Biden administration as profoundly different from his Democratic predecessors, both Obama and Clinton.

I think the Republican Party does not have agreement on that to the same degree. And one of the interesting things to watch if Trump wins is how that internal fight in the Republican Party works itself out.

So the sort of ideological strain in the Republican Party that JD Vance is part of, this sort of more populist dimension of it: What they see markets and, particularly, free trade and trade with China and immigration as having violated is the strength of communities and families. They look around, and they see broken communities, hollowed-out communities.They see families where the male breadwinners have lost their jobs and lost their earning power, and so they’re not getting married, and there are divorces, and there are too many single-parent families

on the Democratic side, I think there’s some of the same views. There’s a lot of broken communities.

a huge part participant in this ideologically is climate change: the sense that markets would happily make people rich by cooking the planet. The market doesn’t know if the money is coming from, the profit is coming from, burning oil or laying down solar panels. And so once again, that some goal actually does need to be set. Markets can maybe serve our goals. They can serve our vision, but they can’t be assumed to get what we want right in the world.

And so the sense on both parties that you actually do need to define goals and define vision and that, ultimately, that is going to have to happen through government setting policy and making decisions — the primacy of that kind of dialogue now, the degree to which the first conversation is: What are we trying to achieve? That does feel different.

that speaks to the decisive nature of the election of 2016, which we will see the longer we get from it as a decisive inflection point, as really marking the end of the neoliberal order

It doesn’t mean that suddenly there are no more advocates of strong free markets. I think one of the questions now and one of the key questions for the Republican Party is: Can they get serious about this?

It requires them to have a serious program of political economy in a party that has lacked direction on political economy for quite some time.

You describe the sort of neoliberal era as bringing this much more cosmopolitan view of ethics, of morals and of America’s relationship with the world — a more sort of urbanist view. There’s a lot of connections between what it means to live in New York and to live in London and to live in Tokyo and to live in Hong Kong.

JD Vance is a good example of this — are much more skeptical of the individualistic moral structure that dominated here and that Republicans, for all the influence of the Christian right, largely left untouched.

it’s actually very complicated in both parties because Donald Trump is himself such a poor vehicle for a return of traditionalist virtue. But there is something happening here, a sort of questioning of not just government policy and industrial policy but: Did all this individualism work? Is a world where kids are on their smartphones all the time and families are having this much trouble — and did we get something more fundamental, almost spiritual, wrong?

he concern about the moral fiber of the American people is not new in the Republican Party. That goes back to Jerry Falwell, to some of the ministers who became popular in the 1990s and calling America back to moral virtue and identifying enemies of God.

The new element is a sense that one has to connect that concern for this kind of morality to a serious program of political economy, that it’s not enough simply to call on people to be virtuous.

t serious conservatives have to find a way to rebuild the economic foundation that lies at the root of so much immorality and so much despair in American life.

If that develops enough of a base in the Republican Party, then there becomes an opportunity to talk with Democrats about that, about family welfare, about the welfare of children, about creating institutions, both economic and social, that have the capacity to sustain communities in ways in which they have not been sustained.

There are some issues that run so deeply on questions of morality between Republicans and Democrats, it’s hard to see how they can find common ground. And probably the most important of these is on the question of abortion and reproductive rights. And to the extent to which JD Vance and his associates take their stand on this issue, the possibilities for developing a conversation about morality with liberals and Democrats are going to be very, very slim, indeed.

the things that I think would have once been framed in terms of Christianity are now framed in terms of classical virtue. There’s a sort of rediscovery of the Stoics, not the early Christians.

there’s something here where — obviously, efforts to remoralize America are not new — but this idea that we have gone wrong in modernity by becoming so individualistic seems to be gathering a fair amount of force.

My read of it is that the Christian right is just too weak and not sufficiently appealing to be the vehicle for it. And so these other aesthetic and ancient containers are being searched for, but there is some kind of pushback happening

I think you see a lot of interest among people in both parties around some of these tech regulations. But I think of that as sort of fundamentally moralistic.

he Christian right has become somewhat contaminated by its blind adherence to Trump and by its too great a willingness to plunge into politics with any messenger, no matter what moral qualities they’re exhibiting.

That there is a movement among conservatives to step back from that and to ground their morality in something deeper, more widespread, something that can appeal to a greater cross-section of Americans, regardless of whether they go to church or not

If there is a moral awakening underway that is not tied to instrumentalizing churches for strictly partisan purposes, which is one way of describing evangelicalism in the last 20, 25 years, then that would be new.

Sarah Igo, “The Known Citizen” — very different kind of book — “A History of Privacy in Modern America.” We’re talking about morality, we’re talking about community, and of course, social media has put the question of privacy and what constitutes privacy and what’s private and what’s public — such an urgent question in understanding America. And she gives us a wonderful hundred-year overview of how Americans in almost every generation have redefined the boundary between private and public, and I found that extremely useful in thinking about where America is at in the 21st century.