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Nobody ever asks if maybe school can’t do the things we’re demanding it do. I’m not asking for a sympathetic hearing for those ideas; I’m asking for any hearing of those ideas. But the New York Times isn’t going to run any pieces about eduskepticism, even though that domain desperately needs new ideas and radical rethinking.

The trouble remains, though - and this is the hell I live in - that it’s still really hard to spark big conversations across the discourse from a newsletter.

I can’t force a topic into people’s brains. That is a privilege that traditional media still hoards.

I can tell you that, in general, when a high-falutin publication throws out an automated form as their submission system, it’s a way to tell prospective freelancers to fuck off. Which is still, somehow, less insulting than what’s going on at Harper’s these days, where the directive is to send your submissions in a paper letter. In 2024. It’s not just that this is obviously far more tedious for the writer, it can only be more work for the editors and the publication as well. But apparently the need to signal that they don’t want submissions, while maintaining the pretense of not being entirely closed off to the rest of us, is sufficient that they’ll pretend that email does not exist. New York’s contact page, which once had submission instructions, no longer does. (But if you want to “pitch a store opening,” you’re in luck.) Never fear, though - they too have somewhere you can send a physical letter.

I had a pitch for Harper’s, a good one. They have an attractive magazine-out-of-time quality, a remove from the hustle that I quite like. It happens that they published maybe my favorite piece among all I’ve ever published. But I couldn’t figure out how to pitch without buying a printer, and anyway I’m confident that sending the physical letter to the listed address would have had precisely the same effect as leaving it at Lewis Lapham’s grave. So I gave up. When someone says “fuck off” as clearly they’re saying it, it’s best to take them seriously.

What is the advantage? It’s like an NFL coach with a shitty team telling the beat reporters he thinks the solutions are already on the roster, I can’t decide if they really believe it or not. Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that all the money flowing into the hands of grubby little outsiders like me is a symbol of a broad discontent within the audience? Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that if nothing else this is useful market information, all of this steady drip drip drip of Lorenzians and Yglesiaii and Nates Silver, Bronze, and Gold? Tina Brown! When Tina Brown feels comfortable sitting at the freakazoid table at the high school cafeteria, perhaps it’s time to ask if maybe there’s some reason why, that maybe the business has grown myopic and scared, that it’s responded to financial difficulties by crawling into a defensive crouch. At exactly the time when the public’s appetite for outsider voices has been proven, quantitatively and with dollars attached, the usual suspects have built the walls higher around their pages, making freelance contribution even harder. Why? For who?

Democrats are going through the same process Republicans did over the 2010s when they realized that the cultural power centers of America are hostile to their political vision. Democrats are realizing that market power is political power.

Biden put both factions in his government

Senator Chuck Schumer’s daughter works for Amazon, so did former Obama spokesperson Jay Carney, as does Kamala Harris’ close advisor Karen Dunn. Bezos himself gave $100 million apiece to Democratic validators Van Jones and Chef Jose Andre, purely as gifts. He also donated $100 million to Barack Obama’s Presidential library. Much of the social issue-oriented infrastructure of the party, the so-called “woke” faction, is financed by corporate money from dominant firms.

Amazon is also integrated into the Democratic party itself.

Powerful Democratic insiders like former Clinton administration official Jamie Gorelick are on the board of Amazon. Gorelick is a partner at Wilmer Hale, and when Merrick Garland was nominated to become Attorney General, she put up a note on her firm biography about how close she is with him, going all the way back to undergraduate days at Harvard.

it’s not a coincidence that at this same time, there is an upsurge of support for Khan and this vision of the party.

Brian Schatz, a very normie Democratic Senator, expressed a new consensus within the party when he said, “Vote against the oligarchs. Vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.” It’s rare to associate the Democrats with fighting oligarchy. Yet, as Democratic pundit Josh Marshall put it about the role of billionaires in public life, now “you can’t not see it.”

While his Federal Trade Commission is suing Amazon for antitrust violations, that has not affected most administration and government officials, who largely admires the firm. For instance, the Biden Small Business Administration is steering business to Amazon, the NSA is giving billions in classified contracts to AWS, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is lobbying for Amazon in Europe, and the new AI safety part of the government has Amazon as a member.

now Democrats are being forced to see that billionaires are less interested in courage than, well, money. It seems like an obvious insight, but there we go.

Moreover, powerful executives are announcing they will use their power over core social infrastructure, and fuse it with the state. In fact, they may be preparing to do just that.

The answer to this crisis of democracy, and yes it's a crisis, is very simple. The government needs to take apart these giant firms that are too big to manage

Who is doing that? Well, it turns that Democrats actually have a faction that is trying, in the form of anti-monopolists, like FTC Chair Lina Khan, and Antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter

Others felt that billionaires were so powerful they were unafraid of political retribution from Donald Trump, and therefore, natural allies

now we all see the truth that Louis Brandeis put forward a hundred years ago: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both."

I don’t know what will happen from here, but something fundamental in the party view changed this week. And there are a lot of people within the party who are going to fight this shift, and whose institutional loyalties are going to be put under real strain.

no longer can anyone seriously argue that the only way to think of Amazon, or any big business, is as a purely economic actor. Jeff Bezos just forced the Democrats to see that economic power is political power.

Prior to this moment, many party elites thought that the superrich, or big business, didn’t matter as much as local elites, like car dealers or trade associations.

Despite his fears of Trump’s fascist tendencies, Hughes found the reality of the Trump administration much less dramatic. “He governed a lot more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies would be seen as not right-wing enough.” He’s learned, he told me, to “discount” much of what Trump says: “It’s basically just his businessman instinct. He literally talks about this in The Art of the Deal. You start by saying something crazy, and then you walk your way back to a point of leverage in negotiations.”

Harris, whom he sees as aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and “deeply destructive to the long-term flourishing of the country.” When it comes to foreign policy, “I haven’t seen even a 10-second clip of her impressing me by analyzing anything going on in the world related to geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so forth,” he told me. “I have basically zero signals of her competency as a manager or executive.”

Foster is most concerned about “the excesses of the culture war” and how, “when they become a part of the bureaucracy, whether it’s on a university campus or within the federal government, [they] can actually become weirdly totalitarian,” he told me. He thinks the left is blind to the fact that it, too, has “a profound capacity for the abuse of power.” He pointed, among other examples, to “gender issues,” the movement to defund the police, and the criminal prosecutions of Trump, which, he said, have “a political taint” to them.

Many of the concerns Hughes and Foster raise are compelling. And yet, to a disconcerting degree, it all seems beside the point—as though we are debating the temperature of the water and the features and specifications of the life rafts as our proverbial ship is sinking.

Both Hughes and Foster were signatories on the Harper’s letter of 2020, a bipartisan statement against creeping illiberalism. (I was one of the writers of the letter.) It has frequently been misrepresented by its critics as an anti-woke document, but it began with an explicit condemnation of Donald Trump, “who represents a real threat to democracy.” As Mark Lilla, one of the letter’s other writers, noted recently in The New York Review of Books, this election is not ultimately about change or policy, or even about blocking Trump; “it is more fundamentally about preserving our liberal democratic political institutions.”

If we cannot manage that, with whatever flawed custodian we have been provided, we may look back on these nuanced policy discussions as an extravagant luxury that we squandered.

If she loses, a whole lot of excuses we’ve been making for America are going to dry up, right quick.

Over the last 10 years we have all, at one point or another, manufactured excuses for why Donald Trump happened.

If Donald Trump happened because a significant percentage of our fellow citizens wanted him, and all his works, and all his empty promises, then there was nothing to be done. If 47 percent of the country wants fascism, then eventually it will get fascism. You can’t simply dissolve the people and elect another.

So we looked for rationalizations to explain why so many Americans were voting for Trump in the hopes that, if we addressed these excuses, they would stop choosing him.

Let’s take a tour through our history of rationalization.

Bob Woodward, who is as jaded and cynical as anyone in Washington, had this to say about Biden in the epilogue to his new book, War:

Joe Biden passed bipartisan gun reform. The CHIPS Act. The Inflation Reduction Act. He passed as much major, bipartisan legislation as any president in a generation.

People hate partisanship and just want a president who gets things done.

War, this book on Biden, however, gave me what was often a real-time, inside-the-room look at genuine good faith efforts by the president and his core national security team to wield the levers of executive power responsibly and in the national interest. At the center of good governance, as evidenced by this book, is teamwork.

The legacy of the Biden presidency will be the core national security team that he built and kept in place for nearly four years. They brought decades of experience as well as basic human decency.

As this book shows, there were failures and mistakes. The full story is, of course, not yet known. But based on the evidence available now, I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.

And yet Biden gets approximately zero credit from voters for any of this.

Voters just thought Biden was too old to do the job. They had genuine concerns about his age and mental ability.

And yet suddenly age is . . . not a concern for voters.

Meanwhile, Trump is now the oldest person to ever run for president. He is manifestly in bad physical shape—just look at his pallor. Mentally he is so unbalanced that he does stuff like this and talks like this.

Democrats took these concerns so seriously that the president stepped aside and blessed someone else to run in his stead. This action was without precedent.The president’s replacement was youthful, but with deep experience in elected office and the executive branch.

Voters don’t want a California-style progressive elitist.

This was a worry when Harris first took the mantle. But she positioned herself from the start as a center-left moderate: a self-professed capitalist who loves small businesses, is a champion of law and order, and a proponent of American military might.

Her running mate is a blue-collar guy from a populist Midwestern political tradition. They’re both gun owners.And for some reason, none of this seems to be resonating with the people who worried that she was too “progressive.”

nflation. Everything is about inflation. Why can’t you understand that?Inflation is down to 2.4 percent, has been falling for five straight months, and inflation-adjusted wages are up 4.3 percent over the last two years.I’m sorry, but those are just the facts. Science.

People don’t care about fancy economic indicators. They judge the economy on what they see in their real lives. They judge the economy based on the price of gas.

Gas is currently at near its lowest price since 2021. It is roughly the same price it was in 2018. (During the Greatest Economy in History.) And because these are nominal prices—meaning, not adjusted for inflation—the real-dollar cost of gas right now is quite cheap.

Sorry, the price of gas doesn’t matter. It’s the price of eggs that tells people how the economy is doing.

Hold on. In January 2023, egg prices skyrocketed to $4.82 a dozen. That’s when everyone said the price of eggs drove voter sentiment. But six months later the price of eggs was down to $2.09 a dozen and everyone said the price of eggs didn’t matter any more.

Well, egg prices are back up—they’re $3.82 a dozen today. So eggs are how people evaluate macroeconomic conditions again.The USDA publishes a list of consumer prices for various grocery items. Here’s a tidbit from the September 2024 report:From July to August 2024, prices increased for seven food-at-home categories, declined for six categories, and remained steady for two categories.It would be helpful to know which prices will determine how voters feel about the economy?

In 2016, voters didn’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton because she had too much baggage. She’d been a despised figure in American politics for 20 years. Voters wanted a fresh face with high favorables.

I didn’t realize we were going to relitigate 2016, but fine. Kamala Harris is a fresh face who is also completely vetted—she’s been an attorney general, a senator, and vice president. And her favorable rating is net positive! The general public likes her!So she should win this election, right?

Today, there aren’t any excuses left. Something like 47 percent of American voters have seen Trump, understood what he was, and wanted it.

Win or lose, that’s the fundamental reality this race has laid bare. The next era in American politics will be defined by how we grapple with the implications of this reality for civic life and self-governance.

But while those are huge numbers by any measure (world GDP is around $100 trillion), they aren’t big enough to motivate most leaders to justify mitigation, which will also cost a whole lot of money.

To put it in terms the authors use, the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act will cost Americans roughly $80 per ton of carbon emissions avoided, and while each ton not pumped into the atmosphere would save the world $200 as a whole, it would only save Americans about $40 of that $200, making it feel to some altruistic but not self-evident in purely economic terms.

In their new paper, economists Adrien Bilal of Harvard and Diego Känzig of Northwestern take a fresh look at the data

They show that the social cost of carbon is likely far bigger — six times bigger — than previously estimated: losses of more than $1,000 per ton, or around 12 percent of world GDP per degree of warming.

— roughly equivalent to the economic drag on big economies if they were permanently at war.

Suddenly, that $80 Americans are spending on reducing one ton of carbon emissions is netting them $200 or so in U.S. economic activity.

Bilal and Känzig argue that it’s very much worth it for countries of means to spend the money now to avoid much greater costs down the line

the potential losses are so vast it makes sense for these countries to go ahead and act on their own to avoid climate change losses, even if other nations do nothing.

What’s different about your methodology and how did it lead you to the numbers you've come up with?

Adrien Bilal: So virtually all of the previous work that's been done on the subject has relied on comparisons of different countries that heat up or cool down at different points in time. The U.K. gets a little hotter in one year, and then Germany stays cool. And then you look at how GDP in the U.K. evolves following that change in temperature.

that generally gives you numbers in the vicinity of $150 per ton of carbon emitted and a 2 percent decline in GDP per degree Celsius in warming

we think that is quite different from what climate change is actually doing to the world. It's not only that the U.K. is going to heat up a little more than Germany, but the whole world is heating up because of climate change. And, in particular, oceans are also heating up. And when the whole planet warms, that has potentially really different implications for the climate system, increased frequency of extreme weather events that then have big local impacts. 

that's actually what geoscientists have been telling us for a long time, but it simply hadn't percolated into economics. And so we took that perspective very seriously and thought, "Well, what happens when we basically compare years where the world is very hot to years where the world is cooler?" And that gives you a much larger effect of climate change on the economy.

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.