"Tedium, Skill, Pleasure, Camaraderie, Exhaustion, Power, and Freedom"

"While so much of Montgomery's writings were focused on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the worlds of work he described have ended up having far more in common with the way we work today than even he might have anticipated. Many of the service-sector workers who have started to organize in recent years—healthcare workers, teachers, screenwriters, actors, and, yes, academics—are people who have strong professional and ethical codes for their work and have become accustomed to some measure of workplace autonomy. They see their freedom at work and their sense of power to do it well threatened by the arbitrary power of their bosses and the sometimes faceless forces of capital. The American workers of today come from many backgrounds and many parts of the world, their politics shaped in part by their experiences in their countries of origin, as was the case for the immigrant workers of the late 19th century whose stories Montgomery told. They are people spurred to action by a rebellion against the imperatives of a new age of scientific management and drawn together by their common plight. They are artists whose day jobs in game stores and coffee shops foster just enough passion and solidarity to try to organize a union. All of this might have been familiar to the iron molders, glass blowers, coopers, and others of the early years of the 20th century."

Kim Phillips-Fein at The Nation reviews A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance.

"After Five Years, We Have Learned Who He Really Is"

"Much has been made recently of this election as a referendum on the president not just as a politician with a set of policies, but as a person. This list—compiled using excerpts from my pieces and my interviews with sources who have known him most of his life—is the distillation of his worldview, a condensed sketch of Donald Trump as a man. And no matter what happens, and whether or not he retains his grip on the White House or decamps in defeat to Mar-a-Lago, these truths will continue to guide his behavior—and the way we perceive it."

Michael Kruse at Politico provides "45 Self-Evident Truths About Donald Trump."

And Michael Krues discusses "The Swamp That Birthed Trump."

And David Rothkopf at USA Today says that Trump "may well be the worst of all those who have betrayed America in the past." 

"This Was Not How It Was All Supposed to Turn Out"

"For many years, Silicon Valley and the machines that came out of it were presented as personally, economically, and socially transformative, agents of revolution at both the level of the individual and the whole social order. They were democratizing, uncontrolled, anarchic, and new. Most of all, they were supposed to be fun—to open up a space of play and freedom. How is it, then, that just a few decades in, we find ourselves trapped in a dreary spectacle that seems to replicate the old patterns of exploitation and dominion in almost every sphere, but with a creepy new intimacy?"

Kim Phillips-Fein at The New Republic reviews Margaret O'Mara's The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.

"The Idea of the University as a Hotbed of Revolution Exists Only in the Imagination of the Right"

"There has long been a tension between conservatism and intellectual life, a rift between the right and higher education; as Hofstadter wrote in 1963, 'In a certain sense the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: Intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question.' That may be inevitable. But what is less certain is the extent to which the right-wing critique resonates with the broader society. As participants in the maintenance of economic privilege, universities open themselves up to these attacks from the right and also undercut their own ability to nurture true intellectual freedom. Were universities to do more to actively challenge the harsh inequality that governs so much of our society, the critique of the right would be far less likely to catch on."

Kim Phillips-Fein at The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses "conservative hostility toward universities."

"There Is Nothing 'Mere' About Symbols"

"He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center—and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. ('As a general proposition, it's hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are,' Obama once said to me.)
"But if the president's inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism, it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing."

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic reviews the Obama era.

And Eric Bates at The New Republic leads a roundtable discussion of the soon-to-be-former president.

"Those Who Recently Dreamed of World Power Now Despair of Governing the City of New York"

"The 1970s—in New York and around the country—saw the dawning of a new era of austerity, as the earlier assumptions of economic growth faded. The contraction of the state also meant the shrinking of the social imagination. The stern dictums about the necessary limits of political dreams contrasted sharply with the new populist utopianism of the free market, where anything might be possible. We still live today in a society defined by these two poles: the harsh limits of the political sphere and the delusional boundlessness of the market. Although it wasn’t solely responsible for bringing the city into this new age, New York’s fiscal crisis marks the boundary between the past and the present we still live in today."

Kim Phillips-Fein in The Nation connects New York City's fiscal crisis of the 1970s to the city of today.

"Occupying Public Institutions Was a Way of Reclaiming Them"

"But today, as people around the world face the contraction of the public sector, the demonstrations of that time seem oddly prophetic, a first salvo of protest against the age of austerity we still live in today. Then as now, people protested the power of a small economic elite to decide the fate of cities and even nations. Then as now, the damage done by cutbacks falls most heavily on those who do not have the vast wealth needed to retreat into a private sphere."

Kim Phillips-Fein in The New York Times compares New York in the mid-1970s to today's protests.

"A Satirist of Economics Almost as Much as a Practitioner"

"But while some of the particulars of his vision may seem out of place today, his argument that there is something absurd about a society that can afford tremendous mansions, private jets and elite colleges while cities close firehouses, shut down bus lines and debate whether their crumbling public schools can even stay open five days a week seems as relevant as ever. So does his willingness to poke fun at those who recite platitudes about the market."

Kim Phillips-Fein in The Nation reviews four republished books by John Kenneth Galbraith.

Visible Hands

"Only the fat cats change—not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government 'handouts' to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of 'a takeover' of America in which Communists would 'infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.' That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today."

Inspired by Jane Mayer's New Yorker article, Frank Rich in The New York Times exposes the right-wing activism of the billionaire Koch brothers.

Right Turns

"I have experienced similar reactions throughout my academic career. In the early 1980s, I helped edit the neoconservative public-policy journal The Public Interest, and though I haven't considered myself a conservative for at least two decades, many academics I meet are astonished to learn this little fact. Some are rendered speechless. Others ask, 'Are you still a neoconservative?,' by which they mean, 'Are you still beating your country?'"

Mark Lilla in The Chronicle Review argues that university faculties lack intellectual diversity.


"I will pass over Lilla himself, who I would certainly count as conservative in this sense. Allan Silver, a professor of sociology and a New Deal liberal, is a stalwart defender of the core curriculum, a proponent of returning ROTC to campus, and an uncompromising foe of ethnic, racial, and gender preferences. Alan Brinkley, provost and a professor of history who has written brilliantly about American conservatism, is someone to whom conservative graduate students gravitate. Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist whom I suppose would be considered a liberal, has nevertheless engaged in ferocious debates with his colleagues Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs in defense of globalization, and in my view clearly has the better argument. One can be culturally conservative while being politically liberal. The liberals I mentioned above are the Tories of higher education, defending academe's basic values against the blight of political correctness."

Bruce L.R. Smith and Alan Wolfe respond.


"But this narrative of conservative defeat and retrenchment--tightly focused on backlash politics and movement conservatism--is only one part of the story. The recent turn in scholarship toward economic change offers another way of understanding the fate of the movement. For despite the financial crisis of the past year, the faith in laissez-faire that conservatives promoted throughout the postwar period continues to exercise a deep hold on American politics."

And Kim Phillips-Fein in The Nation provides a historiography.


"This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a 'conservative' media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint."

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker describes where the Right has gone wrong.


"Despite what Sam Tanenhaus says, conservatism is not dead. Rather, it's undead."

And Rod Dreher in The Dallas Morning News denounces the rise of "Zombie conservatives."


"What all of this has in common is a rejection of the mores of American democracy. There were some things that people on the left and right used to agree on. You might not like it if Congress passes the president's agenda, but the law is the law. You might not like the president himself, but you're not going to make a big stink about it when he does things like pardon turkeys on Thanksgiving or tell kids to study hard and stay in school. You might not want to vote for what the president is arguing for, but if you're a member of Congress you don't heckle him like you're a drunken frat boy in a comedy club."

Paul Waldman in The American Prospect describes the threat.


"At the same time, with the implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call "producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers--laborers, small businessmen and the like--and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy--they are both financiers and welfare bums--and their larceny is enabled by the government they control."

Also in The American Prospect, Michelle Goldberg discusses the return of white racial politics.


"Like many other followers of Rand, John Allison of BB&T has taken to claiming vindication in the convulsive events of the past year. 'Rand predicted what would happen fifty years ago,' he told The New York Times. 'It’s a nightmare for anyone who supports individual rights.' If Rand was truly right, of course, then Allison will flee his home and join his fellow supermen in some distant capitalist nirvana. So perhaps the economic crisis may bring some good after all."

Jonathan Chait in The New Republic uses the publication of two biographies of Ayn Rand to explain her pernicious influence on today's conservatives.


"When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place."

Alexander Zaitchik in Salon profiles Glenn Beck's favorite writer.


"It's difficult enough to write about McCarthyites and Goldwaterites with the proper proportions of imaginative sympathy and moral judgment. But when we're caught in the throes of our own contentious moment, it hardly seems possible to separate the political need to fight irrationalism and zealotry from the psycho-sociological project of distilling the motives of extremists. It's natural, even necessary, to try to make sense of a movement that appears—to many of us, at any rate—delusional. But the most that history, or historians, can do is what Hofstadter did in the first half of the 'Paranoid Style': point to the many antecedents of today's right-wing fantasies and, by putting them in historical context, making them more comprehensible and perhaps less fearsome."

David Greenberg in Slate explains the roots of Richard Hofstadter's investigation of the far right.

Low Rent, High-Rise, Y'all

"Once in office, Weaver presided over a great expansion of public housing. More affordable housing was built under the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 than at any other time in the nation's history, and Weaver's proposals were the ones the administration followed. A national fair-housing law was finally passed in 1968, with Weaver lobbying Congress to support it. Yet these were also the years of the riots in cities like Detroit, of deepening poverty and deindustrialization. Black radicals criticized the housing projects that Weaver helped to build as simply reconstituting the ghetto in new ways. They rejected his quest for a race-blind meritocracy; in a July 1967 column, Jimmy Breslin quoted one such activist: 'You know what everybody says about Weaver? They say, "He's light and bright and damn near white."' Weaver was deeply troubled by the riots, which he argued represented a deepening 'community despair and hopelessness' that could only be undone by concerted government action. But the Great Society lasted just a few years, razed by the politics of backlash as white city dwellers reacted to the housing projects rising in their neighborhoods by fleeing the cities in a panic about living next door to blacks. The public housing projects that Weaver had once viewed as the beachhead of a better society came instead to more closely resemble holding pens for the poorest of the poor, people left out of any social compact whatsoever. The projects became exactly what Weaver had once wanted above all to avoid: a second ghetto. Not only the vision of public housing but the buildings themselves seemed to have failed."

In The Nation, Kim Phillips-Fein reviews Wendell Pritchett's Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City.

Disaster Logic

"It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein's mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism. Nor are the interests of corporations always, or even usually, served by war."

Jonathan Chait reviews Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism in The New Republic.

"An Emergency at Least Equal to That of War"

"But in the end there is little historical evidence for her larger claim that the New Deal made the Depression worse and that without it, the crisis would simply have passed. After all, the catastrophe of the 1930s was halted not by private industry but by the massive public spending generated to fight World War II--an outlay of government resources far greater than anything Roosevelt had initially imagined. The fall in unemployment during the buildup to the war seemed proof of the central principles of Keynesianism: the private economy cannot always spend its way out of a depression; sometimes public spending is needed to stimulate growth. The experience of the war seemed to validate the New Deal, not disprove it. If anything, it suggested that Roosevelt should have gone further--that the New Deal was compromised by his timidity, not his radicalism. Does Shlaes seriously think that the Depression would have melted away if only Calvin Coolidge had been President? Was Alcoholics Anonymous really an alternative to the New Deal?"

Kim Phillips-Fein reviews Amity Shlaes's The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression in The Nation.

As does Eric Rauchway in Slate.

Dealer's Choice

"Moreover, if conservatives aren't the only politicians to have embraced the free market, the victories of free-market economics can't be explained solely in terms of the opportunistic attempts of leaders to link conservative economic and social agendas. The beliefs of social scientists to the contrary, there is nothing simple or automatic about how people come to define their economic interests. Especially in the absence of organizations like labor unions, which can offer an alternative understanding of how the economy operates, it should not be surprising that the vision of the marketplace itself exercises a certain deep appeal, even for people who do not benefit from the policies it prescribes. After all, the market model suggests that individuals exercise tremendous power over their own destinies. It argues that people can determine their economic fates. It provides a way of connecting one's actions to the larger outcome of social and historical processes. These ideas have their own logic and their own attraction, quite aside from the politics of cultural backlash with which they are frequently joined."

In The Nation, Kim Phillips-Fein reviews Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal and Jonathan Chait's The Big Con.