"Cold War II"

"Great powers, then, must not only have substantial populations and resources, but must also use them to support a world-class national industrial base in a prolonged and sustainable way. Neither state socialist crash programs that peter out over time nor bubbles and booms inflated by central banks in liberal market economies are adequate. To date in the industrial era, developmental states, both authoritarian like present-day China and democratic like the midcentury United States, have been more successful than communist regimes and free market liberal regimes."

Michael Lind at Tablet argues that we "are in a new era of global conflict."

"Elections Are Usually a Contest Between People"

"'That being said, we still have to do the people's business. … And there are other societal challenges that get pushed to the side, at least temporarily, while this recall issue is debated. So all I'm saying is once this election is over, I think people of good intentions in both Republican and Democrat parties ought to sit down and see if they can't agree to reduce the questions on the ballot to just one question.'"

Emily Hoeven at CalMatters interviews former governor Gray Davis about California's recall election.

David Edward Burke at Washington Monthly calls for an overhaul of the recall process.

And Steve Lopez at the Los Angeles Times says that the recall campaign has ignored California's biggest problem: income inequality.

"Trump's Lies Will Linger for Years, Poisoning the Atmosphere Like Radioactive Dust"

"America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional. No number from Trump's years in power will be more lastingly destructive than his 25,000 false or misleading statements. Super-spread by social media and cable news, they contaminated the minds of tens of millions of people." 

George Packer at The Atlantic writes "A Political Obituary for Donald Trump."

And Jonathan Russo at Talking Points Memo defines poor Trump supporters as the lumpenproletariat.

"May Rest as Much with a Country's Politicians as They Do with 'Street-Level' Actors"

"'If you had a dad who was down the pit or in a steel mill, you were expected to follow him into that occupation, and if his pit or mill closed, that pulled the economic rug from under you,' Farrall said. 'So the process of deindustrialisation took away young people's hope and aspirations when they were young by making their parents unemployed and hitting their own job prospects. That could lead to them turning to drugs and crime.'"

Jamie Doward at The Guardian reports that "academics claim that their research shows how government policies during the 1980s played a part in kick-starting offending careers."

"This Goes Back to Hamilton, the Daddy of It All"

"'From its very beginning, the United States again and again enacted policies to shift its economy onto a new growth direction—toward a new economic space of opportunity,' argues Concrete Economics, a book by Cohen and DeLong that appears on the reading list. 'Yes, there was an "invisible hand" … But the invisible hand was repeatedly lifted at the elbow by the government, and re-placed in a new position from where it could go on to perform its magic.'"

Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic portrays the Green New Deal as "a leftist resurrection of federal industrial policy."

"Unions Provide a Mediating Function"

"Pondering the working-class grievances that helped elevate Donald Trump to the Oval Office in 2016, I often ask myself: How different might the political climate have been if 25 percent of the private sector were unionized, as was the case in the early 1970s? If more working-class Americans felt listened to and represented? If modernized unions could buffer economic shocks and improve productivity? The decline of the business model of old-style industrial unions may have been economically inevitable, but the lack of any new model to replace it has been socially calamitous. Unions will not be easy to fix, but allowing them to innovate would be a first step, and possibly also a last chance."

Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic makes the "Conservative Case for Unions."

And Stacy Mitchell pushes for a revival of interest in antimonopoly.

While Peter Beinart and Franklin Foer explore problems for Democrats regarding immigration and populism.

"The Very Thing That Is Driving Our Economy Forward Is Creating These Divides"

"A bigger, denser city in general increases the rate of innovation, increases the rate of start-up, increases the rate of productivity. At the same time, the bigger, the denser, the more knowledge-intensive increases the rate of inequality, increases the rate of economic segregation, makes housing less affordable. So it's a two-sided monster."

Paul Solman on the PBS Newshour talks with Richard Florida about "winner-take-all urbanism."

"There Appears to Be a Growing Consensus that Obama-Trump Voters Were a Much Bigger Problem for Clinton than Superior Republican Turnout"

"So: It was the Obama-Trump voters, in the Rust Belt, with the economic anxiety. Disaffected workers in deindustrialized America, who believed that Trump was a genuine populist—and sympathized with Bernie Sanders's critique of the Democratic Party—cost Clinton the election.

"But then, so did insufficient Democratic turnout."

 

Eric Levitz at New York looks at 2016 post-mortems.

"The fact that she was in a position to lose because of the Comey letter, ah, is something that deserves some introspection."

And David Axelrod adds his on CNN.

"The Utterly Predictable Fruit of the Democratic Party's Neoliberal Turn"

"The way I see it, the critical test for our system will come late next year. The billionaire great-maker in the Oval Office has already turned out to be an incompetent buffoon, and his greatest failures are no doubt yet to come. By November 2018, the winds of change will be in full hurricane shriek, and unless the Democratic Party's incompetence is even more profound than it appears to be, the D's will sweep to some sort of mid-term triumph.
But when 'the resistance' comes into power in Washington, it will face this question: this time around, will Democrats serve the 80% of us that this modern economy has left behind? Will they stand up to the money power? Or will we be invited once again to feast on inspiring speeches while the tasteful gentlemen from JP Morgan foreclose on the world?"

Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes that "Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November."

"That's All Being Pulled from the Grasp of the Workers"

"'It’s what I call the de-industrial revolution,' Nottage, a Pulitzer winner and onetime MacArthur grant recipient, says of what’s been taking place in towns like Reading, 'shifting from a manufacturing base to a more service-oriented, white-collar workforce. All of those people invested in those manufacturing jobs found themselves completely upended.'"
"'When you rip that out from under the country, how do we redefine ourselves?'"

Daryl H. Miller in the Los Angeles Times talks with Lynn Nottage about her new play, Sweat.

"The Ideas He's Moving to the Mainstream Are All Very Dangerous Ideas"

"I believe that there's a price being paid for not addressing the real cost of the deindustrialization and globalization that has occurred in the United States for the past 35, 40 years, and how it's deeply affected people's lives and deeply hurt people to where they want someone who says they have a solution. And Trump's thing is simple answers to very complex problems. Fallacious answers to very complex problems. And that can be very appealing."

Brian Hiatt interviews Bruce Springsteen in Rolling Stone.

"This Is Not the Country It Was Yesterday"

"The risk is that Britain becomes a kind of offshore oddity, quirky but irrelevant–shut out of the action of its neighbouring continent. That shift will be felt first by the City of London: perhaps few will shed any tears for them, even if financial services are–or used to be–one of this country's biggest employers. But eventually that new view of Britain could percolate through, affecting our creative industries, our tourism and eventually our place in the world."

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian reacts to the Brexit.

As does Owen Jones.

As does David Dayen in The American Prospect.

"The Golden Age of American Growth May Be Over"

"But Mr Gordon's tone grows gloomy when he turns to the 1970s. Economic turbulence increased as well-known American companies were shaken by foreign competition, particularly from Japan, and as fuel prices surged thanks to the OPEC oil-price rise. Economic inequality surged as the rich pulled ahead of the rest. Productivity growth fell: having reached an average of 2.82% a year between 1920 and 1970, output per hour between 1970 and 2014 grew by an annual rate of no more than 1.62%. America today faces powerful headwinds: an ageing population, rising health-care and education costs, soaring inequality and festering social ills.
"What chance does the country have of restoring its lost dynamism? Mr Gordon has no time for the techno-Utopians who think that the information revolution will rescue America from such 'secular stagnation.'"

The Economist reviews Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War.

"The End of a World That Had Sustained Them"

"There was a time when the white working class was the subject of happier tales. Like the yeoman farmer in the 19th century, the white worker of the mid-20th century was the protagonist of the American saga. Members of the white working class were the linchpin of the New Deal coalition, the guys who fought and won World War II (well, if you ignored those Americans shunted to the all-black units), the Riveting Rosies who built those guys' armaments, the postwar factory workers who made the goods we sold to the world at the height of U.S. economic power and, in consequence of their high levels of unionization, the world's most affluent and economically secure working class from the 1950s through the 1970s.
"In recent decades, however, the stories of the white working class have grown relentlessly grimmer."

Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect discusses the rise in the death rate for middle-aged white workers.

As does Noah Smith at The Bloomberg Report.

As does Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

"A Rude Awakening for the Entire United States"

"For the first generation after World War II, American life was defined by one word: 'more.' Not just bigger cars and bigger houses, but two cars and two houses. The nation’s standard of living increased dramatically—on a pace to double every 33 years—with much of it generated by the auto industry. In 1949, America’s automobile fleet stood at 45 million. By 1972, it was 116 million—more cars than we could fill up from our own wells. The alpine graph of American prosperity had reached a plateau, and cutting off our supply of foreign oil was all it took to push it downhill."


In Salon, Edward McClelland argues that October 1973 "was a watershed month for the American middle class."

"Nation Longs For One More Day With Dying Manufacturing Sector"

"'I have all these wonderful memories from back when the conveyor belts were constantly running, shifts were working around the clock, and it seemed like the manufacturing sector was just so full of life, but now, I can barely recognize it at all,' said Alison Panetta of Akron, OH, explaining that she now simply wanted to make sure she said her farewells on her own terms. 'At this point, I've accepted that it isn't going to get any better. I just want to enjoy what little time we still have left.'
"'I made the mistake of not doing that with the family farming sector, and I'm not going to make it again,' Panetta added."


From The Onion.

"Class Animus Was—Is—Central to Who They Are and How They Think about the World"

"Maybe I concealed it too well, but this critique of the Democrats was supposed to have been one of the book’s big takeaway points. It was fun to mock the culture-war fantasies of the right but in doing so I also meant to challenge Clintonism. Yes, it had worked wonders in fundraising terms, but in forswearing the economic liberalism that appealed to working-class voters, it brought them electoral disaster. Again, the proof was all around us, in all the embarrassing defeats of those years, not to mention the needless capitulations like Al Gore’s in 2000. The bland centrist style that Democrats held so dear was political poison. To beat the right, I argued, they needed to move left.
"Today this sounds like advising them to dig a tunnel to Tasmania with their bare hands. It sounds preposterous. Not because the problems I wrote about in 'Kansas' have been solved—deindustrialization still defines the rust belt, depopulation is still clearing out the Great Plains, inequality grows worse and worse every year—but because every Democrat knows that the way you deal with a growing right is to make friends with Big Finance and do your part to fill the Big Prison. Left populism might sound nice, but everyone in D.C. knows it can never be a practical solution to any electoral problem."


Thomas Frank in Salon looks back at What's the Matter with Kansas? ten years later.

"A 'Race between Education and Technology'"

"Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a 'temporary phase of maladjustment' as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity. So it could well prove. However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages."


The Economist discusses the danger of "technological unemployment."

"Rust Belt Stories"

"The author is fully present in these scenes, though the tales are predominantly those of others: Steelworkers laid off in their 50s, never to work again; autoworkers in their 40s moving into service jobs at a fraction of their former pay; chronically poor urban scavengers; young men who will never have a shot at a factory job rolling drugs in urban underground economies. Or economies in which nothing is produced."

Scott Martelle in the Los Angeles Times reviews Edward McClelland's Nothin' but Blues Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America's Industrial Heartland.

"They Didn’t Alter Its Class Structure, but Reproduced It"

"For the last forty years, the American economy has become increasingly bifurcated between a highly-educated, well-paid professional/managerial/white collar group and a poorly educated, poorly paid proletariat, largely composed of service workers. (In his new book, The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, my colleague Timothy Noah has a good discussion of this divide.) The schools reflect this, if imperfectly. There are still middling mediocre schools, such as those my daughters attended, but the school system nationally is increasingly divided between an elite group of public and private schools that prepare their students for college and professional school and lowly group of ragtag inner city and rural or small town public schools (many of which are in the non-union South) that expel their students into the bottom rungs of service economy.
"If you listen to education reformers, you would imagine that there is a huge demand for highly educated workers at the top that the lower tier schools are not meeting, but that is not the case."

John B. Judis at The New Republic questions would-be school reformers.