One of the biggest falsehoods that the economics profession foists upon us is how supply meets demand or Say's Law which Keynes went after. You can have long periods of insufficient aggregate demand or high unemployment.
The government sets the amount of demand via interest rates and the cost of credit. If it's too high, people won't borrow and invest and demand won't be enough.
But if the government does this for too long you'll get deflation. The question is why don't we get deflation sooner.
Instead of deflation advanced economies seem to get stuck in a Japanese rut where they can't make inflation, especially when they don't try very hard.
If the government provides enough stimulus or adjusts rates so there's enough aggregate demand, then labor markets will tighten and workers will see wage increases.
Today though we have oligopolies and monopsony and a taboo about raising wages despite low unemployment.
My impression of job guarantee advocates, which I am afraid you are not doing much to dispel, is that they are not willing to admit that their preferred approach ahas any drawbacks, or that any alternatives have any merits.
then Stephen Colbert last night said "God is socialist" after taking about the Fox news person who want to a Sander/Ocasio-Cortez rally in Kansas. The woman almost had a breakthrough about how enticing the socialist message was.
A JG could be a small part of a successful socialist state.
Say a socialist movement was successful 20 years from now and somehow had a program which agreed with what I think would be successful.
Run the economy hot via monetary policy and Kalecki-Lerner-Vickrey fiscal macro. Wages are negotiated by sectors and unions are strong with strong labor protections.
A sovereign wealth fund would be heavily invested in the economy and provide a social dividend/UBI to everyone regardless of income.
Free healthcare, free housing, mass transit and large investment program in infrastructure and green conversion.
There would still be the hard cases who could apply to a JG where they could get trained and work on projects for their community as they wait for employers to hire them.
There would be a demand for workers given that the economy was run hot with the emphasis on full employment.
Listened to the powercouple Elizabeth and Matt Bruenig's podcast on social mobility, and they made a good point about social mobility being alienating as the successful family member becomes alien to the ones she left behind.
I wonder if this is a dynamic with the red/blue divide in America, with upwardly mobile people becoming meritocratic Democrats and alienating themselves from their more red-state lower income families. Obviously many upwardly mobile low-income Republicans stay conservative even as they become successful. Maybe culturally they stay more attuned to lower-class uneducated red-staters.
The more educated upwardly mobile become liberal while the less educated or more mercenary, less empathetic upwardly mobile remain conservative.
Doesn't the central bank control the rate of return within limits? For instance Keynes wanted to euthanize the rentiers with zero percent returns. The CB could adjust the rate of return for UBI check investments so it was livable without runaway inflation.
"It's like Republicans promise economic growth and job creation and so do Democrats. What's the difference? They both promise to be fiscally responsible and pro-business. What's the difference, really, when you think about it?"
But on a more serious note, I’m geniunely puzzled as to how this is any different from what used to be called liberal Democrats (before and during the 1990s–and who were mostly purged from power by the Clinton era New Democrats) would propose... So it’s really hard to see how what is currently referred to as socialism would differ from Hubert Humphrey’s economic proposals.
It would be nice to discuss this with a historian of post-war liberalism.
Kennedy did an income tax cut. What else? LBJ did the war on poverty but it was incomplete. They made improvements on Social Security. Medicare and Medicaid. Minimum wage increases. Incrementalism until the 1970s and Reagan. LBJ privatized Fannie and Freddie. FDR had the Second Bill of Rights but it was only minor incrementalism after he was gone. Taxes on the rich came down, yes Medicare and Medicaid were good but socialists were demanded single-payer Medicare-for-All. Better anti-poverty programs. Better housing programs. Better labor laws.
How did liberal Democrats collapse so easily into neoliberalism? From equal outcomes where everyone has a minimum level of dignity (see FDR's second bill of rights) to equal opportunity and education.
Socialism focuses on the necessity of government involvement in the economy and the centrality of the labor movement. It recognizes the hostility of corporations and the rich to economic democracy. Socialists push free public college.
What did Jimmy Carter do? Beef up the EPA? There wasn't a sense of fighting for working people after LBJ.
Bruenig on Medicare for All:
Medicare for All nationalizes the US health insurance industry, bringing it under social ownership and control. It also combines this nationalization with a universal public benefit program that should be very popular and appealing to socialists and non-socialists alike. Thus it is a fairly straightforward democratic socialist strategy as it moves the ball on social ownership through incremental reforms that could win popular democratic support.
Ocasio-Cortez sounds a lot like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
America has long-championed individualism as the foundation of our democracy and the free market economy. Such values form not only the bedrock of conservativism, but also the pillars of the post-World War II global order, which is under assault from a backlash against globalization and the rise of populist nationalism, both here and abroad.
By highlighting individual dignity and the dignity of our neighbors, Ocasio-Cortez is advancing a new social value-- one which sees the individual as both a solitary being with certain inalienable rights and as a citizen and member of society. This duality could de-polarize American politics by introducing 21st century social values into today’s political discourse while upholding long-held individualist values.
The tension between individualist and communitarian values has fostered binary choices between American conservatives and liberals, the market and the state, right versus left, red versus blue, and “us” versus “them.” This dichotomy assumes a left to right continuum in which compromise in the middle is the modality for public choice. The idea of binary choices on the spectrum from left to right is threatening our democracy.
...What is at issue and more starkly evident in the 21st century is that the individual is vividly embedded in the social fabric and is connected with neighbors, near and far. This web of engagements and entanglements in our globalized era invites a new outlook, one that embraces complexity, contradiction, and conflicting viewpoints. Those with such open mindsets can adopt blended mixes of contrarian perspectives to reach inclusive agreements about the way forward rather than simplistic middle ground compromises.
The key is that Ocasio-Cortez founds her formulation on both the idea of the individual and social responsibility.
The truth is that individualist values of liberty, property rights, freedom and sovereignty worked well in the 20th century as the foundations of competition, free markets, democracy and the nation-state. Yet today, well into the 21st century, globalization in the broadest sense has penetrated and transformed our individual lives in ways that make clear our inter-connectedness.
Today, we need to add to these bedrock American principles new values that embody and honor this connectivity, including by upholding respect for others, fairness for all, trust in one another and a sense of personal (and mutual) responsibility. Adding these social values to the American political discourse would help prioritize actions that could achieve greater social mobility, public access, economic security, and systemic sustainability.
These actions, which would seek blended, mixed economy, pluralistic approaches, could lead to better social outcomes from the market economy, greater social cohesion, more inclusive markets, less polarization, and greater effectiveness of policies, politics, and governance. These would restore confidence in markets, faith in institutions, and trust in government.
Thank you, Ocasio-Cortez for bringing America face-to-face with the new understanding we need and the new narrative required to transform American politics for the 21st century.
DSA has certainly been a beneficiary of the Dirtbag Left and its iconoclastic rage; Chapo Trap House frequently directs its guests to support the socialist organization, and its founders are in Chicago for the DSA convention. Mother Jones called the podcast a “gateway drug” for democratic socialism, and DSA’s leaders recognize that’s correct. Even if DSA won’t adopt Chapo’s insult-humor shtick in its official platform, it’s hard to imagine that some of its beliefs won’t seep in some way into the organization through new membership.
Chapo’s “dirtbag” politics have alarmed other left-leaning writers. In an essay for the New Republic, Jeet Heer warned against what he called its “dominance politics” as counterproductive to building a coalition with center-left Democrats.
But in an interview last year, Chapo Trap House co-host Matt Christman countered that Donald Trump had captured the “transgressive thrill of defying the cultural expectations of the elite,” and that the left would be wise to reclaim it. Incisive put-down humor, he suggested, isn’t just useful for amassing a podcast following; it could also be helpful to an ascendant left-wing politics.
“The gonad element of politics is now totally owned by the right. All the left has now is charts and data. You cannot motivate people with charts and data and lecturing,” Christman said. “If we’re going to win, we cannot allow [right-wing provocateur] Milo Yiannopoulos and all of these carnival-barking Nazis to have all of the fucking fun.”
These folks are actually proud that they don't know how to do politics. "Mueller will save us." "Good Republicans will save us." "A recession (!) will save us."
What will save you are a long-term electoral strategy and structural reforms aimed at politically dismantling the GOP.
Another part of the package is passing policies that have significant, positive, & easily comprehensible impacts on people's lives when Dems are in power. Free stuff's great. People like free stuff. You "pay" for it by raising taxes on the wealthy & corps, which people also like
Listened to Chapo which was thought-provoking.
How do you sideline the 30 percent who are Trump supporters?
Clean house in the Democratic Party. We need a strong socialist movement which should include a resurgent labor movement and poor people's movement.
Make it so the white nationalists/anti-immigrants no longer have a veto.
Per Martin Sandbu (paywalled) at the Financial Times, Italy has slow productivity growth. This has led to anti-immigration and xenophobic-populist parties succeeding. Sandbu points out the way to increase productivity is to maintain full employment and close the output gap, not by paying workers less.
Germany has become more competitive by paying workers less. Krugman doesn't seem to emphasize this and doesn't seem to emphasize Sandu's story. Italy needs better fiscal policy since it can't do a devaluation.
Better fiscal policy can be a substitute for a devaluation.
Labour UK wants the central bank (Bank of England) to focus on productivity growth. This would entail a dialogue with fiscal policy makers since they would need to pull their weight.
C.B. Strike is interesting with Tom Burke and his assistant Holliday Grainger. Sherlock: "conventional is the enemy of interesting." Stargate Atlantis's John Sheppard: "42, the ultimate answer to the great question of life, universe and everything." (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, and Jackie Robinson's number.)
Labour has said it will set the Bank of England a new 3 per cent target for productivity growth but refused to specify when this should be achieved.
John McDonnell, shadow chancellor, will on Wednesday launch Labour’s final report on the UK’s financial system.
Written by Graham Turner, an economist at GFC Economics, the report will make a series of recommendations, including that the BoE should move to Birmingham.
But its most eye-catching proposal is that the central bank should target productivity “to better help drive economic growth”. The bank’s mandate would be expanded to include a 3 per cent productivity growth target.
“The Bank of England and government should sign an accord at the start of the next government, detailing how each will work towards achieving this 3 per cent target,” the party said. “The Bank of England will be required to report, after each Budget, on the government’s plans in light of this 3 per cent target.”
However, the party was unable to explain whether the target would cover a period of months or years or even decades. “It is open for consultation,” it said.
The report, called Financing Investment, highlights Britain’s poor rate of productivity growth and emphasises the low level of investment into manufacturing, ICT and other critical sectors.
Its other recommendations, some of which have been previously announced, include setting up a Strategic Investment Board; using RBS, the publicly-owned bank, to deliver more lending to small companies; and establishing an applied sciences investment fund to deliver state funding to research and development.
Raising productivity growth is a key aim of all political parties because increasing each worker’s output would help raise the national growth rate, increase incomes and bring more tax revenues into the Treasury.
Productivity growth has never exceeded 3 per cent a year in Britain. Over the past decade it has increased by just 0.2 per cent a year.
Last November, the Office for Budget Responsibility calculated a “strong productivity” scenario in which Britain’s public finances would move into surplus by 2022 if annual productivity growth improved to 2 per cent a year by the early 2020s.
In the same month, Philip Hammond, chancellor, admitted in the Budget that productivity growth had been “stubbornly flat” for years.
However, one of the few aspects all the BoE’s policymakers agree on is that central banks only have the ability to smooth booms and busts in the economy, and have no power over the underlying productivity growth rate.
The BoE estimates the likely growth of productivity and sets interest rates on that basis.
Last autumn, Mark Carney, BoE governor, criticised those who wanted the central bank to solve problems such as productivity. The BoE “cannot deliver lasting prosperity and it cannot solve broader societal challenges,” he said, adding that calls for it to solve poor UK productivity “confuse independence with omnipotence”.
The BoE refused to comment.
Simon Clarke, a Tory MP, said: “Labour’s refusal to put a timeframe on their target shows their attempt to meddle with the Bank of England’s independence is already unravelling.”
Sorry, Mr. Donohue, this IS who you are. People like you made a deal with racists so you could get deregulation and tax cuts. Every step you took was leading to this moment.
new from US Chamber President Tom Donohue: “Thousands of children are being forcibly removed from their parents by our government. There is no other way to say it, this is not who we are and it must end now”
Big Business and old-timey conservatives famously made a deal with Nazis against the Communist and SocDem left in Germany. Didn't turn out well.
I agree with Krugman, but I sort of feel this way about liberals and neoliberals. Their incrementalism, minor-tinkering and focus on technocrats instead of mass mobilization are partly complicity in the situation we find ourselves in. They're attacks on the Left and socialists certainly don't help things.
They focus on a small number of 3rd party types who refuse to support Democrats, but to me those people are numerically insignificant compared to non-voters and to working class and middle class voters who are voting against their interests.
Center left parties have moved towards the right and have lost support b/c of it, not just in the US but in Europe.
By not delivering a robust, prosperous economy, certain elites have enabled Trumpism.
But, intriguingly, Allen’s work in this area has also implications for his work in another area: the origins of the Industrial Revolution. As is well-known, Bob is the originator of the hypothesis of High Wage Economy (HWE), an argument that the Industrial Revolution was driven by high cost of labor in England (and low cost of energy) which made the substitution of labor by capital profitable. This was most famously seen in the evolution of the welfare ratios (nominal wages divided by the cost of the subsistence basket) for North-West Europe vs. Italy vs. China/India. While all three welfare ratios were about equal in the 15th century, they diverged afterwards with North European being much higher and China/India’s welfare rations plummeting. Allen saw in that divergence the origin (and not the effect) of the Industrial Revolution.
Now, with the poverty lines that are subscripted for place and time, what we see to be a welfare ratio from the worker’s perspective is no longer the same thing as the cost of that worker to a capitalist. The new methodology introduces a wedge between what is the worker's welfare and what is the cost of labor for the capitalist. This is most obviously seen in Allen’s former and new results for Russia. With the same basket across all countries (the earlier approach) Russian welfare ratio during most of the 19th century was 2; with a climate/country specific baskets, the welfare ratio is around 1 (that is, is much lower because of high requirements imposed by a cold climate).
But note that the cost of that worker to a Russian capitalist is still twice as high as the cost of an equivalent worker (at the same subsistence) in India. When we now draw the welfare ratios using Allen’s new methodology, we have to explicitly state that they reflect welfare ratios from the worker’s perspective, not the cost of labor. The implication of this wedge is that, following Allen’s own HWE hypothesis, introduction of machines is --everything else being the same—more profitable in the North than in the South.
If that’s the case, then a geographically-determined explanation for the Industrial Revolution suddenly looks more plausible than before. So, I thought, perhaps one (unintended) effect of Bob’s new and much improved methodology is to help the geographical explanations for the rise of the West.
Marx on the opiate of the masses was more complex and sympathetic than the New Atheists or their reputation anyways:
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Should religion be taxed away? Should the rich? I've had social media discussions with ardent MMTers and they believe JG will somehow be a better vehicle than a UBI against the rich and against capitalist logic.
Unfortunately #MMT is a restatement of standard Keynesianism that readily morphs into pernicious nonsense - no need to tax the rich, just run whatever deficit you feel like. In my experience, "no need to tax the rich" is the big selling point.
The JG advocates go on about how everyone needs to chip in and produce and do "socially necessary" labor.
I lean more towards Keynes who did advocate euthanizing the rentier but also allowed for people to save up money and be competitive over accumulation:
Moreover, dangerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative. But it is not necessary for the stimulation of these activities and the satisfaction of these proclivities that the game should be played for such high stakes as at present. Much lower stakes will serve the purpose equally well, as soon as the players are accustomed to them....
Josh Denny who has a Food Network show "Ginormous Eats" has been tweeting some racist stuff.
Is it okay to tweet at Food Network and try to get him fired? What if it was sexist stuff? Homophobic stuff? Where do you draw the line?
I don't think it's a good idea to try to get people fired b/c if the world lives by eye-for-eye then everyone is blind. I don't think it's worthwhile to doxx pathetic, poor alt right Nazis from their job at the hot dog stand. Yes call them out and fight them.
But there are stories of ex-Nazis "deprogramming" other poor Nazis like from a cult or from a gang. I'm not talking about the suburban Nazis, but the more working class, poor ones. Give them something else to live for, don't just write them off.
But people higher up the scale like the racist lawyer in NYC and Denny? I'm starting to think it's okay. Trump has made it more permissible for these people to speak out and spread their hate. It's worthwhile to push back and don't let them build momentum especially via platforms. I'm very pro-Antifa.
But still I think the focus on getting people fired is overdone, like who cares if Joy Reid or Neera Tanden is fired? They'll just be replaced. It's funny to point out their faux pas and hypocrisies.
The focus should be on what sort of platform they have and how much power.
Better to try to convert people rather than shame them as Briahna Joy Gray and Steve Randy Waldman emphasize within the context of Trump voters and deplorables. Paul Krugman has finally admitted that the rise in populism in Europe can have something to do with economic anxiety rather than just being a matter of racist deplorables.
This means - as some European researchers sugget:
The policy implication and take-home message that stems from our results is clear: if one wants to defeat populism, one must defeat first economic insecurity.
(not the clearest blog, maybe contradictory, but I'm working out my ideas on this. It's difficult to generalize. Better to punch up than punch down. Better to try to make allies than enemies. Cut people some slack and be generous even if they aren't with you.)
The cultural backlash against globalisation, traditional politics and institutions, immigration, and automation cannot be an exogenous occurrence, it is driven by economic woes. In fact, as we show, in regions where globalisation was present but have benefited economically there is no such cultural backlash at all and the populist message has retreated. The policy implication and take-home message that stems from our results is clear: if one wants to defeat populism, one must defeat first economic insecurity.
Can consensus towards populist forces persist even after economic insecurity has been reabsorbed? This is the key question today. While the documented culture backlash cannot be the root cause of populist success as it is itself borne out of economic insecurity, it may play a crucial role looking forward. If the new identity politics succeeds in reshaping peoples' beliefs and attitudes, sentiments can acquire an autonomous role and may continue to exert an effect even when their economic cause is gone.
Surprising people! Arguably the biggest popularizer of the idea in the 20th century was libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who specifically favored a negative income tax as a replacement for much of the welfare state. Many left-of-center economists, like James Tobin and John Kenneth Galbraith, were also on board. More recently, Emmanuel Saez and Jonathan Gruber, two of the most influential left-leaning economists currently working, argued that an ideal tax system would feature a "large demogrant."
Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed the idea in his book Where to Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, writing, "I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income." Activists and scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven authored an influential article in The Nation in 1966 which called for a national movement of the poor with the intended goal of achieving a basic income. More academically, left philosophers and intellectuals like Erik Olin Wright, Peter Frase, Carole Pateman, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt and in particular Philippe Van Parijs have written in favor of the idea.
Writing in 1943, with the wartime policies of “full employment” enjoying wide support, Michal Kalecki wrote a remarkable essay entitled “The Political Aspects of Full Employment.” Kalecki opens by writing, “a solid majority of economists is now of the opinion that, even in a capitalist system, full employment may be secured by a government spending programme.” Though he is talking about full employment, which means an “adequate plan to employ all existing labour power,” the same is true of UBI. The majority of economists would agree that a plan to guarantee an income for all is possible.
However, Kalecki ultimately argues that full employment policies will be abandoned: “The maintenance of full employment would cause social and political changes which would give a new impetus to the opposition of the business leaders. Indeed, under a regime of permanent full employment, ‘the sack’ would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow.”
It has been called the leftwing alternative to Breitbart – a subversive, humorous and politics-focused new media presence that has attracted a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic.
Chapo Trap House has mostly attracted followers of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, but recently it burst into the mainstream US media when a dispute erupted between the podcast’s provocative, hard-left commentators and the New Republic, a stately institution of polite neoliberalism.
As part of a takedown of the “dirtbag left”, the century-old commentary magazine noted that a phrase used by Chapo’s Brooklyn-based hosts had prompted outrage in some quarters.
In a recent edition, co-host Will Menaker said – not for the first time – that Clintonian liberalism was the architect of its own defeat. “But get this through your fucking head,” he said. “You must bend the knee to us. Not the other way around. You have been proven as failures, and your entire worldview has been discredited.”
The phrase “bend the knee”, a historical gesture of deference, was interpreted by some critics in terms of gender and identity politics – realms into which Chapo hosts often throw grenades.
“Bend the knee gets read as a sexual reference,” the New York magazine and All the Single Ladies author Rebecca Traister wrote in an email quoted by the New Republic. “Not because people think it is literally about sex, but because it conveys a hunger for dominance and submission, which is very quickly heard as gendered and sexual.”
The contretemps, which was picked up by the Washington Post, defined divisions in the American left that have been growing hostile as a new generation seeks to shed old influences.
Menaker and co-hosts Brendan James, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, Virgil Texas and Amber A’Lee Frost all declined requests for comment. But their rollicking message has developed an enthusiastic audience, of supporters they call “grey wolves”. Chapo subscriptions have grown rapidly, now at 16,000 and bringing in $70,000 a month.
The hosts, who are aligned with the Brooklyn arm of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), met on social media, gaining followers with their offbeat humor and views on what is termed “left Twitter”.
That led to a series of podcasts on the popular Street Fight Radio before the launch of Chapo Trap House, named for Sinaloa cartel head Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and the hip-hop term for a drug house.
One DSA member familiar with the thinking of the podcast producers offered the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism as an ideological reference, and said the spat with the New Republic illustrated the resistance of neoliberals to warnings that a hard left turn is necessary to counter the rise of the so-called alt-right and avoid continued electoral defeat.
In one Chapo episode, the podcast’s hosts excoriated The West Wing as an expression of the patronizing self-entitlement of liberals.
“They are very anti-establishment,” said the DSA member of the Chapo hosts, “and believe that neoliberalism as a doctrine has failed, and they want centrist Democrats to acknowledge that it was their failure that destroyed the working class and allowed this atrocity [the Trump presidency] to take place in the White House.”
John Mason, a professor of political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey, said a leftwing “counter-reaction” has been building for a decade.
“It’s the feeling that the new liberal agenda resulted in a whole generation of young Americans being shafted, locked into a gig economy, loaded down with student debt and no access to healthcare,” he said.
“So there’s been a reaction against Democrat politicians of the 90s who tried to make a compromise with corporate capitalism and then defined liberalism around cultural issues of diversity, immigration, women’s rights and so on, while riding along with the shafting of the working class.”
In an interview first drafted for the Harvard Crimson before an appearance at the university in April, Christman criticized Ivy League universities for being “perpetuator[s] of privilege, obviously, but also … perpetuator[s] of the fantasy of meritocracy, which is what justifies the privilege”.
“All of these kids who are so brilliant just happened to be children of people who are in a similar social situation, but they went to Harvard – like Jared Kushner, for example! He’s not just some dickhead son, he’s a dickhead son who went to Harvard. For$3m. It’s basically laundering privilege.”
In a recent edition of the podcast, Jezz In My Pants, Chapo hosts cited the success of Labour leader Corbyn’s social democratic platform in the UK election last month as proof of the potency of “dirtbag” politics.
“It’s the beginnings, or the contours, of something else, like a shaft of light,” said A’Lee Frost. “If you run a real left candidate, the real left will win.”
Corbyn lost, although Labour did deny Theresa May’s governing Conservative party an outright majority.
Though the Chapo Trap House hosts have been lauded by Paste magazine as the “vulgar, brilliant demigods of the new progressive left”, divisions on gender and generational lines are becoming more apparent.
The Democrats' performance as an opposition party? Pathetic
“Who is the most popular politician in the United States right now?” asked Mason. “Bernie Sanders! The ground has shifted and this is really the centre of the Democratic party. The people who have been marginalised, especially after this defeat, are those who belong to the Clinton-Obama wing.”
The far left, Mason said, is articulating itself in new ways. He pointed to a recent meeting of Sanders and Al Gore and the emergence of anti alt-right groups such as Redneck Revolt. Last week, the DSA published an electoral strategy guide; it anticipates strong or record attendance at its convention in Chicago next month.
If Chapo Trap House and its political brethren are the rising stars of Democratic politics, they bring anxiety with them. The battle within the party could echo the fights of the 60s, which pitted the new left against cold war liberalism, contributed to the chaos of the 1968 convention and helped open a divide that ushered in nearly a decade of conservative government.
“The fear is we’re going to do 68 over again and that’s the argument the Clintonists will make,” Mason said. “That a battle within the Democratic party will help elect a conservative militia that will then, despite being a sociological minority, craft the institutions so they can remain a political majority.”
Dani Rodrik: "Another wrong turn came in what the United States didn’t do when it opened its economy with NAFTA, the WTO, and then the entry of China into the WTO. At some point, the United States could have done what Europe did in an earlier stage in this history when Europe became an open economy. That is to erect very generous social insurance and safety nets. The kind of insecurities and anxiety that openness to trade creates can be compensated or neutralized by having extensive social policies, and that’s what Europe managed to do.
Europe is much more open to trade in the United States. Yet to this day, trade remains uncontroversial in Europe. When you look at populism in Europe, it’s not about trade at all. It is about other things, it is about immigrants going to reduce the welfare state."
"And this gets me to my fifth quarrel with Paul Krugman here. As I see it, the most important thing we missed about globalization was how much it required support from stable and continuous full employment."
"Yet over time, those parties, Piketty explains, "gradually become associated with higher education voters," which he describes as creating a system of "multiple-elite" parties where "high-education elites now vote for the 'left,' while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the 'right' (though less and less so)." In other words, both sides of the spectrum became parties of the elite, with no party for less educated folks or the working class.
Piketty argues that this situation "contributes to rising inequality and lack of democratic response to it," as well as the rise of populists like Trump, Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in Britain. "Without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low- education, low-income voters from all origins within the same party," he writes."
Elizabeth Bruenig, an assistant editor at the Washington Post (full disclosure: We've previously worked together), is a Christian socialist who believes abortion is morally wrong, except when the mother's life is at risk. Her pro-life views seemingly echo many Republicans, but unlike conservatives, she believes that to fight abortion we should expand the social safety net.
"What I aim for is to reduce abortions peacefully, without involving the penal-carceral system, which I'm highly skeptical of," she told me. "I support bigger, more robust welfare programs that would help women and families: a child allowance, state-paid parental leave, and single-payer healthcare." Better access to social services, she reckoned, is "a way to help them choose life."
In a 2014 article for the American Conservative, Bruenig cited multiple studies that found the majority of American women get abortions for economic reasons. "If the goal really is reducing abortion and supporting the ability of mothers to care for their infants," she argued, "the data directs us to a very intuitive solution: give would-be moms, especially the poorest, the financial boost they need to give birth while maintaining financial security. A child allowance program fits the bill neatly."
