“No, I Do Not Think the Microprocessor Doomed Social Democracy”, a substackin’ Brad DeLong exclaims, linking to a “very nice” (Brad says) piece by Arthur Goldhammer in Democracy, Chip Shots, a review of Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology and quoting an extensive chunk of it, edited by Brad,…
Search Results for: Liberalism
Stakhanovite liberalism—It’s still a thing!
“Stakhanovite1 liberalism” was a labored term of abuse worked up by the late William F. Buckley to ridicule overproducing liberals. Coal miner Alexsei Grigoryevich Stakhanov was made a “Hero of the Soviet Union” by Joseph Stalin in recognition of his exploits with a jack hammer and his example was used to encourage others to overfulfill…
Finger-Pointing in the Dark: The Rout of Neo-Liberalism
It is, appropriately enough, gray and wet in Washington, DC this morning. Brilliant sunshine would be almost more irony than one could bear. Brexit was a stunner. Compared to Donald Trump, it was a popgun. It’s become overwhelmingly clear that the real cost of the Great Recession was not the cost of fighting our way…
Neoliberalism and its discontents
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a contemptuous take down of Thomas Piketty’s then notorious book, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. If anyone has been citing Piketty’s arguments in the current presidential primary season, I’ve yet to hear it, but that hardly matters, because global capitalism is taking a pounding from all quarters, a…
Running on empty: The liberalism of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and William de Blasio
President Obama wept while announcing his new executive actions that will supposedly protect Americans from guns, demonstrating that honest emotion is often the poorest of guides to both good politics and good policy, a lesson that today’s liberals are notably loath to learn. There was a time when liberals were smart about gun control. They…
Liberalism and the white working class, expanded
A few posts back, I ended a rant on Charles Murray (one of two, actually) with a cheap shot at liberals, to wit: “So why doesn’t the white working class vote Democratic? Because liberals don’t care about them.” Let me unpack that, just a bit. Liberals have in fact done a fair amount for the…
OMG! I’m turning into Larry Summers! But not all the time!
The truth can be ugly, can’t it? Here are, courtesy of frequent good guy yet employed by the American Enterprise Institute James Pethokoukis, a number of cogent (I think) charts to illustrate a recent cogent (I think) talk by Larry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics titled “What Should the 2023 Washington Consensus Be?”,…
Yeah, I flunked Econ 101! What’s your point?
As a matter of fact, I I didn’t flunk Econ 101, because I never took it! So what? To quote Mel Brooks, I’m an old man and I’ve got a right to talk. And, to quote another old man, Richard Nixon, “I am not an intellectual, but I do read books!” Well, I do and…
Yo, Fareed Zakaria! Biden administration national security advisor Jake Sullivan is not “fiercely intelligent”! Unless by “fiercely intelligent” you mean “totally stupid”!
The good news is that we have a “Biden Doctrine”, says the WashPost’s Fareed Zakaria. The bad news is, it’s a Biden doctrine. Innocently spelling out the bad news for us is Biden national security dude Jake Sullivan—“fiercely intelligent”, Fareed tells us, fiercely, as though a little afraid that Jake might punch him out at…
Peter Watson’s The German Genius: Ist es deutsch? Ja, allzu deutsch.
Peter Watson’s massive (996 pages) study, The German Genius, is one of the most confounding books I’ve ever read, “impressive” for most of its great length, often “brilliant” in its discussion of 20th century Germany, but then lurching downhill drastically in places, descending to the level of Nazi apologetics at its worst—plus one whopping mathematical…