Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites appear to believe that, across a range of metrics, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is gaining ground in its bid to replace the United States as global hegemon. Americans might, therefore, at least consider the possibility that the PRC is outcompeting the United States. If the CCP is correct, this success would be due in large measure to Washington’s confusion…
Given Israel’s prominence as a developer and exporter of weapons and military technologies, the collapse of its defense systems on October 7, 2023, has raised concerns among security services in Europe and the United States. Central to this discussion is whether the operational success of Hamas’s attack was due to structural weaknesses in the technological…
The idea of America as the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II—innovative, productive, and hard-working—is now firmly a part of the story we tell about ourselves. It is a source of pride, patriotism, and inspiration. And it’s a true story. But that was then, and this is now. Today, Americans are waking up to the reality that we can’t make things in sufficient quantities to keep us safe, while our principal adversary is flooding the world with its manufactures…
The AMI has been operating since 2020 and has exceeded our expectations in terms of reach and impact. Demand far outpaced our initial projections, as more than 350 manufacturers signed on in the first three years. Our original goal was for two hundred enterprises within four years. Manufacturers who work with the AMI have experienced a 22 percent increase in labor productivity…
Since late 2021, the Biden administration has set aside more than $1.6 trillion in infrastructure spending. Almost three years later, it’s very hard to know where most of that money has gone. The Biden administration’s infrastructure laws are built upon two distinct and competing philosophies of industrial policy. The first, demonstrated by the CHIPS…
The world is about to need more energy. A lot more. The combination of providing basic energy services to emerging markets and powering a new generation of data centers and manufacturing activity means the era of flat energy demand is over. Grid operators all across the United States are grappling with a rapid uptick in…
Eskom’s recent history can teach us many things. It illustrates what happens when the power sector fails—not in one heaping collapse, but gradually through diminished reliability, with a resulting social stratification between those able to privately do something about it and those who cannot. It is a warning about a politics of energy that debates attachments to particular technologies and fuels…
Early in my teaching career, I sat in a meeting at my public school district; projected up front was a colorful graphic with the word “equity” placed at the very center. It was the conceptual cornerstone and guide star of this governmental entity—justifying and affecting every one of its policies, practices, curricular decisions, even down to the organization of classroom desks (rows were said to create a hegemonic power structure wherein the teacher is oppressor and the student is oppressed). In the past decades, American education has undergone a fundamental shift in its telos, replacing achievement, equality, and merit as foundational ideals with this notion of equity, and, until very recently, few have stopped to question the goodness or rightness of this transformation…
As a cultural subject in, and by extension of, hypermodern America, you cannot believe in Rousseau’s return to nature, or Winckelmann’s return to the ancients, or the late Romantic insistence on the imaginative power of the poet. The closest you’ll get to the sacred is liking pictures of cathedrals on X, and the only way you’ll approach the infinite is through the secularized infinity of the scroll…
Byung-Chul Han is one of most popular figures in contemporary German philosophy. More a derivative than an original thinker, he applies ideas of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc., to such facets of modern life as professional burnout, dating apps, and social media. His work mostly announces the disappearance, decline, or death of some previously cherished aspect of human existence…
By Hügo Krüger and Joel Kotkin
In this era of heightened racial and ethnic tension, few academic concepts have enjoyed as much success as “settler colonialism.” This approach has been used to explain conflicts taking place in Israel-Palestine, Australia, Russia-Ukraine, Latin America, and the African continent, as well as within the Western world. Yet the most fervent “anticolonial” regimes have generally done little to improve the lives of the oppressed…
Today, many self-described liberals in the professions—including in my world of academic political philosophy—inhabit what the historian Darrin M. McMahon calls “a kind of egalitarian plateau,” convinced that the orienting value of their lives is equality. Yet liberalism’s relationship to equality has, historically, been far from a warm embrace…
It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Rothbard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we…
What do we talk about when we talk about the frontier? For more than a century, Americans haven’t been able to avoid using that term to describe our society’s past, present, and future. It may be time to find a better one. A new conceptual frame is needed to examine the political, social, and economic logic of the periodic upheavals in American life that result from these dynamics. We might call this process filibusterism, after its protagonists…
- When the rich get richer, they do not spend more—or at least in the right way to stimulate the economy. And low interest rates after the financial crisis benefited the rich disproportionately, keeping the economy sluggish and backfiring as a policy measure. Those are the…
- For as long as I can remember, the American Right has celebrated “statesmanship” while striving to drown the state in a bathtub. Under appeals to the wisdom of the ages, it has pursued utopian projects at home and abroad that have done immense harm to…
- The use of “extremism” is often used to rationalize stepping outside typical constraints on the use of power. Constitutional restraint and governmental accountability can be set aside more easily when “extremism” is the enemy. Likewise, social media, the financial industry, and the media routinely engage…
- By Nick Iacovella and Jon Toomey
The United States is suffering from the worst drug shortage crisis in recent history. Whether it is basic generic drugs, antibiotics, or chemotherapy drugs, patients, doctors, and hospitals are facing shortages that are claiming American lives and straining our nation’s health care system. According to…
- Please join us in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 8 for a conversation with Representatives Jake Auchincloss and Ro Khanna. The China Challenge: The Future of U.S.-China Relations and Revitalizing American Industry…
- The recent media flurry over “Bidenomics” is the latest attempt to distill a complex but far from complete rupture with neoliberalism. Premised in part on lifting the wages and employment rate of historically low-income groups, Bidenomics is really about two things: strengthening the relationship between…
- “Pelerin” means pilgrim in French. I made a pilgrimage—an ironic one—to Mont Pelerin in Switzerland. It was here in 1947 that F. A. Hayek organized the foundational meeting that would effectively launch neoliberalism as an intellectual and policy movement (the term was coined at a…
- The question of how to fund newsgathering has made the news. With the advent of internet classifieds, the growth of massive search and social media platforms, and the wide availability of free news content, media organizations—particularly local and regional ones—have faced challenges in sustaining robust newsgathering…
- The question of how to fund newsgathering has made the news. Since the advent of internet classifieds, the growth of massive search and social media platforms, and the wide availability of free news content, media organizations—particularly local and regional ones—have faced challenges in sustaining robust…
- There are a lot of discussions about the media in American politics, but very few about advertising, which is the key pivot point around which the media organizes itself. In America, and throughout the world, the press is dying, starved of ad revenue. Since 2005,…