The hotly-debated new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is a grand sketch of liberalism's future that fails to reach beyond the lean horizons of its present
Your description of what freedom means -- or ought to mean -- was bracing and is rarely heard in these parts.
Americans struggle to give it that abundantly (yes, indeed!) generous definition. The stirring tones of the Proclamation of Emancipation could have been a start and FDR's Four Freedoms did hint at a guarantee of something more than mere subsistence but the effort stalls soon after that. We look back at what Gary Gerstle calls the New Deal Order with fondness, a type of Fordism on a national scale for the country's white population. Even so, we tell ourselves, it was far better than the Social Darwinist alternatives from the Gilded Age that reactionaries like Robert Taft and Fred Hartley wanted us to return to. Yet it was just a matter of time before the dismantlers would succeed and they made their first move with the 1973 Powell Memo, still worth reading as the guiding spirit for today's Project 2025.
As you point out in your review essay, but in a too circumlocutionary way, this book is In the spirit of Gerstle. Klein and Thompson -- with their fellow travelers, Noah Smith and Matt Ygelsisas -- want to claim the mantle of that New Deal Order but substantially reworked and without a jot of the redistributionist and regulatory force of the original program. In fact, they would happily identify with deregulatory zeal of the current Gilded Age for large swathes of the economy.
Their vision then amounts to this: "efficient" delivery of "public goods" that increases the "productivity" of the economy. (Quotation marks only to emphasize their touchstones.) From this, we get the non-zero sum game. Workers receive cheaper and better housing, child care, health care, education, social insurance, etc., thanks to government investment while the private-sector gets highly productive and economically secure labor input and can count on high growth to sustain their drive for profits.
This not how capitalism works, or has ever worked. The primeval drive for profits is maximal and all-consuming. Michael Kalecki told us, capitalism needs -- even requires -- the insecurity of workers to survive. Private capital in a market economy is savage, predatory and will use politics, the law, technological innovation, whatever, to suck the marrow of economic value to usurp for itself. It must necessarily be shackled.
Your conclusion was right on the mark. The book is another artful attempt to salvage the discredited belief system known as neoliberalism. Lipstick on a pick? Quite possibly.
Your description of what freedom means -- or ought to mean -- was bracing and is rarely heard in these parts.
Americans struggle to give it that abundantly (yes, indeed!) generous definition. The stirring tones of the Proclamation of Emancipation could have been a start and FDR's Four Freedoms did hint at a guarantee of something more than mere subsistence but the effort stalls soon after that. We look back at what Gary Gerstle calls the New Deal Order with fondness, a type of Fordism on a national scale for the country's white population. Even so, we tell ourselves, it was far better than the Social Darwinist alternatives from the Gilded Age that reactionaries like Robert Taft and Fred Hartley wanted us to return to. Yet it was just a matter of time before the dismantlers would succeed and they made their first move with the 1973 Powell Memo, still worth reading as the guiding spirit for today's Project 2025.
As you point out in your review essay, but in a too circumlocutionary way, this book is In the spirit of Gerstle. Klein and Thompson -- with their fellow travelers, Noah Smith and Matt Ygelsisas -- want to claim the mantle of that New Deal Order but substantially reworked and without a jot of the redistributionist and regulatory force of the original program. In fact, they would happily identify with deregulatory zeal of the current Gilded Age for large swathes of the economy.
Their vision then amounts to this: "efficient" delivery of "public goods" that increases the "productivity" of the economy. (Quotation marks only to emphasize their touchstones.) From this, we get the non-zero sum game. Workers receive cheaper and better housing, child care, health care, education, social insurance, etc., thanks to government investment while the private-sector gets highly productive and economically secure labor input and can count on high growth to sustain their drive for profits.
This not how capitalism works, or has ever worked. The primeval drive for profits is maximal and all-consuming. Michael Kalecki told us, capitalism needs -- even requires -- the insecurity of workers to survive. Private capital in a market economy is savage, predatory and will use politics, the law, technological innovation, whatever, to suck the marrow of economic value to usurp for itself. It must necessarily be shackled.
Your conclusion was right on the mark. The book is another artful attempt to salvage the discredited belief system known as neoliberalism. Lipstick on a pick? Quite possibly.
“The paucity of abundance” well done, Luke. You’re embracing Marx on title shithousery.