When Donald Trump—I know, I know, but stay with me here—began his ascent in the Republican presidential-primary field this past summer, political journalists all started wrestling with variations on the same burning question: Just who were these people telling pollsters they would grant this coiffed real-estate scion access to the White House?
In 1992, the American Economic Review published a “Plea for a Pluralistic and Rigorous Economics,” signed by a number of eminent economists, including John Kenneth Galbraith, Charles Kindleberger, Paul A. Samuelson, Robert Heilbroner, and Hyman Minsky. One of the organizers of the manifesto was Geoffrey M. Hodgson, now a research professor in business studies at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. Since then, Hodgson has published a number of critiques of mainstream academic economics, including How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (2001) and From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities: An Evolutionary Economics Without
It’s hard to imagine a worse election cycle for this sort of project. McKay Coppins, a political reporter with BuzzFeed News, has produced, in The Wilderness, an expansively reported preview of the 2016 Republican-primary campaign, focusing on people generally considered by the smart set to be the most likely contenders for the nomination. But Coppins began work on his book years before the first primary vote would be cast, and it was released a month before the Iowa caucuses. Meanwhile, over the course of 2015, former reality-television personality Donald Trump, having reinvented himself as a sort of Twitter-era Joe McCarthy
After the tumult of the 2016 election season has subsided, one result can be safely predicted: The most successful “spinners”—speechwriters and strategists, digital gurus and data miners, pollsters and PR people—will be alternately praised as masterminds and pilloried as manipulators. For those who yearn for an era before political candidates had “handlers”—and who ignore the fact that “authenticity” is as likely to take the form of the incendiary Donald Trump as the idealistic Bernie Sanders or Rand Paul—David Greenberg’s magisterial history of White House hype, Republic of Spin, is a welcome reminder that public relations has long been an integral
The old saw that Los Angeles is a city without a past went into American culture’s discard pile some time ago. If the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, Charles Manson, Proposition 13—the dawn of modern conservatism’s anti-tax mania—and Rodney King aren’t history, what is? That doesn’t stop a hazy impression from persisting elsewhere in the country that LA somehow sprang into being with the birth of the movie business. Yet the Pueblo de Los Angeles was founded in 1781, making it older than Chicago and Washington, DC.
One of the strangest spectacles in contemporary American politics is libertarians’ schizophrenic attitude toward the power of the state. We are supposed to hate the government, we are told, but mostly just the feds: One of Rand Paul’s big crowd-pleasers is to demand the return of power to the states—whether to legalize marijuana, ban abortion, or make marriage a religious rather than a civil institution. The great fear, for today’s pot-smoking readers of Ayn Rand, is of a distant and faceless government, all those bureaucrats in Washington, DC; the utopian dream is the return of face-to-face power, the intimate, reasonable
A warning to American leftists: These two fine works of history will probably depress you. They may also nudge you to think hard about what your forerunners did to change the country and why they failed to accomplish more.
In 2008, Matthew Desmond moved into a trailer park on the southern edge of Milwaukee, where most everyone was white. A few months later, he relocated to a rooming house on Milwaukee’s heavily African American north side. There, he lived with a security guard who worked at the trailer park. Desmond was a budding sociologist pursuing his graduate degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, an hour west of Milwaukee. His aim was to better understand life at the hardscrabble margins of the housing-rental market.
Tamara Draut doesn’t mince words. “The working class has had a boot on its neck for three decades,” she writes in her new book, Sleeping Giant. Working-class Americans, she says, have endured a bruising descent into economic hardship and instability. The good blue-collar jobs that fueled postwar American prosperity have all but disappeared. The service-sector work that now accounts for most job growth typically pays low wages, offers few benefits, and requires erratic schedules that wreak havoc on family life. With some justification, Draut compares the struggles of today’s working class to those of the early industrialized labor force. Sleeping
Capitalism as we know it is failing, says Paul Mason, and it’s high time to anoint a successor. In his futurist tract Postcapitalism, he attempts to do just that, mixing Marxist theory, labor history, tech euphoria, and about forty other ingredients into something resembling a unified theory of political economy.
In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s historic disclosures and flight from the United States, many Americans took to the airwaves and social media to argue, dissect his choices, and opine on his possible motives. Was he a coward? A hero? A traitor? A patriot?
From the early 1970s though 2005, I was a loyal member of the Republican Party and the libertarian wing of the conservative movement. When I signed on in the ’70s, the movement was very small; it was possible to know everyone in Washington who was a significant player. And I knew almost all of them, some even from college.
Ghetto is one of those words that ring tinnily today. The put-down “He’s ghetto” implies that its target is low-class or unsavory—an association that only has meaning in the context of America’s poisonous culture of race. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, when social scientists fretted about a “ghetto underclass” of single mothers, welfare-dependent children, and “superpredators,” the term enjoyed a brief recrudescence. But then a diverse array of scholars, including historian Michael B. Katz, sociologist Herbert J. Gans, and political scientist Adolph Reed, stepped in to point out that ghetto and underclass alike were value-laden and inaccurate, reinforcing a
It’s no great exaggeration, these days, to say that the state of the white American working class is driving the American commentariat crazy. The non-college-educated white voter is notoriously the bedrock demographic aligned behind likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump—and leaders of the conservative movement, which has long pivoted on elaborate bait-and-switch appeals to its aggrieved, antigovernment, downwardly mobile base, are appalled to see that base swallowing whole the nativist, protectionist, and belligerently class-baiting nostrums bursting forth from the GOP’s unlikely orange-hued tribune of populist resentment. National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson recently sized up Trump’s ardent working-class supporters and
One day in August of 2012, the ground began to tremble in the tiny town of Bayou Corne, Louisiana, the smell of oil filled the air, and the bottom of a nearby bayou tore open. Earth, brush, and trees were sucked under, as though down a drain, while oil oozed to the surface. The sinkhole, which eventually covered thirty-seven acres, was not a spontaneous development: Underground drilling by a company called Texas Brine had pierced the wall of a subterranean cavern, and the cavern had collapsed. The eerie disaster made a ghost town of Bayou Corne, after the state of
Late in the autumn of 2014, a prominent Yemeni politician was out taking a walk near his home in the capital city of Sana’a when two men on motorbikes shot him to death. Muhammad Abdelmalik al Mutawakel was a professor of political science who had long been advocating for a strong, democratic state in an otherwise fractious, feudal place. Mutawakel was the leader of a liberal party and an architect of the uprisings that had deposed Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s autocratic former president; he had been negotiating a peace deal behind the scenes among Houthi rebels, the opposition, and the
When you finish Nicholson Baker’s seven-hundred-plus-page tome devoted to a day-by-day, minute-by-minute account of his several-week stint as a substitute teacher in rural Maine, you will be exhausted by the accumulation of minutiae, irritated by the endlessly distracted chatter, and numbed by the sheer relentlessness of human interaction in large groups: You will, in a word, have been schooled. There is a wide variety among books about education; the lofty view engages pedagogy and policy, while a subgenre with long-standing currency offers first-person narrative—fictional and factual—from idealistic teachers. Decades ago, Bel Kaufman’s popular novel Up the Down Staircase, based on
FDR grasped the potential of radio in 1936. Ike made pioneering use of television in 1952 (as did his running mate Richard Nixon). JFK triumphed on live TV in 1960. Ronald Reagan, a veteran screen performer, exploited the televised photo op in 1984. Bill Clinton recognized the power of MTV. With the rise of social media, Barack Obama had YouTube, Hillary Clinton has, in a negative sense, e-mail, and the master of reality TV Donald Trump is defined by . . . Twitter?
In 2012 Sue Klebold and her husband Tom popped up in Andrew Solomon’s deliriously received Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, talking about their love for their son Dylan, who with his friend Eric Harris shot and killed twelve students and a teacher and injured twenty-four others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Both seniors, they had been planning to blow up the school and kill many more, but the bombs they built didn’t go off. Sue Klebold said some rather startling things in Solomon’s book, such as “I am glad I had kids
The pattern is wearily familiar. A person with a grudge acquires an automatic weapon, exacts his revenge in a deranged killing spree, is shot dead himself, and leaves behind an outpouring of grief, soul-searching, and fiery political rhetoric that lingers in the headlines for days. Before long, the killing is eclipsed by another horror and becomes simply another entry in the dossier of death in America. The combination of legislative inaction, a powerful, endlessly cynical firearms lobby, and a fragmented electorate has produced that sad distinction for which America is known: The nation with the most firearms per capita on
