Joshua Mitchell writes,

What binds globalism and identity politics together is the judgment that national sovereignty is not the final word on how to order collective life. This judgment against national sovereignty—let us state the matter boldly—was the animating principle of the post-1989 world order, an order that is now collapsing before our eyes. Citizens who came of age after 1989 scarcely know how daring this project has been and, thanks to the American university, can scarcely conceive of any alternative to it. The post-1989 world order, however, is not fixed and immutable. It is, moreover, a rather bold historical experiment.

These are from a new journal called American Affairs. Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I will put some more quotes, from this and other articles, below the fold.

A few random thoughts from me:

1. What is Michael Lind doing on the masthead? I do not think of him as a natural Trump supporter. Of course, the mission statement for the journal does not say anything about Mr. Trump. It says, for example

We seek to provide a forum for the discussion of new policies that are outside of the conventional dogmas, and a platform for new voices distinguished by originality, experience, and achievement rather than the compromised credentials of careerist institutions.

2. We have National Affairs (Yuval Levin’s journal) and now American Affairs. What’s next? Playoffs? A college draft?

3. I find it easier to be anti-anti-Trump than to be pro-Trump. Left-wing campus activism repels me. The Democratic Party’s identity politics repels me. The outrage-manufacturing machine that is the Washington Post front page repels me. The arrogance of those in power regarding ordinary citizens repels me, although I do not think that American’s citizenry is blameless when it comes to the health care mess, for example.

4. I think that most of the policy ideas to help working-class Americans that are floating around these days are beside the point. I feel that way about trade restriction, immigration restriction, minimum wage increases, support for unions, education–pretty much every hobby horse, left and right.

I think that deregulation could make a positive difference, although the difference might be small. That is an area where there is some alignment between President Trump’s agenda and the needs of working-class Americans.

However, if it were up to me, I would focus on reducing the implicit taxes on labor demand and labor supply.

a. Get rid of “employer-provided” health insurance, which is an employment tax on healthy workers to pay for health care costs of workers with chronic illnesses, and instead provide support for the chronically ill with government funds. On health care policy in general, I continue to prefer the approaches that I suggested a decade ago in Crisis of Abundance to the Obamacare and ObamacareLite choices currently in play.

b. Reduce or eliminate the payroll tax.

c. Substitute a basic income grant for means-tested programs, including food stamps and Medicaid. However, reduce overall spending on poverty programs. That probably means setting the BIG below the level required to sustain a household. Leave it to charities and local governments to find the households that need and deserve more assistance than a low BIG can provide.

d. Fund (a) and (b) with a tax on consumer spending.

5. On foreign policy, if Trumpism means nothing more and nothing less than treating governments that work with us better than governments that work against us, then I am on board.

…If you seek further proof that the 2016 election was religious and not political, look to the weepy and still incredulous parishioners of the Democratic Puritan Church, who are incapable of accepting the outcome of the election. In national politics, you get another chance every four years; in religion, you have to fight evil every day. There is no election cycle in religion. This explains why the parishioners of the Democratic Puritan Church will continue to fight President Trump and everything that he does. For them, politics is religion.

…The retirement of the G.I. Bill generation, the tyrannical advance of the social sciences, the generally caustic hermeneutics of critique, the cancerous growth of identity politics—these and other causes have all but decimated the ranks of conservatives in the American university. Conservative foundations can really do nothing about this state of affairs, short of starting new universities, which they cannot currently afford to do. They watch as year after year the average age of their colloquia attendees gets older and their hair grows greyer. That is because today, fewer and fewer Ph.D. programs around the country have the requisite faculty members to form a three-person Ph.D. committee on behalf of up-and-coming conservative thinkers. When up-and-coming conservatives have no intellectual career alternatives in the American university, these sometimes undisciplined and irreverent souls will look elsewhere to say what they have to say.

…The post-election cry over “fake news” from these media sources is really quite remarkable. Any university professor who has battled the Left these past several decades knows that postmodernism and identity politics find the idea of “truth” laughable.

…The natural disposition of peoples is to huddle around “their own.” In America, what is remarkable is that enough of this impulse has been broken down so that we can live together without immediately looking to “our own.” Liberal greatness means that we look at others as neighbors and as fellow citizens. That we need to have strong borders, that we need to slow down immigration so that 95 million workforce-age fellow citizens can find jobs, and that we only admit foreigners who aspire to become American citizens, is not inconsistent with liberal sovereignty. We are a nation of immigrants, held together by liberal ideals, which call on us to gather together as neighbors and as citizens.

Gladden Pappin writes,

a cross-partisan position would be very different from the “centrism” that currently masks a set of uniformly neoliberal policies. The political upheavals of 2016 point to the possibility of another sort of centrism: a broad political constituency wanting a well-defined country able to offer its citizens security, a sound economy, and brighter future prospects.

…By their own self-understanding, however, “management” and “governance” are designed to keep critical aspects of the economy, state administration, and security from being “politicized.” They are incapable of being experienced by citizens as a place of political activity where democratic citizenship matters. Insulating economic policy from “political” questions means that ordinary citizens increasingly lack any means of redress when management goes bad.

… “When Trump supporters were asked why they voted for him,” the Wall Street Journal reported on December 20, only “1% said the most important reason was to advance traditional Republican policies. By contrast, more than one-quarter said the prime reason was to improve the economy, while 23% said it was to put America first rather than focusing on other countries. Some 21% said it was to defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.” Including the 18 percent who wanted to “change business as usual in Washington” and the 5 percent who voted in order to “take a tough approach on immigration,” 94 percent of Trump voters responded to the basic appeals of his campaign, in spite of a relentless effort by the Republican establishment to wage the campaign on the grounds of Republican orthodoxy.

The implementation of global trade agreements, vacillation and weakness in defense of American interests abroad, policy preference for the service sector (whether financial or blue collar)—these efforts have put citizens at a disadvantage on both sides of the aisle. Yet a campaign message that had virtually no policy articulation from established think tanks swayed a decisive portion of the electorate. Enterprising politicians: seize the day. Policy professionals: refocus. The old platforms have already adjourned

Channeling James Burnham, Julius Krein writes,

The initial separation of ownership and control that gives rise to the managerial elite is brought about by the historical development of capitalism. Managerialism succeeds because it proves more capable of fulfilling capitalist desires than capitalism itself. Simply to continue acquiring, the bourgeoisie must turn to the managers. But the impetus behind managerialism is not merely the desire for new technology. Burnham points out that the medieval master artisans required greater training and skill than the average capitalist laborer or even the typical bourgeois entrepreneur. Increasing technical complexity alone does not give rise to managerialism. Rather, it is the coordination of massive systems—mass production and consumption, mass politics, mass armies, and so on—that necessitates distinctively managerial competencies. Managerialism is thus a consequence of capitalism’s universalist ambitions, and its power derives from the managers’ ability to exert dominance over an ever-widening sphere.

…Organizing production becomes the exclusive province of the managers; everyone else is reduced to a consumer, dependent upon the managers. It is status as a member of the managerial class, not as an individual property owner, that determines economic and political power.

…In classical liberalism, the legitimacy of the government is based upon its ability to secure the rights of individuals under the social contract, most especially their right to acquire property—which is both the right to labor or “produce” freely, and to enjoy the fruits of their labor or to consume freely. The legitimacy of managerial society, by contrast, rests solely upon the managers’ ability to provide for the “right” to increasing consumption—to ensure “freedom from want.”

…Because conservatives refuse to acknowledge the differences between the economy of 1890 and the economy of 1990, they think that their enemy is the state. They fail to recognize that although the managerial elite uses the state as an instrument to acquire power, the real enemy is not the state but rather the managerial separation of political and economic power from the liberal social contract. In their confusion, they have done nothing to restrain the state, but the effect of their efforts has been to further undermine the political community as a whole, advancing only the interests of the managerial class.

…The fundamental contradiction within managerialism is that while the power of the managerial elite—its competence—rests upon its separation from any political community, from “the people,” this increasing separation eventually undermines its legitimacy and competence.

…The contradiction of managerial society is analogous to the conventional formulation of the corporate “agency problem” between management and shareholders, but much deeper. For it is not only that the interests of the managerial class diverge from other classes. Rather, the society itself disappears. Even if certain legal forms are maintained, they no longer have the same meaning. There are no shareholders in the original capitalist sense, only other managers. There is no property in the classical sense, only forms of managerial control. And finally there is no political community. There are no individuals, and there are no peoples, only a detached managerial apparatus through which power is exercised but which has no other purpose.

Reuven Brenner writes,

How is it that the United States, which has the deepest and most democratized financial markets in the world, should find itself in a position where government, through infrastructure spending and so forth, is perceived as the only effective source of capital in so many depressed areas?

To answer this question requires a clearer understanding of the failed policies of the past and the theories that legitimized them. As taxes and regulation compound to pay for well-intentioned if rarely thought through programs, the weakening of the matchmaking, capital-creating process prevents the creation and effective use of private-sector capital and jobs. Governments are then under the electorate’s pressure to increase spending and subsidies (requiring, in turn, additional tax revenues and more borrowing). And it is precisely our intellectual subservience to academic economists’ “macrostrology” that perpetuates this vicious cycle of failed policy. Instead of correcting policy mistakes by holding institutions more accountable, our economists, lost amid meaningless aggregate statistics, abstract models, and half-correct theory, conceive only of more aggressive social engineering.

Michael Anton writes,

the liberal international order (hereafter “LIO”) is the post–World War II consensus among the victorious great powers (excluding the Soviet Union, and later mainland China) on (in descending order of consensus) security, trade, and internal political arrangements. In more concrete terms, it is the constellation of institutions built to further that consensus: the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, and other, later entrants such as the World Bank.

…The attempt, beginning in 1991–92, to extend that order over the whole world was a case of American eyes being much bigger than our stomachs (or teeth), a confusion of ideology and interests. In fact, however, such expansion was never necessary to core American interests—peace, prosperity, prestige.