The end of free market consensus
By Gary Gerstle

The phrase “political order” is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond election cycles. In the last 100 years, America has had two political orders: the New Deal that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, crested in the 1950s and 1960s, and fell in the 1970s; and the neoliberal order that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, crested in the 1990s and 2000s, and fell in the 2010s.

At the heart of each of these two political orders stood a distinctive program of political economy. The New Deal was founded on the conviction that capitalism left to its own devices spelled economic disaster. It had to be managed by a strong central state able to govern the economic system in the public interest. The neoliberal order, by contrast, was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymieing growth, innovation and freedom. The architects of the neoliberal order set out in the 1980s and 1990s to dismantle everything that the New Deal order had built across its 40-year span. Now it, too, is being dismantled.

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Here’s why everyone’s talking about a ‘K-shaped’ economy
By Christopher Rugaber

Persistent inflation has received renewed political attention after voter anger over costly rents, groceries, and imported goods helped Democrats win several high-profile elections last month.

“Those at the bottom are living with the cumulative impacts of price inflation,” said Peter Atwater, an economics professor at William & Mary in Virginia. “At the same time, those at the top are benefiting from the cumulative impact of asset inflation.”

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Why Americans Disagree on Everything
By Mark Edmundson

Our culture is amok with binaries. We have two major parties, just two, and they are forever opposed. When a group tries to start a third party, it can be summarily disabled by the existing powers. We love sports, generally the most binary of activities. One side wins; one side loses. Root hard for your squad, and the devil take the opposition. We savor debates where one side wins and one side loses.

In the larger world, we find allies, and we find enemies. We are, as I say, Democrats or Republicans, realists or idealists, people of much faith or people of none. We wear our team jerseys with pride and scoff at the opposition’s colors. We indulge in what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences” to keep the binaries alive.

Binary thinking is not always destructive. It can clarify complex situations and help us get oriented and make decisions. But when all thought is binary, we are in trouble. It can result in crude and insensitive conclusions. And it can be an inducement to conflict.

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What explains the genius of the American Founders?
By Gordon S. Wood

English politics were dominated by about 400 noble families whose fabulous scale of landed wealth, political influence and aristocratic grandeur was unmatched by anyone in North America. The English aristocrats were arrogant, complacent about their constitution and unwilling to think freshly about most things. When they thought about the outlying and underdeveloped provinces of their greater British world at all, they tended to look down upon them with disdain. In the eyes of the English ruling class, not only North America but also Scotland was contemptible and barely civilized.

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The Revolt of the Elites
By Christopher Lasch

The radical movements that disturbed the peace of the twentieth century have failed one by one, and no successors have appeared on the horizon. The industrial working class, once the mainstay of the socialist movement, has become a pitiful remnant of itself. The hope that “new social movements” would take its place in the struggle against capitalism, which briefly sustained the left in the late Seventies and early Eighties, has come to nothing. Not only do the new social movements–feminism, gay rights, welfare rights, agitation against racial discrimination–have nothing in common; their only coherent demand aims at inclusion in the dominant structures rather than at a revolutionary transformation of social relations.

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