Ross Douthat's Age of Extinction

And more from this week...

We’re jumping right in to your one thing to read this week, because it’s a particularly excellent essay from Ross Douthat in the New York Times: An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.

I’m not even going to add any comment, because I’d rather you go read the essay. Also, I’m not going to add any comment, because I’m with 200 of my closest friends at American Compass’s annual retreat on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, so I must get back to celebrating our progress in restoring an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. Likewise, your usual Monday edition of Understanding America will be postponed until Tuesday.

But I still have a full roundup from the week for you:

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

Trump Rejects Millionaires Tax Hike | Richard Rubin, Wall Street Journal

After a couple of weeks of trial balloons floated by not only influential Republican members of Congress, but also the Secretary of the Treasury and the President, the Trump administration now seems to be tamping down rumors of higher tax rates for high-income households. Whether it happens or not still depends, as it always has, on whether it helps the GOP thread the extraordinarily narrow needle on a tax package that can hold everyone together on a party-line vote. If a higher tax rate doesn’t help get a deal done, no one is helped by supporting it. But what the trial balloons have demonstrated is that if it does get a deal done, the old orthodoxy of “thou shalt never consider a higher tax rate” is not going to be an obstacle. Which means, for all practical intents and purposes, that the old orthodoxy is dead.

Bonus link: In his interview with Time Magazine, President Trump expands on his own thinking, supporting higher taxes on high-income households in principle, but worried about the political costs: “I'd be raising them on wealthy to take care of middle class. And that's—I love, that. I actually love the concept, but I don't want it to be used against me politically, because I've seen people lose elections for less, especially with the fake news.”

Can Democrats Pivot to the Center? | Park MacDougald, City Journal

This is a very thorough assessment of what ails the Democratic Party. My own analysis is a bit simpler, but I think complementary: Progressives committed themselves irrevocably to the principles of “Social Justice” and “Defending Democracy,” and now find themselves operating in a democracy that does not share their vision of social justice. Something has to give, but they can give on neither, and so they find themselves paralyzed. (Spoiler: What has to give is the social-justice vision for which they have had full opportunity to make the case, and failed.)

Pope Francis, Trad Icon | Sohrab Ahmari, First Things

“In retrospect,” writes Ahmari, “it’s clear that Francis was just the pontiff we needed.”

All this amounts to a far more radical and systemic critique than most will find in the Church’s trad corners, where too often opposition to autonomy-über-alles doesn’t extend beyond the abortion or gender clinic to include the boardroom and the trading floor; where the purple-haired are afflicted, but not so men who coolly offshore jobs, asset-strip firms, or deny workers a living wage. Francis not only saw more clearly the whole rotten structure, but called out these critics on their narrowness and, yes, rigidity.

Grandparents Are Reaching Their Limit | Faith Hill, The Atlantic

The stories here are affecting, and provide a helpful snapshot of many challenges in modern life. But the lens is peculiar, to say the least, and may actually provide the better lesson about those challenges. For instance, the author posits that “when care work falls on families,” grandparents and parents suffer, as if care is not the fundamental work of all families. “Once you take the burden of care away from the family,” asserts once sociologist, “people can engage in a much more emotionally satisfying way.” Satisfying for whom? The article of course features the cliché that “everyone just wants what’s best for the children,” but it’s hard to find anywhere in the 3,000 words a discussion of those children as anything but inconvenient props in the lives of others.

TARIFF CORNER

A benefit of the ongoing tariff happenings is all the high-quality coverage and commentary we’re finally getting on the challenges of an industrial base. A few of my favorites from this week:

How America Lost Manufacturing | Amal Naj, Wall Street Journal

An interesting narrative about the decline of the Big Three automakers in the face of (fortunately, mostly U.S.-based) manufacturing by foreign competitors, the story has a lot of good lessons for thinking about how future waves of automation, including with AI, are likely to proceed. Implementing new technology is hard, and “one-fell-swoop” upgrades are rarely the way.

China Has an Army of Robots on Its Side in the Tariff War | Keith Bradsher, New York Times

And what begins in the story above, as U.S. leaders in robotics licensing their technology to Asian firms, comes home to roost here, as Chinese dominance in the development and deployment of leading-edge manufacturing technology. Making things matters.

Big Oil Is Offshoring Its Prized Engineering Jobs to India | Collin Eaton, Wall Street Journal

Lest you think business executives have learned the lesson of what happens when you send your engineering overseas and lose both your technical expertise your talent pipeline, they are still doing it, because that’s what the financial market’s incentives dictate in the absence of policy constraints.

Why It’s So Difficult for Robots to Make Your Nike Sneakers | Jon Emont, New York Times

A lot of good examples here in what makes manufacturing hard, but also in what will likely change if trade policy pushes toward more U.S. manufacturing. Production is not independent of design; both depend on business model. If Nike needs to do a lot more capital-intensive, highly automated manufacturing, it will also need to rethink how it designs sneakers and how often it changes fashion details. With different decisions along those other dimensions, domestic manufacturing might be cost-effective. With the option of using cheap foreign labor, those decisions will not be made.

This is a good example of what gets lost when people say the return of domestic manufacturing means that everything will be more expensive. It might just mean that you can’t get Nikes with the swooshes in eight different places each year. Is that a loss in consumer welfare? Presumably. Is it one that makes it harder for middle-class families to make ends meet? No. Should we trade off coolness of swoosh placement for the sake of a stronger industrial economy? That is the question on which policymakers might wisely depart from what the economic models dictate.

AND AT COMMONPLACE

So much good stuff this week, all of the sort that simply wouldn’t be published without Commonplace’s entrance on the scene. Very proud of what our editorial team is putting together:

Why Are Free Traders So Emotional About Trade? by Michael Lind

Those who dogmatically object to any strategic trade policy cannot be taken seriously as critics.

What Working-Class Voters Really Want by Ruy Teixeira

Hint: It’s not what white college graduates want.

‘Save PEPFAR’ Goes Too Far by Carmel Richardson

The program does not deserve the full-throated endorsement of Christian conservatives.

And on the American Compass podcast, managing editor Drew Holden steps in for me to host a fantastic conversation with journalist Mark Halperin about why the press so often gets the story wrong about President Trump, why it refused to cover former President Biden’s decline, and how the mainstream media’s incentive structure drives its descent into a liberal echo chamber.

As always, visit commonplace.org, follow us on X @commonplc, and subscribe for regular articles directly in your inbox.

Enjoy the weekend!