The Choice Becomes the Echo

And more from this week...

With today’s entry, we conclude a full year of Understanding America: 101 posts (I guess I skipped one at some point), just under 200,000 words, roughly three books worth of commentary on economics, public policy, and politics. It has been gratifying to see readership grow steadily, roughly tripling over the period, and to receive so many interesting comments and questions. I hope you feel that what lands in your inbox twice each week has helped you to better, well, understand America.

Your one thing to read this week is “Rediscovering Order in an Age of Populism,” by former Vice President Mike Pence and Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner in the new issue of National Affairs. The essay is a resignation letter of sorts: two former conservative leaders meandering for more than 4,000 words over terrain nowhere in the vicinity of contemporary America. If Phyllis Schlafly helped launch late-20th-century conservatism with A Choice Not an Echo, this is how it peters out—as an echo of an echo of that once vital choice, that no one can even hear.

Pence and Feulner lament “the conservative movement's transformation into the anti-woke movement” and the New Right as “often reduced to mere opposition. It is, after all, easy to shout ‘no!’ And it feels good, too.” But they reach this conclusion only by ignoring virtually every relevant area where conservative are actively debating and advancing policy. Neither technology nor innovation makes an appearance in the essay, nor investment, competition, immigration, production, wages, labor, health care, spending, deficits, poverty, inequality.

Rather, they themselves see only wokeness, and make “contemporary corporate culture” the nation’s one problem worthy of discussion in depth:

Boardrooms have been co-opted by left-wing activists. Wall Street has sold out to progressive extremists by pushing for environmental, social, and governance policies that advance left-wing goals to the detriment of shareholders and workers. Fortune 500 companies have spent millions to fill our airwaves with ads that promote transgenderism and climate alarmism as much as their products.

Nowhere has this been clearer than in the rise of DEI initiatives that prioritize political dogma over merit and competence. These policies have encouraged racial and gender-based hiring quotas, ideological litmus tests in the workplace, and the erosion of excellence in education and industry alike. DEI is nothing less than state-sanctioned racism.

Having condemned the New Right (inaccurately) for focusing on the same problem they focus on themselves, they proceed to propose doing nothing. “While patience is required, the market can address this problem far more effectively than heavy-handed, counterproductive government action that we have spent decades criticizing the left for undertaking.” They feel that conservatives have traditionally trusted the market while the Left has taken heavy-handed government action that successfully captured the corporate culture, and to remedy this they propose to continue trusting the market while leaving heavy-handed government action to the Left. “True change,” you see, “comes not from government mandates, but from moral renewal.”

You might be thinking it’s unclear what Pence and Feulner want. But actually it’s quite clear, because in addition to this discussion of “Ordered Souls and the Administrative State” (yes, really, that’s the heading), they also expound upon “Ordered Souls and Foreign Policy” and “Ordered Souls and Global Trade.” They want more involvement in Ukraine and lower tariffs. Also more school choice and fewer marriage penalties in the tax code.

The Old Right is not without proposals. What it lacks is ideas.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

Big-Ass Truck Abundance | Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring

This is an interesting follow-up to last week’s discussion of climate policy, and the problem with the center-left’s newfound infatuation with an “Abundance Agenda” that conveniently treats decarbonization as job one. Yglesias highlights Congressman Ruben Gallego’s recent New York Times interview in which he says, “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, which, nothing wrong with that.” For Yglesias, “This is, pretty literally, abundance. … Are we making it easier or harder for people who would like to buy a shiny new truck to do that?”

So far, so good. Let’s apply this to some policy! What policy area do you think of when the question turns to whether a working-class American can buy a big-ass truck? If you’re Yglesias, you see implications for tariffs, antitrust, housing, even Medicaid! But does it mean any rethinking of the climate obsession? No, no it does not. In fact, who knew, it turns out that Big-Ass Truck Abundance makes the case for more aggressive climate action, because people can use their big-ass trucks to work on the solar farm construction projects.

Why Superintelligent AI Isn’t Taking Over Anytime Soon | Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal

It’s funny to watch Mims, the Journal’s technology columnist, and Kevin Roose, the New York Times technology columnist, adopt precisely opposite perspectives on the progress and implications of AI. Roose always sees AGI just around the corner, with dramatic effects poised to sweep across the landscape. Mims seems more interested in actual empirical research, the experience of practitioners attempting deployment… and he tends to reach a very different conclusion.

No, I Don’t Deserve to Be Assassinated | Andrew Biggs, American Enterprise Institute

I guess Yale put on a play about a young transgender Puerto Rican woman who decides to murder the seven board members responsible for oversight of the island’s debt. Biggs, one of the seven in real life, and named and assassinated in the play, makes the peculiar choice to fact-check the play and defend the board’s work. And look, I don’t doubt that whoever wrote this sort of play probably didn’t do a great job on the specifics of the Puerto Rico debt crisis. But fighting about the facts strikes me as a mistake.

Let’s stipulate that the oversight board is lousy—that Puerto Rico’s debt burden was onerous, that Congress penalized it harshly, that the board members did their best to squeeze out every cent. That wouldn’t make it OK to do a show about killing them. Once again, higher education’s performative caterwauling about political violence, safe spaces, and all the rest proves to just be pretext for elevating favored groups and denigrating others. That’s a lot of public funding you’ve got there, Yale. Shame if something were to happen to it…

Boeing’s Troubles Are America’s Troubles | Holman Jenkins, Wall Street Journal

A remarkably straightforward acknowledgment from a columnist on the Journal’s editorial page: “Boeing received a contract for the Air Force’s new F-47 advanced fighter, its CEO bristling at suggestions that it was a charity award to get the company back on its feet. Fine with me if it was… There may soon be a job for the U.S. government to defend and direct Boeing’s overhaul if it hasn’t already deliberately started to do so with the F-47 award.” Perhaps, sooner or later, market fundamentalism cannot help but give way to reality.

The Path to Record Deficits | Richard Rubin et al, Wall Street Journal

A nice visualization of how the late-1990s budget surpluses collapsed into what are now record budget deficits.

TARIFF CORNER

Four interesting stories, all on the same theme: The aggressive U.S. trade actions against China are forcing Chinese exports into other markets, creating a broader crisis for the global economic system. By definition, we aren’t experiencing this in the United States. But it has become the trade story for other key markets and it is driving those countries toward the U.S. as the vastly preferable trading partner.

Trade With China Is Becoming a One-Way Street | Jason Douglas and Clarence Leong, Wall Street Journal

China Is Unleashing a New Export Shock on the World | Alexandra Stevenson, New York Times

EU Spurns Economic Dialogue with China Over Deepening Trade Rift | Andy Bounds and Joe Leahy, Financial Times

China Floods Brazil with Cheap EVs Triggering Backlash | Allesandro Parodi and Victoria Waldersee, Reuters

AND AT COMMONPLACE

How to Save the President's Tariffs from the Courts by Nick Phillips, Amanda Gould.

The legal battle over Nixon’s tariffs provides a roadmap to secure Trump’s.

Gross Domestic Problems by Mark DiPlacido. Why rebalancing trade is necessary for sustainable growth.

The Home-Baking Revolution by Brad Pearce. The wheat farmers and mill manufacturers who are Making America Healthy Again with fresh bread.

And this week on the American Compass Podcast, Philip Pilkington, author of the forthcoming The Collapse of Global Liberalism, joined me to discuss how economic metrics obscure economic problems, and especially the limits to consumption as the primary measure of prosperity.

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

Enjoy the weekend!