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Julius Krein

Julius Krein is the editor of American Affairs.
Articles by Julius Krein

Where the Chips Fell

Before student loan forgiveness, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, and the Inflation Reduction Act, something called the CHIPS Act was a major news story for a few days in late July. CHIPS was essentially a bill to support semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, and the final version that passed into law, which added basic research…

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The Other Realignment

Since “realignment” became a topic of conversation around 2016, it has usually been conceived as either a cross-partisan populist alliance, based on the overlapping themes of the early Trump and Sanders campaigns, or the takeover of either party by its “radical” or “populist” wing. But realignment could also take the form of the Democratic Party establishment recasting its agenda and reshuffling its coalition. This form of realignment remains somewhere between a distant possibility…

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The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth

Throughout 2021, U.S. stock market valuations have hovered near all‑time highs. In June, the unadjusted price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of the S&P 500 index eclipsed the tech boom record of 2000. Many other asset classes have attained, or nearly attained, record valuations as well. Stratospheric valuations may be partially attributable to the unique circumstances surrounding Covid-19…

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America’s Unhealthy Gerontocracy

America in its present state of decline increasingly resembles the late Soviet Union, but one of the most unsettling parallels is its unmistakable slide into gerontocracy. From Trump to Biden to Sanders to Pelosi to most of the Senate, one might think that the biblical three score and ten had become a mandatory minimum for…

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The Real Class War

Since at least 2016, the divide between the “working class” and the “elite” has been considered a defining issue in American (and Western) politics. This divide has been defined in occupational terms (“blue collar” versus “information workers”), geographic terms (rural and exurban regions versus major urban cores), and meritocratic terms (non-college-educated versus those with elite…

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Share Buybacks and the Contradictions of “Shareholder Capitalism”

In the jargon of finance, America is suffering from a capital allocation problem. The country seems incapable of making the necessary investments to fuel future productivity and growth, or to ensure widespread prosperity. At the government level, public spending on basic research and development as well as infrastructure investment has declined significantly over the past…

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The Three Fusions

Media headlines to the contrary, there is at present no authentic debate between globalists and nationalists in the West. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is because there are no authentic globalists. Worse than any open conflict between the two is the confusion that results from the absence of one. This confusion with respect to…

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Two Cheers for Tax Reform

The recently announced tax reform package is one of the few serious and intelligent proposals offered by House Republicans in years. Not surprisingly, however, everyone seems to hate it. Defenders no less than critics of the plan seem incapable of thinking about tax policy outside of the simplistic framework of Reaganomics. As a result, most…

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James Burnham’s Managerial Elite

Conservative polemicists have long presented a caricature of a decadent liberal elite, and liberals have offered a competing caricature of a conservative plutocracy. But few have attempted to understand how these ostensible opponents function as elements of the same elite, or how they have participated in maintaining the broader intellectual, political, and economic status quo.…

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