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Michael Lind

Michael Lind is a fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, a fellow at New America, and a columnist at Tablet.
Articles by Michael Lind

Dinners with Moynihan

“Lind,” the voice on the phone told me one day in the mid-1990s, “I’ve been talking trash all day with Al D’Amato. Can you meet me tonight for dinner?” That is how dinners or lunches with Daniel Patrick Moynihan typically came about. My phone would ring and a secretary would tell me, “Please hold for Senator Moynihan.” Then the familiar voice…

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Leveraging Federal Procurement Policy to Secure America’s Supply Chains

Shortages of essential personal protective equipment (PPE) and medicines during the Covid-19 pandemic endangered the lives of many Americans and medical personnel, while the inflation-stoking shortages that have followed pandemic-caused lockdowns have illustrat­ed the dangers of disruptions to supply chains of many kinds. At the same time, the deepening military and strategic rivalry between the…

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The Pluralist Alternative To Neoliberalism

Thanks to rising inequality, sub-replacement fertility, and growing anti-system populism, technological civilization in the United States and worldwide is experiencing the latest of several historic crises that have occurred since the transition from agrarian to industrial economies that began in Britain, Western Europe, and the Northern United States two centuries ago. The central issue from…

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The Reshoring Imperative

The Covid-19 pandemic brought tragedy and disruption to America. But it has also provided another stark warning concern­ing the country’s disastrous overreliance on overseas production. It has demon­strated that without a strong, self-reliant industrial base, this country’s ability to forge a healthy, prosperous future—and even its ability to defend itself against foreign enemies—will be severely compromised. The fact that the world’s largest, and theoretically most advanced, economy could not provide…

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The Politics of Tollbooth Capitalism

No historical analogies are perfect. But in many ways the election of 2020, along with that of 2016, echoes the election of 1896. In 1896, the geographic and social bases of the two national parties were the opposite of what they are today. McKinley in 1896 and Biden in 2020 did best in the same…

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Trade Wars Are Strategic Sector Wars

Trade Wars Are Class Wars is an excellent guide to one kind of trade war, the competition for limited global consumer demand, a trade war which is indeed a class war within nations. About the other kind of trade war, the competition among nations for strategic indus­tries, the book has nothing to say. Those seeking guidance on this issue must look elsewhere…

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Home Economics: Putting the Family Back into the Economy

The idea that economics is the study of markets is one of the greatest mistakes of our time. Properly understood, economics is the study of the production of goods and the provision of services. The market is only one realm in which goods production and service provision are found. The others are the family, the…

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Tripartism, American Style: The Past and Future of Sectoral Policy

In reality, Coolidge Republicans and Roosevelt Democrats were not that far apart, agreeing that collective bargaining was legitimate in the private sector but not in the public sector. Before the late twentieth century, mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike agreed with the sentiment expressed by Coolidge in his speech to union officials in 1924: “We have yet a long way to go…

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National Developmentalism: From Forgotten Tradition to New Consensus

In response to the rise of “populism,” members of the Washington establishment have adopted a reassuring way to frame the ques­tion of America’s proper relationship to the world. As they see it, Americans are divided into two camps—open or closed, globalist or nationalist, interventionist or protectionist. In this framing, the closed, nationalist, and protectionist camp…

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Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise

In March 2018, China’s state-controlled internet, amid rumors that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was secretly visiting China, rendered the term “fatty” unsearchable. In China, “Fatty the Third” is a derogatory nickname for Kim, who inherited his position from his father and grandfather. This occurred shortly after Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party…

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