After decades of witnessing factories shutter and production move overseas, the political class in Washington seems finally to have woken up to the consequences. A once-in-a-century pandemic laid bare the costs of industrial weakness, and a generation-defining geopolitical contest with China has further raised the stakes. The importance of supply chains and domestic production to…

Conservatives have been on a collision course with Big Tech for some time. The removal of President Trump from major social media platforms in 2021 further inflamed preexisting concerns, and Republican deference to the Chamber of Commerce agenda on these issues can no longer be taken for granted. From censorship, to political bias, to data…

The American electrical grid can no longer be relied upon to supply the public with the power it needs to get through the day. In 2020, California saw brownouts caused by an overinvestment in renewables and an underinvestment in reliable power. The Golden State pays 80 percent more in electricity prices than the rest of the country. Texas’s blackouts during the Uri ice storm a year later killed seven hundred Texans and cost the state hundreds of billions of dollars. In July of this year, the Texas regulator warned…

Whatever its merits, consumer-driven, market-based—or, as I call it, “libertarianoid”—policy reform suits the structural and ideological needs of the American political system. It allows Democrats to expand the reach of government without having to increase state capacity. It allows Republicans to proclaim at once their compassion for a program’s bene­ficiaries and their commitment to the free market. And it allows both parties to shower interest groups with subsidies…

As nations around the world struggle to deal with the humanitarian crisis created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they also face difficult choices in balancing near- and long-term economic and envi­ronmental challenges. Europe, in particular, is stuck in a bind between multiple conflicting goals. In the immediate term, the continent must access fossil fuels from other sources in order to offset Russian oil and gas imports and avoid massive disruptions for consumers and industry. On the other hand, Vladimir Putin’s war has served as a clarion call to accelerate plans for decarbonization in order to starve the Russian war machine of revenues and build a more sustainable energy future…

Read in this light, the invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent alliance between Russia and China makes sense as part of a larger scheme to hasten ongoing American decline and accelerate the emergence of a multipolar world. Going forward, the core strategy of America’s rivals—already reflected in Russian rhetoric and diplomacy—will probably be to convince the rest of the world that their assessment of America is the correct one. The key question now is, how will America’s elite respond to this spreading perception of the country’s decline…

A Japanese or South Korean attempt to obtain nuclear weapons would be risky in many ways. It could trigger a preemptive strike—by North Korea against South Korea, for example. Even if it did not provoke an aggressive response, however, it could result in unwelcome diplomatic outcomes. It would put a serious strain on relations with the United States, which serves as the “policeman” of nonproliferation. Thus a more likely scenario involves these countries adopting a nuclear opacity posture similar to that developed by Israel…

Woke capital has many nascent theorists whose accounts emphasize factors external to the corporation: the pressure of woke consumers; the demands of woke investors; a need for political and cultural legitimacy from the woke public or perhaps a narrower woke elite; the social justice demands of the woke state. While not exactly wrong, each of these falls short by failing to look deeply inside the corporation. Woke capital is the result of an interaction within the corporation between the professional and managerial classes. Its impulse is professional-class employees…

Beck makes his case with excerpts from speeches by abolitionists who were also advocates of reducing immigration, excerpts from news reports about immigrant-led race riots, tales of organized economic exclusion of American Freedmen, policy recommendations from civil rights leaders, and data about demographic trends. The book chips away at the com­mon narrative which suggests that advocating for immigration moderation amounts to a form of white supremacy. He explicitly challenges…

The 2010s were a dangerous decade in Western politics. In the span of a single year, between June 2016 and June 2017, the Brexit referendum began Britain’s departure from the EU, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and France’s party system collapsed. But whereas Brexit and Trump were seen as breakthroughs of nationalist populism, what emerged from the French upheaval in that year was populism turned on its head. Emmanuel Macron, a centrist newcomer of impeccable technocratic, neoliberal, and pro-EU credentials, routed establishment center-left and center-right parties and took over the presidency in May 2017, putting a political party he had launched barely a year before at the center of French…

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…

Against what he sees as the pallid abstractions of Anglo-American political philosophy, Geuss presents himself as a champion of a more skeptical, historically informed way of thinking about politics. In his new book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal, Geuss gives an account of the autobiographical origins of this mode of thought and, more ambitiously, though also more vaguely, gestures toward an alternative to liberalism. Not Thinking Like a Liberal traces Geuss’s education, first at an unusual Catholic boarding…