Both Democrats and Republicans want America to build things again: semiconductors, nuclear power, and more. But beneath high-tech industries lie thousands of underappreciated businesses—machine shops, chemical manufacturers, and others—that form the backbone of any industrial economy. Overhauling the SBIC program to fund these unsung industrial companies will help ensure that American manufacturing survives and that American small businesses continue to grow…

Understanding the rationale behind Eccles’s ambitions also holds lessons for the current moment, revealing just how powerful and malleable bank supervision can be, why the industry’s current effort to remake supervision could backfire, and why those taking up arms to defend supervision may come to regret that decision. Conti-Brown and Vanatta show that supervision is a powerful tool. It can and often has been used to meaningfully enhance the health of banks and the banking system. Yet they further show that it can and has been used to serve other agendas as well, potentially making it very attractive to an administration looking to deploy such tools in new and sometimes self-serving ways…

The negative consequences of the H-1B can be traced back to its conception and design; the story of who crafted the visa, which firms and lobbies pressed hardest for its passage into law, and how it became Big Tech’s preferred option has largely gone untold. And while it is, of course, a natural feature of American life for businesses to lobby the government for policies that would benefit their bottom lines, what stands out about the emergence of H-1B is the sheer ease and lack of skepticism its advocates encountered as they made their case before lawmakers…

The nature of our capitalist system is such that the budgetary dimensions of deterrence matter. Buying certain kinds of weapons can be cost prohibitive. A defense industrial revival must be made to be a good investment, not just good security policy. Just as it was a bipartisan policy choice to deindustrialize and erode our defenses, it is no less of a conscious decision by policymakers today to buy different kinds of weapons in a different fashion…

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 coincided with a growing realization that the old economic playbook, which often relied on lip service to markets, was inadequate and culminated in unintended social and economic harms. Trump championed a view long held on the fringes of policy debates: that America’s massive trade deficits and deindustrialization were not just economic issues, but strategic liabilities. He pointed to the loss of factories and dependence on imports as evidence of American decline, rejecting the idea that such trends were benign side effects of globalization…

In American politics, discourse on China is ideological and one-dimensional, lacking in actual grounding in how this vast civilization-state actually works. I am optimistic that Breakneck will help move the national debate to a more nuanced understanding of China, and one that can inform the development of better industrial policy in the United States. The cultural diagnoses in Breakneck offer fertile ground to inspire a new generation of leaders and nation-builders. But perhaps Wang’s most important reminder is this: America’s strength lies not in perfection but in the promise of possibility…

There has been a fateful shift in how we define expertise. The Progressive reformers built vocations that were tied to missions, visible to the public, and legible to politicians. Their successors redefined expertise as a credential: the knowledge of process rather than mastery of a craft. To businessmen and academic reformers alike, competence meant general managerial skill, not professional vocation. As this view took hold within the bureaucracy, “expertise” came to mean knowing the procedures rather than knowing the work…

By naming their new book The Technological Republic, Palantir executives Alexander Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska gesture toward America’s distinctive technological and political heritage. The book comes at a unique juncture in Silicon Valley’s history. Its leaders have awoken to their status as a distinct social elite but remain uncertain as to what obligations that status carries. Their old “Californian Ideology,” half libertarian fantasy and half globalist prophecy, has collapsed. What creed will take its place, however, is not clear…

The decline of the American nuclear energy architecture was not merely political. It was institutional and legal, though not directed at nuclear energy itself. Reformers in the 1970s, reacting to perceived bureaucratic excess and regulatory capture, embedded procedural constraints across the admin­istrative state. Environmental statutes introduced layers of adversarial oversight that prioritized transparency and legal challenge over coher­ence and execution. The regulatory center of gravity shifted toward the courts. Standing rules were relaxed, citizen suits multiplied, and statutes like NEPA became primary instruments for challenging, delaying, or procedurally exhausting federal projects. These changes, while not aimed at nuclear energy development directly, rendered the deployment of sovereign-scale infrastructure increasingly untenable…

Closing the gap between U.S. power and its foreign policy commitments, while recognizing the non-utility of nuclear weapons (both strategic and tactical), would require a build-up of America’s military-industrial surge capacity, a reduction in overseas commitments, or both. The former would require the reshoring of many lost industrial supply chains. The latter would require not merely burden-sharing among existing allies, but burden-shedding by Washington to former protectorates that would now have to protect themselves, with only residual support from the United States…

American actions have repeatedly demonstrated a fundamental inconsistency and incoherence. A recent example is U.S. leaders berating Europeans for military underspending, while scuttling any European attempts to create an indigenous, united military-industrial complex or buy European-made weapons. It is obvious that there is a theoretical contradiction within the heart of America First grand strategy: America is not designed to be an empire and is accordingly susceptible to the whims of public opinion. Simultaneously, both the elite and the public both desire to be the primus inter pares in an anarchic international system…

Westerners who hope for re-civilization often have a nostalgic view of what it might look like. They often seem to assume that modern developments, both technological and governmental, will simply vanish as society re-civilizes and that we will then return to the insularity of old‑school village life. But this seems extremely unlikely. The process of re-civilization is undertaken by integrating aspects of one’s ancestral civilization with ultramodern innovations in both government and technology…

As we pass peak globalization and find ourselves in the midst of new proxy wars such as that in Ukraine, the ongoing restructuring of global order necessitates that we reframe a new concept of the national interest. The phrase is conspicuous by its muted appearance and sometimes even total absence from contemporary political discussion across the West. The proposition I want to advance here is that the reemergence of the national interest is less about shifts in the global balance of power and first and foremost a matter of internal democratic politics…

In San Francisco, there has been a revolt of the political center. Its leaders have emerged not from the world of professional activists, but from regular San Franciscans: parents of kids stuck in virtual learning, Asian families afraid for the lives of their elderly relatives, and people sick of walking through gauntlets of meth smokers. Their anger has led to a sea change in how the city practices law enforcement, leading to a historic drop in property crime rates. But it has yet to make an appreciable impact on the biggest problem the city faces: the open-air drug market…

Early liberalism’s exclusion of nonwhite people can be seen as the result of the abstractions that dominated Enlightenment thinking when the European mind was detached from its religious roots. In order to create a fictional world of interchangeable, “colorblind” individuals, liberalism first had to politically and philosophically erase those whose very existence was a testament to the unchosen and particular realities of human life. The rights were kept for “white people” because “white” functioned as the signifier for the “abstract individual” that the liberal imagination had invented.