Balance of power

Some big ideas to close the week

These are some of the big ideas still ricocheting around our heads this week at The Ink. Catch up on the linked conversations, or simply mainline these provocations.

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Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, once had a long dinner with his then fellow Senator (and still fellow beard haver) J.D. Vance, now the vice president. Murphy told me that he and Vance, coming from different parties and ideologies, agreed that the country could see a dramatic realignment of the parties, depending on which party was more willing to kill sacred cows and reorient its approach:

There is a realignment available in American politics. That there are a whole bunch of people on the right who actually know the economy is fundamentally unfair, think the culture is empty, and understand that it can’t be fixed without a government that steps in and tries to solve for some of these problems. And that the race is between the Republican Party trying to become more friendly to those government interventions — a higher minimum wage, more support for unions, breakups of corporate power — versus a Democratic Party becoming less judgmental of Trump’s base, who is often economically populist-curious, but still socially conservative.

And that if the Democrats said, You know what, if you don’t agree with us on all of our social and cultural issues, but you agree with us on unrigging the economy, we want you in. And whether we’re going to do that before Republicans become real economic populists is kind of, maybe the defining question — the defining race — of the next 20 years. And right now we have an advantage, because Trump clearly is not ready to do anything to help regular people. But are we ready to grow our coalition?

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I also spoke to The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos about China, America, and how what each country wants for itself and fears in the other will define the coming decades. When I asked Osnos what kind of global influence China wants, this was his answer:

I don’t think it’s a simple matter of them saying, OK, now we want to be the new United States. We kind of want to take over…superintending the world, that that’s somehow going to be kind of our natural position now. They don’t want to do that strategically. That doesn’t accord with their understanding of how the world should be organized. They think that’s like an overstretch, an overreach. They think that’s going to lead you into trouble.

They would rather have a version of leadership that is — this is their kind of language for it — more of a tributary arrangement, meaning that a big country is going to have this position and other countries will kind of live within the ecosystem of that big country…

But they are interested in in overtaking the United States in in some respects, in technical terms, in economic terms…partly because they think that’s good for them in self-protective terms. They don’t want to live in a world in which the United States is, in their mind and Xi Jinping’s telling, at the risk of constantly encircling and limiting their capacity.

Is China America's enemy?

And I asked Lindsey Tramuta, an expatriate writer based in Paris, about what living abroad has helped her see about America:

I think it shows a sense of humanity that I haven’t felt Americans offered each other in a long, long time. I think there’s a sense of community that we’ve seen in certain very local communities coming out of the U.S. since the beginning of the year — Minneapolis, among others.

Those moments show me something that I have felt and seen in France for the last 20 years…

That’s really what living abroad is about, too, is realizing that if we could take a little bit from here and take a little bit from there and realize that that doesn’t make us less than because we’re borrowing and adopting from other cultures.

Will America become a nation of emigrants?

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Photo: Evan Vucci/Getty