What makes a just economy? Can America face the past? Will democracy survive?
The questions we're asking this week
This week is Passover, the Jewish holiday that — putting the story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt aside — centers on the ritual asking of questions. There is special importance attached to providing a space for a child who doesn’t know yet how to ask a question, in order to teach them to do so.
At The Ink, this week has been a week of big questions. Will the former president face justice? Can the Biden administration act to make Americans’ lives better — and learn to speak to their emotional needs? Can we change the way we raise boys to build a better society — and stave off authoritarianism?
And, thinking on our conversation with Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, can we overcome four decades of neoliberalism and build a more just economic order?
This book I have written is trying to fill the gap, the vacuum that's been created by the death of neoliberalism. And what I try to say is, you ought to begin by thinking about what kind of society you want, and then think about what kind of economy will deliver that. And, clearly, it has to be human-centric. How can we let the most individuals have the greatest freedom? Freedom defined as their opportunities, what they can do. How can we have most people live up to their potential?
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With FTC chair Lina Khan, we’re asking how her agency can work to increase the freedom people feel every day — and even restore faith in government itself.
How people experience freedom in their day-to-day lives often involves their economic relationships and what their engagement is like in our commercial sphere. Some of the chicken farmers that I talked to, for example, were so scared of the processors that they were dependent on that they didn't even want to go speak to the government. The fear of retaliation was undermining their free speech rights — core liberties.
Senator Chris Murphy asks if the Democrats can learn to speak to the emotional crises that drive Americans toward authoritarianism — or if they’ll continue to risk everything by leaving the management of change to the most divisive forces.
What matters most is people’s sense of connection to others and their sense of meaning and purpose in the world. And you don’t solve a crisis of meaning and purpose by just giving people a little bit bigger tax credit.
So, listen, I’m for lowering the cost for drugs, and I’m for the child tax credit, but we need to be talking about the actual crises of purpose and meaning that are happening in this country. That means talking about really hard issues like masculinity and why so many men are feeling like they are lost. That means a really hard, tough critique of globalism and being very open and vocal about our desire to rebuild healthy small cities and healthy small towns. That means talking about power and not being afraid to name the people who have screwed us, the corporations and the billionaires.
Watching the Trump criminal trial, we ask, with civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, what accountability might look like when — and if — it comes.
There just has to be a reckoning. There just has to be. You can't reset unless you truth-tell and demand that people are held accountable for wht they have done. And if they've broken the law, they should be held accountable for breaking the law. To the extent that they've broken norms, ethics, values, they should also be held accountable for that.
With the Supreme Court ready to derail (or delay indefinitely) Trump’s election-interference trial, we ask again why Americans hope for a deus ex machina — rather than mobilizing for change.
People still seem to want the savior. It was going to be Robert Mueller, then it was going to be the attorney general… But we have to save ourselves. This is the essence of democracy, expressing yourself through your right to vote, and your right to assemble and protest. And elsewhere in the world, when democracy has been regained, quite painfully, it’s been through a combination of mass mobilization with electoral strategy and messaging — positive messaging, future-oriented messaging. But mass mobilization and building the democracy movement are fundamental, because as we have seen in the past, there's always going to be limits to what the legal system will do with these types of people.
As scholar of authoritarianism Sarah Kendzior asked before the 2020 election, why have Americans not faced up to the capture of the courts?
The saddest thing to see is what has happened to the courts because they are usually the last bulwark against autocracy. That's why the G.O.P. has tried for so many decades to control them and take us from a representative democracy to an autocracy run by the decrees of lackeys. People need to look more deeply at why the courts have failed. There have been so many threats against judges, juries, lawyers, and others in this system — the issue is not just complicity and incompetence, but fear of threats. We are living in a mafia state.
As messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio asks, what will it take for people to understand that it can happen here?
I am still swimming in the waters of American exceptionalism. And in the waters of American exceptionalism that are deep inside of us, there are certain things that just don't happen. They don't happen here, in this place where — our belief in the system tells us — it can’t.
Even having lived through 2020, even having been intimately pressed up close to January 6, I think that there is just a basic human need to think that the system's going to hold, that the institutions will save us.
Looking back at our thoughts after Trump’s second impeachment ended in acquittal, we wonder when America might reconsider its willingness to dole out undeserved second chances — and start giving the deserving their first.
So now, with a kind of constitutional sanction, Trump will get his thousandth second chance. Just as he got after every business failure, just as he got every time he crossed some supposed red line in office. And is this surprising? Is this second chance to resume a role in public life all that different from the impunity of every police officer who has shot an unarmed Black person? Is it different from the impunity of every Republican who laid the ground for Trumpism, then bailed at the last minute, only to reinvent themselves as a democracy-is-fragile guru? Is it different from the impunity of the speculators who caused the 2008 financial crisis? Is it different from the impunity of those who brought us Guantanamo and torture and Iraq and Katrina and climate change and voter suppression and suffocating plutocracy and more?
With political scientist Daniel Ziblatt, we ask whether Americans can recapture the spirit of institutional reform that the country left behind with the rise of the modern conservative movement.
I also think there's something to be drawn from looking at America's own great tradition of institutional reform. Up until about 1970, there was a tradition of reforming the Constitution and making our system more democratic. We’ve stopped doing that, and reimagining what’s possible is really important.
And, as author and activist Rebecca Solnit asks, can we move beyond knee-jerk responses and simple explanations towards real understanding of the problems we face?
I was just thinking of Robert Jay Lifton's term “thought-terminating clichés,” which is when you respond to a complex or ambiguous situation with some little slogan, a phrase that dismisses it as something we already know and don't have to think about anymore. This is something I have been saying about the horrific situation in Israel and Gaza right now. Categories are where thoughts go to die and people stuff into really neat categories: everybody in this group is like this; everybody in that group is like that. And they never have to think about it again.
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