“Rounding Up” is a newsletter rounding up various links, newsletters, and podcasts from the perspective of political reform. If you’d like to join this experiment, please subscribe.
This week’s links feature a new book on Baby Boomers, debates about the future of the right, responses to Biden’s new stimulus package, tech policy, Heidegger, and more.
If you have any newsletters you think I should be following or any tips, feel free to drop me a line (through Twitter, email, etc.). Check out @fredbauerblog or fredbauerblog via gmail.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
Go Boom: In her new book, Helen Andrews profiles six eminent Baby Boomers. She discusses it with Ross Douthat and Arthur Bloom here. And with Saagar Enjeti and Marshall Kosloff here.
Lots of interesting material in the latest National Affairs. In one piece, Casey Burgat and Matt Glassman consider different accounts of the Trump presidency and possible consequences:
Was Trump a passing aberration, a transformative disruption, or merely a reflection of the state of our politics? Though they do not seem compatible, each view reveals an important facet of the truth, as each highlights a significant institutional fact about the modern presidency.
The disruptive character of Trump's time in office reflects some elements unique to him, of course. But it also reflects a core fact about the nature of the American presidency: It is inherently disruptive. All presidents, by nature of the authority they wield, re-arrange coalitions and ideologies, alter future agendas, and transform institutions and practices. It's true for political failures like Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover as well as successes like Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt. In this respect, Trump will inevitably reshape American politics. The scope of the disruption, however, remains less than clear, as it will be a product of how current and future political actors come to understand the Trump disruption and react to it.
Future directions for the right? The Wall Street Journal hosts a conversation between Gerald Seib, Oren Cass, and George Will on the future (and past) of conservative policy-making. The American Compass Twitter feed has some excerpts from that discussion here.
Biden’s First Move: As I was finalizing this issue, Joe Biden released details of his proposed “American Rescue Plan.” Big money, big ambition—$1.9 trillion. Some comments from Samuel Hammond (targeting child-care provisions), Matt Yglesias (an overview), Marco Rubio (checks first), Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy (on its effects on child poverty), and the Chamber of Commerce (you might be surprised).
The world is flat—and miserable, Alana Newhouse says. But those very frustrations are also an opportunity to build anew:
This disconnect between culturally mandated politics and the actual demonstrated preferences of most Americans has created an enormous reserve of unmet needs—and a generational opportunity. Build new things! Create great art! Understand and accept that sensory information is the brain’s food, and that Silicon Valley is systematically starving us of it. Avoid going entirely tree-blind. Make a friend and don’t talk politics with them. Do things that generate love and attention from three people you actually know instead of hundreds you don’t. Abandon the blighted Ivy League, please, I beg of you. Start a publishing house that puts out books that anger, surprise and delight people and which make them want to read. Be brave enough to make film and TV that appeals to actual audiences and not 14 people on Twitter. Establish a newspaper, one people can see themselves in and hold in their hands. Go back to a house of worship—every week.
(The theme of a return to embodiment is pretty big right now… see Snead, Carter)
US population growth has slowed.
Ben Woodfinden outlines the politics of paranoia. He also offers a reminder: a serious politics of reform can address some of the forces fueling challenges to the democratic order (but it actually does have to be a serious politics—not performance art):
The underlying conditions and causes that have fuelled discontent across the west aren’t going away. Something needs to be done to reverse the slide that is taking place across the western world, and it’s going to require serious leadership. We need to deal with the conditions, especially the structural economic and social conditions, that are increasingly creating a legitimacy crisis of democracy and make people vulnerable to demagogic forces. But far too many of the populists who claim to speak for the unheard have no interest in this. Their interest is in fuelling the grievance and outrage machine, not public policy. That’s not about dignity and respect, that’s just a new kind of elite that wants to rise to fame and fortune on the back of lies.
On a related note, Ramesh Ponnuru warns Republicans that being a party of opposition might not be enough during the Biden administration. (A policy-free agenda—a politics of “no”—does not really prepare the GOP for the task of governing.) He also notes the way that a politics of pure, parliamentary-style opposition might be in tension with the structure of the American system: “It is a better fit for the British than for the American political system, which gives the head of government much less power over the legislature. Every incoming president in the era of polarization has had a Senate majority of his own party, which has made it possible to staff the cabinet without too much difficulty. If a president comes to power without a friendly Senate majority, a default of opposition could create executive dysfunction.”
For Marshall Auerback, a key question of tech policy is who has power:
For one thing, it leaves too much power in Silicon Valley’s hands, with likely deleterious consequences ahead, much as the excessive free hand given to Wall Street’s financial engineers ultimately gave us the 2008 global finance crisis. Subcontract this kind of power to Big Tech and imagine what mischief might follow. Why arrest your political opponents when you can get corporations such as Google to cut off their phones, their bank accounts, and their electricity and water? You can claim that the state itself is not authoritarian and in a narrow sense this is true. But you can still see the potential scope for mischief when you empower Silicon Valley too much and allow them to determine what constitutes hate speech and what doesn’t, what incites violence and what doesn’t, what speech should be allowed and what shouldn’t, etc.
The National Review “Editors” podcast also looks at tech regulation, as does Matt Stoller.
New kid on the block: Walter Kirn has begun a newsletter. It’s off to a good start…(“All I know about Friendship is its name.”)….
Via the gang at The New Thinkery, Richard Velkley talks Heidegger and Strauss. If that’s not must-listen, what is?
The CBC surveys the legacy of Judith Shklar.
The American Mindset: Is Art Helpful or Harmful? Discuss.
Brian T. Allen tours the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Pierre-Jacques Volaire’s “The Explosion of Mount Vesuvius” from the museum’s collection: