“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.
Keep scrolling for links about high finance, medical costs, the modern journalistic marketplace, postmodern conservatism, the meaning of Exodus and more.
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A new issue of National Affairs is out. Essays include Lawrence Mead on work requirements, Rita Koganzon on educational traditions, and Rafi Eis and Kian Hudson on nationalism.
Sample from Eis’s piece on national memory:
The nation, too, ensures the perpetuation of its identity by recalling and continually reliving its memories. This collective remembrance connects each person to the nation, enabling individuals to tie their identities to that of other members of the nation — including those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born but will one day participate in this process of shared recollection. In this way, memory mystically overcomes the natural barriers imposed by the passage of time.
Regarding infrastructure: Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has announced a new cost-cutting plan for the Post Office. James Surowieki says that critics of cost-cutting should blame those cuts less on DeJoy and more on Congress, which “wants the Postal Service to be a profitable business and essential government service at the same time.”
We have to pick one. If we want the USPS to be self-sustaining, then we have to reconcile ourselves to changes like the ones DeJoy is proposing. But if we want first-class mail to be delivered quickly everywhere for the same price, regardless of distance, and if we want post offices to stay open everywhere, then we should just abandon the idea that the USPS should be self-sufficient, and we can treat it like any other government agency.
In a new report, Chris Pope proposes some reforms to lower the costs of prescription drugs for seniors:
To fix these problems, Congress should increase the responsibility of Medicare’s private plans for reining in drug costs. This can be done partly within Part D, by shifting mandatory rebates to the catastrophic segment of the insurance benefit, but more completely within Medicare Advantage (MA). Because taking medications can prevent costly hospitalizations, MA plans typically offer prescription drug coverage with lower premiums and cost-sharing than in traditional Medicare, making them especially popular with beneficiaries who seek to enroll in Part D. Since MA plans already bear full responsibility for the medical costs of their members, Congress should be able to cap out-of-pocket drug costs in MA without diminishing the appeal of MA plans or adding to federal expenditures.
See also the Manhattan Institute’s new “Transition 2021” report, with proposals on crime, infrastructure, energy, and more.
A new series at American Compass—“We’re Just Speculating Here…”—looks at changes in investment patterns in the United States. Oren Cass writes in the intro, “The extraordinary growth of the financial sector’s non-investment has coincided with a sharp decline in the real economy’s actual-investment, and not by coincidence. The sector’s massive profits rely not on value-creating transactions but on extracting the wealth that once fueled the real economy’s growth.”
Joel Kotkin argues that the suburbs are the political battleground of the future:
What neither party has developed is an agenda to win the suburbs, beyond appealing to voter fears about immigration, white nationalists, or crime. Part of the problem is structural: though suburbs vastly outnumber the residents of traditional cities, there is no suburban equivalent to the National Council of Mayors and virtually all major media outlets—television, print, periodical—reflect a distinctly big-city worldview, primarily that of New York and Washington. Hollywood, now a primary generator of woke values, remains ensconced in Los Angeles, while the tech oligarchy has clustered around ultra-liberal Seattle and San Francisco.
At the New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells uses the current Amazon unionization drive to look at the changing politics of labor.
Matt Stoller argues that the Obama administration was indifferent to growing concentration in the tech sector—and that times may be changing.
In conversation: Shadi Hamid, Damir Marusic, and (special guest) Jason Willick talk political representation.
Andrew Sullivan interviews Mickey Kaus on immigration, welfare, and other topics.
Steven A. Camarota looks at the numbers of the migration surge at the border.
Agnes Callard talks with The Browser.
Phil Cristman writes on the “strange undeath of middlebrow.”
Freddie deBoer has a post in his newish newsletter arguing that the economic hollowing out of many traditional media outlets is the motivating force behind some criticisms of the newsletter phenomenon:
And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t. In fact Republicans are making great hay of the collapse of the media into pure unapologetic advocacy journalism. Some people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary ideologues or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them? Substack didn’t create this dynamic, and neither did I. The exact same media people who are so angry about Substack did, when they abandoned any pretense to serving the entire country and decided that their only job was to advance a political cause that most ordinary people, of any gender or race, find alienating and wrong. So maybe try and look at where your problems actually come from. They’re not going away.
New Kid on the Block: Postmodern Conservative is back—as a newsletter. Titus Techera kicks it off—classic cinema, philosophical inquiries, and Peter Lawler, oh my! His inaugural post indicates that other authors will be joining him.
Michael Walzer surveys some of the meanings of Exodus:
The Exodus has a long post-biblical political history. The march from slavery to freedom in the promised land has inspired many movements for social and political transformation. It was a common theme of Puritan preachers during the English Revolution of the 1640s. It was invoked often during the American Revolution, not only by preachers but also by political leaders—Benjamin Franklin among them. Black slaves in the American South sang of their hoped-for liberation in Exodus language—“Let my people go!”—and the story played a part in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s and in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The book of Exodus is the central text for Catholic liberation theology.
Walzer also argues for the value of the following approach to social change: “no promised land without you and me.”
Drawing on his new book, Leon Kass discusses Exodus with Bill Kristol.
Nicholas Poussin’s “Crossing the Red Sea” (c. 1634):