REPORT
U.S. Falters in Bid to Replace Chinese Rare Earths
Despite new legislation, Washington won’t be delivering critical minerals needed for defense, high tech, and energy.
BY KEITH JOHNSON, ROBBIE GRAMER | MAY 25, 2020, 7:00 AM
A front loader shifts soil containing rare-earth minerals to be loaded at a port in Lianyungang, in China's eastern Jiangsu province, on Sept. 5, 2010. STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES


Rising tensions with China and the race to repatriate supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have given fresh impetus to U.S. efforts to launch a renaissance in rare earths, the critical minerals at the heart of high technology, clean energy, and especially high-end U.S. defense platforms.

But it’s not going well, despite a slew of new bills and government initiatives aimed at rebuilding a soup-to-nuts rare-earth supply chain in the United States that would, after decades of growing reliance on China and other foreign suppliers, restore U.S. self-reliance in a vital sector.

“I think the light bulb has gone on, but we are still in a muddle about exactly what to do about it,” said David Hammond, an expert on rare earths at Hammond International Group, a consultancy.

The problem is that, despite years of steadily increasing efforts under the Trump administration, the United States—both the public and private sectors—has yet to figure out how to redress the fundamental vulnerabilities in its critical materials supply chain, and America still seems years away from developing the full gamut of rare-earth mining, processing, and refining capabilities it needs if it seeks to wean itself off foreign suppliers.

This month, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz became the latest lawmaker to introduce legislation meant to jump-start a domestic rare-earth industry by offering juicy tax breaks for new projects—and especially large tax incentives for end consumers who source finished products from American suppliers. Other lawmakers, like Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have pushed legislation of their own meant to spur U.S. development of rare earths.

The U.S. Defense Department, meanwhile, is trying to throw money at the problem, putting rare earths at the center of the annual defense acquisition bill three years in a row, with plans this year to massively increase existing Pentagon funding for rare-earth projects. All that comes after a drumbeat of Trump administration moves, from a 2017 executive order seeking to ensure supplies of critical minerals to a 2019 Commerce Department report suggesting ways to do so.

“It’s ripe for legislation,” said an advisor to Cruz, who says that kick-starting domestic demand for finished rare-earth products will percolate back up the supply chain and rejuvenate a U.S. industry that has basically evaporated since its world-leading days three decades ago.

The drive to decouple from China has been thrown into overdrive by the coronavirus pandemic and new calls from hawks in Washington to take a tougher approach to confronting Beijing’s rise as a global rival. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, took to the Senate floor this week to rail against China’s economic imperialism and called for the United States to leave the World Trade Organization and create a brand-new global economic order.

Other lawmakers and Trump administration officials, starting with the president, are also increasingly leery of maintaining the kind of deep economic integration with China that has marked the last two decades.

“There’s this confluence of factors that really provided added momentum to the discussions on the Hill concerning security of supply [of rare earths],” said Jane Nakano, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It went on before COVID, but certainly there’s added momentum because of COVID.”

Gaining independence on rare earths has been the subject of on-again, off-again debates in U.S. defense circles since 2010, when China, the world’s leading supplier, briefly halted rare-earth exports during a dispute with Japan. If there’s so much urgency about building a U.S. supply chain, it’s not to make the materials needed for the next generation of smartphones, electric car batteries, or wind turbines—though all those things need high-end rare-earth products.


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Rather, the Pentagon’s front-line weapons are all heavily reliant on precision-crafted rare-earth products and materials whose manufacture now is largely in the hands of China. Each F-35 fighter, for instance, needs 920 pounds of rare earths; each Virginia-class nuclear submarine requires 9,200 pounds. Tomahawk missiles, guidance systems, and jet engines all need different combinations of alloys and specialized products using some of the 17 different rare-earth elements.

If lawmakers, the Pentagon, and the White House are all now taking the rare-earth challenge seriously, why do they seem to be making little progress in tackling the issue?

Part of the problem is that a lot of the efforts so far, both in private sector and those with government funding, have focused simply on getting more rare-earth ores out of the ground in the United States. There are new rare-earth mines in different stages of early development in Alaska, Wyoming, and Texas, in addition to expansion underway at the one existing mine at Mountain Pass, California.

Another potential factor is the growing realization that China can’t continue to dominate the rare-earth market in perpetuity. This is not because of any legislation coming out of Washington that outmaneuvers Beijing but simply because China is taking steps to limit its breakneck production of the minerals, the mining of which leads to massive environmental damage.

“China has in its campaign to dominate the world splurged all its rare earths at bargain basement prices and has now ended up as a net importer of heavy rare earths,” said Christopher Eccleston, a mining strategist at the London-based financial advisory firm Hallgarten & Company. “It’s really quite a turnaround.”

In a 2019 study, Hallgarten projected that China would mine less than 50 percent of the world’s rare earths, compared with about 75 percent today, by the mid-2020s as it tightens restrictions on extracting its diminishing supplies.

Still, the critical bottleneck for the United States, and especially the defense sector, isn’t access to rare-earth ores, which are available from many countries all over the world, including deposits in Vietnam, Brazil, India, Australia, Canada, and Greenland. Rather, it’s that the rest of the value chain—processing those ores, refining them into metals, and turning that metal into advanced products like permanent magnets—is dominated by China.

“People get caught up on the resource end, and they don’t realize that China owns the metals and will continue to own that space,” said James Kennedy, the founder of ThREE Consulting, a rare-earth consultancy focused on security implications.

Some of the latest initiatives do seek to address part of those vulnerabilities, though even those measures have been ill-starred. The Pentagon said last month it would provide funding to both the project at Mountain Pass and for Australian firm Lynas to build processing facilities. But now both those programs appear to be on hold: Reuters reported that the Pentagon is halting the funding of those rare earth projects pending further investigation. It’s not clear if the holdup is due to the realization that Mountain Pass has minority Chinese ownership (and a Chinese monopoly on the mine’s output) or if the retreat is due to the realization that neither U.S. project is rich in the particular kind of heavy rare earths the military needs.


So far, all the steps taken fall short of rebuilding the full, mine-to-magnet kind of value chain that would be needed to ensure U.S. self-reliance of the critical materials.

“In the end, it does not matter how many rare-earth mines the United States opens. It does not matter if they are upgraded to produce mixed or separated oxides,” Kennedy said. “Nothing matters until we figure out how to overcome China’s control over metal production.”

Some of the latest plans—like Cruz’s new bill—do try to nudge the development of more domestic capacity at the high end of the value chain, by incentivizing manufacturers to use magnets and other advanced products made in the United States. But using traditional tools like tax credits to fix a problem caused by China’s state-mandated dominance of an entire industry is likely doomed to fail, Kennedy said.

“Tax incentives are only good if you see profitability,” he said, a rare event in an industry plagued by high costs, razor-thin margins, and serial bankruptcies. U.S. lawmakers’ proposals, he said, have “a market solution for a non-market problem.”

That’s a point that Kennedy, Hammond, and many other rare-earth experts repeatedly make: Given China’s state-mandated dominance of the niche rare-earth industry, it basically controls pricing and ensures that normal economic rules don’t apply. That makes it hard to respond to China’s current dominance by turning to market-based solutions, like urging mining companies to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into big upfront investments that could be rendered uneconomical with a single decision in Beijing.

“Let’s see: uncertain demand, uncertain price, uncertain technology—yeah, let me get my checkbook out,” Hammond said.

To make sure the United States can rebuild the full range of rare-earth capabilities—from mining to processing to making the advanced final products—Hammond and others think it’s time for the Trump administration to turn its penchant for state capitalism to one sector that could actually use it. That would entail bypassing the dicey market economics of rare-earth mining and processing altogether and doing something like creating a government entity that could just underwrite the entire process in the name of national security.

“This is a critical defense issue, like the shipyards in the Second World War,” Hammond said. “Rare earths lends itself to a state capitalist solution more than just about anything.”





Keith Johnson is a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @KFJ_FP


Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @RobbieGramer

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class Hardcover – May 12, 2020
by Joel Kotkin (Author)




Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.

The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes―a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates.

Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers―a vast, expanding property-less population.

The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them―if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.
Review

“Kotkin has written an essential and critical study of emerging class structures at the intersection of technological determinism and post-industrial capitalism. He suggests that technological oligarchs are already controlling our economic future while creating a high-tech neo-feudal society that undermines democracy and economic mobility for the middle and working classes.”



--John Russo, Visiting Scholar, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University, Co-editor, Working-Class Perspectives


“Our society and economy is no longer progressing but regressing into a kind of “neo-feudalism.” As Joel Kotkin describes it, our once-great middle class is being eviscerated and America is dividing into a small group of uber-wealthy oligarchs who have colonized luxury cities like San Francisco and New York. A gripping cautionary tale by one of the most provocative and original thinkers of our time, this book is a must read for all those concerned about the future of our cities and our society.”

--Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis.
About the Author

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California and Executive Director of the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute. He is Senior Fellow for Heartland Forward and Executive Editor of the widely read website NewGeography.com. He is a regular contributor to City Journal, Daily Beast, Quillette and Real Clear Politics. As director of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman, he was the lead author of a major study on housing, and recently, with Marshall Toplansky, published a strategic analysis for Orange County, CA.


Kotkin is the author of eight previous books, including The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us and the highly praised The New Class Conflict. He co-edited the 2018 collection Infinite Suburbia. Kotkin’s books The City: A Global History and Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Are Reshaping the Global Economy, were published in numerous languages including Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German and Arabic. Kotkin has published reports on topics ranging from the future of class in global cities to the places with the best opportunities for minorities.

Kotkin has conducted major studies on demography and urbanism in East Asia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and many cities in the United States.


AMAZON KINDLE, YOU CAN DOWNLOAD A FREE CHAPTER TO READ


https://www.amazon.ca/Coming-Neo-Feudalism-Warning-Global-Middle-ebook/dp/B07VCG8RPF/ref=sr_1_1?_encoding=UTF8&dchild=1&keywords=The+Coming+of+Neo-Feudalism%3A+A+Warning+to+the+Global+Middle+Class&qid=1590459848&s=digital-text&sr=1-1


The Coronavirus Is Also Spreading a Dark New Era of Neo-Feudalism

‘HUMAN SACRIFICE’

Rather than a catastrophe ruining lives, some modern day clerics see the pandemic and the lockdowns as a “test run” for their dreams of achieving “degrowth.”

Joel Kotkin
Published May. 25, 2020

https://joelkotkin.com/books/


OPINION

Queen Mary's Psalter (Ms. Royal 2. B. VII)/Public Domain



Adapted from The Coming of Neo-Feudalism (Encounter Books).

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the global shift already underway towards a neo-feudal society. With the middle-class economy largely shut down and, in the best-case scenario, in for a long and painful recovery, the population that is barely hanging on is expanding rapidly in America and around the world. In the U.S. alone, the ranks of the poor are projected to increase by as much as 50 percent, to levels not seen in at least a half century.

Neo-feudalism is reprising the kind of society that existed in Medieval times, characterized by declining social mobility and greater concentrations of power. In the neo-Feudal world, as in the original, the middle class loses its primacy, as small businesses fail and even affluent families face the prospect of joining the ranks of ever expanding class of property-less serfs.

FROM DAILY BEAST
BEHIND PAYWALL
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coronavirus-is-also-spreading-a-dark-new-era-of-neo-feudalism?ref=home




Winter 2019 / Volume III, Number 4
America’s Drift toward Feudalism
by Joel Kotkin

America’s emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a dramatic break from the past. The United States came on the scene with only vestiges of the old European feudal order—mostly in the plantation economy of the Deep South. There was no hereditary nobility, no national church, and, thanks to George Washington’s modesty, no royal authority. At least among whites, there was also far less poverty in America, compared to Europe’s in­tense, intractable, multigenerational poverty. In contrast, as Jeffer­son noted in 1814, America had fewer “paupers,” and the bulk of the pop­ulation was “fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to la­bor moderately and raise their families.”

Yet in recent decades this country, along with many other liberal democracies, has begun to show signs of growing feudalization. This trend has been most pronounced in the economy, where income growth has skewed dramatically towards the ultrarich, creating a ruling financial and now tech oligarchy. This is a global phenomenon: starting in the 1970s, upward mobility for middle and working classes across all advanced economies began to stall, while the prospects for the upper classes rose dramatically.

The fading prospects for the new generation are all too obvious. Once upon a time, when the boomers entered adulthood, they en­tered an ascendant middle class. According to a recent study by the St. Louis Fed, their successors, the millennials, are in danger of be­coming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation.

This generational shift will shape our future economic, political, and social order. About 90 percent of those born in 1940 grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project. This proportion was only 50 percent among those born in the 1980s, and the chances of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has declined by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Corporate CEOs used to boast of starting out in the mailroom. There will not be many of those stories in the future.

The Return to Oligarchy

In feudal society, power was exercised primarily by two classes—what the French referred to as the First Estate, the clergy, and the Second Estate, comprised of the warrior-aristocratic elite. Everyone else, even successful merchants, resided in the Third Estate, and most were peasants living at subsistence levels. This was a society, noted historian Pierre Riché, composed of “those who prayed, those who fought, and those who labored.”1

Contemporary society may have little place for orthodox religion, and our military, however impressive, hardly constitutes an effective ruling class. But we are beginning to see the elevation of two very powerful classes—one dominant economically, the other culturally. Meanwhile, the power of today’s Third Estate inexorably weakens.

The ultrarich represent an emergent global aristocracy—or rather, a new oligarchy. Fewer than one hundred billionaires now own as much as 50 percent of the world’s assets—the same amount that around four hundred billionaires owned a little more than five years ago. In the United States, the richest four hundred U.S. citizens now have more wealth than 185 million of their fellow Americans com­bined. The shift has been dramatic: the top 1 percent in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth from 1945 to 1973, but in the following two decades the country’s richest classes gobbled up the majority of U.S. income growth.

Patterns of property ownership reflect the very same trends that anchored both the medieval aristocratic and ecclesiastical classes. The proportion of land owned by the nation’s hundred largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017. In 2007, according to the Land Report, this group owned a combined twenty-seven million acres of land, equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined. A decade later, the hundred largest landowners had holdings of over forty million acres. Their holdings are now larger than the entirety of New England. Even in much of the vast American West, where much of the land remains in public hands, billionaires have created expansive estates that many fear will make the rest of the local population land-poor.

In the past, the oligarchy tended to be associated with either Wall Street or industrial corporate executives. But today the predominant and most influential group consists of those atop a handful of mega-technology firms. Six firms—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—have achieved a combined net worth equal to one-quarter of the nasdaq, more than the next 282 firms combined and equal to the GDP of France. Seven of the world’s ten most valuable companies come from this sector. Tech giants have produced eight of the twenty wealthiest people on the planet. Among the na­tion’s billionaires, all those under forty live in the state of California, with twelve in San Francisco alone. In 2017, the tech industry pro­duced eleven new billionaires, mostly in California. Only China, home to nine of the world’s top twenty tech firms, presents any kind of challenge to their domination.

Initially many Americans, even on the left, saw the rise of the tech oligarchy as both transformative and positive. Observing the rise of the technology industry, the futurist Alvin Toffler prophesied “the dawn of a new civilization,”2 with vast opportunities for societal and human growth. But today we confront a reality more reminiscent of the feudal past—with ever greater concentrations of wealth, along with less social mobility and material progress.

Rather than Toffler’s tech paradise, we increasingly confront what the Japanese futurist Taichi Sakaiya, writing three decades ago, saw as the dawn of “a high-tech middle ages.”3 Rather than epitomizing American ingenuity and competition, the tech oligarchy increasingly resembles the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. With the alacrity of the barbarian warriors who took control of territory after the fall of the Roman Empire, they have seized the strategic digital territory, and they ruthlessly defend their stake.

Such concentrations of wealth naturally seek to concentrate power. In the Middle Ages, this involved the control of land and the instruments of violence. In our time, the ascendant tech oligarchy has exploited the “natural monopolies” of web-based business. Their “super-platforms” depress competition, squeeze suppliers, and reduce opportunities for potential rivals, much as the monopolists of the late nineteenth century did. Firms like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft control 80 to 90 percent of their key markets and have served to further widen class divides not only in the United States but around the world.

Once exemplars of entrepreneurial risk-taking, today’s tech elites are now entrenched monopolists. Increasingly, these firms reflect the worst of American capitalism—squashing competitors, using inden­tured servants from abroad for upwards of 40 percent of their Silicon Valley workforce, fixing wages, and avoiding taxes—while creating ever more social anomie and alienation.

The tech oligarchs are forging a post-democratic future, where opportunity is restricted only to themselves and their chosen few. As technology investor Peter Thiel has suggested, democracy—based on the fundamental principles of individual responsibility and agency—does not fit comfortably with a technocratic mindset that believes superior software can address and modulate every problem.

This emerging world is far removed from the democratic capitalism that dominated the era after World War II. Rather than encouraging and accommodating families, today’s oligarchs promote a largely childless college campus environment, where they even pay female workers to freeze their eggs. Traditionally companies liked employees with families. Not so much in the brave new tech world, which demands long hours and little time off for such things as raising children.

As for the rest of the population, the prospects are even bleaker. In the tech hub of San Francisco, the middle-class family is almost extinct. The city has lost thirty-one thousand home-owning families over the past decade. It leads the state in economic inequality. The evidence of massive inequality, pervasive homelessness, and social dysfunction fills the streets.

Silicon Valley, located in the suburbs south of the city, has also become profoundly less egalitarian. It is increasingly divided between an entrenched ultra-wealthy class and a dependent poor class, work­ing largely in the service industries. By 2015, some seventy-six thou­sand millionaires and billionaires called Santa Clara and San Mateo coun­ties home, while many in the area struggle to feed their families and pay their bills each month. Nearly 30 percent of Silicon Valley’s residents rely on public or private assistance.

Wired magazine’s Antonio García Martínez describes the contemporary Valley as “feudalism with better marketing.” In Martínez’s view, a plutocratic elite of venture capitalists and company founders sit above the still-affluent cadre of skilled professionals—well paid, but living only ordinary middle-class lives, given taxes and high pri­ces. Below them lies a vast population of gig workers, whom Martínez compares with sharecroppers in the South. And at the very bottom lies an untouchable class of homeless, those addicted to drugs, and criminals.

Martínez describes a society that, as in the Middle Ages, is “highly stratified, with little social mobility.” High prices make it all but impossible for anyone except the very affluent to own their homes. Workers in the gig economy, much less the “untouchables,” have little chance to improve their lot but struggle to barely pay their rent, or are forced to sleep in their cars, on friend’s couches, or commute long distances from the outlying periphery.

Feudalism with Better Marketing

This new feudal order rests on a new clerisy, which has now taken the cultural and intellectual role exercised by the old First Estate. Al­though largely secular, these worthies take on the role of ecclesiastical authorities from medieval times, seeing themselves as anointed to direct human society—a modern version of the feudal “oligarchy of priests and monks whose task it was to propitiate heaven.”4

Far larger and broader than the oligarchy, the clerisy spans an ever‑growing section of the workforce that largely works outside material capitalist enterprise—as teachers, consultants, lawyers, gov­ernment workers, and even doctors, more of whom now work as employees or contractors than owners. These professions have only grown, while those of the traditional middle class—small business owners, workers in basic industries and construction—have seen their share of the job market shrink.

Estimates of the size of the clerisy vary. Michael Lind estimates what he calls the “overclass” at some 15 percent of the American workforce, far larger than the membership of the old First Estate, which was closer to 1 percent of the French population. Charles Murray, on the other hand, offers a narrower estimate including only those at the top echelon in law, government, and universities—roughly 2.4 million people out of a country of over 320 million.5

At its apex, the clerisy today is dominated by what Daniel Bell would define as the “knowledge class.”6 Made up largely of the well-educated offspring of the affluent, this class has become increasingly hereditary in part because well-educated people marry each other. Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 to 48 percent. “After one generation,” as Bell noted, “a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.”7

The new clerisy is crucially important to the new oligarchs, who need allies in the government, media, and academia to maintain their supremacy. In many cases the tech elite now control the clerisy’s own industries: consider the media, with Jeff Bezos’s takeover of the Washington Post, and the entertainment industry, with the rise of Netflix, Apple, and Amazon in Hollywood.

The political rise of this cultural overclass has been building for well over fifty years. As early as the 1960s, presidential historian Theodore White spoke of the “the new priesthood . . . of action intel­lectuals” that shaped the John F. Kennedy administration. This ming­ling of intelligentsia and power reached a pinnacle during the presi­dency of Barack Obama, whose administration was staffed al­most exclusively with products of the nation’s elite universities. More than sixty administration officials, roughly a fourth of Obama’s over­all appointments, had attended just one school—Harvard. Remark­ably, more top administration officials had degrees from Oxford Univer­sity than from any American public university.

Like the old First Estate, the clerisy—what the French socialist writer Christophe Guilluy calls “the privileged stratum”—operate from an assumption of “moral superiority” that justifies their right to rule.8 They represent the apotheosis of H. G. Wells’s notion of an “emergent class of capable men” who could take upon itself the task of “controlling and restricting . . . the non-functional masses.” This new elite, he predicted, would replace democracy with “a higher organism,” what he called “the New Republic.”9

Whereas the old First Estate justified its control based on spiritual dogma, the modern clerisy bases much of its power on its reading of “science.” Its members claim that, rather than mere factionalism, they represent an “objective” perspective above personal considerations. “When scientists say they want to live up to their social responsibilities, what they usually say is that they want more power than they have,” once observed Irving Kristol. “It means they want to run things, to take charge. It’s always nicer to run things than to be run by them.”

A shared belief in meritocratic superiority binds the oligarchs and the clerisy. This has led, as in medieval times, to a remarkable sharing and dissemination of orthodoxy. Even professions such as journalism, once at least somewhat diverse philosophically, have become, with few exceptions, boosters of the “progressive” party line. By 2018, barely 7 percent of U.S. reporters stated they were Republicans; some 97 percent of all journalist political donations go to Democrats.

Similar patterns can be seen in other media as well. Once divided between conservatives and liberals, Hollywood and its imitators else­where now tilt heavily to the Left. Liberal columnist Jonathan Chait, reviewing the offerings of major studios and networks, described what he called “a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.” In 2018, over 99 percent of all major entertainment executives’ donations went to Democrats.
Universities and the New Clerisy

But the ultimate engine of the clerisy’s power, and the prime incubator of its orthodoxy, lies in the universities. This sector has expanded its influence and scope enormously in the last half century. The total number of people enrolled in college in the United States grew from five million in 1964 to nearly eight million in 1970 and to some twenty million today.

Yet even as the universities have expanded, it’s the elite tier that serves as the ultimate gatekeepers for the upper classes. In his book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, David Rothkopf compiled a list of more than six thousand members of the “superclass” around the world—including leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media, and religious groups. After drawing a “globally and sectorally representative sample” of three hundred members from the list, Roth­kopf and his colleagues found that close to three in ten attended one of twenty elite universities—with Stanford, Harvard, and the Uni­versity of Chicago most highly represented.10

As elite universities have become more expensive and more critical to success, they have become, if anything, more socially exclusive, widening the gap between themselves and smaller, less well-posi­tioned institutions.11A National Journal survey of 250 top American public sector decision-makers—a critical part of the upper clerisy—found that 40 percent of them were Ivy League graduates. Only a quarter had earned graduate degrees from a public university. The days of rising up from a minor college to a position of influence and high status increasingly belong to the past.

Equally troubling, the clerisy, again like its medieval counterparts, has adopted a role as an enforcer not of free thought but of “pro­gressive” orthodoxy. These trends are particularly acute in fields that most impact public policy and opinion. Well under 10 percent of faculty at leading law schools, such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley, describe themselves as conservative. Leading journalism schools, including Columbia, have moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting and have adopted a “social justice” agenda as their signature approach.

Much like the early Church after the fall of Rome, which sought to suppress the memory of pagan civilization, the clerisy now has turned against the inheritance of modern liberal capitalism. In the schools, they have worked to remove the lodestones of that culture—Homer, Cicero, Shakespeare, Milton, and the founding fathers—from the campus curriculum. Instead they favor more politically correct books that tend to focus on the undoubted failings of our civilization, but rarely support the idea of America as a fundamentally liberal society which has provided unmatched opportunity for millions.

In modern America, the clerisy represents an ascendant class that shapes many of the “progressive” values embraced by the oligarchs and helps legitimate their rule. Imbued with a sense of natural su­periority—whether based on religion or some sense of elevated cognitive abilities, they now seek to shape our cultural, political, and social environments in ways that often violate the standards of liberal democracy, open exchange, and pluralism. Before we cede such power to the clerisy, we may want to consider the old Latin phrase quis custodiet ipsos custodes—who watches the watchers? In the rise of the clerisy, we see a powerful force for hierarchy, social stagnation, and thought control that could rival the role played by its predecessors in medieval times.

The Decline of the Third Estate in America

As the oligarchy and clerisy have waxed, the prospects for the Ameri­can third estate have either stagnated or gotten worse. In the United States, a country built on aspiration, the fading prospects for the new generation are now painfully obvious. Three-quarters of American adults today will not grow up to be better off than their parents. According to Pew, a majority of parents think their children will be financially worse off than themselves.

Unlike their parents, most of whom joined the middle-class yeo­manry, many young people face a future as propertyless serfs. By 2030, according to a Deloitte study of U.S. trends, millennials will account for barely 16 percent of the nation’s wealth. GenXers will hold 31 percent, but even in 2030, when they will be entering their eighties and nineties, boomers will still control a remarkable 45 per­cent of the nation’s wealth.

This erosion of the “American dream” centers largely on property. Since the end of feudalism, the rise of market-oriented democracy has accompanied the rapid dispersion of property ownership. This factor, critical in the earliest development of self-government in ancient Athens and Rome, was critical to the American founders’ conception of a republic. During the middle of the twentieth century, rates of homeownership in the United States expanded from 44 percent in 1940 to 63 percent thirty years later. Yet in the new generation, this prospect is fading. In the United States, homeownership among the post-college cohort (ages 25–34) has dropped from 45.4 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2016, a drop of 18 percent, according to Census Bureau data.

Some pundits suggest the decline of homeownership stems from changing preferences among younger people. Planners, social pundits, and urban intellectuals within the clerisy repeatedly make this asser­tion—one echoed by investors who seek to create a “rentership” society where people remain renters for life, enjoying their video games or houseplants. Yet virtually all surveys show that the vast majority of younger people would like to own a single-family home, and most want to raise children. The reason for not doing so lies with high housing costs.

In the emerging neo-feudal world, property ownership is increasingly restricted to older generations, who benefit from expanding home values and rental income, as well as wealthy institutional investors. In this new order, inheritance, notes French economist Thomas Piketty, seems destined to “make a comeback.”12 In the next generation, inheritance may play a role unseen since the nineteenth century. In America, a nation with a mythology disdainful of inher­ited wealth, millennials are counting on inheritance for their retirement at a rate three times that of the boomers. Among the youngest cohort, those 18 to 22, over 60 percent see inheritance as their primary source of wealth as they age.

The Politics of Inequality

These changes in the patterns of ownership and class will likely reshape liberal democracy, creating “new forms of government,” pre­dicts Stratfor’s Eric Schnurer, “[with] economics and social organization as different from today’s as our world is from the Middle Ages.” The shrinking of the yeoman class of small businesspeople and prop­erty owners certainly undermines the ballast of democratic community life, and could well accelerate the already ongoing radicalization of American politics.

This radicalization is clearest among millennials—those faced with limited prospects for upward mobility. Some 40 percent of millennials, notes Pew, favor limiting speech deemed offensive—well above the 27 percent of GenXers, 24 percent of boomers, and 12 percent of the oldest, many of whom recall the censorship imposed by fascist and communist regimes of the past. Millennials are also more likely to be dismissive about basic constitutional civil rights, and are even more accepting of a military coup than previous generations.

This new radical bent extends to both Right and Left. In November 2016, more white American millennials voted for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. But the new radicalism is, for now, most pro­nounced on the left. During the 2016 primaries, socialist Bernie Sanders outpolled Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined. A 2016 poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 44 percent of American millennials favored socialism while another 14 percent chose fascism or communism. By 2024, these mil­lennials will be by far the country’s biggest voting bloc.

Drawing little hope from the private sector, many millennials en­dorse policies that favor handing control of American economic life to Washington. Some of this tendency rests on environmental con­cerns, but economic inequality drives much of the thinking. As one of the architects of the Green New Deal recently said, “Do you guys think of [the Green New Deal] as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

The Coming Battle

Ultimately the shift of millennials to the Left could lead to a conflict between the oligarchs and the clerisy over the appropriation of wealth. The way things look now, the battle will be over who pays for an ever-expanding welfare state—not how to expand the middle class. This is likely to shift our politics increasingly in an authoritarian direction. As the great historian Barrington Moore noted, “No bourgeois, no democracy.” In a country where the middle ranks are shrinking, the elites more powerful, and ideological polarization is on the rise, the prospects for democracy, even in its greatest homeland, could be grim indeed.

In the world envisioned by the oligarchs and the clerisy, the poor and much of the middle class are destined to become more dependent on the state. This dependency could be accelerated as their labor is devalued both by policy hostile to the industrial economy, and by the greater implementation of automation and artificial intelligence.

Opposing these forces will be very difficult, particularly given the orientation of our media, academia, and the nonprofit world, as well as the massive wealth accumulated by the oligarchs. A system that grants favors and entertainment to its citizens but denies them prop­erty expects little in return. This kind of state, Tocqueville suggested, can be used to keep its members in “perpetual childhood”; it “would degrade men rather than tormenting them.”13

Reversing our path away from a new feudalism will require, among other things, a rediscovery of belief in our basic values and what it means to be an American. Nearly 40 percent of young Ameri­cans, for example, think the country lacks “a history to be proud of.” Fewer young people than previous generations place an emphasis on family, religion, or patriotism. Rather than look at what binds a dem­ocratic society together, the focus on both right and left has been on narrow identities incapable of sustaining a democratic and pluralistic society. The new generation has become cut off from the traditions and values of our past. If one does not even know of the legacies underpinning our democracy, one is not likely to notice when they are lost.14 Recovering a sense of pride and identification with Ameri­ca’s achievements is an essential component of any attempt to recover the drive, ambition, and self-confidence that propelled the United States to the space age. If we want to rescue the future from a new and pernicious form of feudalism, we will have to recover this ground.

To reverse neo-feudalism, the Third Estate—the class most threat­ened by the ascendency of the oligarchs and the clerisy—needs to re­invigorate its political will, just as it did during the Revolution and in the various struggles that followed. “Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten to how to rebel,” noted the British historian R. H. Tawney.15 Whether we can understand and defy the new feudalism will determine the kind of world our children will inherit.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/americas-drift-toward-feudalism/
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume III, Number 4 (Winter 2019): 96–107.

Notes
1 Pierre Riché, Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, trans. Jo Ann McNamara (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 133.

2 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980), 9.

3 Taichi Sakaiya, The Knowledge Value Revolution, trans. George Fields and William Marsh (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985), 152.

4 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 2, Social Classes and Political Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 443.

5 Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Books, 2012), 19–20.

6 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 15, 51, 213, 387.

7 Bell, 427.

8 Christophe Guilluy, The Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 2, 9.

9 H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Books, 1999), 51, 85–87, 99.

10 Ben Wildavsky, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 169.

11 Murray, 4–56; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 26–27, 84, 421–22, 424–28.

12 Piketty.

13 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

14 Roderick Seidenberg, Post-Historic Man: An Inquiry (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 179.

15 R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), 321.

About the Author


Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His next book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, will be published in 2020.

ALSO BY JOEL KOTKIN
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The New Shame of Our Cities

The many coronavirus conspiracy theories
By Jon Allsop, CJR MAY 15, 2020

ON FEBRUARY 2, more than a month before the World Health Organization deemed the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, it declared that the virus had led to a “massive infodemic.” WHO observed “an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” A few months later, the infodemic has only intensified. Conspiracy theories are sloshing around the internet, alleging, among other wild claims, that China deliberately engineered the virus in a lab, that the US military implanted the virus in China, that Bill Gates wants to use vaccination to microchip the world’s population, and that the virus is spreading via 5G technology. Often, right-wing media outlets have boosted the signal; last week, for example, One America News Network, an outlet beloved of Trump, implicated Gates, George Soros, and the Clintons in a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control.” Sometimes, the White House has been the booster. We all remember bleachgate.

Early this month, a viral YouTube video brought some of these strands together. The video—a clip from a “documentary” called Plandemic—starred Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who claims, among other things, that wearing a face mask can actively make you sick, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suppressed her work on the harms of vaccines. (There is zero evidence for any of this.) The video was promoted aggressively by anti-vaccination activists and by adherents of QAnon, a convoluted deep-state conspiracy theory; the Epoch Times, a right-wing media outlet with ties to Falun Gong, also boosted Mikovits’s message. This week, Davey Alba, of the New York Times, reported that mentions of Mikovits on social media and TV have “spiked to as high as 14,000 a day.” Facebook and YouTube eventually removed the video, but not before it reached millions of users. Erin Gallagher, a social-media researcher who charted the video’s spread, concluded that “both platforms were instrumental in spreading viral medical misinformation.” According to Anna Merlan, of VICE, Zach Vorhies, a former YouTube and Google staffer who now has ties to QAnon and anti-vaxxers, helped orchestrate the video’s virality.

ICYMI: The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom

The Mikovits video reached at least eight million people, and it may only be a small taste of conspiracies to come. Kevin Roose, who covers technology for the Times, writes that he was watching the clip from Plandemic when a “terrifying thought” struck him: “What if we get a COVID-19 vaccine and half the country refuses to take it?” Roose sees a number of reasons why a future COVID vaccine could play into the hands of propagandists—it’ll likely have been fast-tracked, adding rocket fuel to existing vaccine-safety fears; it’ll likely be mandatory, at least for certain groups, boosting anger about perceived government overreach; and anti-vaxx boogeymen, including Gates and the WHO, may end up being closely involved in its development. The anti-vax movement, Roose writes, is highly organized and media savvy. By contrast, the messaging of authoritative official health sources can be clunky and poorly suited to online discourse. As Renée DiResta, a researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory, wrote in a recent column for The Atlantic, “All too often, the people responsible for protecting the public do not appear to understand how information moves in the internet era.”

The pandemic is particularly fertile ground for conspiracists. There is not, as yet, an authoritative, established scientific consensus about the virus and its spread, leaving wide informational gaps for nonsense to fill. And the fact that the coronavirus is, as I wrote in March, an “everything story,” affecting every single aspect of our lives, lends itself conveniently to a conspiracist’s habit of thinking in terms of sweeping theories with unifying explanatory power. Yesterday, The Atlantic launched “Shadowland,” a series of pieces, on themes broader than the coronavirus, examining America’s vulnerability to paranoid thinking. In an introductory note, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, writes that “the conspiracy theorists are winning.” That, he believes, poses an “existential threat.”

Deep, insightful coverage of our poisoned information ecosystem is welcome. Still, conspiracy theories are highly fraught terrain for the reality-based press. By debunking theories, we risk reinforcing their appeal, and furthering their spread. “Throw a fact check at a subversion myth, and it will transform into proof for believers,” Whitney Phillips wrote for this magazine’s recent disinformation-themed issue. “After all, trying to disprove the existence of a Satanic plot is exactly what a Satanist would do.” Journalists must decide, on a case-by-case basis and in real time, which theories are widespread—and harmful—enough to demand rectification, and the best way to go about doing that. It isn’t an easy task. It’s especially hard when lives are on the line.
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Below, more on the coronavirus:
Bright lines: Yesterday, Rick Bright, a whistleblower who says he was ousted from a top federal health job for pushing back on Trump’s advocacy of unproven coronavirus drugs, testified (in person) before a House subcommittee. Bright warned lawmakers that the country faces “the darkest winter in modern history” if it doesn’t improve its handling of the pandemic. Addressing reporters at the White House, Trump and his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, blasted Bright, and boasted about the administration’s preparedness.
Burr caught first?: On Wednesday, the LA Times reported that the FBI seized the cellphone of Senator Richard Burr, a Republican of North Carolina; the bureau is investigating claims that Burr, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, traded stocks based on private briefings he received before the pandemic hammered the US economy. Burr insists that he acted based on publicly available news reports out of Asia; still, yesterday, he stepped back as Senate Intelligence chair while the FBI investigates him. At least three other senators—James Inhofe, Kelly Loeffler, and Dianne Feinstein—have also faced scrutiny related to recent stock trades. (All three deny wrongdoing.) In March, CJR’s Lauren Harris spoke with Robert Faturechi, of ProPublica, and Lachlan Markay, of the Daily Beast, who were first to report on the trades of Burr and Loeffler, respectively.
Layoffs and closures: Yesterday, citing the economic pressure of the pandemic, Quartz laid off around 80 staffers, slashed executive pay, and moved to permanently shutter its physical offices in London, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Washington, DC. (The site is also trying to reduce its rent in New York.) The union representing Quartz staffers said the layoffs had an “outsized impact” on its members. Elsewhere, Matt McKinney reports, for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, that the pandemic has caused a wave of closures among Minnesota newspapers. Owen Van Essen, a media-industry analyst, told McKinney that he expects up to 300 weeklies nationwide to close before the year is out.
A “devastating” impact: For the Washington Post, Ben Strauss reports that in the absence of live sports, sports reporters have been hit particularly hard by layoffs and furloughs of late. Many fear that the pandemic will permanently reshape the sports beat. “There are more important things going on in the world, but I think we’re f—–, honestly,” Paul Sullivan, a sports columnist at the Chicago Tribune, who is about to go on furlough, told Strauss. “Whether sports come back or not.”
Writing on the wall: For CJR, Lauren Markham reports that newsrooms based in California were better prepared than most for the disruption caused by the pandemic, because of the state’s history of earthquakes, wildfires, and power outages. “Most California newsrooms have some form of disaster plan at the ready,” Markham writes. (ICYMI, Markham profiled Lizzie Johnson, a “fire reporter” at the San Francisco Chronicle, for CJR’s recent magazine on coverage of the climate crisis.)
Strike a pose: Yesterday, Amazon announced that it’s collaborating with Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America to launch “Common Threads: Vogue x Amazon Fashion,” a storefront that will aim to help independent high-end designers weather the downturn caused by the pandemic. Vanessa Friedman, of the Times, has more.
In brief: In Russia, Meduza, an independent news site, reports that officials have “fiddled statistics” to keep the country’s COVID-19 death count down. In Brazil, volunteer journalists are working to memorialize victims of the virus via a collaborative project called “Inumeráveis” (“Innumerable”); the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas has more. The Atlantic, which has been lauded for its coronavirus coverage, added 70,000 new subscribers across March and April. And yesterday, Reuters reportedly hosted a “virtual singalong” for its employees.


Other notable stories:
For CJR, Howard Polskin, a watcher of right-wing media trends, explores how the Washington Examiner became a “traffic monster.” Hugo Gurdon, the site’s editorial director, has embraced “a model of the newsroom as an editorial factory,” Polskin reports. “Leaving aside its robust opinion section, the rest of the Examiner website is peppered with lots of short, easy-to-digest, fast-to-produce news stories.”
Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo reports that staffers at BuzzFeed increasingly feel animosity toward the Times; one BuzzFeed editor said it feels like the Times is “trying to murder us.” “BuzzFeed feels like the Times has a knack for rereporting certain stories and then publishing similar features of their own with minimal or no credit,” Pompeo writes. The Times has also poached several BuzzFeed stars, including its former editor, Ben Smith.
For the LA Times, Stephen Battaglio profiles Soledad O’Brien, the former CNN anchor who likes to excoriate other journalists on Twitter. O’Brien “believes her tweets are a service in an era when news is often interpreted through a partisan prism,” Battaglio writes. For O’Brien, “journalistic cowardice is a crime and should be pointed out.”
In 2018, authorities in Iran arrested Hassan Fathi, a newspaper columnist, after he gave an interview to the BBC. Last week, he began an 18-month term in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. The Committee to Protect Journalists is calling for Fathi’s release, noting that the spread of COVID-19 makes his imprisonment a “potential death sentence.”
And on Tuesday, at 11am Eastern, Covering Climate Now, the climate-journalism initiative led by CJR and The Nation, will host a webinar focused on climate coverage amid the pandemic. If you’d like to take part, you can register at this link. (The webinar is for journalists only. Following the webinar, CCN will post a recording on its website.)

ICYMI: Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?


Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.

The Editor of Jacobin on the Evolution of American Socialism


By Isaac Chotiner April 26, 2019

Bernie Sanders exceeds the rest of the Democratic field in his ability to change the conditions in which policy is written, the editor of Jacobin says.Source Photograph by Mark Wilson / Getty

In 2010, amid the wreckage of an economic crisis, Bhaskar Sunkara, then twenty-one years old, started the magazine Jacobin. Democratic socialist in outlook and aimed at replicating the success that magazines such as National Review had had in spurring on the conservative revolution, Jacobin grew into a sometimes doctrinaire but frequently engaging and thought-provoking journal. And when Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign surpassed almost everyone’s expectations, it became clear that the ideas that Jacobin had been pushing had wider support than was generally understood. Two years later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emerged as a Democratic star; Sanders became a 2020 front-runner, and portraits of young socialists appeared in a cover story in New York.

Now comes Sunkara’s first book, “The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality,” which is both a history of socialism in the twentieth century and a blueprint for how democratic-socialist ideas might succeed in the twenty-first century. Taking in everything from Lenin’s rise to Sweden’s status as “the most livable society in history,” the book does not defend the failures of Marxist-inspired societies. Nevertheless, Sunkara scorns the idea that those failures should limit the ambitions of reformers and revolutionaries intent on creating a fairer society.

I recently spoke by phone with Sunkara, who, in addition to his work on Jacobin, is a columnist for the Guardian US. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different approaches that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have taken to progressive reform, why Americans vote against their economic interests, and whether liberals are too focussed on the explanatory power of race.

How do you see the difference between democratic socialism and social democracy, and why do you think that difference is so crucial to the future of radical politics?

Great question. We obviously have a common ancestor, Karl Marx.

Not you and me, just to be clear.

Right, not us. Karl Marx and [Friedrich] Engels both called themselves social democrats. It was a united movement in the big workers’ parties in the late nineteenth century. Then the movement kind of switched. Nowadays, what you would call social democracy is the movement that seeks to expand the welfare state, but within the confines of capitalism. It’s a kind of functional socialism. We’re going to cede ownership, but we’re going to tax those productive enterprises and make sure at least there’s a base level of security and rights for people.

A democratic socialist would say, “That’s great. Let’s fight for all those things, let’s have that kind of society.” Then we also want to ask deeper questions about ownership. One is, in a society where things are getting better for workers, but the ability to hold investment is still in the hand of capitalists, capitalists could always rebel against the social-democratic agreement. In Sweden, for example, capital by the late nineteen-seventies is basically saying, “All right, this agreement was working for us before, but now we’re not making enough profit. We need to roll back the welfare state.” If you can finally socialize investment and find a way to transfer production toward coöperatives and toward these other forms of socialized ownership, then maybe we can avoid that.

The second reason is just moral and ethical. I think that wage labor constitutes a form of hierarchy and exploitation that we could do without.

Your book also evinces a certain respect for reformist, rather than radical, politics, and you write that you are aware of “how profound the gains of reform can be.” So why is Sweden insufficient? I think a lot of people would look at Sweden and say, “O.K., it’s not perfect. It can get better. But it’s about as good as any society that humans have been able to construct.”

Part of the reason why my tone is that way is I believe that a mass base of people pushing for things, like Medicare for All and all these other reforms we need in the United States, will be people who will be just like what you described, liberals and progressives. If we, as socialists, adopt this kind of too-snarky, radicaler-than-thou mentality, which obviously we can all slip into at times, we’ll alienate the potential base that could actually make a better country and a better world.

In Sweden, we have to look at what’s happened in the last twenty or thirty years. If you could freeze Sweden in 1974 or 1975, it’s a pretty damned good society. For the last twenty, thirty years, there’s been a rightward lurch in Swedish politics. There’s been ground opened for the populist, racist right. A lot of the welfare state has deteriorated.

I’m not sure that social democracy is sustainable in the long run. Eventually workers will start demanding things that will make inroads into the profitability of capitalist firms, and these capitalists will then turn on the social-democratic compromise. Is there a social-democratic road to socialism? I don’t see them as separate roads. I see one as kind of stopping short, stopping at the five-yard line or ten-yard line.


It seems like you’re trying to make a practical argument, essentially saying that social democracy is always going to fall short and that there are structural reasons why it is likely to. Would that be fair to say?

Yes, exactly.

There aren’t really any antecedents of what you are advocating for. And so, if we want to argue practically about what can work, does that make you anxious or wary?

Yeah, definitely. I think that’s one reason why I like to say, “Let’s go to social democracy. Let’s see what works.” But at some level I just believe that democracy is a good thing, and that we should have a certain set of ideals for our society, which is as much democracy as possible, as little hierarchy as possible. Now, there might be limits to that. Maybe a complex society with a complex division of labor does require some sort of hierarchy. I’m not sure how far we can go, but I do think it’s useful to have the social horizon.

Postwar Sweden was not a multiethnic, multicultural society in the way that modern America is. Are you worried that there’s an inherent contradiction between what we’re talking about and a society that is multicultural and multiethnic—that many people are unwilling to be a part of democratic socialism when people look different from them?

I’m not completely concerned. In Sweden’s case, they were organizing in a deeply unequal country. Now, are there certain organizing barriers in the U.S., a country with a really deep history of racism and racial inequity? Yes. But I think those barriers can be overcome by politics. I think human beings all want the same things. We all want to take care of ourselves, take care of our families. We know when we’re being oppressed. We know when we’re being exploited. We’ll always look for a way out of that situation if it were to arise.

What makes you think that human beings all want the same thing?

We’re animals, right?





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I don’t mean sex and food.


We don’t like being oppressed. We don’t like being treated poorly. I think we want a degree of personal autonomy. I think these things are fairly innate. I’ll give you a concrete example. As women get more economically secure, as they’re in the workplace, they’re able to leave relationships, and divorce rates go up. Is that because these women were automatically indoctrinated with leftist ideals? I think it has more to do with the fact that they’re actually able to seek a better bargain for themselves as they’re given more power. When workers are in conditions of low unemployment, they tend to be more willing to go on strike and fight back. Also, if you look at the polling, people actually have a lot of the same concerns. They have the same concerns about health care, about security.

Right, but do men feel more secure now that women have extra freedom? That seems like a more disturbing question or a more disturbing possible answer. The point is that I think some people perceive their security as coming at the expense of others.

Yeah, that’s one thing we need to battle against politically, because there is a zero-sum-game mentality when it comes to immigration, when it comes to gains by racial minorities, by women. We need to fight against that. The socialist case is that when it comes to, let’s say, white male workers, any privilege that they might have over nonwhite workers or over women is a relative privilege, not an absolute privilege. I don’t mean to downplay the difficulty and the need for anti-racism and feminist organizing, but it is to say that our premise, as socialists, is that we can construct a political coalition in which all oppressed people can make gains, even though some people are going to make less gains than others based on their relative position beforehand.

You write in the book, “Socialists need to argue against the idea that racism and sexism are innate and that people’s consciousness won’t change through struggle. Racism has taken on an almost metaphysical role in liberal politics—it is somehow the cause of, explanation for, and consequence of most social phenomena. The reality is that people can overcome their prejudices in the process of mass struggle over shared interests, but that requires getting people involved in those common struggles to begin with.” When you say “metaphysical role,” are you talking about responses to Trump’s election?

I think after Trump’s election there was this idea that there is this original sin of racism in the United States, and we can’t get rid of it. Obviously, the United States is a society that was built on exclusion, that was built, in particular, on the exploitation of black Americans during slavery, and after slavery, too. It’s also a society in which there’s been a mass civil-rights movement and a feminist movement. There have been other things to make it more humane.

I don’t want to be Panglossian, but I want us to look back at the progress of the last half century and say, “There was great progress, but it wasn’t enough.” I think there was too much pessimism coming from liberal quarters about this. I think people could be won over. Do I think the ordinary Trump voter can be won over? I guess it depends. There’s obviously a core of Trump voters who are racist, who cannot be won over to a progressive program, and many of them aren’t even workers. They’re people who are the traditional base of the right in any country, this middle-class base of authoritarianism. There’s also a bunch of people who were just angry and discontented.

Many people voted for Trump because he’s a Republican and they’re Republicans, and they’re often Republicans for reasons having to do with cultural issues like abortion. This gets back to what we were talking about earlier, about people wanting different things.

Yeah, I take your point that there is a caricature of speaking about economic issues that means essentially not speaking about other issues. But for me, for example, the struggle for reproductive rights is not a cultural or social issue; it is an economic issue. It’s an issue that I want to bring into working-class politics. In other words, who are the people who suffer the most if there’s no abortion clinic within fifty, sixty miles of them? It’s the poorest workers. Who are the people who suffer most from harassment on the job? The women workers. There is a way, I think, to foreground economic issues but not downplay other things.

I agree that, by and large, Democrats do better when they talk about economic issues first. But there probably are a lot of poor people who feel like no abortion clinics mean fewer fetuses getting killed. I do think acknowledging that people have a totally different way of looking at things is important.


Yes, definitely. I think maybe one way to do this is to say, “Listen, we’re not going to backtrack or capitulate on anything we think is important, like fighting for immigrant rights or fighting for abortion rights, but we want to be so convincing on other issues that we can win people over.” For example, if someone’s No. 3 issue is immigration, and they’re on the right on immigration, but their No. 1 issue is jobs and their No. 2 issue is health care, we want to convince them that we’re so good on No. 1 and No. 2 that they’ll vote for the Commie bastards anyway.

It’s interesting that Trump thinks that his appeal is based on cultural and racial issues. His closing message in 2018 was not “Hey, struggling guy in Ohio, I improved your pocketbook.” It was “The Muslims are coming” or “The immigrants are coming.” His message in 2020 will likely be the same. I think it’s at least worth paying attention to the fact that he thinks that’s the way he can win those voters.

This is typical of this kind of right-wing populism. It’s pretty slippery. What he’s primarily pointing to is the idea that something was lost. Obviously, we need a counter to that. Part of it is speaking to a loss but in a different way. You want to talk to people about the fact that jobs have been lost. The unions have been devastated. We just want to point to different villains, which, of course, is a dangerous thing. But at least as far as Sanders or A.O.C. and this crop of left-wing politicians that emerged the last couple of years, I don’t see them as doing it in a way that fuels the right. I see them as doing it in a way that is helping to neutralize those on the right, keep it where it is, which is a minority authoritarian movement that’s going to cause a lot of headaches, that’s going to be around for a long time, but we’ve just got to keep them to their thirty-five or forty per cent, and we need to win over the rest.

What have you made of the Jeremy Corbyn experience in Britain? Labour recently said that it wanted to end the principle of the free movement of people in any Brexit deal, and Corbyn hasn’t generally been strongly against Brexit. I wonder how you think he’s dealt with that, and if it’s given you any pause about how socialist or left-wing policymakers sometimes deal with these issues.


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Even foregrounding the question of freedom of movement seems to be playing on the terrain of the right. Any voter that is going to vote on the issue of immigration and opposition to freedom of movement as a primary thing is not going to be won over. I think it’s counterproductive even at that political level.

So to synthesize what you’re saying about Corbyn, and Sanders, too, who sometimes seems like he’s in favor of more restrictive immigration policies than some on the left—you want them to neutralize the right by talking about economic issues without engaging in any of the cultural demagoguery. Is that fair?

Yes, I want Sanders, instead of just saying, “Oh, I’m against open borders,” in this very negative way, to just say, “Immigrants are coming here because they want to construct America, and they’re working hard. I’d rather have them in the country than people like Donald Trump.” I just can’t imagine the Democratic electorate would be turned off by that. I can’t imagine it would be a poison pill. That’s the one thing that I see a lot of people on the left have been consistently prodding Sanders on, and he has showed a capacity to evolve on certain things. I do believe that if he were in power, you would see something like amnesty for people already here, and you would see a more humane immigration policy.

Is Donald Trump a neoliberal?


This is a complicated question. Neoliberalism to me means the movement to use the power of the state in order to decrease the power of labor and to deregulate and restore the profitability of firms in the seventies and eighties. Since then it’s become the dominant economic consensus in the U.S. You still have a very strong aggressive state, but you don’t expand social welfare. You make sure things stay deregulated, and so on. In that sense, Trump is with the neoliberal consensus, but I think the term has been used as a pure pejorative to the point that it’s losing its analytical value.

In terms of weakening Wall Street regulations or watering down regulations via Cabinet agencies, or not expanding the welfare state, I don’t think those really fit as a description of the Obama Administration, but maybe you do?

I think the Obama Administration represented a centrist consensus within the Democratic Party, which said that the best way to preserve the welfare state was to insure that the economy was humming and growing and that, broadly, the interests of corporations were served because corporations were the ones generating the wealth that Obama wanted to use in order to sustain and expand social programs like Obamacare. But he, in the construction of the social programs, shied away from the creation of big universal programs that would have required more political struggle and actually might have been impossible to enact under his Administration. Would I call that neoliberal? I mean, maybe. I probably have many times in short columns and things like that, but I’m not sure how much analytical value it has.

If you watch what the Trump Administration is doing at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, talking about it as neoliberal seems to miss what’s going on to me because it seems noticeably different than what we—

I don’t think there’s a strong contingent of capital that’s calling for some of the things that Trump is doing. In other words, it seems to me that neoliberal policy would be deregulation that capital demanded, whereas Trump seems to be operating in his own ideological direction—it seems like with a degree of autonomy that I would have to reconcile with Marxist theory. [Laughs]

It seems different than what we’ve seen in the past from either Republican or Democratic Administrations to some extent, no?

There’s definitely been a big departure in certain ways. I think there has been a continuity with Republican Administrations as far as tax cuts and so on. But things have definitely gotten worse, and worse faster than they did under Obama. Obviously, we opposed a lot of Obama’s policies, but there’s no point in saying it’s all the same, because it absolutely isn’t. If push comes to shove and I were in a swing state in 2020, of course, I would vote for anyone in the Democratic field over Trump. I think that’s common sense. It should be hegemonic on the left.

When Sanders was refusing to release his tax returns, you had a series of tweets in which you wrote, “People obsessed with tax returns are narrowly looking for personal corruption as a sign of capture. Politicians serve capitalist interests because they administer a capitalist state dependent on private profits and favorable market conditions to survive and fund programs.” And “Candidates aren’t literally bought by elites, they structurally represent capitalist interests. Bernie is an exception.” Can you explain this?


I was trying to make a broader point about the way in which the interests of businesses exert themselves in government, which is not through direct bribery or coercion or lobbying but more often than not through the dynamics of the economy itself. Things I said, like Bernie is an exception, undermine that point. So I wouldn’t stand by all of that. I would say I agree with my underlying point, but I do want to see Trump’s tax returns. I’m glad that Bernie released his tax returns, too, so I guess I should say that as well.

Corruption occurs in noncapitalist countries, too.

Yeah, of course. But corruption to me isn’t a widespread issue. The conversation often is about Trump only being in power to enrich himself and make his business more profitable. Or back in the Iraq War days, it was, “Dick Cheney only did this war just to make money for Halliburton.” On the one hand, as a populist thing, they’re attacking the right enemies, so maybe it’s O.K., but, to me, it just isn’t the way society actually works. That was the point I was making, but I do think you’re right. There are other levels of corruption that don’t have to do with the things I said that we should obviously be on guard for, and that’s why we need transparency in government. If you’re running for public office, we should know your finances.

Before we go, the Jacobin coverage of Venezuela was more positive during the Chavez regime and earlier in the Maduro regime. Has the way in which that situation has gone downhill made you think any differently about any conception of socialism, or about signs that people should be on the lookout for in leaders that you or other people on the left missed?

There was a lot of debate in the Latin American left about certain things that Venezuela was doing, as opposed to Bolivia and Ecuador. One is, Venezuela seemed to be breaking with some of the “neoliberal consensus” more than Bolivia and Ecuador, but doing it through using oil rents, and I think in the long run that probably created some more macroeconomic instability. In Bolivia and Ecuador there was a more conservative approach on some of the macroeconomic stuff, and that enabled them to create more stability in the long term.




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You undermine a lot of the gains of your programs for workers if you’re also going to expose them to hyperinflation. That doesn’t make me some deficit hawk or austerity type to say that. I think there were macroeconomic mistakes. There was obviously, at times, an extremely right-wing opposition in Venezuela. There was a lot of political instability, some of it coming from the United States. I think as a whole, the mentality of the left has been to say that we in the U.S., a country that has been the perpetrator of so much injustice in Latin America and so many interventions, don’t have a right to critically look at states.

I meant that the way Chavez used rhetoric was more important than some people on the left maybe thought. Do you think that it’s worth paying attention to things like this and that we probably shouldn’t be totally surprised by how it played out?

When we were analyzing Venezuela, we analyzed it mostly through the populist tradition, saying that Venezuela was a manifestation of left populism. Maybe this is kind of an academic cop out, but I think some of the rhetoric Chavez was using, some of the approach from his government, the fact that he did have a segment of capital on his side, the fact that he would have all these military officers and a segment of state bureaucracy on his side, the fact that there wasn’t an active labor-backed party in Venezuela and whatever else, meant that we interpreted it all as, Hey listen, this is definitely redistributive. This is vaguely left. This guy seems good, so it’s good. This is a social movement if he says it is.


I guess the underlying point of your question is, Might creating this kind of polarization of us versus them, and pushing very hard to destabilize the country lead to that outcome? Burke had that one line, I’m paraphrasing very brutally, that the only thing worse than existing tyranny is a failed revolution against that tyranny. I think we always have to be on guard with what happens when our revolutions fail, because often it leads to a counterrevolution on the right or a situation of political paralysis. That can’t stop us from trying to make change, but I think a lot of the lesson of the last hundred years is to pay attention to unexpected outcomes and to construct policies in a way that makes sense.

You talk about Sanders a bit at the end of your book. Is it fair to say that in your mind Sanders is a good democratic socialist, and Warren is a good social democrat?

I’m not sure if I would call Warren a social democrat, but in my mind she’s definitely the second-best in the field. I think the gap between Sanders and Warren and the gap between Warren and the rest of the field is equally significant. I think a lot of the things she’s proposing are great. I think she’s pushing the policy debate in a really good direction.

Does any part of you ever think that someone like her being President, given how the government works, would actually be more effective for the left than someone like Sanders?

I see your argument. Let’s say you have a scenario where the world ends in eight years, and you’re talking about what can get passed within this next eight years. Then you would say that maybe Warren has certain skills that might be useful administrating the state. Maybe those skills exceed those of Sanders.

In my mind, thinking about politics over ten, fifteen, twenty years, someone with the strength and moral clarity of Sanders, with the ability to attract people to him and create a movement around him, can really create the conditions in which we’re not just writing policy but we’re changing the conditions in which policy is written. Does that make sense? I think Sanders is better at changing the conditions in which policy is written and being uncompromising in certain things in a way that is actually useful in the long term.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-editor-of-jacobin-on-the-evolution-of-american-socialism-bhaskar-sunkara




Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with major public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.