Koji Sasahara/AP Photo
Clyde Prestowitz, founder and president of Washington-based think tank Economic Strategy Institute, speaks during a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo, March 28, 2006.
“A prophet is not without honor save in his own country,” sayeth the Bible. And in a brilliantly complementary insight, John Maynard Keynes wrote, “it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”
Prophets whose views challenge orthodox certainties are seldom honored in their own lifetimes or their own countries. They are often ridiculed and scorned. If they are academics, they risk not getting tenure. By contrast, people who fail conventionally win laurels and enjoy influence. One need look no further than Henry Kissinger or Larry Summers.
When the prophets turn out to be prescient, their adversaries seldom have the grace to admit their own errors. Dissenters often fail to alter the prevailing consensus because the power of bad ideas is linked to the power of potent interests.
But in recent years, something very heartening has occurred. The prophets have substantially won the battle of ideas. The examples are legion.
The late Bennett Harrison began writing about deindustrialization in the early 1980s. He and his frequent co-author, Barry Bluestone, in several books, also warned of the political impact on the working class. In the past decade, one mainstream economist after another, such as David Autor of MIT, has documented the devastating impact, and we finally have a president in Joe Biden who is working to re-industrialize America.
Clyde Prestowitz began warning about the folly of “free trade,” both ideologically and as policy, in the 1980s. He and the other critics of America’s policy of indulging Asian mercantilism for the sake of free trade were treated like flat-earth loonies. Prestowitz, who is still at it, has the satisfaction of total vindication; but Biden’s China policy still has a way to go.
My dear friend Sid Wolfe, who founded and led the Public Citizen Health Research Group for more than half a century, began warning of the excessive power of the drug industry and the failure of for-profit medicine in the 1970s. He has had real, lifesaving influence in keeping some dangerous or ineffective drugs off the market and in influencing Biden policy on drug pricing. But even as corporate medicine keeps discrediting itself, the goal of national health insurance is farther away than ever.
As the entire neoliberal paradigm has been impeached, both by dissenters and by reality, mainstream foundations are now investing heavily in thinkers and institutions whom they touched only gingerly, if at all, not so long ago.
As these heterodox ideas have triumphed, they have helped spawn a far larger, younger, and less lonely cohort of activists and critics. I could spend the rest of this post listing names: Lina Khan, Barry Lynn, Ganesh Sitaraman, for starters, and the entire Economic Policy Institute network.
The Prospect has published many of these thinkers and is aligned with this broad mission. One important thing all have in common is that they are radicals committed to altering mainstream politics and policy. By contrast, the far left is mainly devoted to demonstrating, over and over again, how capitalism destroys society and corrupts government. The far left has largely given up on the reform project. We have not.
And yet, the paradox and tragedy of our era is that it’s all too possible to win the battle of ideas and lose the politics necessary to turn those ideas into practice. We’ve surely demonstrated the reality of climate change. Did we win that debate too late?
We’ve won the argument over deindustrialization and trade, but not in time to prevent a lot of the working class from defecting to Trump. We’ve demonstrated the government’s complicity in institutional racism, but remedial policy is going backwards.
And we finally have a Democratic president who rejects the once-ascendant nonsense about the superiority of laissez-faire capitalism, and who is working to revive the prospects of the working class. But Biden is stymied at every turn, even by some in his own party.
It’s the best of times and the worst of times—and a call to keep struggling on all fronts.
