I’ve now been at the Prospect for almost three years. It was my first presidential election here, and I have never appreciated our brand of tough, informed election reporting more, while at the same time the near-total lack of such coverage anywhere else has never been more apparent. It will be critical during the second Trump term to support independent media like the Prospect, which you can do here.
“Democrats Lost the Propaganda War”
Liberals have been tearing their hair out arguing how they could have lost to Trump. A better question is how Trump could have won with such a wildly unpopular platform. I think an utterly poisoned information environment is the answer: “As local news is steadily strangled to death by the Facebook/Google advertising duopoly, the resulting gap is being filled with right-wing propaganda and reactionary voices on social media, who flood the information space with hysterical lies about national culture-war topics, and salient local information falls by the wayside.”
“The Case for Pragmatic Socialism”
In this article, I made a case for socialism built around philosophical pragmatism, as outlined by Richard Rorty and other scholars. For too long, socialist analysis has been obsessed with abstract metaphysics or trying to predict the future. The goal should be simpler: “Economic institutions should be rearranged to produce the most equal practical distribution of resources. That’s enough to get started, without the need to wait for the system to collapse of its own weight.”
“The Crypto Plot Against America’s Gold Reserves”
Crypto shills have a bill in Congress to revalue America’s gold reserves to the tune of $677 billion, and use the money to buy Bitcoins. Why? So crypto moguls who own lots of the coin can cash out their holdings into real money. “It would be one of the biggest upward transfers of wealth in world history.”
“Why Were Inflation Hawks Wrong?”
Economists like Larry Summers and Jason Furman argued that beating post-pandemic inflation would require a yearslong period of high unemployment. Instead, inflation came down without unemployment rising in the slightest. Why? “Inflation was transitory, largely caused by supply chain snarls resulting from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that have since been sorted out.”
“The Green-Energy Revolution Shows What Real Innovation Looks Like”
Silicon Valley is obsessed with innovation, but mysteriously has become obsessed with scams like cryptocurrency, NFTs, and AI. But even aside from those, Big Tech companies like Facebook and Google are not actually that innovative—especially not compared to the green-energy revolution that is quietly proceeding at breakneck pace, carried forward by a bunch of unrecognized scientists and engineers. “It might be more fun to watch a megalomaniac on stage in a turtleneck promising his app will save humanity. But what will actually power the economy of the 21st century is a bunch of largely unknown, unrecognized people doing thankless, difficult, and often boring technical tasks.”
“In Defense of Bidenomics”
Centrist liberals like Jonathan Chait have consistently attacked President Biden’s economic record. His arguments are bad. “To make the case, Chait has to seriously bend the facts, omit multiple major stories entirely, and on occasion resort to flagrant falsehoods.”
“Tim Walz Would Make a Great Running Mate”
Unfortunately, Tim Walz will not become vice president. But he was one of the brighter spots of the Harris campaign, at least before Democratic consultants told him to stop being interesting. Mostly, however, I want to note that this article ran just a few days before Walz was selected.
“The Supreme Court Has Murdered the Constitution”
John Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. United States is, in my view, the worst Supreme Court decision since Plessy v. Ferguson, and maybe even Dred Scott v. Sandford. And that’s just the latest in a line of atrocious decisions that have torn out great chunks of the Constitution. “The intention, obviously, is to pave the way for a Trump dictatorship, like some Enabling Act passed before Hitler actually took power. But it’s in keeping with the thrust of Roberts’s jurisprudence since the moment he was confirmed.”
“Trying to Find Trump’s Ground Game in Pennsylvania”
I did some reporting around my hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and could not find a single Trump canvasser among the scores of Harris volunteers. Though Trump eventually won, the fact that the swing in the state was much less than it was nationally tends to suggest that his get-out-the-vote effort was genuinely bad.
“The Housing Industry Never Recovered From the Great Recession”
The 2008 crash did terrific damage to the home construction industry, and as it recovered very slowly over the following years, it became much more concentrated and monopolistic. This contributed to the sudden skyrocketing of rents and home prices in 2021-2022: “High housing demand produced high profits rather than more homes.”
