The @mattyglesias post is good, you should read "Racial Realignment" as it's a great recent New Deal book
but the best criticism of “Vulgar Katznelsonism” is this heated 2008 debate between Katznelson and Suzanne Mettler on GI Bill's higher ed money. /1 jstor.org/stable/20446759
By relying so much on private markets and states for benefits, parts of the GI Bill reinforce racial discrimination.
But the eligibility for higher education and training dollars are set federally and independent of need, ensuring black veterans get the same money as whites. /2
But equal dollars go into a higher ed system that is largely segregated and unequal. This is where they disagree.
Katznelson (left) sees this as amplifying inequality while Mettler (right) sees it as undermining, and notes analytically his approach can't disentangle changes. /3
I think Mettler gets the better of it. I can't do justice to the whole debate here. But if you are interested in these arguments I found this debate really clarifying, as it deals with how to understanding one of the more clear universal benefits of the period straight-on. (4/5)
Last, realizing @SuzanneMettler1 is on twitter; she also wrote a great book on how New Deal divided citizens by race and gender. The key of this literature? Federally-controlled programs were best situated to evolve and expand to be fully-inclusive. (5/5) amazon.com/Dividing-Citiz…
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NYTimes has a 50y retrospective on Milton Friedman's popularizing of shareholder primacy, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” with line-by-line commentary from smart folks.
They skip what I take to be the most interesting and aggressive part: that a majority of shareholders must not be allowed to vote to adopt "social responsibility."
So it's not really about who gets to make decisions, but about imposing a specific notion of what firms are. /2
Even a critical response here assumes shareholder primacy is historically dominant and "practical."
But as Berle and Means noted, for decades before the New Deal shareholders were shedding legal powers as it was impractical for them to execute it under industrial capitalism. /3
The question of whether people not working during this crisis should have income support delivered through UI or payrolls
has little to do with the collapse of small and medium businesses. That collapse is driven by fixed costs and a fall in expectations of future income. 1/
True that PPP and payroll proposals have some funding earmarked for fixed costs, like rent. But those are completely insufficient by themselves.
We must extend income replacement, with triggers, for unemployed workers. But that won't answer the small/medium business question. /2
Without endorsing, here's one approach from @ModeledBehavior. Note how he's talking about fixed costs with liquidity and future income with solvency. This plan isn't about worker income replacement; we already know how to do that, and it is different. eig.org/news/main-stre…
Smart by Liz Bruenig on how Sanders should use the family security benefits of his agenda to win over "anxious suburbanites wearied by the tumult of the Trump years." True, but it's worth a memory trip as to how opposed this idea has been on the Left. /1 nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opi…
This well-debated June 2018 piece is 1 of 2 worth revisiting. Geismer/Lassiter argued there's no way to address the concerns of affluent suburbs without demobilizing other voters or throwing the interest of working-class communities under the bus. /2 nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opi…
It benefits from being pre-primary, but it suffers from projecting a 1980s analysis 40 years forward. e.g. suburbs are different, the piece struggles to update for that. But it also assumes what it needs to prove, that there is no agenda capable of bridging the 2 communities. /3
This is why I think conservatives messaging against socialism is going to be hard, and maybe even a disaster. Here's Rubio laying out the case against socialism by discussing "free health care" and "free education." Those are winning, popular issues! /1
More to Rubio "the core of Marxism" is the promise "we're going to provide you security with free" programs. Promise of freedom through economic security was #actually the core of the New Deal, which remains very popular.
Tougher terrain for them to fight on than you'd think. /2
I keep coming back to this @michelleinbklyn piece about how the Dems plan of saying "Trump, he's way outside the bounds of normal conservatives" completely backfired on them. The GOP: "Sanders is so far outside your normal Democratic politician." Yeah! /3 slate.com/news-and-polit…
There were 3 sets of false arguments on Dodd-Frank made by conservatives over the past decade, ones that would consistently come back no matter how well they were addressed. Mike Bloomberg has made all 3, and one has to question how well he'd see to those crucial reforms. (1/8)
This goes beyond any one statement. And in case you think I'm reverse-engineering this, here's material from 2017 to educate against these arguments under the new administration. I never thought I'd dust them off for a potential Democratic nominee. (/2) rooseveltinstitute.org/doomed-repeat-…
First is the big one, what Nocera calls the "Big Lie": the financials sector played no role in the crisis, that the GSEs, CRA, and Congress were the primary culprits. @JHWeissmann addresses it here. If you believe this then Dodd-Frank was unnecessary. (/3) slate.com/business/2019/…
An important political maneuver conservatives used was not pushing for Social Security cuts per se but instead privatization. Beyond leaving it to 'markets' to do the cuts, it meant that centrist liberals embraced the position of cuts + revenues alone. /1
It showed they weren't up for the ideological battle. Obama-era officials were genuinely confused why conservatives wouldn't take this-or-that deal, not understanding it was the public-ness of Social Security and Medicare they wanted to end, not some formula or ratio. /2
In Obama-era this disconnect was clearest with Senator Wyden's adventures with Paul Ryan in, ahem, "premium support" (i.e. privatizing Medicare). Wyden thought 'responsible-adult-market-deficit' stuff while Ryan dreamed of drowning the leviathan. /3 washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…