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9 Jul, 25 tweets, 9 min read
1. Since it pains me to write an essay without footnotes, I thought I’d do a thread on all the reporting, research, and thinking that stands behind this article.
2. First, a bit more of my own thinking on the historical forces behind today’s global crisis of democracy. Both to explain the worldwide reactionary turn and to develop a strategy to revive democracy, we need a systemic conceptualization, not moralizing.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
3. Short version: the advance of formal democracy and negative freedoms over the last 40 years proceeded at the expense of substantive democracy and positive freedoms, leaving the foundations rotten for all. Here’s a wonderful discussion of these issues:
amazon.com/Escape-Freedom…
4. @ThePlumLineGS’s piece on how Biden’s domestic economic policy is essential to depriving authoritarians of their power:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
5. Biden speeches: “We’re at an inflection point between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face…autocracy is the best way forward, they argue, and those who understand that democracy is essential—essential to meeting those challenges.”
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
6. “We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future”
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
7. Huge vaccine profits going to pharma despite the work being publicly funded:
“The nine new billionaires are worth a combined $19.3 billion, enough to fully vaccinate some 780 million people in low-income countries”
cnn.com/2021/05/21/bus…
8. Rich democracies decided against vaccinating the world:
nytimes.com/2021/03/21/wor…
9. Rich democracies incapacitated Covax before it could even start its work:
wsj.com/articles/why-a…
10. The coalition fighting against vaccine apartheid, which generated much of the pressure that has pushed the Biden administration to start taking action:
yesmagazine.org/social-justice…
11. A detailed plan to expand vaccine production into the Global South, which the rich democracies are not considering:
citizen.org/article/how-to…
12. Another detailed plan to expand vaccine production into the Global South, which the rich democracies are not considering:
imf.org/en/Publication…
13. A report on the financing needs for a global climate transition:
“Emerging and developing economies currently account for 2/3 of the world’s population, but only 1/5 of global investment in clean energy, and 1/10 of global financial wealth.”
iea.org/news/it-s-time…
14. The Atlantic Council report that defines defense of the rich countries’ domination of the global economy as an essential interest of the “free world”:
atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-resea…
15. Susan Sell’s book about how corporations got the US to impose their preferred restrictions over intellectual property on the world:
amazon.com/Private-Power-…
16. @KristenHopewell’s book on how the developing countries have fought back against the trade rules imposed on them by the rich democracies:
amazon.com/Breaking-WTO-D…
17. Ha-Joon Chang’s book about how the rich countries got rich and have sought to restrict the Global South from doing the same things:
amazon.com/Kicking-Away-L…
18. My own brief account of how China escaped these restrictions:
foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/08/chi…
19. Brett Christophers’s book on the prominence of rentierism among the most profitable companies:
amazon.com/Rentier-Capita…
20. Reporting on the failures of US aid in Guatemala:
nytimes.com/2021/06/06/wor…
21. And finally, some hopeful ideas. @KevinPGallagher and Richard Kozul-Wright on a Global Green New Deal:
bu.edu/gdp/2019/04/10…
22. Ideas on how to organize the provision of global positive public goods from @GlobalPubInvt:
globalpublicinvestment.org
23. @Zhu_Keren on the rich democracies working with, rather than against, China to achieve global development:
thediplomat.com/2021/06/build-…
24. Ideas from @ErikLoomis on how to start establishing global labor rights:
dissentmagazine.org/article/left-v…
25. The idea of development as a human right:
cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/upl…

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More from @jwdwerner

Jake Werner Profile picture
1 Apr
Biden’s pitch on public investment. It’s not just a misrepresentation of the US–China conflict. It’s also a child’s conceptualization of the global crisis of democracy: USA=democracy, but no one will like us if we’re not big and strong! And then they won’t want to be like us! 1/ Image
As this and endless versions of the same op-ed show, the US elite does not take democracy seriously. Rule by the people requires not just a periodic option to vote but, first, a meaningful choice—real differences among candidates leading to different outcomes in governance. 2/
And second, it requires that the voters, outside the one day they get to cast a ballot, are living lives that equip them with the self-confidence, knowledge, status, and sense of belonging in the community to make participation in politics both desirable and meaningful. 3/
Read 14 tweets
Jake Werner Profile picture
13 Mar
The liberal international order, functioning as designed on the single most consequential question it faces right now. I guess India and South Africa are sinister revisionist powers. 1/
law360.com/lifesciences/a…
If we want to understand what’s going on in the world, the dominant US foreign policy framing dividing the world between democracies and autocracies is not very useful. As this episode illustrates, it’s the rich vs poor divide that is more often the salient distinction. 2/
The dominant ideology is so powerful and blinding that when someone in the US says “the democracies”, it’s almost always coterminous with the rich, former colonial countries. It’s frequently used in situations that obviously do not include most of the world’s democracies. 3/
Read 8 tweets
Jake Werner Profile picture
11 Mar
1. The main thing happening here is everyone dressing up their pet priorities in anti-China rhetoric because, as Douglas Holtz-Eakin says, “Hating China is a big bipartisan thing”. But underneath the opportunism there’s a very dangerous substantive issue.
washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021…
2. We should celebrate the breakdown of the neoliberal prohibition on setting economic priorities openly and democratically. But what’s emerging in its place is a bipartisan consensus around a nationalist industrial policy to hoard scarce global growth for the US.
3. Even those in the executive branch—the home of universal considerations—seem to have given up thinking about how the interests of the US could be aligned with the interests of the rest of the world, offering instead only scaremongering on China to try to bring others along.
Read 7 tweets
Jake Werner Profile picture
30 Jan
Good news! Western commentators too often conflate Xi’s centralization with his reactionary politics. These need to be conceptually separated—in China and around the world—because progressive politics also requires overcoming fragmented politics, but for very different ends.
A big reason Western commentators interpret centralization under Xi as nothing but authoritarianism is that don’t really know anything about how the Chinese state has operated for the last forty years. So a crude stereotype of monolithic Oriental despotism fills in the gap. 2/
In fact the state became highly fractured among jurisdictions and within officials (their public duties at odds with their private interests). What Xi is attempting with the anti-corruption and Party discipline campaigns is to regain the center’s ability to impose priorities. 3/
Read 4 tweets
Jake Werner Profile picture
14 Jul 19
Quite a troubling piece from János Kornai: life in China “had frozen under Mao”; Western liberals naïvely brought the spark of life (market reform), inadvertently causing “the resurrection of the Chinese monster”; the West must now destroy the monster. 1/
ft.com/content/f10ccb…
It's hard to read the Frankenstein metaphor as anything other than a claim about the racial or civilizational essence of China. What’s interesting is the tension within the piece between the remnant abstract universalism of liberalism, still the conscious commitment, and the 2/
emergent culturalism, which has now become the real (though still unconscious) substance of the thinking. That’s best seen here, where the disavowal of the obvious consequences of his point serves as a crude screening device to escape awareness of his betrayal of liberalism. 3/
Read 4 tweets

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