Quote of the Day (Lars-Erik Cederman, on Economics and Ethnic Nationalism)

“[E]thnic nationalism tends to attract the most support from those who have been disadvantaged by globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. Populist demagogues have an easy time exploiting growing socioeconomic inequalities, especially those between states’ geographic centers and their peripheries, and they blame ethnically distinct immigrants or resident minorities. Part of the answer is to retool immigration policies so as to better integrate newcomers. Yet without policies that reduce inequality, populist appeals that depict out-groups as welfare sponges will only gain traction. So governments hoping to amp down ethnic nationalism should set up programs that offer job training to the unemployed in depressed regions, and they should prevent the further hallowing out of welfare programs.”— Swiss-Swedish political scientist Lars-Erik Cederman, “Blood for Soil: The Fatal Temptations of Ethnic Politics,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019

The image of Lars-Erik Cederman that accompanies this post was taken on Nov. 1, 2018, by AliceRuth11.

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on American Culture, ‘No Longer Synonymous With the Aspiration to Freedom’)

“American culture is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know. America was always associated with capitalism, business, and markets, but nowadays there’s no pretense that anyone else will be invited to share the wealth. USAID is gone; American humanitarianism is depleted; America’s international medical infrastructure was dismantled so quickly that people died in the process. The image of the ugly American always competed with the image of the generous American. Now that the latter has disappeared, the only Americans anyone can see are the ones trying to rip you off.”— Pulitzer-prize winning American historian Anne Applebaum, “The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark,” The Atlantic, November 2025

By all means, as you’re watching Ken Burns’ multi-part documentary on the American Revolution this week, please read as many articles as you can from The Atlantic’s November issue, which is entirely devoted to “The Unfinished Revolution.”

In this year of PBS budget cuts, Burns has been enormously careful in interviews not to sound like he’s taking an ideological, let alone party, side. That won’t stop those inclined from thinking he is indeed “woke.”

For those like me who fear that he might pull his punches, The Atlantic will provide some much-needed perspective, especially the pieces by Applebaum, Fintan O’Toole (“What the Founders Would Say Now”), and David Brooks (“The Rising”). They remind us that the commitment to equality and against despotism was a near-run thing 250 years ago, and perhaps even more so today.

Quote of the Day (Martin Wolf, on How Economic Decline Made Liberal Democracies Fragile)

“Today's liberal democracies are the most successful societies in human history, in terms of prosperity, freedom and the welfare of their peoples. But they are fragile. Resting on consent, they require legitimacy. Among the most important sources of legitimacy is widely shared prosperity. A big part of the reason for the erosion of trust in elites has accordingly been a long-term relative economic decline of significant parts of the working and middle classes, worsened by economic shocks, notably the global financial crisis.⁠”—British journalist and economics commentator Martin Wolf, “In Defence of Democratic Capitalism,” The Financial Times, Jan. 21-22, 2023

The image of Martin Wolf that accompanies this post, from the 2015 Crawford Forum, was taken June 29, 2015, by AH1P1295.

Quote of the Day (John Maynard Keynes, on Wealth Inequality)

“I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth, but not for such large disparities as exist today. There are valuable human activities which require the motive of money-making and the environment of private wealth-ownership for their full fruition. Moreover, dangerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative. But it is not necessary for the stimulation of these activities and the satisfaction of these proclivities that the game should be played for such high stakes as at present.”—English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935)

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on ‘Where the Wealth's Displayed’)

“Where the wealth's displayed

Thieves and sycophants parade
And where it's made
The slaves will be taken.” — Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, “Dog Eat Dog,” from her CD of the same name (1985)

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)

Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on Hate and the Threat to ‘The American Idea’)

“America cannot survive if the American idea is repudiated. Nations are not made by territory, or the greatness of nations by extent of land. Nations are made by commitments of mind and loyalties of heart, and the nobler the commitment of the mind, the higher the loyalty of the heart, the greater the nation. If the American proposition is no longer the proposition to which the American heart and mind were committed at our beginning, then America is finished, and the only question left is when America will fall.”—American poet-statesman Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), “Must We Hate?”, The Atlantic, February 1963

Quote of the Day (Nicholas Kristof, on What We Lost With the Decline of Labor Unions)

“For all their shortcomings, unions midwifed the birth of the middle class in the United States. The period of greatest union strength from the late 1940s through the 1950s was the time when economic growth was particularly robust and broadly shared. Most studies find that at least one-fifth of the rise in income inequality in the United States is attributable to the decline of labor unions.

“Unions were also a formidable political force, and it’s perhaps not a surprise that their enfeebling has been accompanied by a rise in far-right policies that subsidize the wealthy, punish the working poor and exacerbate the income gap.”— Nicholas Kristof, “Trump’s War on Workers,” The New York Times, Aug. 11, 2019

Quote of the Day (Noah Smith, on Technology and Labor)

“What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down? If the ‘endowment of human capital’ with which people are born gets less and less valuable, we'll get closer and closer to that Econ 101 example of a world in which the capital owners get everything. A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction.”—Noah Smith, “The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots,” The Atlantic, January 2013

(The image accompanying this post is from, of course, Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last embrace of silent film—a movie about the disruptive effects of new technology, made nine years after sound had rendered obsolete a whole style and generation of film personnel.)

Quote of the Day (Joseph Stiglitz, on the Price Paid by the Rich for Inequality)

“There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable. The evidence from history and from around the modern world is unequivocal: there comes a point when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society, and when it does, even the rich pay a steep price.”—Economist Joseph E.  Stiglitz, “The 1 Percent’s Problem,” Vanity Fair, May 31, 2012 (Web exclusive)

Quote of the Day (Tony Campolo, on the U.S. Budget as a “Moral Document”)

“The budget of the United States is a moral document, and yet we spend 40 percent on the military while we are cutting education, aid to the poor, Medicare and Medicaid. Oil companies have made the largest profits in the history of corporations, and they are going to Congress asking for more tax breaks. We give to the rich and take from the poor. CEOs are earning 300 times more than workers….Jesus was neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Jesus called all of us to righteousness. Did you know that 40 percent of the new members of Congress cite Ayn Rand and her gospel of selfishness as their primary guiding force, rather than the Sermon on the Mount?”—Rev. Tony Campolo, Sunday sermon at the Chautauquan Institution, July 10, 2011, quoted in Mary Lee Talbot, “Morning Worship,” The Chautauquan Daily, July 11, 2011

This Day in Presidential History (The “Great Society” That Wasn't)

January 4, 1965—Lyndon Baines Johnson, fresh from an electoral landslide that gave him commanding majorities in both houses of Congress, prodded his former colleagues to pass a mass of social-welfare legislation designed to eliminate social and economic inequality, giving rise to the catchphrase that characterized his Presidency as surely as “The New Deal” had summed up Franklin D. Roosevelt’s: “The Great Society.”

Unlike the New Deal, the impetus for the Great Society derived not from an economic crisis but a moral one. The international community—and, indeed, more and more Americans—questioned how, in the land of the free, African-Americans didn’t enjoy the same opportunities as whites a century after the Civil War, and how, in a country enjoying abundant prosperity, poverty still existed in urban slums, rural Appalachia, and farms harvested by migrant workers.

Few Presidents have known the sting of poverty so well as LBJ, who experienced it firsthand when his father Sam, a scrupulously honest politician, couldn’t subsist on his state legislator salary in Texas. (The Johnsons’ Hill Country home lacked electricity and indoor plumbing.) Few Presidents have seen so directly how affirmative government could make a material difference to constituents, as when the young Congressman Johnson helped achieve electrification of the Hill Country. And few Presidents have so relished their role as legislator-in-chief, since LBJ had already been preparing for it as majority leader in the 1950s, when he amply earned the nickname given him by biographer Robert A. Caro: “Master of the Senate.”

Now, the ambitious, idealistic, profane, caring chief executive proposed to push, educate, and soft-soap his former colleagues, attempting to disprove the notion promulgated by historian James MacGregor Burns that congressional institutional roadblocks resulted in a “deadlock of democracy.” In the process, LBJ sought to pass legislation that would:

* end poverty;

* promote racial equality;

* improve education, making it, for the first time, a federal priority;

* revitalize cities;

* protect the environment (highway beautification was a particular pet project of First Lady Lady Bird Johnson).

The soft-soap element of the fabled “Johnson Treatment” was there for an entire nationwide audience to behold on TV, as the President invoked on “this hill that was my home” how he had been “stirred by old friendships.” He briefly addressed newcomers to Capitol Hill, many of whom had ridden into office on his coattails, in this manner: “You will soon learn that you are among men whose first love is their country, men who try each day to do as best they can what they believe is right.”

The Congress that LBJ was stroking—“the Fabulous Eighty-Ninth,” in the phrase used by historians favorable to their work—would, over the next two years, pass much of the sweeping legislation that LBJ proposed. From 1963, when he took office from the slain John F. Kennedy, to 1970, when the impact of LBJ's legislation began to take hold, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the sharpest decline over such a brief period in the 20th century.

Yet, after the fall of 1966, voters began to turn away from the architect of the Great Society and the party that did his bidding. Over the years, the gap between rich and poor would widen.

By the start of this decade, with the global recession still biting deeply, more and more observers have been given serious credence to warnings that the middle class is disappearing and the lower class swelling. (See, for instance, this interview with Yale’s Bruce Judson on WNYC-FM’s “Leonard Lopate Show”.) Even conservatives such as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and Jim Manzi have recognized the threat that inequality poses to the nation in general and the GOP’s uncertain fortunes in particular.

All the more surprising, then, that the 45th anniversary of the announcement of LBJ’s breathtaking reordering of the American economic landscape has gone comparatively unnoticed.

Was his program a success? It depends on which type of economist you’re talking to, a liberal or a conservative.

What’s not really in dispute, however, is that within two years, Americans were backing away from the commitment LBJ called for. The following reasons might account for why it all came apart:

* Americans’ preference for divided government. The periods in which Presidents can act are relatively short. The four 20th-century Presidents who passed the most consequential domestic legislation—Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Reagan—all ended up having their ability to pass further laws undercut by mid-term elections that strengthened the opposing party.

* The chain reaction of the aggrieved white working class. Blue-collar ethnics and Southern white populists were among the foot-soldiers of the New Deal. But, as Thomas B. Edsall—formerly a reporter with the Washington Post, now political editor for the Huffington Post—pointed out in Chain Reaction, these two groups—resentful of busing, affirmative action, and other federal remedies to aid blacks and other minorities—came to perceive a pernicious linkage between taxes and the ‘60s rights revolution. Many in these groups began switching their loyalties—first to Richard Nixon, then, with less hesitation, to Ronald Reagan.

* The phantom menace of foreign competition. Virtually nobody saw it at the time, but Japan was moving decisively toward becoming more competitive with the U.S. Johnson and John F. Kennedy had been beholden to Big Labor for crucial electoral support. In this decade, while labor pressed for greater concessions, Big Business accommodated them, passing along inevitable cost increases to consumers. Bean counters instead of marketing or technological visionaries came into vogue in management. All the while, America was losing its edge in the auto and steel industries.

* The fracturing of families. Daniel Patrick Moynihan came under fire for pointing out the impact that single-parent families had on the black community. Yet, as Douthat has pointed out, the collapse of the two-parent household “disproportionately affects the poor and working class, depriving them of the social capital they need to rise.”

* LBJ’s penchant for bureaucracy. In one of the most insightful memoirs ever written by a White House aide, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Joseph Califano relates how the President lectured a group of nursing-home executives that when they design toilets for their residents, they should “make sure you don’t put the toilet rack behind them so they have to wrench their backs out of place or dislocate a shoulder or get a stiff neck in order to get their hand on the toilet paper.” No matter how admirable LBJ’s concern for human dignity might be, you have to wonder why an executive came to detail so exactly how his plan should be implemented, instead of leaving it up to the people involved as to the most cost-effective means of doing so. Imagine an army of such bureaucrats, similarly inclined, and you might begin to understand the building annoyance.

* The credibility gap. As time went on, the media began reporting more and more skeptically about the President’s uncertain relationship with the truth, or his “credibility gap,” starting with the mundane (a claim that an ancestor had fought at the Alamo) and proceeding to more substantive matters (the course of the Vietnam War). This undercut his moral authority.

* Guns vs. butter. LBJ had hoped to prosecute the Vietnam War on the cheap. Instead, he ended up igniting inflation. The strong economy that, he felt, made it possible for Americans to extend their hand generously to their neighbor was badly weakened, making the electorate restless.