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**JULY 26, 2023**

Kuttner on TAP

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**** Prophets With Honor

What happens if we win the battle of ideas and lose the politics?

"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
<[link removed]> 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 <[link removed]>, has the satisfaction of
total vindication; but Biden's China policy still has a way to go.

My dear friend Sid Wolfe
<[link removed]>, 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.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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The Nightmare of American Public School Teaching
<[link removed]>
Moral injury is driving teachers out of the profession. Here's how to
help them stay. BY LIZ ROSENBERG

Student Debtors' Faith in President Biden Is Tested
<[link removed]>
Borrowers react to the Supreme Court striking down Biden's student
loan forgiveness program. BY EMMA J. MURPHY

The Real Problem With Asset Managers
<[link removed]>
Rich people collect the vast majority of capital income. There's a
better way. BY RYAN COOPER

 

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