As US businesses recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, many face a new problem: persuading Americans to return to work. Anecdotes of worker shortages abound; a McDonald's in Florida, for instance, is paying people $50 just to show up for an interview. In Bloomberg Opinion this week, Michael Strain explains how public policy can step in to help.

Whether President Joe Biden will pursue pro-employment policies is an open question, however. As Matthew Continetti writes in The Washington Free Beacon, Biden is following in the footsteps of previous Democratic presidents who campaigned as moderates but governed as liberals — which is likely bad news for the Democrats' majority in Congress.

Also in Bloomberg Opinion, Hal Brands argues the Cold War playbook of championing political dissidents may not help Alexey Navalny. It took sustained effort over two presidencies to begin ameliorating the plight of Soviet prisoners, Brands writes, and today the task is even harder. Vladimir Putin cares less about international opinion than Mikhail Gorbachev did, and he is nowhere near as desperate for Western approval as Gorbachev became in the late 1980s.

But reprising some Cold War practices may still help at home. In an essay for Law & Liberty, Ryan Streeter remembers the surge of literary and cultural endeavors that arose after the end of World War II, including the Mont Pelerin Society, great-books curricula, and the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. These were inspired by a realistic view of what binds society together, Streeter writes, and concerned Americans today should build on these successes to defend the first principles, practices, and institutions on which human flourishing depends.

This would be more popular with the American people than many might think. Despite the impression that an illiberal movement has seized the world of education, Samuel Abrams writes in RealClearPolicy, new data show that the majority of citizens want viewpoint diversity in our K–12 system — and do not approve of the race-reductionist ideas masquerading as progressive and inclusive values in today's classrooms.

Thank you for your interest in AEI's work, and we'll see you next weekend.