August 3, 2023
THE JACOBIN rIGHT:
The American left and right loathe each other and agree on a lot (The Economist, Jul 13th 2023)
Normally, you need read only the first six or seven words of a senator's sentence to be able to correctly surmise his party. See if you can tell from the next 40 or so, an extract culled from a prominent senator's recent book: "Today, neoliberalism is in. In the eyes of our elites, the spread and support of free trade should come before all other concerns--personal, political and geopolitical. In recent years this has led to a kind of 'free-market fundamentalism'." Suppose you were given a hint. The three proposed solutions for the neoliberal malaise are: "putting Wall Street in its place", bringing "critical industries back to America" and resurrecting "an obligation to rebuild America's workforce".If you guessed a Democrat--perhaps even more cleverly Bernie Sanders writing in his recent work, "It's ok to be Angry About Capitalism"--you would be wrong. It was in fact Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida and one-time presidential contender, writing in his just-published book, "Decades of Decadence".
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 3, 2023 3:29 PM