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BrotherJonathan's avatar

To be fair, on the issue of shareholder primacy and managerialism Krein has updated his analysis with his "Real Class War" article. In his estimation, the working class not only lacks any revolutionary potential but also is completely incapable of influencing public policy beyond protest voting. An increasingly restive professional-managerial class must now reckon with the fact that the policies they championed and are complicit in passing are hollowing them out to the benefit of the top .1 percent. The once-dominant managers are under threat not from the working class but from the owners, and any change to that is going to require on the part of professional defectors from the status quo, to use Vermuellian terminology, "integration from within" or a populist managerialism.

So while I think these critiques are aptly directed at certain portions of the populist right, it is also clear that we are really still at the very early stages of building an infrastructure to promote these ideas and matters of emphasis like big tech censorship vs. big tech market power, scattershot tariffs vs. a concentrated program to reshore manufacturing, predistribution vs. redistribution, and whatever trade-off there might be between the social and economic value of immigration are being and will continue to be worked through. There are many on the right now open to policies like universal healthcare and these ideas will continue to be in flux for some time. We really are only at the beginning. For now, what we hear from populists on the right is a useful shift from the reigning orthodoxy of the previous 60 years. Such intellectual shifts are generally protracted, painful processes.

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SevenDeadlies's avatar

Could you write more on right to work laws? Without doing much research my initial thought is they're nuetral to negative for workers, but I'm guessing it's one of those depends on the details.

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