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2 weeks ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | Emmet Penney |Julius Krein
REVIEW ESSAYDemocracy in Power:A History of Electrification in the United Statesby Sandeep VaheesanUniversity of Chicago Press, 2024, 400 pagesThe American grid is in trouble. For years, our country has been retiring reliable power plants and building unreliable wind and solar resources. Moreover, most of the country’s power gets allocated in complex power markets where decisions are made beyond the public eye.
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2 weeks ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | Richard D. Kahlenberg |Julius Krein
The Democratic Party has lost its way. A party whose very purpose has been to fight for working families has forfeited their trust and confidence. The losses are most obvious among white working-class voters. In 1960, John F. Kennedy won white working-class (noncollege) voters but lost white college graduates by two to one.
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2 weeks ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | Jacob Dreyer |Julius Krein
Late last October, we were in the basement of an obscure academic building in Berlin’s southwestern suburb of Dahlem, a group of twenty or thirty people assembled to hear Wang Hui talk about nationalism; my friends at the Berggruen Institute Europe had organized a residency in Venice and Berlin for him, to engage with European thought before the Trump victory that everybody saw coming.
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2 weeks ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | Joel Dodge |Julius Krein
The Defense Production Act of 1950 (DPA) is one of America’s oldest and most important industrial policy laws, reemerging in recent years as a vital tool for addressing urgent national crises. Yet for decades, the DPA was rarely used outside of the Department of Defense, and was hardly the subject of major policy debates or headline news. That changed over the last five years, as both presidents Trump and Biden increasingly came to rely on the law for a number of emergent needs.
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2 weeks ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | Philip Pilkington |Julius Krein
Today’s consumer capitalist societies present us with a paradox: We are told year in and year out that living standards are rising, but many people—especially younger people—can feel their quality of life decline as time goes on. This feeling is palpable and can be seen in the hardest of the quality of life indices, such as the suicide rate and the rates of drug addiction and overdose.
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2 weeks ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | Kenneth Flamm |William B. Bonvillian |Julius Krein
In the previous issue of American Affairs, we argued that the demise of leading-edge chip manufacturing in the United States has created an acute defense industrial base crisis with major geopolitical implications. Recently departed Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has characterized the former U.S. chip manufacturing champion’s problems as resulting from a fundamental qualitative shift in the economics of leading-edge chip manufacturing for which Intel—and U.S. national security interests—were unprepared.
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2 weeks ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | Nadia Asparouhova |Julius Krein
In January of this year, JD Vance, a former venture capitalist, took the oath of office as vice president of the United States. His, and President Donald Trump’s, inauguration marked a critical inflection point in the relationship between tech and public institutions. Tech has been building up to this moment for a while.
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2 weeks ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | David Polansky |Julius Krein
REVIEW ESSAYThe Reactionary Spirit:How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the Worldby Zack BeauchampPublicAffairs, 2024, 272 pagesHayek’s Bastards:Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Rightby Quinn SlobodianZone Books, 2025, 272 pagesFollowing her defeat in the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton published a book titled What Happened.
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1 month ago | 
americanaffairsjournal.org | Julius Krein
When American politicians start talking about “liberation,” it is usually not a good sign, at least in recent decades. Prior to President Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcements on April 2, many of my generation associated the term with the George W. Bush administration’s insistence that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” after the invasion of Iraq. The latter proved to be a catastrophic blunder.
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2 months ago | 
theamericanconservative.com | Julius Krein
Politics
What a Mar-a-Lago Accord Can and Cannot Do
A new monetary combination is but one piece of a larger, politically difficult puzzle.
Featured in the May/June 2025 issue
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Proposals for a new “Mar-a-Lago Accord”—an international currency agreement similar to the Plaza Accords of the 1980s or Bretton Woods in the 1940s—appear to have gained traction within the Trump administration.
