Well, okay, I have finally gotten the new issue of the Washington Monthly posted online. Here’s a peek at the Table of Contents. Obviously, the issue has as its theme the difficulties facing the Millennial generation, but there are also some other excellent articles and book reviews. Have a look.
Editor’s Note: Ancient Greece’s Middle-Out Strategy
by Paul Glastris
Paying Providence … Journalists not jailbirds … Live from New York, it’s election season …
Ten Miles Square
The Monthly Interview: John Sarbanes
A conversation with Representative John Sarbanes, on a new campaign finance idea to get lawmakers more focused on voters than big-money contributors.
Features
Surprising numbers of white working class voters will support the Democratic agenda-if Democrats promise to reform the government that would carry it out.
What did the Wisconsin governor’s union busting actually accomplish for the “hardworking taxpayers” of his state? And what do his actions tell us about how he might govern as president?
How Hillary Clinton and her diplomats kept authoritarianism at bay in Eastern Europe.
Why is America Losing the Commercial Drone Wars?
For years, lobbyists and conservatives have managed to wrap regulatory agencies in ever more procedural red tape. Now those restrictions are hamstringing what ought to be a sprinting American industry.
How the “sharing economy” allows Millennials to cope with downward mobility, and also makes them poorer.
By focusing on the growing riches of the “1 percent,” we miss another form of inequality that is bigger, and arguably even more dangerous.
The Lost Entrepreneurial Generation?
Millennials are starting fewer businesses than previous generations. Here’s what might be holding them back.
Can shared equity make homeownership safe for Millennials?
How New Orleans Made Charter Schools Work
Since Katrina, the Crescent City’s schools have produced what some experts believe to be the most rapid academic improvement in American history-and created a reform model other cities are trying.
The GOP Congress is working on a new toxic chemical bill. Should Obama sign it, or wait for the next president to get a better deal?
On Political Books
Efforts to elevate Ronald Reagan’s reputation to Rooseveltian heights continue. Time to stand athwart historians, and yell “Stop!”
Why today’s Congress can no longer cope with complex problems.
Ex-offenders need jobs to stay out of Jail. But easy access to criminal records, a gift of the internet age, means than employers won’t hire them.
Are Millennials really more alienated from politics than youth in generations past?
I’ll be doing a little promotional work for this issue over the next couple of weeks, but I should otherwise be able to return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Let me know what you think of our work.
Washington Monthly always seems to crash my Chrome browser on my phone for some reason. New Republic as well.
how do they crash? The same way?
The page will load, I’ll start reading, and then I’ll scroll. It scrolls a little, then gets “stuck” in that I cannot scroll. Or go to the address bar. Or tabs. Or anything. So I have to force close by swiping chrome and then reload it. Then it says “restore previous session?” down below.
But yes much in the same way.
Corrupted plug-in maybe? I’ve been having some similar issues (not at WM).
Spoke too soon. The plugin “Fire IE dll” hung while scrolling page one of the Scott Walker article. I just changed the plugin preference to “ask me” and had no more trouble.
looks great
“Surprising numbers of white working class voters…” – it is only surprising if you have been listening to the main-stream media for years. Poll after poll on issue after issue support a liberal agenda. No one has had the guts to run on it.
If the “heavy lift” is getting money out of politics and government this could be a fun campaign.
The Greece article was interesting. “Conservatives” love to refer to the classical period, but I’ve know for a long time that the fall of the Roman Republic, and later of the Western Roman Empire, didn’t back them up. It was mostly driven by ever-higher concentrations of wealth reducing the size of the “citizen class”, people able to participate in the state.
I didn’t know that Greece was a society with very low wealth differentials within the citizen class, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I did know that Sparta declined by the same process Republican Rome did – wealth got more and more concentrated and the group of people who could provide fighters for the state smaller and smaller, until finally they couldn’t field a powerful citizen army. Rome switched to paid soldiers and they eventually began supporting coups. Sparta just shrank into irrelevance.
Of course reality won’t stop the “conservatives” who will continue saying Rome was destroyed by high taxes or debasing the currency.
The review of The Age of the Disegaged was on target in its criticism of the notion that Millennial voting patterns indicate disengagement and for calling for data about Millennials running for office.
What I have witnessed is that Millennials are, for the time they have available to pursue it, more engaged in politics than those who are immediately older but more frustrated by how rigged the political system is by money. I know some Millennials who have briefly held seats on planning and soil and water commissions who resigned in protest over the way certain developers could get their projects railroaded through planning and certain institutions could get preferences in the soil and water commission. Also how difficult it is to turn the soil and water commission to an agenda of sustainability.
And Millennials are more active in extra-electoral movements for change, participating in Occupy Wall Street and #blacklivesmatter movements and continuing to press institutions, especially 1%-dominated institutions like the University of Chicago to to deal with 99%-level issues like the availability of an adult trauma center at the University of Chicago Hospital. And wondering why a no-brainer should be so damn difficult.
You are getting Millennials with growing protest rap sheets in spite of the fact that employers will surely use the fact of arrest as a disqualifying factor.
Non-conservative Millennials are shying away from political office just because they do not want to face the constant temptation of selling out their principles. Nor the constant bullshit political issue arguments that conservatives use to fog public awareness. Nor the automatic hostility of corporate media. They refuse to participate in a rigged game and are waiting or trying to figure out how to unrig the game from the outside.
BTW, overall the selection of topics for this month’s issue is brilliant and timely for a progressive Democratic audience. I especially appreciated the statistic on the number of elected political offices in the US. And I added it to my sig, which takes Karl Rove’s insight about “doing the math”. I also recommend his other one: “Hit them where they are strongest.”
For the GOP, that would be “freedom”, “balanced budgets”, “cutting spending”, “business friendly”, “strong defense” and “reducing regulations”. As you might guess, it all depends on who you are as to whether the GOP really is for those things. In other things, the buzz words hide a peculiar GOP interpretation.