I would like to see you debate or discuss these issues with Matt Stoller. His take on the TikTok divestment bill is pretty awful (he approves, not because of his open animus towards China, but because he considers the forced divestment to be much-needed government regulation of social media); I imagine he is strongly in favor of preventing the importation of Chinese EV's because of the 'unfair competition' argument.
Interestingly, I've never seen him factor climate change into any of his arguments: indeed, he's written approvingly several times recently about Texas petroleum & fracking companies. I don't know if this is simply a blind spot or if he simply doesn't consider climate change an important issue.
I think one of the profound mistakes that people like Stoller are making is the assumption or bet that they can re-orient the state in ways that we think of as good (anti-monopolist, anti-austerity, government-regulated, etc) by using the China card as the lodgement or beachhead. The error is in reading the politics of policy--right-wingers and centrists have a political horizon that does not go beyond smiting America’s geopolitical foe. So getting govt regulation via inflaming China war at Step 1 does not mean you’re ever going to proceed to anything more democratic at Step 2. TikTok is a great example. The US will never regulate the rest of social media the way they’re trying to regulate/ban TikTok--never. So in banning TikTok, we’re not “bringing the state back in”; we’re bringing a clash of civilisations back in that selectively targets America’s geopolitical enemies and democracy is nowhere to be seen.
The net consequence is that you end up having Democrats basically carrying out a right-wing agenda of building up the national security state and empowering the reactionary terrain of geopolitical rivalry while everything more “progressive” than that ends up being unachievable or (in the case of IRA) extremely brittle. There is no political coalition to carry through an agenda that goes beyond simply heightening the forces of militarism and ethnonationalism.
What do you make of the argument that tariffs on green energy are necessary to get buy-in domestically for the green transition, especially in the politically important upper Midwestern states?
I don’t think it’s true; I think it’s scapegoating. At this point, a major barrier to a green transition in the US is the affordability and mass adoption of green tech. I fail to see how tariffs will make the products cheaper; they prevent the cheaper products from entering the market.
But this to me is why routing the green transition through green capital is kind of fraught. If you providing subsidies as an inefficient way to create jobs and accelerate a green transition even though you’re making the industry less profitable, that might not make economic sense but that makes perfect sense insofar as you’re providing a public good (green adaptation) while stimulating fuller employment. But we foreclose on the public-good logic when we place bets on sectoral “leadership” and building an economy of the future around manufacturing...things I think don’t make any sense in a global context.
I honestly am not sure. On the one hand, you're right there was a path the IRA could have taken that focused on building out public green energy programs and resources rather than just de-risking green capital. And this does seem like the only hope we have for actually solving the problem vs a basket of half-measures that often feel like they're more about mollifying the progressive left while alienating as few allies as possible than actually doing anything.
On the other, for whatever reason I don't see a lot of evidence that most people care about stopping global warming enough to actually change much about their lifestyle (tragically!) so it's easy for the opposition to mobilize against any green legislation. Stuff like the big farm protests in the EU makes me think it was smart to deliberately make the IRA a protectionist program to create domestic jobs. It simultaneously gives things to the base (union autoworkers ) while neutering potential arguments that it is "socialist" government overreach. Thinking of how much energy conservatives were putting into convincing people the IRA was bad for autoworkers and how that could have caught on if it weren't designed to explicitly counter that argument.
But maybe some of this is beside the point, like you point out Biden was surrounded by people that made it easy to hijack environmental policy and use it against China. There is probably another road not taken where the IRA keeps all it's essential features without being so intentionally antagonistic towards China. Cheap Chinese batteries in American-made cars seems like a pretty good deal to me!
Yeah, this strikes me as a sensible way of being ambivalent. My critiques are quite radically inflected, but on some level a lot of my concerns could be mollified with a genuinely antiwar Keynesianism--you could make the IRA and other legislation specifically about jobs, but in a way that recognises the jobs are going to be permanently subsidised, effectively daring conservatives to take the funding away. Then you could sidestep the whole question of tariffs and exclusionary political economy. My concern(s) now are both that everything is grafted on to dystopian war-prep with China and that government support for a green transition is basically throwing money at firms and praying they’ll do the right thing, which seems crazy to me (but also the American way)
I also wonder your views on recent US solar manufacturers' petition of imposing tariffs on SEA-made solar panels/cells, link here: https://americansolartradecmte.org/.
I am deeply concerned about its implications, as it targets explicitly at SEA countries rather than 'circumvention takes place in SEA countries'.
It’s a huge problem! It’s one of many signs that the US is actively using whatever leverage and political capital it has to create a divergence in global political economy--the US very much wants other countries to sort into rivalry geopolitical blocs, and third-party tariffs on SEA is a sign of that. One of many problems here is that the US doesn’t have the leverage in Asia to disembed China from supply chains and production networks. And yet this trend will likely get worse under a MAGA presidency. There’s a section of the Democratic Party that sees folly in the current path, but they’re not the section currently running the Biden administration.
I would like to see you debate or discuss these issues with Matt Stoller. His take on the TikTok divestment bill is pretty awful (he approves, not because of his open animus towards China, but because he considers the forced divestment to be much-needed government regulation of social media); I imagine he is strongly in favor of preventing the importation of Chinese EV's because of the 'unfair competition' argument.
Interestingly, I've never seen him factor climate change into any of his arguments: indeed, he's written approvingly several times recently about Texas petroleum & fracking companies. I don't know if this is simply a blind spot or if he simply doesn't consider climate change an important issue.
I think one of the profound mistakes that people like Stoller are making is the assumption or bet that they can re-orient the state in ways that we think of as good (anti-monopolist, anti-austerity, government-regulated, etc) by using the China card as the lodgement or beachhead. The error is in reading the politics of policy--right-wingers and centrists have a political horizon that does not go beyond smiting America’s geopolitical foe. So getting govt regulation via inflaming China war at Step 1 does not mean you’re ever going to proceed to anything more democratic at Step 2. TikTok is a great example. The US will never regulate the rest of social media the way they’re trying to regulate/ban TikTok--never. So in banning TikTok, we’re not “bringing the state back in”; we’re bringing a clash of civilisations back in that selectively targets America’s geopolitical enemies and democracy is nowhere to be seen.
The net consequence is that you end up having Democrats basically carrying out a right-wing agenda of building up the national security state and empowering the reactionary terrain of geopolitical rivalry while everything more “progressive” than that ends up being unachievable or (in the case of IRA) extremely brittle. There is no political coalition to carry through an agenda that goes beyond simply heightening the forces of militarism and ethnonationalism.
What do you make of the argument that tariffs on green energy are necessary to get buy-in domestically for the green transition, especially in the politically important upper Midwestern states?
I don’t think it’s true; I think it’s scapegoating. At this point, a major barrier to a green transition in the US is the affordability and mass adoption of green tech. I fail to see how tariffs will make the products cheaper; they prevent the cheaper products from entering the market.
But this to me is why routing the green transition through green capital is kind of fraught. If you providing subsidies as an inefficient way to create jobs and accelerate a green transition even though you’re making the industry less profitable, that might not make economic sense but that makes perfect sense insofar as you’re providing a public good (green adaptation) while stimulating fuller employment. But we foreclose on the public-good logic when we place bets on sectoral “leadership” and building an economy of the future around manufacturing...things I think don’t make any sense in a global context.
What do you think?
I honestly am not sure. On the one hand, you're right there was a path the IRA could have taken that focused on building out public green energy programs and resources rather than just de-risking green capital. And this does seem like the only hope we have for actually solving the problem vs a basket of half-measures that often feel like they're more about mollifying the progressive left while alienating as few allies as possible than actually doing anything.
On the other, for whatever reason I don't see a lot of evidence that most people care about stopping global warming enough to actually change much about their lifestyle (tragically!) so it's easy for the opposition to mobilize against any green legislation. Stuff like the big farm protests in the EU makes me think it was smart to deliberately make the IRA a protectionist program to create domestic jobs. It simultaneously gives things to the base (union autoworkers ) while neutering potential arguments that it is "socialist" government overreach. Thinking of how much energy conservatives were putting into convincing people the IRA was bad for autoworkers and how that could have caught on if it weren't designed to explicitly counter that argument.
But maybe some of this is beside the point, like you point out Biden was surrounded by people that made it easy to hijack environmental policy and use it against China. There is probably another road not taken where the IRA keeps all it's essential features without being so intentionally antagonistic towards China. Cheap Chinese batteries in American-made cars seems like a pretty good deal to me!
Yeah, this strikes me as a sensible way of being ambivalent. My critiques are quite radically inflected, but on some level a lot of my concerns could be mollified with a genuinely antiwar Keynesianism--you could make the IRA and other legislation specifically about jobs, but in a way that recognises the jobs are going to be permanently subsidised, effectively daring conservatives to take the funding away. Then you could sidestep the whole question of tariffs and exclusionary political economy. My concern(s) now are both that everything is grafted on to dystopian war-prep with China and that government support for a green transition is basically throwing money at firms and praying they’ll do the right thing, which seems crazy to me (but also the American way)
I also wonder your views on recent US solar manufacturers' petition of imposing tariffs on SEA-made solar panels/cells, link here: https://americansolartradecmte.org/.
I am deeply concerned about its implications, as it targets explicitly at SEA countries rather than 'circumvention takes place in SEA countries'.
It’s a huge problem! It’s one of many signs that the US is actively using whatever leverage and political capital it has to create a divergence in global political economy--the US very much wants other countries to sort into rivalry geopolitical blocs, and third-party tariffs on SEA is a sign of that. One of many problems here is that the US doesn’t have the leverage in Asia to disembed China from supply chains and production networks. And yet this trend will likely get worse under a MAGA presidency. There’s a section of the Democratic Party that sees folly in the current path, but they’re not the section currently running the Biden administration.