Socialists Will Never Understand Elizabeth Warren (I’d have chosen a different title)

The Democratic candidate is part of a long intellectual tradition that’s gone forgotten in the West: pro-market leftism.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s politics seem like a tangle of contradictions. She wants free markets, but also wants to tax billionaires’ capital. Her enemies on the right claim that she is a socialist, but Warren describes herself as “capitalist to my bones.”

Warren’s politics are so confusing because we have forgotten that a pro-capitalist left is even possible. For a long time, political debate in the United States has been a fight between conservatives and libertarians on the right, who favored the market, and socialists and liberals on the left, who favored the government.

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Other Writing:

Essay

The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online with Marion Fourcade

Governments around the world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes exacerbated the pandemic, we’ve so far paid dangerously little attention to coronavirus’s challenge to democracy. Access the full article here.
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Essay

Three Moral Economies of Data – with Nils Gilman

In October 24, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave an epochal speech to a conference of European data officials. Many outside the technology industry have warned that we are sleepwalking our way through a vast transformation of politics, economy and society. Our world is being remade around us by data and by algorithms. Tools ...
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