Pun Salad

In 2018, now-President Trump was presented with a bipartisan budget deal that smashed spending caps and hiked federal outlays by $400 billion. He fumed about the cost and threatened to veto the package. He eventually signed it, but said publicly that he was "disappointed" with the final bill and vowed to "never sign another bill like this again."

The first thing opponents of industrial policy should note is that it can work. But there are some other things we should note, too: that while it can work, it usually doesn’t; that it didn’t cause most of the growth it gets credit for in Asian countries; and that the limited benefits it offers probably can’t be realized by modern-day America.

But first, the concession. Done smartly, strategic trade policy and targeted subsidies can boost a country’s competitive position in growth-promoting industries. And because those industries often cluster, successful national champions can be quite hard to dislodge — just think of Detroit’s decades-long dominance of the global auto market. Once a cluster is established, spillover effects can foster further growth in related sectors.

Unfortunately, industrial policy is rarely particularly smart. Even brilliant planners can’t actually predict the future, and if they guess wrong, they can squander a great deal of taxpayer money while actually making the economy less competitive. France’s Minitel network, a sort of proto-Internet once heralded as a triumph of industrial policy, arguably hindered French adoption of the actual Internet.

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

The quest to base morality on science is like the old alchemist’s quest to turn lead into gold. The project appears eminently doable. The necessary steps seem so small (in alchemy’s case, lead and gold are practically neighbors on the Table of Elements), and the goal so beneficial, that it is frustrating when the quest fails. But fail it does, as explained by two University of Virginia faculty, James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, in their excellent new book. What is perverse is that the quest never ends—at least in the case of science and morality. Alchemists retired their beakers and brick furnaces in the 18th century.

2. Author: I find John Irving unreadable, so does it come down to Russell Banks?  Who else is there?  Salinger lived in New Hampshire for a long time, so I’ll pick him, though it is also pretty far from my favorite.