Next Social Contract Initiative

Archives: Next Social Contract Initiative Articles and Op-Eds

Democracy, Hacked

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • New America Foundation
February 8, 2013 |

In a little more than a decade, since he won the popular vote but lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, the former vice president and Tennessee senator Al Gore has been a best-selling author; starred in an Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006); won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2007, for his environmental activism; and made a fortune some have estimated to be bigger than Mitt Romney’s, thanks in part to the recent sale of his stake in the Current TV network to Al Jazeera.

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Lind: Is America Still a Land of Great Promise?

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • New America Foundation
October 1, 2012 |

Is America still a land of promise?

The biblical metaphor was used in 1785 by George Washington, who described the new United States as a "second land of promise." More than a century later, the progressive journalist Herbert Croly wrote: "From the beginning the Land of Democracy has been figured as the Land of Promise."

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U.S. Leaves Working Families in the Lurch

  • By
  • Joshua Freedman,
  • New America Foundation
September 27, 2012 |

In this election season, Republicans and Democrats have been touting the importance of family and hard work that make America a land of opportunity. Mitt Romney has talked about his father's love and rise from odd-job laborer to successful businessman. President Barack Obama has spoken of how his grandparents worked industriously to go to college, buy a house and raise their children.

While triumphant stories of middle-class families make for good campaign speeches, the truth is far less heartening.

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The British Seeds of American Decline

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • New America Foundation
July 31, 2012 |

When American and foreign observers speculate about American decline, as they often do, they tend to draw parallels between the United States and the Roman Empire. But parallels between a modern, industrial, urban, nearly-monolingual nation-state and a loose collection of tribes with an agrarian economy are worthless.

A more apt comparison is between the America of the early 2000s and the Britain of the early 1900s. Is the United States repeating the United Kingdom's decline, but on a larger scale?

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American History Lessons for the Eurozone

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • New America Foundation
July 5, 2012 |
Can European leaders learn from the example of Alexander Hamilton? The nation-building efforts of America’s first Treasury secretary are frequently held up as a model for European integration more than two centuries later. The crisis of the eurozone has led many to argue that Europe can learn from Hamilton and other 18th-century American founders about how to structure a continental union.
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The Movement Has Fizzled Out

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • New America Foundation
June 20, 2012 |
Although its model, the Boston Tea Party, started a revolution, the Tea Party movement has left hardly a ripple in history. Launched on a large scale on Feb. 19, 2009, when CNBC’s Rick Santelli ranted on television against an Obama administration proposal to help homeowners facing foreclosure, the movement “jumped the shark” — to use a metaphor from TV — in the summer of 2011. Under pressure from Tea Party activists, the Republican Party came close to threatening the credit rating of the U.S. by refusing to allow the federal debt ceiling to be raised.
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A Subsidy for Dignity

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • Lauren Damme,
  • New America Foundation
March 14, 2012 |

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the United States may be afflicted by high levels of unemployment for years to come. Compounding the challenge to public policy is the fact that many jobs in many sectors will never be restored, either because they depended on debt-enabled demand during the bubble economy years, like many jobs in finance, real estate, and construction, or because they are vulnerable in the long term to offshoring or automation.

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What Kind of Capitalist Is Romney?

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • New America Foundation
January 13, 2012 |

In a presidential primary season distinguished so far by the absence of substantive debates, the controversy over whether Mitt Romney and his partners at Bain Capital should be considered job creators or job destroyers raises a profoundly important issue.

Beyond the concerns about the loss of American jobs to off-shoring or automation and the food-fight tactics of Romney's rivals is a legitimate question about what kind of capitalism 21st century Americans should want.

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The Cost of Free Trade

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • New America Foundation
December 1, 2011 |

Any renaissance of American manufacturing must begin by fundamentally reversing our trade policies—both in general and in particular toward China. Over the past two decades, leading U.S. manufacturers, both the venerable (like General Electric) and the new (like Apple), have offshored millions of jobs—by one recent estimate, 2.9 million—to China to take advantage of the cheap labor, generous state subsidies, and low currency valuation that are linchpins of China’s mercantilist development strategy.

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ROOM FOR DEBATE: Does Congress Hear the Occupiers?

  • By
  • Michael Lind,
  • New America Foundation
November 16, 2011 |

On July 28, 1932, at the command of President Herbert Hoover, police and soldiers led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur attacked and destroyed the camp of the Bonus Army, a group of thousands of World War I veterans and their families and allies who had spent the spring and summer protesting the unemployment created by the Great Depression. The violence, in which two veterans were killed and dozens of people were injured, shocked the American public and helped to ensure the victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt over Hoover in that fall’s presidential election.

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