On April 12, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the appointment of Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, a career Foreign Service Officer and former ambassador.
In a world that seems to be divided between neoliberal orthodoxy and identitarian dogmas, it is possible to miss the waning presence of traditional social democracy. Born of the radical Left in Marx’s own time, social democrats worked, sometimes with remarkable success, to improve the living standards of working people by accommodating the virtues of capitalism. Today, that kind of social democracy learned at home from my immigrant grandparents and from the late Michael Harrington, one time head of the American Socialist Party is all but dead. This tradition was, in retrospect, perhaps too optimistic about the efficacy of government. Nevertheless, it sincerely sought to improve popular conditions and respected the wisdom of ordinary people.
For most of the recent past, economic geography has shifted to ever-larger cities across the globe. By the end of the last decade, many were convinced that we were entering a supreme era of the glittering, high-rise “superstar” city that would inevitably swallow all the best bits of the economy, and serve as unparalleled centers of tech, culture, political activism, and global trade. Globally, the ranks of city-dwellers more than doubled over the last 40 years, from 1.5 billion in 1975 to 3.5 billion according to data from the OECD.
Yet now this urban-centric pattern may be slowing, and even reversing. Three critical factors are at play here. First, of course, the pandemic has weakened the appeal of urban life by the very logic of social distancing and higher levels of infections and fatalities. The second factor has been an alarming uptick in urban crime and disorder, particularly in the United States but elsewhere as well. Finally, there has been a move to dispersed and online
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
The Biden presidency is only a few days old, and already crucial constituencies within the Democrat coalition feel betrayed. President Joe Biden was supposed to be the consensus candidate for the Democrat Party establishment because voters viewed him as a mid-Atlantic moderate. The rest of the primary field collapsed behind him, and, like Pete Buttigieg, are collecting their payoffs in appointments and other political promotion.
The flurry of actions taken in the first few days of the Biden administration ripped that marketing strategy asunder. The Biden campaign had provided clear policy documents online, so, based on their own words, what has happened since the inauguration was utterly predictable, especially on energy policy and social issues.