Republicans Against “Opportunity”

Plus, who is teaching Harvard’s “meritless” courses?

The Harris presidential campaign website has a new “issues” section promising an “opportunity economy.”

A battle is raging within the Republican Party and within the center-right generally in America between traditional free-market economics types and those who want to replace that with something else that is vaguely defined but usually involves higher taxes and more government involvement. In the “replace that with something else” camp is a guy called

Oren Cass

who is effective at outreach to the media and to certain Republican senators, particularly Rubio and Vance. I’ve written about Cass and his “American Compass” outfit previously over at FutureOfCapitalism, a predecessor site to The Editors.

Cass now has a newish Substack called

Understanding America

. He has a new piece out there, provocatively,  attacking Kamala Harris for talking about an “Opportunity Economy.” Cass writes:

the obsession in our political rhetoric with “opportunity” is misplaced. Much more important than “opportunity” and “mobility” is “stability” and “security.”

In support of that claim Cass marshals a focus group and a Pew poll fielded in 2014.

Cass insists he’s not totally against opportunity, but he warns that it’s risky: “Before getting excited about ‘a chance,’ it’s important to know the odds.” He says America shouldn’t overemphasize it: “We can value opportunity and mobility without always defining them as the top priority and most worthy aspiration, making their shortcomings the key challenge, and using them as the organizing principle for our politics.”

It’s hard to convey in words the level of exasperation that Cass’s argument generates from me in terms of a gut reaction. You might sum it up as “oy!” It’s true that people have different tolerances for risk and different levels of ambition, based on everything from life experience to family and religious background. Yet Cass seems to ignore that one of the things that has always made America special compared to the rest of the world is the opportunity available here. People who valued stability over mobility might not have made the decision to immigrate to America in the first place. Plenty of European countries have cushy welfare safety nets, but fewer great fortunes and world-changing companies are created there, there’s less dynamism, and there’s lower economic growth.

Aside from the questions of national character and comparative political economy, Cass’s analysis takes public opinion as fixed. Yes, soon after the 2008 economic crisis, which featured foreclosures and job losses, security and safety might be more salient than opportunity and mobility. But part of political leadership might involve cultivating risk-tolerance and celebrating entrepreneurship, rather than simply altering the agenda to appeal to a nation of civil servants and factory workers with an expectation of lifetime job tenure. Part of politics is reminding Americans that this is a land of opportunity, rather than a place where the government dispenses security and stability to passive recipients. 

Cass blames “our political elite” for what he views as the misguided emphasis on opportunity. “The view among those who have dedicated their lives to achieving and exercising power from society’s apex tends to be a peculiar one, even as it gets broadcast from that apex as the norm,” he writes. It’s not clear exactly about whom he is talking, but it could be that some of those people do prefer the emphasis on opportunity. Perhaps they have the wit to realize they are the ones who are going to be taxed and regulated more in pursuit of “stability.”

Anyway, one can debate the abstract preferences between stability and opportunity from now until tomorrow, but typically they are translated into concrete tax, spending, and regulatory policies. Those policies are sometimes billed as win-win or rising-tide-lifts-all-boats, but they sometimes turn out, also, to involve more zero-sum tradeoffs. 

I’m not a huge Harris booster by any means, but I’m happy to see her at least rhetorically embracing “opportunity” language. Republicans who spurn the language and the policies while chasing votes may find themselves punished when voters eventually realize that emphasizing safety over opportunity doesn’t result in much safety either. Ask anyone whose family came to America from a communist or socialist country.

Harvard’s ‘Meritless’ Courses:

The Harvard Salient

, a conservative student publication, reports that “While receiving a legitimate humanistic education at Harvard is still possible, the number of meritless courses has made separating the wheat from chaff increasingly challenging.” It proceeds to list 20 actual, non-parody offerings from the Harvard course catalog with titles such as “Street Dance Activism: Co-choreographic Praxis as Activism” and “Queer Interventions in Latinx Studies.” 

I’m not passing any judgment myself here on whether those courses are worth a student’s time or a parent’s money. But I thought it’d be interesting to take the analysis a step further and ask, who is teaching those classes? Eighteen of the classes have named instructors. Here are the titles of the teachers: