Chuck DarwinI’d wanted to interview Jennifer Harris for years.
She has been the quiet intellectual force behind the Biden administration’s economic policies,
and she seemed key to understanding why both parties in Washington had walked away from free trade and neoliberalism
— the belief that free markets will bring prosperity and democracy around the world.
These matters felt personal to me.
I spent much of the Trump administration following steelworkers in Indiana who lost their jobs when their factory moved to Mexico.
They felt betrayed by elites
— and they weren’t wrong.
I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies.
No one knew what to call it
— Post-neoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism?
— but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around.
I believed in it. But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?
To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be.
As a young State Department policy planner in the 2000s, she was a lonely voice in Washington raising the alarm about the rise of China.
She pushed for tariffs and against trade agreements before it was cool,
and was an author of a book called
“War by Other Means” about how blind faith in free markets put the United States at a geopolitical disadvantage.
For years, she felt like an oddball in Washington, where both parties were still in thrall to neoliberalism.
But after Donald Trump’s election in 2016,
which tapped into a deep well of anger over free trade,
she was suddenly an It Girl in the world of Washington policy wonks.
The Hewlett Foundation hired her as the head of an initiative that has given away $140 million so far
to people who are devising a new economic philosophy.
Then she served a stint in the White House.
Today, she’s an intellectual leader of a growing, bipartisan consensus that my colleague David Leonhardt recently highlighted.
The thinking behind it goes like this:
Unquestioning belief in the free market created a globalism that funneled money to the 1 percent,
which has used its wealth to amass political power at the expense of everyone else.
It produced free trade agreements that sent too many U.S. factories to China
and rescue plans after the 2008 financial crisis that bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street.
Fury over all that helped elect Mr. Trump,
who denigrated elites for selling out the country.
But if Mr. Trump correctly identified a problem
— “China is eating our lunch”
— he did not solve it,
beyond putting tariffs on Chinese products.
His tax cut for the rich hurt rather than helped matters.
It’s the Biden administration that came in with a plan to build an economy that was good for workers,
not just shareholders,
using some strategies Ms. Harris had been talking about for years.
...
In 2016 Ms Harris argued passionately that Hillary Clinton should denounce the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
something Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders had already done.
Mrs. Clinton did eventually reject the agreement, though Mr. Trump won anyway.
“Jen not only offered unique perspectives,” Mrs. Clinton told me in a statement, but also “ideas that were often ahead of their time.”
The excruciating loss made Mr. Sullivan far more open to Ms. Harris’s views.
(They eventually wrote an article together in Foreign Policy calling for a new economic philosophy.)
And it sent Democrats back to the intellectual drawing board.
Larry Kramer, then the president of the Hewlett Foundation, recruited her in 2018 to promote alternatives to ideas that had guided U.S. policy for decades.
He hoped she could do for free-market skepticism what Milton Friedman and his allies had done for free-market fundamentalism,
which became policy under the Reagan administration and eventually was embraced by both parties as truth.
Her work at Hewlett was just getting off the ground in 2020 when Mr. Biden won.
Ms. Harris couldn’t resist the chance to join the administration.
“It felt like the ‘Nerd Justice League’ was assembling,” she told me.
“And I had some FOMO.”
As an adviser on international economic policy, Ms. Harris had a hand in everything from making the case for industrial policy to designing a new framework for trade.
This time, she wasn’t a lonely voice.
Numerous grantees or partners from the Hewlett initiative entered the administration as well:
Heather Boushey, an expert on equitable growth, became a member of Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers;
K. Sabeel Rahman, a scholar of antitrust law, became head of regulatory affairs;
and his collaborator Lina Khan became chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
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