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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available. This e B ook i s l ic en se d t o J o nath an J e n ner, j o nath an .d onald .j e n ner@ gm ail.c o m o n 0 6/3 0/2 022 CO NTEN TS So You’re Interested in Politics?

PAR T 1: THE HORSE RACE CENTER ( N .); CENTRIST ( ADJ ., N .) DEMOCRACY ( N .) FILIBUSTER ( N .) FOLKS ( N .) ( PL .) KITCHEN T ABLE ( N .) PAR TISAN ( ADJ .); PAR TISANSHIP ( N .) POLICY ( N .) PROGRESSIVE ( ADJ ., N .) PUNDIT ( N .) PAR T 2: STRUCTURES CLASS ( N .) CONSER VA TIVE ( ADJ ., N .) ECONOMY ( N .) IDEOLOGY ( N .) INCLUSION ( N .) INTERSECTIONALITY ( N .); INTERSECTIONAL ( ADJ .) LIBERAL ( ADJ ., N .) MA TERIALIST ( ADJ ., N .) NEOLIBERALISM ( N .); NEOLIBERAL ( ADJ .) RACISM ( N .); RACIST ( ADJ .); SYSTEMIC RACISM ( N .) SCIENCE ( N .) PAR T 3: MOVEMENTS ACTIVISM ( N .) ALLY ( N .) EQUITY ( N .) GREEN ( ADJ .) NONVIOLENCE ( N .); NONVIOLENT ( ADJ .) PA TRIOT ( N .) PEOPLE ( N .); POPULISM ( N .) RADICAL ( ADJ .) SOCIALISM ( N .) SOCIAL JUSTICE ( N .) Notes This e B ook i s l ic en se d t o J o nath an J e n ner, j o nath an .d onald .j e n ner@ gm ail.c o m o n 0 6/3 0/2 022 ECONOMY (N.) In 1992, a politi cal consultant named James Carville scrawled a slogan on a whiteboard in Bill Clinton’ s presidential campaign headquarters. “It’s the economy , stupid ” has since become famous as a piece of blunt, homespun political wisdom. But the phrase always confused me. Carville meant it as a rebuke to any members of the Arkansas governor’s staf f stupid enough to forget the campaign’ s outward focus on “rebuilding our economy .” But what exactly is the economy? What makes it “ours”—and just who are “we” here? A century ago, most voters, and plenty of economic thinkers, would have shared my perplexity , but for different reasons. “Economy” once referred to something rather simple: frugality and prudence in using one’s own resources, usually at the level of the individual or the household. The verb “economize,” and the disappearing school subject of “home economics” are lonely survivors of this once dominant usage. The addition of the indefinite article “the” to the word changed everything. Today “the economy” (and the related phrase “this economy”) refers to the systems of work, exchange, and consumption in some defined place—a city, a nation, or the globe. There’s the Akron economy , the Ohio economy , the US economy , and the world econom y; there’ s a health care econom y and an oil economy . “Econ omy” is a dif ficult word to define, since we use it so broadly: to describe how we work, what we buy, government policies we vote for or against, and the means by which we live, eat, study , get sick, and die—in other words, we use it for almost everything. Exactly when this great expansi on took place is a question of scholarly debate. The anthropologist Timothy Mitchell argued that “the economy” as we now use it is a creation of the 1930s, and particularly of the Keynesian economic doctrines that imagined a system of exchange that could be managed by experts. The invention of metrics like the gross domestic product helped create the novel concept of the national economy, a concept governments could see, measur e, and manipulate. But language is hard to pin dow n neatly . The “national economy,” writes historian Timothy Shenk, also named the relationships between “race, law, land, culture, psyche, and so much more.” And as Quinn Slobodian writes, in the nineteenth century Europe’s empire builders routinely talked about the “world economy” they were making. It would have looked quite different from a bank in London, the docks of Liv erpool, or a rub ber plantation in Malaysia, but the slippery versatility of the phrase cloaked those differences. This is still the power of “the economy ,” unmodified: to conjure a host of political, racial, religious, and class meanin gs, the things otherwise named by words like work, unemployment, wages, purchasing power, job creation , an d much more. “The economy ,” though, tends to harmonize these things. As Clinton recognized, everyone imagines that they benefit one way or another from “a strong economy .” 15 This is the incantatory power of “the economy”: it’s a con vincing phantasm of something closely felt that, on its own, has very little substance. We know , at some level, that there is really no “national economy ,” at least nothing neatly separable from all the other national economies out there. We also know that a small farmer, a DoorDash delivery driver, and a venture capitalist don’t have especially similar interests, and that capitalism’ s global power and complexity limit what any individual, even a powerful one, can do to manipulate it. We kn ow this, but “the economy” lets us for get it: a sprawling monstrosity becomes a machine we can tinker with. We “fix it,” we “pump dollars” into it, and we “rebuild” it. It’s a faceless specter, a humm ing or rickety machine, and a living thing, which we routinely describe as “ailing,” “ jittery ,” or “stagnant, ” waiting to be “nur sed back to health.” So when politicians style themselves as stewards of the economy , the y perform a sleight of hand: as anyone with a job can tell you, your economy and your boss’s aren’ t the same . When the US pres idential candidate Beto O’Rourke said, in 2019, that we should all get to “p articipate in this economy ,” he described the economy almost like a baseball team where everybody gets a chance to hit. He seems not to realize that if you work a dangerous, insecure, low-paying job, your problem is precisely that you are participating in “this economy .” 16