The torrents of legislative and executive action stemming from the recent change of administrations in Washington have left many folks dizzy, angry, fearful, or hopeful. Each of these responses is explored in Benjamin Studebaker’s first book wherein a provision of a much needed, sturdy framework allows readers to see how each response interconnects as parts of a structure in crisis. Studebaker “takes the crisis of American democracy seriously not by trying to terrify you about populism, but by engaging with its causes.” Chief amongst the causes, he argues that the acceleration of ‘capital mobility’—the ease with which jobs and money can seek more favorable regulatory or administrative environments—has brought about a global wave of competition between economic networks that has overwhelmed the abilities of the institutions in charge of moderation and regulation. Rather than casting blame or pointing towards an ideological taproot, Studebaker draws largely from the work of Thomas Piketty, reasserting how “economic change has undermined democracy by damaging the sense that economy operates in a meritocratic way.” In the first three of six chapters, Studebaker offers his diagnosis and estimation of the titular crisis, including a fine balance of supportive evidence. In the more speculative and theoretical second half of the book, he appraises the deliberate hollowness at the core of contemporary understandings of liberty, equality, and representation as an impediment to more substantive political engagement. By lacking a significant conceptual vocabulary, he argues, the lasting shallowness of political engagement explains why politics have become increasingly despairing and desperate while simultaneously infiltrating virtually every one of our possible escape routes. Although he concludes that the diagnosis is terminal, (“the crisis cannot be solved with reform or revolution, and that it can only terminate in political despair”) the book concludes with an imaginative look at how its arguments and premises could be overly pessimistic, imputing a glimpse of optimism that new ideas and opportunities might lurk unseen under the morass of our extant situation. Studebaker’s openness to being wrong provides a refreshing level of sincerity in such bleak work. 

In the book’s first and most analytical chapter, “The Unsolvable Problem,” Studebaker summarizes why we find ourselves caught between the nostalgia for the rising living standards of the twentieth century and the widespread disappointment and viciousness of the twenty-first. He begins his assessment by showing how ubiquitous competition for capital in the global economy saps the political momentum towards any raising of taxes or wages, say to afford or expand pro-worker policies such as Medicare for All. In a world where local place is becoming less relevant due to entrenched distribution systems, like transportation logistics and the internet, oligarchs and their large corporations are more empowered to leverage their power and size to force a race-to-the-bottom effect in labor jurisdictions. The most recent competition for Amazon’s second headquarters between US cities and regions comes to mind as a very public example of a large corporation engaging in this practice. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, are often dependent upon operating in a certain location—think of neighborhood retailers and non-franchised restaurants—thus limiting their ability to engage in similar tactics. The growing role of technology and tech companies has further disintermediated the protections that previous generations of workers enjoyed by encouraging an entrepreneurship model of freelancing as part of what has been euphemistically called the gig economy. Much of the argumentation in Chapter One draws heavily from the work of economic historian Walter Scheidel, who postulates that inequalities in wealth and power, once established, tend to remain and grow over time rather than disperse. With both reform and revolution seemingly unlikely, we are left with the role of existing institutions which have bent but not fully broken under these conditions. 

One of the book’s more impressive offerings is Studebaker’s contemporary revision of the sociological view of class in the light of contemporary political economy. He posits three broad categories: the workers, the professionals, and the employers. Workers are those that did not go to college, are dependent upon wages, and answer to a boss. Those in the professional class usually have a college degree, are also dependent upon wages and might answer to bosses or clients, but have different interests and values than workers that are typically expressed in cultural positions in resistance to proletarianization. Lastly, the employers are those that answer to themselves and are reliant upon labor rather than wages for income. In each of these categories, a wide swath of income level and variation exist as Studebaker aims to simplify rather than complicate. The usefulness of this schema is shown in subsequent chapters as Studebaker tailors specific arguments to various segments of society, especially the influence and appeal of cultural positions as a site of divisive distinction. In connecting this schema to his assessment of the stagnancy of recent political life, Studebaker argues that the importance of projecting popular or ‘correct’ positions has become overemphasized as a result of the impotency of politicians to do anything to restrain capital mobility. In order to deflect from their inability and to curry favor in office or during primaries and elections, politicians instead play up cultural positions to appeal to increasingly gerrymandered populations of either workers or professionals. 

The growing enmity that manifests as cultural warfare between segments of professionals and workers is perhaps one of the book’s more trenchant observations. In providing the schema as a framework, Studebaker is able to make much more incisive and holistic points without appearing to champion a particular set of beliefs, underscoring that the audience of this book should not be defined by certain predispositions. This book seeks to unite and find a tenable and productive middle ground between the Left’s structural critique of American politics and the Right’s insistence upon restoring the imagined civic virtues of the past. Citing the evolution of Bernie Sanders’s campaign from 2016, when workers and professionals surprisingly meshed in an agenda built around pro-labor and mitigation of globalization’s effects, to the 2020 iteration which emphasized the professional’s cultural positions over the worker’s economic ones, Studebaker claims that the extant system preys upon this antagonism. Catherine Liu, who is cited here, has made similar but more in-depth arguments about how the inefficacy and “virtue-hoarding” of the professional class is a result of their exposure to certain “activist rhetoric” in college.

Although it was first published in 2023, Studebaker’s book has lost none of its indispensability since the second election of Trump. His accessible tone and prose belies a wide erudition that nonetheless entices readers with the gloomy prospects of our current trajectory. In communicating such a well-reasoned downbeat note, Studebaker has enhanced the probability of a resurgence in meaningful engagement with political economy and for that reason alone deserves much lauding.