Henry Tonks, Author at Public Seminar

Capitalism

Behind the Balancing Act of Kamala Harris’s Industrial Policy

What should Kamala Harris learn from the complicated history of post-1970s New Liberals

October 21, 2024 • by Henry Tonks

Breaking with the strategic ambiguity of her presidential campaign’s early months, Vice President Kamala Harris served up a clearer distillation of her economic agenda in a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on September 25. The speech was fêted as Harris’s “pragmatic,” “moderate-friendly” pitch. Harris also, however, pointed to ...

How Moderate Republicans Went Extinct

Reconsidering Nelson Rockefeller and his legacy

September 18, 2024 • by Henry Tonks

At the Aspen Ideas Climate Summit in spring 2022—one of those gatherings of the well-informed and the well-to-do so beloved by American politicians—Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, urged Republicans to “take back” their party from Donald Trump. “This country,” the veteran Democratic leader opined, “needs a ...

Can American Liberalism Reinvent Itself?

How obscuring the public side of public-private partnerships from FDR to Clinton rendered the liberal state politically precarious

June 27, 2023 • by Henry Tonks

The DLC, soon to anoint Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas as their chairman and presidential standard-bearer, were leaving the legacy of New Deal and postwar liberalism behind. They were, after all, “New Democrats.” Or were they? ...