Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I had high hopes for Glenn Youngkin as long ago as ... well, his victory in the primary election against the other (more Trumpian) Republicans in the field. He, like Mitt Romney before him, comes from the world of private equity, and the masterminds of that world are much-maligned, their work does have a disruptive effect that draws enmity. But they do much more good than harm -- amidst those disruptions there is a lot of productive innovation and the displacement of settled inefficiencies. Like Romney's Bain, Youngkin's Carlyle is the object of lurid stories about how it throws people out of work. There is some truth to it. And I feel sympathy, drawn from personal experience, for anyone who has been laid off. During the 2012 campaign, Romney made himself seem utterly unsympathetic toward those experiencing the downside of Bain-stoked disruption. He notoriously said "I like being able to fire people." He was trying to make a point about healthcare policy but this, com...

Terry McAuliffe won the Democratic Party's nomination for Governor earlier this month, setting up an autumnal show-down with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin.  There was no suspense in the Dem primary, McAuliffe won with 62% of the vote, and the second-place finisher got only 19% . Nobody was biting nails.   McAuliffe is an old-school political hack, who guaranteed the loan that the Clinton's used to buy their nice new house in Westchester County (pictured above) when they were ready to  move out of their leased Pennsylvania Avenue place in DC. He almost immediately thereafter became the head of the DNC and is credited with valuable modernization of the fund-raising machinery there. He also had a big part in running HRC's campaign in 2012.   His opponent, Youngkin, is a former CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the biggest private-equity management firms in the world. He played a big part in Carlyle's transformation from a partnership into a publicly traded ...