New Progressive Quarterly Journal

Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has come out with its first issue. It looks promising, oriented along the lines of the New America Foundation (at least in terms of author affiliations), one of the best things to come out of the think tank world in recent years. There’s substantial foreign policy content here, with a review by Michael Lind of Peter Beinhart’s recent book, Michael Singer extolling the better side of American exceptionalism -“exemplarism” – to ground foreign policy, and Kathryn Roth-Douquet on military service.

Jedidiah Purdy‘s “The New Biopolitics” adds an inventive coda to twinned trends of the birth dearth in the West (too few to support the social benefits net going forward) and the gender imbalance that sex selection is creating in the south (with the prospect of a large population of unattached males more prone to radicalism). (Before becoming a lawprof at Duke, Purdy published a well-received book from Knopf on the US and globalization.) He suggests a “bargain model” in which developed countries put capital into the South, in programs relating to education, public health, and infrastructure (all with an eye to long-term political stabilization), which the South would pay back a generation later by contributing to social security in Europe and the US. Though there’s something slightly implausible about the proposal, it sure beats international tax schemes and might shift the premises of international transfers to a more palatable and calculable national-interests framework.