#political-economy

I. Introduction — The American Paradox

For as long as it has existed, the United States has carried two competing self-portraits. On one hand, it is the archetypal “nation of immigrants”—a country defined not by bloodline but by the recurring arrival of new people, new languages, and new cultural currents. On the other, it has repeatedly flirted with the idea of building a large, protective, European-style welfare state, the kind associated with stability, solidarity, and a tightly woven social safety net. These are both powerful visions of what a nation can be. But they do not always coexist easily.

The tension is simple to describe and notoriously difficult to resolve: can a country sustain both high levels of immigration and a far-reaching social-democratic welfare state? Many modern political movements treat these two ideals as naturally compatible—morally aligned, even. Yet historically, the countries that built the most comprehensive social-democratic systems did so under conditions of cultural homogeneity and slow demographic change. The United States, by contrast, has been defined by constant demographic renewal, often in rapid waves.

A century ago, though, something different happened. The United States tightened its immigration laws dramatically, shutting the door to whole regions of the world under the logic of racial “preservation.” And it was precisely in that same era—roughly from the 1930s through the 1960s—that America developed the beginnings of a modern welfare state, expanded union power, and laid the foundations of its vast administrative apparatus. These two forces—redistribution and demographic closure—grew together not because they were philosophically aligned, but because one was artificially engineered to make the other politically possible.

I was born in September 1994, which means that some of my earliest years happened to coincide with one of the strangest fiscal periods in modern American history.

I obviously did not know this at the time. I was learning to read and riding a bicycle while the federal government was doing something it had almost forgotten how to do: bringing in more money than it spent. In fiscal year 1998, the United States recorded its first federal budget surplus since 1969. The surplus grew in 1999. Then, in fiscal year 2000, it reached $237 billion, or about 2.4 percent of the entire economy. Federal debt held by the public was actually being paid down.[1]

There was something almost futuristic about the mood surrounding the numbers. At the beginning of 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected that, if the laws then on the books remained in place, the federal government would accumulate $5.6 trillion in surpluses between 2002 and 2011.

Instead, it accumulated $6.1 trillion in deficits.

That is an $11.7 trillion difference between the fiscal future the country could see from January 2001 and the one that actually arrived.[2]

I have been trying to understand what happened in between.

The obvious place to look is September 11. The attacks transformed American foreign policy, created an enormous new security apparatus, led directly to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and began commitments whose financial consequences are still arriving decades later. It is tempting to draw a clean line from the balanced budgets of my early childhood to the War on Terror and then onward to the immense public debt of the present.

Drive across northern or western Iowa and one feature of the landscape becomes hard to miss.

There are cornfields, grain elevators, small towns, long straight roads, and, increasingly, enormous white wind turbines turning above all of it.

That would not be especially surprising in a state known for aggressive climate politics.

Iowa is not such a state.

Donald Trump won 55.7 percent of Iowa's presidential vote in 2024. Republicans currently hold large majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Iowa has moved decisively toward the Republican Party over the past decade. (Iowa Secretary of State)

And yet, in 2024, 62.84 percent of all electricity generated in Iowa came from wind.

Coal supplied about 21 percent. Natural gas supplied about 14 percent.

Wind was not a boutique supplement to Iowa's electrical system. It was the system's dominant source of generation. (Iowa Utilities Commission)

At first glance, there seems to be a political contradiction here.

Renewable energy has become entangled with climate politics in the United States, and climate politics has become sharply partisan. One might therefore expect the country's most wind-dependent states to resemble the country's most environmentally progressive states.

But Iowa suggests that this is the wrong way to think about it.

The more interesting question is not why a Republican state somehow tolerates wind power.

It is how wind power became useful enough that tolerating it ceased to be the point.