Broadsheet

lists = [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5]] [*L for L in lists] # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] # equivalent to [x for L in lists for x in L] sets = [{1, 2}, {2, 3}, {3, 4}] {*s for s in sets} # {1, 2, 3, 4} # equivalent to {x for s in sets for x in s} dicts = [{'a': 1}, {'b': 2}, {'a': 3}] {**d for d in dicts} # {'a': 3, 'b': 2} # equivalent to {k: v for d in dicts for k,v in d.items()}

I have a Google Doc with a long list of posts I’ve been meaning to write. Far down the list was a line that read “New Keynesian macroeconomics deserves a Nobel”. Somehow I never got around to writing that post, and now I never will. Because today, it happened! This year’s Econ Nobel went to Bob Hall and Mike Woodford, two of the theory’s most important creators.

First, let me say that this prize is long overdue. In 2009, I asked my PhD advisor, Miles Kimball, who was the greatest living macroeconomist. Without hesitation, he answered “Bob Hall”, and said he would be very surprised if Hall didn’t win the Nobel at some point. Hall’s work is breathtakingly broad; if you want good summaries, I recommend Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen (as usual). As for Michael Woodford, everyone I know assumed that if New Keynesian macro ever did get the prize, Woodford would be included, as he literally wrote the book on it.1

But anyway, let’s talk about New Keynesian economics — what it is, how it came about, why it’s important, and why it didn’t get a Nobel until now. Let’s start with a brief history of modern macroeconomics.

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, most economists tried to understand the macroeconomy by looking at relationships between macroeconomic aggregates. For example, “If income goes up by 10%, how much will spending go up?”. Or “If inflation goes up by 3 percentage points, how much will unemployment go down?”. 2

The problem with that is that correlation isn’t causation. Suppose you see that when inflation rises, unemployment goes down. That correlation is called a Phillips Curve. So you think “OK, if we raise inflation, more people will get jobs”. But you try that, and it doesn’t work — you push inflation up (by printing more money), but unemployment stays high. The correlation you saw before has now broken down. Now you’ve got two problems instead of one!

This is a very simplified version of what a lot of economists think happened in the 1970s. Whether that’s what really happened is a story for another day. But the stagflation of the 1970s prompted the econ profession as a whole to rethink how it modeled the macroeconomy. A lot of researchers asked: What parts of the macroeconomy are invariant to policy? What are the solid foundations we can stand on, so that when we try to make some sort of change, we don’t cause our own theories to crumble?

The answer most economists settled on was called “microfoundations”. They reasoned that the basic drivers of individual and corporate economic behavior shouldn’t change when macro policies like interest rates and government spending change. Most importantly, those drivers include:

Technology
Consumer preferences
The process by which people and businesses form expectations of the future

Do all three of these really stay the same when economic policy changes? Probably not completely. But it gave macroeconomists a place to start. So in the late 1970s and early 1980s, economists started to build macro models based on theories of individual and corporate behavior. These were called “microfounded” macro models.

The last of those three “microfoundations” — expectations — was particularly thorny to think about. Almost any sort of expectation-formation process that you write down allows policymakers to trick people over and over, by surprising them systematically. Economists thought that eventually, people should wise up to the government’s tricks. So they came up with the idea that consumers and businesses should, on average, be as smart as the economists making the models. If economists write down a model of how the world works, that model should be the average person’s mental model in the model. Basically, people generally know how the economy works, and they plan accordingly.

This idea is called “rational expectations”.

In 1978, Bob Hall wrote a very influential paper that convinced a lot of economists that this was the right track. Hall wanted to test a simple idea, originally developed by Milton Friedman: If people plan out their consumption in advance, then changes in the level of consumption should be completely random.3 Nothing from last quarter should be able to predict the change in consumption this quarter — because if something last quarter mattered for this quarter’s consumption, people would already have changed their consumption last quarter! Hall found that, sure enough, a bunch of variables that seemed like they should be important for consumption — especially last quarter’s income — didn’t actually help predict changes in consumption.

For a more detailed explanation, I recommend this post by John Cochrane:

The Grumpy Economist

Bob Hall and Consumption

I wrote this essay on Bob Hall and Consumption (link goes to pdf on my webpage) for the conference in honor of Bob Hall at Hoover, November 22. It turned into a more extended history of some trends in macroeconomics, which any student of macroeconomics might find useful. Why we do what we do is often obscure. If this post exceeds your email limit, finis…

2 years ago · 35 likes · 8 comments · John H. Cochrane

Brian Albrecht has a good (brief) explanation as well.

At first blush, this might not seem like an important result. After all, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence — there might be other variables that do predict changes in consumption, that Hall simply forgot to test. And in fact, Hall did find one variable that predicted future changes in consumption: stock prices. So even in the formal sense, the basic theory didn’t quite hold. Nor did Hall’s result rule out the traditional Keynesian idea of consumption — if government spending surprises people, it can move consumption immediately, without creating any sort of predictable future change.

But it was an important result, for two reasons. First, if people plan ahead when making their economic decisions, it should be possible for policymakers to influence today’s behavior by making promises about what they’ll do in the future. Second, if it’s impossible for economists to predict changes in consumption, that implies that consumers are as good at planning their future consumption as economists are.

If that’s true, it’s an important lesson for policy: If you want to make people consume more, or if you want to make businesses hire more, etc., you have to do it in a way such that people generally understand what you’re doing.

So macroeconomists set out to make models of the economy in which people understand how the economy works. At first, this effort didn’t go well. For example, one very popular early idea — which eventually won a Nobel — was called “real business cycle” (RBC) theory. This was the idea that recessions and booms are driven purely by changes in the rate of technological progress — if engineers happen to invent less useful stuff this quarter, you get a recession.

No one denies that technological inventions can be very important for economic growth — just look at how the AI boom is powering the U.S. economy right now. But the idea that tech progress drives the business cycle in a simple, mechanical way just doesn’t fit the evidence. In particular, productivity booms don’t seem to line up with economic booms, as RBC theory would predict.4

Even more importantly, RBC models predict that monetary policy — raising and lowering interest rates — shouldn’t affect the real economy. Ed Prescott, the creator of RBC theory, famously declared that monetary policy “is as effective in bringing prosperity as rain dancing is in bringing rain.” But our best evidence says that Prescott was wrong — monetary policy almost certainly does affect the real economy.

So something’s going on there. Macroeconomists were missing something big — they didn’t understand how or why monetary policy boosts growth and employment. During the 1990s, a bunch of economists started coming up with possible reasons why having the Fed buy bonds could result in more people getting jobs.

These ideas generally fell under the name of “New Keynesianism”. As John Cochrane and others have pointed out, this was something of a misnomer. Whereas John Maynard Keynes and his successors thought a lot about fiscal policy — i.e. government spending and taxes — the New Keynesians of the 1990s and 2000s focused almost entirely on monetary policy. New Keynesian macro initially owed a lot more to Milton Friedman than it did to Keynes — everything was about the Fed, and the idea of fiscal stimulus initially fell by the wayside.

Anyway, in the 90s and 2000s there were plenty of ideas about how monetary policy could affect the real economy. This is probably one big reason why New Keynesian economics was so slow to win a Nobel — it has so many creators that it’s not even clear who deserves the prize. Greg Mankiw, David Romer, Stanley Fischer, George Akerlof, Janet Yellen, Olivier Blanchard, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Jordi Gali, Mark Gertler, John Taylor, Guillermo Calvo, and a bunch of others contributed pieces to the edifice.

Most of these contributions were ideas about why prices are slow to adjust to macroeconomic fluctuations. Basically, if you have something that decreases aggregate demand — say the Fed raises interest rates like in 1980, or there’s a banking panic after a housing bubble bursts like in 2008 — there’s a question of why companies don’t just cut prices and maintain the same level of output. If there’s something causing prices to fall too slowly, that can force companies to produce less instead. A lot of New Keynesian theory is about why companies have difficulty cutting prices.

Bob Hall made very important contributions here too! The basic New Keynesian model explains how interest rates can affect GDP, but it doesn’t explain why that affects employment. After all, if growth slows down, it’s not immediately obvious why a bunch of people should be thrown out of their jobs. In a 2005 paper, Hall made a model explaining how wages might be slow to adjust to changes in demand — meaning that when there’s a downturn, companies can’t just cut wages, but instead have to lay off workers.5

Anyway, New Keynesian economics wasn’t the brainchild of a few famous founders — it was a riot of new ideas. It needed someone to come synthesize all of those ideas into something simple that central bankers could use to set monetary policy in real life. That man was Mike Woodford.

In a paper with the late Julio Rotemberg, Woodford laid out a simple New Keynesian model. On the question of why companies have difficulty cutting prices in a recession, he punted — Woodford simply assumed that for whatever reason, only some companies are able to change their prices each quarter.6 (This idea is called “Calvo pricing”, after its creator, Guillermo Calvo.) The rest of the model is pretty simple. Woodford uses the same basic consumption-smoothing model from Hall’s 1978 paper, in which people’s decision of how much to consume and how much to save depends on the interest rate. He assumes that the central bank (i.e., the Fed) sets interest rates according to a simple rule that balances out the risks of inflation and unemployment. There are a few more assumptions in there, but those are the basics.

This simple model provides a guide for monetary policy. It explains how the central bank can cause a recession in the short term — like Paul Volcker did in the early 1980s, when he raised interest rates to fight inflation — but can’t raise employment forever by keeping rates permanently low. And it explains how the central bank can respond to a drop in private demand — say, from a financial crisis like the one in 2008 — by cutting interest rates to stabilize the economy in the short term.

In other words, Woodford’s model — which he later expanded into a famous book — is a grand synthesis of the general consensus that emerged from the intellectual ferment of macroeconomics from the 1970s through the 2000s. We knew that aggregate demand was a real thing. We knew that the economy had trouble adjusting to negative demand shocks, resulting in a lot of disruption — reduced output, people getting thrown out of work, and so on. And we knew that monetary policy could boost the economy in the short term, but that its effect probably faded in the long term. Woodford gave us the simplest plausible model to describe all of that, and to offer central banks a badly-needed road map for stabilizing the economy.

Because it was so simple and so applicable, Woodford’s New Keynesian model became the standard tool of central banks around the world. No sooner was his synthesis complete, however, than it ran into a huge problem. In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. and European economies were hit by such a huge negative demand shock that cutting interest rates all the way to zero failed to put things right. Something else was needed.

There were three basic ideas for what that “something else” should be. The first is contained in Woodford’s model, and draws on the basic idea in Hall’s papers. It’s the idea of “forward guidance”. If the central bank can promise to leave interest rates low for a long time even after the recession is over, that can prompt consumers to spend more today — thus hastening the end of the recession.7 The second is quantitative easing — having the Fed buy long-term bonds instead of just short-term ones, in order to push down long-term interest rates. QE isn’t in Woodford’s model, but he eventually came around to supporting it.

The third idea was fiscal stimulus. If interest rates go all the way to zero, then government spending can become a more effective way of raising demand (as long as the central bank doesn’t cancel out the stimulus by raising rates again). When the Great Recession hit, New Keynesian economists scrambled to put Keynes back into their theories, by adding a role for fiscal stimulus.

Hall wrote a paper in 2009 explaining how stimulus could be effective:8

[T]he multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0…but higher values are not ruled out. New Keynesian macro models have multipliers in that range as well…Multipliers are higher—perhaps around 1.7—when the nominal interest rate is at its lower bound of zero, as it was during 2009.

In that paper, Hall explains how fiscal stimulus can be effective even in light of his famous result from 1978. Even if there is no simple “consumption function” linking stimulus directly to spending, there are plenty of ways that stimulus can affect the behavior of companies and consumers, especially when interest rates are at zero.

And Woodford wrote a paper in 2011 showing how stimulus works in his basic model:

This paper explains the key factors that determine the output multiplier of government purchases in New Keynesian models, through a series of simple examples that can be solved analytically. Sticky prices or wages allow for larger multipliers than in a neoclassical model, though the size of the multiplier depends crucially on the monetary policy response. A multiplier well in excess of one is possible when monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound, and in this case welfare increases if government purchases expand to partially fill the output gap that arises from the inability to lower interest rates.

So in the end, the New Keynesians went beyond the ideas of Milton Friedman, and brought some Keynes back into their theories.

But New Keynesianism’s biggest success arguably came not in the Great Recession, but in the post-pandemic inflation of 2021-23. Inflation spiked to 9% in 2022, but then came down to around 3% in early 2023 after the Fed raised interest rates. But what’s remarkable is that unlike in the early 1980s, this happened without a big rise in unemployment!

It’s not clear exactly why this happened, of course, but it sure looks like a big victory for the kind of New Keynesian macro that Bob Hall and Mike Woodford pioneered. The most likely explanation for this “immaculate disinflation” is that as soon as businesses realized that the Fed would do whatever it took to beat inflation, they stopped raising prices — and inflation simply ended.

It didn’t require demand destruction like Volcker caused in the early 1980s. It didn’t require legions of down-and-out unemployed blue-collar workers cutting back on essential purchases to finally force companies to stop raising their prices. All it required was a clear Fed commitment, and forward-looking expectations — exactly the mechanisms at the core of Bob Hall and Mike Woodford’s models.

It was this episode, even more than 2008-9, that truly represented New Keynesianism’s acid test. And it seems to have passed with flying colors. There was always a question mark hanging over the theory — it was always unclear whether it could shape the future instead of simply telling a story about the past. Since 2022-23, the answer to that question looks like a much more unambiguous “yes”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that had something to do with this long-overdue Nobel.

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Believe it or not, I have read that book cover to cover.

These are simple examples, but sometimes these models could get very big and complicated!

Except for a smooth trend, which people plan out in advance

Here’s another good paper showing the same thing.

This was far from Hall’s only contribution to New Keynesian macro. Another example is his 1986 paper showing how monopoly power could exacerbate economic booms and busts.

Woodford separately wrote down a model of how Calvo pricing might arise from imperfect information. It’s not clear how important this model is, though, or whether Woodford — or anyone else — actually thinks that this is the real reason prices are slow to adjust.

Interestingly, it looks like we did this. The Fed kept interest rates ultra-low even in the late 2010s, when demand had recovered. And it even kept rates low in 2021 as inflation was surging. There’s an interesting paper to be written there about how sluggishness in the Fed’s reaction function might be a substitute for forward guidance, and act as an automatic stabilizer of sorts.

The “multiplier” here is a measure of the effectiveness of stimulus. When the multiplier is greater than one, it means a dollar of government spending raises GDP by more than a dollar.

2026 Daniel Drake Medals The University of Cincinnati College of Medicine’s highest honor

E. Steve Woodle, MD

Woodle, professor of surgery and the William A. Altemeier endowed chair in surgery at the College of Medicine, is a multiorgan transplant surgeon and transplant immunologist who has spent more than four decades advancing the understanding of organ rejection and pioneering immunosuppressive therapies that have reshaped transplantation. Earlier in his career at the University of Chicago, he performed a liver transplant on a 10-day-old infant, setting a Guinness World Record for the youngest liver transplant recipient. He joined the College of Medicine in 1999 and directed the Division of Transplantation for nearly two decades, building an internationally recognized program of clinical and research excellence. In 2001, he performed Ohio’s first allogeneic islet transplant for type 1 diabetes. After undergoing his own liver transplant in 2003, Woodle returned to the operating room and became the first liver transplant recipient to perform a liver transplant.

Woodle has helped originate several therapeutic approaches now considered standard in transplantation. As a fellow, he conceived the genetic re-engineering of OKT3, the first FDA-approved monoclonal antibody — work later developed into teplizumab (Tzield), which the FDA approved in 2022 as the first immunomodulatory therapy for type 1 diabetes. He was the first investigator to introduce plasma cell-targeted therapy for a non-malignant human disease, using proteasome inhibitors to treat antibody-mediated rejection in kidney transplant recipients. He also pioneered corticosteroid-free immunosuppression, including the field’s landmark double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of early corticosteroid withdrawal. He helped conceive and establish clinical kidney exchange for incompatible living-donor pairs, publishing the field’s first peer-reviewed description in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997. Kidney exchange now accounts for roughly one in five living-donor kidney transplants in the U.S.

His scholarship includes more than 400 scientific publications cited more than 22,000 times, and he has delivered more than 700 invited lectures and mentored generations of transplant surgeons, physicians and pharmacists. In 2025, he received the American Society of Transplantation’s Senior Achievement Award in Clinical Transplantation and was named an Ashbel Smith Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he earned his medical degree.

Featured photo at top: Daniel Drake Medal. Photo/University of Cincinnati.

I’ve been in a conversation over the last few weeks about a possible piece I might write for another publication about Democrats and the politics of masculinity and power, particularly how this relates to how young men have shifted to the right in the Trump era. I mostly think that this is an issue that affects Democrats generally, and is not just narrowly about this or that demographic group. This has been a theme in lots of conversations at TPM over the last 20 months when it comes to the extra-ideological division among Democrats between “fight” and accommodation and civility. Going back even further, to late 2004, I’ve been writing about what I call “dominance politics,” or, originally, “bitch slap politics.”

I thought of this this weekend because there was a blip of attention to comments from David Brooks on The Newshour. “The insinuations that El-Sayed is involved in terrorism because he’s Muslim, ridiculous. Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up. That’s just not what we do here in this country.” There are a slew of problems with this. Not least of which are false equivalence and appeals to ethnic hatred and bigotry. Ossoff didn’t call Mike Collins a Nazi. What Brooks is referring to is Ossoff’s debate swipe when he told Collins, “You’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online.” This isn’t some random swipe. It’s been one of the biggest stories of the campaign season that week after week reporters keep finding members of Collins campaign, political operation or family who are associated with far-right or neo-Nazi individuals and organizations or who distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. This is merely an aggressive statement of facts that are unambiguously in the public record. But it’s not the specifics of Ossoff’s attack or Brooks’ tut-tutting I want to focus on here. It’s the more general and more important issue of tut-tutting, elite gatekeeping and how this relates to how Democrats operate in the public sphere.

The premise of “dominance politics”/”bitch slap politics” is that in 21st century American politics and in some ways for much longer, the issues or public policy bundle a candidate brings into a campaign is only a thin part of the electoral equation. What really drives campaigns is a series of competitive performances of dominance and power. In opera terms, think of it as the difference between the libretto and the score, with the former operating at a surface level and the latter packing the real driving energy and motive force. Most specifically these focus on leveling attacks that your opponent is either unwilling or unable to defend themselves against, which is to say dominance. You demonstrate your power and the other guy’s or gal’s weakness. You set the terms and they react.

Ossoff has stood out over the last year or so, and especially over the last three or four months, as a Democratic candidate operating in this mode. It’s not primarily visual. 2026 Dems have a number of T-shirt-wearing, gym-hitting candidates and Ossoff isn’t one of those. If anything he’s more in the Obama mode — well-dressed, more cerebral, coded as educated and cosmopolitan. He’s not aping an influencer or a podcaster. What he’s doing is controlling the terms of the campaign, focusing on a few key themes and prosecuting it aggressively. He’s also including the mixture of taunts and attacks that hold the initiative in the campaign. His campaign speech aside about Natalie Harp was a prime example: “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.” Off-hand, open to countless interpretations, chosen to cut not at one of Trump’s countless offenses or even just one of his vulnerabilities but against his weakness, hapless grasping and deterioration. It triggered an outburst of squealing complaint from the White House which Ossoff promptly made fun of: “It’s been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week.” Most importantly, he didn’t back down. Which made the storm of criticism orchestrated by the White House look more like hurt and grievance — in a word, whining.

The “Natalie” comment was from a public speech. But it wouldn’t have gotten a lot of attention if Ossoff’s campaign team hadn’t clipped it and distributed it as a viral video. In this sense it was highly orchestrated. I was curious whether he’d operate in the same mode in a less controlled setting. And that’s where the “Third Reich” comment came, in a debate with Collins on Friday night. Note that again the comment comes in a fusillade of other attacks and as a kind of offhand aside and the tone is not one of censure or outrage so much as mockery. Note Ossoff’s words and the body language of the two men in this clip, especially how Collins seems to crumble in response and can’t even look at Ossoff or even the camera by the time the exchange is done.

Ossoff says that Mike Collins has "hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-08T23:41:13.879Z

To be realistic about expectations, it is important to remember that it is easier to dominate when you’re winning. Nothing signals power like being ahead. And nothing signals weakness like failing and trying everything you can to stop failing and not having anything work. But what we’re describing in Ossoff isn’t simply a reflection of the state of the campaign. It’s a significant part of why Ossoff, who was supposed to be the most endangered Democratic incumbent, appears to be one of two races where Democrats have a solid, outside the margin of error lead. And the way he’s running his campaign, the way his campaign is focused on signaling dominance and power, is not only visibly different from how Democratic campaigns usually operate but is distinct even in the context of the 2026 cycle, where others are operating in this lane, landing more aggressive, cannier attacks in a way that feels novel.

Obviously how the public sees a candidate depends not only on what they do in a campaign but what they do in office if they win. One of the revolutions that has or is in the process of taking place over the last two years is the kind of popular revolt among Democrats (and Democratic-adjacent independents or occasional voters) at what they see as the weakness of the party’s leaders. Sometimes this reads as characterological. Sometimes it reads as the willingness to be both a participant in political battles and what amounts to the referee, or more pointedly the perpetual custodian of a political order your opponent has already destroyed. What this all amounts to is that Ossoff’s campaign mode and the mode a few other Democratic candidates are leaning towards is both a reaction to the last two years and also will have to be followed by a different kind of political action in office. Because performances of dominance and power work because they are powerful descriptions and implicit promises about how you will exercise political power when you have it.

When I saw people reacting to Brooks’ tut-tutting comments about Ossoff’s remark (“That’s just not what we do here in this country”) I saw many saying some version of “Well, that’s Brooks’ job, brushing Democrats back, keeping them in line.” There’s something to that but I think less than it might seem. Gatekeepers usually have about as much power as you give them, certainly in cases like these where the power of voters is arrayed against elite opinion, and largely elite opinion as it is expressed in social and cultural spaces dominated by people who vote mostly for Democrats — news media generally and certainly The Newshour. The relationship with these kinds of gatekeepers tends to be much more symbiotic.

Before the Trump Era it used to be common for White Houses to host off-the-record meetings where presidents would meet with ten or a dozen opinion columnists or opinion leaders to discuss the news of the day. I would get invited to some of these during the Obama years. I remember one of these from relatively early in Obama’s presidency when the hunt still felt live for a so-called “grand bargain” on deficit-cutting. In the course of the conversation I was struck by the way that Obama’s interaction with Brooks was of a different character than his interactions with basically everyone else there. I may definitionally not be part of “mainstream” discourse, but almost everybody else there was definitionally within it. Also, in this pre-Trump era, Brooks was more clearly still a Republican in this kind of context. It was clear that the rest of us there were people Obama knew generally, whose opinions he wanted to hear and who he of course also wanted to influence. But with Brooks this was just one get-together in an ongoing and pretty extensive conversation. Brooks had a hold on Obama and perhaps vice versa.

That’s a choice.

To be clear, that was a different era and I don’t say this to criticize anyone. Elite opinion and discourse slightly above the fray of partisan combat still existed in a way that is simply no longer the case. So there was at least some logic in trying to cultivate it. I note it here simply to explain that elite opinion is embedded and longstanding and largely something that exists within Democrats, not something that David Brooks or anyone else is imposing on them. The relevant point is simply that Brooks’ is bad advice. The mode Ossoff is campaigning in is manifestly working. Brooks’ comment that, “that’s just not what we do here in this country,” is manifestly false, though that’s the least important thing to focus on.

Dominance politics exists in different forms and flavors. One of the things that made Trump’s meteoric rise possible was that dominance politics is his native language. He never needed to learn it, try it on for size, adapt it to his own needs. And he spoke it with all its predatory and gendered dimensions turned up to 11 if not higher, something that allowed him to pick the lock of Republican politics as it had evolved over the 20 years prior to 2015. A Democrat could never do that. It conflicts with too many Democratic values. It is also the party of women, at least disproportionately so, and the political vehicle of those who care about women’s empowerment and rights. But none of this obviates the need to speak the language in which American political campaigns are now conducted. But, as I noted, dominance politics exists in different forms and flavors. It can be readily adapted to Democratic aesthetics and sensibilities. It’s also why, while everyone’s entitled to their own sartorial choices, there’s probably no need or wisdom to rebranding every Democratic male candidate as a ripped he-man stressing his kidneys by maxxing out on protein powder. Performances of power are fundamentally about learning about how political power works and how it doesn’t, how to communicate it, how to do things in the political realm which grow from it.