The headline of a recent Washington Post op-ed, “Biden is reviving a lost Democratic industrial policy playbook,” suggests an important question: Why was that playbook abandoned? Writer Henry M. J. Tonks spends considerable time explaining why a group of “young, highly credentialed politicos enamored with the high-tech economy of the future” initially created such a playbook back in the 1980s. After the volatile, stagflationary 1970s, these “Atari Democrats” were looking for a big, new economic idea to propel the party and to counter the “Reaganite, free- market revivalist ascendancy,” as Tonks puts it. They thought they found their answer in the booming Japanese economy, success that many at the time credited to its government-led economic model of central planning, subsidies, and trade protectionism. They pushed Washington to do its own strategic planning and intentional subsidizing of emerging high-tech sectors. What happened to the Atari Democrats and industrial policy ideas?

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