No, the ability for the national leader to make the nation follow his command is a consequence of right-wing ideology. Populist ideology is to do whatever to get representatives of the people in power; buffering against the leader's idiosyncracies for better electability is more populist than picking a leader with independent opinions.
Like you've got semi-competent left-wing populism that gives people what they ask for EXCEPT when they ask for removing the left-wing populists (and even so, they kind of do, that's why it's becoming less and less competent), and you've got kakistocratic right-wing populism that removes left-wing populism to replace it with oligarchy.
Left-wing populism tends to get fiscally strangled by the global financial marketplace. Perhaps that's unfortunate, but, unsurprisingly, that's how people with money react.
Informed by, not strangled by. The error is in assuming that left-wing extremists are the most populist people on the left, but the essence of populism is appealing to the people, and so in a democratic society one can only reasonably consider the winning politicians to be the most populist.
I'm not proposing that the winning politicians are by definition populist, but rather that populism inevitably causes them to win, so if they remain competitive yet seem non-populist, it's because you are missing an aspect of how they are populist. Center-left types appeal to the people with stuff like a vibe of authority and a willingness to fold against popular pressure.
I am still not in agreement with your difinition of pupulism. Populism is not simply any popular ideology. A essential component of any populist movement is the rejection of elites (what kind of elites differs between movement). Appeals that rely on elitism are inherently anti-populist.
With respect to tailcalled, that's because it's circular: "populism" is what's popular, so if a candidate is gets the most votes, (s)he must be the most popular, and is therefore "populist."
It strikes me that left-wing populism is the type for easy, cheap social liberalisation changes (trans people on the White House lawn type actions) but when it comes to left-wing economic populism, that gets strangled (e.g. student loan forgiveness).
'Yes we can have rainbow columns on the White House for Pride Month'
I never figured out what to think about minimum wage, but I want to note the people don't just demand a minimum wage, they also demand jobs and cheap products...
Right, this is obviously the biggest issue with populism: lots of different things are popular, including things that are jointly incoherent. Also, something can be popular while the inevitable consequences of implementation are unpopular.
All governments have to find a balance that is popular *in aggregate* but that's much harder than just picking a handful of popular issues.
>but the essence of populism is appealing to the people, and so in a democratic society one can only reasonably consider the winning politicians to be the most populist.
No really -- to win in a mass democracy, you need a lot of cash and manpower to build name recognition and get your message across, and to get cash and manpower you normally need to have the backing of a pre-established political party. This performs a gatekeeping function, and means that politicians who are genuinely populist, in the sense of appealing to the ordinary people rather than the elite, often find it hard to get elected.
This isn't an insurmountable obstacle, the issue is that even if you did come beyond it, you're still ultimately competing on the basis of popular opinion, and since very few people actually care about popular opinion more than the center-left democrats do, there's not enough interest in raising that money (especially because the few people who do care more about popular opinion can often become more influential without spending the money, and because caring about public opinion makes it much easier to earn the money).
Left-wing populism is just as kakistocratic as the right-wing variety; they just dress it up in fancier words and are better at manipulating procedures to confer artificial "legitimacy" on the grift.
For the tariffs specifically, the reason the president has any powers at all is that Congress passed a law giving them to him. There is an open question of whether it was legal for them to do that. ("Nondelegation".)
I am given to understand that this is actually the mechanism behind most of the powers of the president. The theory generally goes that Congress assigns responsibility for decisions to other parties because they are afraid that, if they make a decision on their own, they might lose votes.
But I would have a hard time describing that dynamic as "a consequence of populist ideology", unless you want to consider the concept of democracy "populist ideology".
Meanwhile, "democracy" is fast becoming an epithet for "liberalism" (hence all the hyperventilating about how overturning Roe v. Wade was "an attack on our democracy").
Right. The left really needs to grapple with the fact that democracy *has* given us this unusually civilian government and disregard for institutional credentials.
Only the EHC people are consistent, never thinking democracy was any great shakes anyway, and defending an unaccountable, independent layer of smarter-than-thous. If you want accountability, leave it to your local grocer or newspaper missing deliveries.
In contemporary usage, at least, the distinction between "populism" and "democracy" seems to turn on whether I agree with the majority's view.
I'm in favor of transgender athletes competing according to the sex with which they identify, so appealing to the majority's opposition to this is populist. I'm in favor of economic redistribution, so appealing to the majority's desire to tax the 1% is democracy.
I am hoping (but not expecting) that the past 10+ years of rule by "pen and phone" and executive order might convince folks that congress needs to get back to doing things by passing laws rather than just setting up a situation where whichever person is president makes most of the decisions.
I don't EXPECT this ... I expect the lesson to be learned is that it is very important WHO is the "one guy in charge."
The idea that a single person in the US can unilaterally change the rules for trade on a daily basis is pretty silly (whether one agrees with the specific policies or not). I feel the same way about killing off the Keystone pipeline. And many other issues :-(
Just ending the filibuster, so that each majority could pass legislation and face its consequences at the next election, would do a lot to encourage moderation.
> For the tariffs specifically, the reason the president has any powers at all is that Congress passed a law giving them to him.
I think it is pretty clear that Trump's tariffs are not justified by his claimed legal authority. How long it takes the courts to stop him is another question.
It's unfair to blame congress for passing a law that doesn't actually give him this power, just because he's using it as a pretext.
I think its fair, in the sense that they are cowards who could easily undo Trump's fiat on this issue and have shown themselves unwilling to do so for reasons that I'm sure are not in line with what they themselves think is best for the country. Like Scott said, spineless toadies.
>"I think it is pretty clear that Trump's tariffs are not justified by his claimed legal authority. How long it takes the courts to stop him is another question."
This happens over and over and over again with other laws. The legislators passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly swore up and down that it would ban quotas...yet not a decade later there was the entire left swearing up and down that "affirmative action" hiring preferences were required by the Act and anyone who didn't engage in them was guilty of "disparate impact" racism.
Same with the 14th Amendment and the '64 Act on gay and trans issues.
Same with the FACE Act, which both criminalizes obstructing exercise of religious faith in a house of worship, and access to an abortion clinic; but it turns out it only ever gets used against little of ladies praying and not the "Jane's Revenge" types.
At a certain point your objection becomes an unprincipled demand for rigor.
Its not "not willing to look like a traitor" aspect that Scott was talking about. Congress is controlled by Republicans who have full constitutional power to restrain Trump in numerous ways, but they have been bullied by their base. At least one of them has gone on record as being actually scared to resist Trump. I think that makes them unqualified to serve, but I believe them when they say it.
So wait, in a representative body, actually following the will of the most active and vocal constituents makes you *unqualified to serve*? Odd definition of "democracy" and "representative" you have there.
One might consider this definitionally true, but, as empirical matter, politically successful movements which can fairly be described as "populist" seem to commonly unite pretty hard behind a single leader who exemplifies and spreads the spirit of the movement.
Can you name any populist movements at any historical point in any country, where the movement “buffered against the leader’s idiosyncrasies for better electability”?
Populism has always seemed to me to prefer strong individuals over committee or party based buffers.
To a great degree, I think the American constitutional system must own tariffs. Rarely have I seen a better argument for parlimentarianism- more or less along the lines of your article.
Presidential systems often make it hard to get positive things done (because you typically need legislation), but seem to do little to prevent many bad things from being done, and good things undone or at least suspended.
The American Constitution is kind of Creationist while British parliamentarianism is kind of Darwinian. The British idea seems to have won the test of the market.
There are lots of parliamentary systems, but the US and UK share the use of "First Past The Post" voting. This makes renewal of the system difficult, because if a party develops a permanent deficiency or corruption it's hard to fix - there party has to be fixed from within rather than being replaced (there have been exceptions where a new party overtook an old one in both the US and UK, but they are exceedingly rare compared to other countries)
I presume that the USA has a lot of complex state laws that lock in the 2-party duopoly since the 1850s, but, realistically, the topic is too boring for me to investigate.
They all naturally allow for new parties to join, anyone who credibly has support from a specific region or chunk of the population (depending on the ruleset) can get in, support one of the larger parties to get some power.
With time they can grow in popularity and eventually lead an alliance.
The President is a natural focal point - you only really have two options, any other vote is a protest vote.
Canada has also bucked the trend of having it's left wing labour party squeeze out it's liberal party. I think one possible explanation is that the regionalism of Canadian parties provides an alternative basis for party identity other than ideology. The main example is that the NDP is a more viable left wing party in western Canada than the more moderate Liberals. In the 1990s, there was also a western-based conservative party, Reform, that has since merged with original conservative party.
I'm not sure to what extent that explains why Canada has three major parties even before considering the Bloc in Quebec, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's part of the reason Canada has a more interesting party landscape.
On the other hand, it's not like the UK doesn't exhibit these dynamics also, with the SNP being roughly analogous to the Bloc, Nigel Farage's Reform party being like the Preston Manning-led Reform in Canada, etc.
Canada is unusual in having a rich non-urban region that defines itself regionally but whose regionalism is defined in opposition to separatism.
In most places regionalist sentiment cashes out as separatism.
Separatist movements in poor regions tend to do badly because poor regions are dependent on subsidy from the centre to maintain living standards that are only somewhat behind the national average).
Wealthy urban regions tend to produce left-wing separatists (e.g. Catalonia), wealthy rural regions right-wing separatists.
Atlantic Canada is relatively poor, which inhibits separatism there, but the Prairies aren't, they're wealthy, rural, right-wing, hostile to Ottawa (ie regionalist) but they're not separatist because that's associated with Quebec and they're very anti-Quebec. The result was a regionalist right-wing party, Reform, which is now essentially the dominant faction of the CPC.
Note that the UK's Reform is strongest in rural and exurban areas of England that aren't poor (Lincolnshire, Essex, etc). It's not strong in comparable areas of Scotland (Aberdeenshire) because Reform is strongly anti-separatist.
I think the issue is the US *has the presidency as a first past the post system* (electoral college with winner-takes-all in almost every state).
If the Republicans split into social conservatives and business types, those two parties would likely have a greater share of Congress that the Republicans alone do today. But neither sub-party would ever, ever win the presidency.
That effect is not limited to presidential systems, though. If a party splits in an FPTP parliamentary system, its vote share is split in each constituency that they both run in, so each is less likely to win each constituency. That means that their total number of representatives is reduced from before the split, even if they have all the same voters. So even if they ally, they are unlikely to obtain a majority in parliament and form the government. Voters know this and tend to vote for the largest party that they don't hate, strongly punishing splitters.
Regional parties get around this issue (including things like the UK liberal democrats, who are a regional-to-certain-specific-towns-and-areas party). The Greens will still get squeezed, but the Scottish National Party do fine.
Yeah, you can have regional parties as "urban liberals" and "suburban liberals" as well as the more usual sorts of regions. Even more so in non-US district systems (I'm thinking here of UK, Canada, Australia) where the priority for the independent districting commission is creating districts with relatively strong geographical identities) districts of cities tend to be just one of urban, suburban, exurban or commuter town. This isn't true of towns, where the whole town will be a single district (or there's a simple two or three way split so you can Anytown North and Anytown South or North, East, Southwest or whatever) and the district contains all of them. This is one big reason that town seats vote differently from city ones.
Both the US and UK (your examples from above) have seen new parties emerge and old parties die though. As have other major systems with FPTP voting, like India and Canada. So the theory does not seem to match practice.
Once could as well theorize that FPTP allows a party to die if it screws up badly enough, whereas with PR it could shamble on forever, maybe even as part of a governing coalition.
The US two party system does seem unusually strong and durable, even relative to other FPTP systems. My guess is that it's the combination of FPTP, a Presidential system, and nationalized politics - and that you need all three.
The US has had two parties. The names have changed, but it's been stable that way. Basically a new party starts and (generally) flames out, or it gets bigger and swallows the old one.
The UK also has two large parties, but again they change over time. Labour used to be the odd one out; I think the Liberals(!) were the other main party.
Parliamentary systems seem to be allow small parties to hang around longer without being swallowed by one of the two large ones. In the US system there are independent House members, but that's usually because the Congressman is *personally popular in his district*. E.g. Sanders.
If Sanders dies or retires, he's not handing it over to someone else, or if he does, that person is unlikely to be able to continue.
The UK party system started out with informal factions that emerged during the Restoration era, the Whigs and the Tories, with the original fault line being Whigs opposing the Duke of York (later King James VII and II) as heir to the childless King Charles II, while the Tories supported the King and the Duke of York. There were also ideological, religious, and demographic splits that rhymed with the fault lines of the English Civil War a generation previously, which in turn rhyme with various factions during the reigns of Henry VIII and his kids.
The Whigs eventually won this rather decisively. Not immediately in 1688 when the Whigs arranged for the Dutch Stadholder Willam of Orange to invade, chase James off the throne, and replace him (as William III and II of England and Scotland), but the Tories were electorally marginalized from the 1710s onwards and suffered quite a bit from their associations with the Jacobite Risings (a series of rebellions in favor of James's male-line descendants against theHanoverian dynasty, descended from a Protestant side branch of the Stuarts who had married into various German royal-ish families) whom the Whigs had arranged to inherit the throne after William and James's two daughters (Mary and Anne) had all died childless.
Later in the 1700s, during the reign of George III, elections and parliamentary coalitions became much more about shifting factions organized around specific individuals, most of whom were nominally Whigs, with some of them (especially Lord North's faction) being called "Tories" as an insult by opposing factions. These eventually settled down into more stable and organized factions, one organized around William Pitt the Younger and the other organized around Charles Fox and Lord Grenville. The Tory label stuck to Pitt's faction, and the Fox-Grenville faction successfully claimed the Whig mantle.
The factions got formally organized into parties in the mid-1800s, with Robert Peel organizing the Tories into the Conservative party first, and Lord Russell organizing the Whigs into the Liberals a bit later.
Labour was a political movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that, as implied by its name, was strongly associated with trade unions. It was outside the two-party system because most of its constituents couldn't vote anyway. It became a major electoral political party after WW1, when the franchise was expanded to include all adult men and many women. It helped that the Labour leader at the time, Ramsey MacDonald, got along very well personally with King George V.
"The US two party system does seem unusually strong and durable, even relative to other FPTP systems. My guess is that it's the combination of FPTP, a Presidential system, and nationalized politics - and that you need all three."
Also, the role of money in US elections. It takes a lot of it, and that causes interest groups to band together.
Honest question -- how much of that is because countries took a good hard look at the two systems and decided that the parliamentary system was better, as opposed to former British colonies simply inheriting the system of their former colonizers?
Well, it might be hard to characterize France as "inheriting the system of their former British colonizers".
But in a broader sense, I would guess most of it. When you set up your system, you look to a local power or an affiliated culture and do what they do. South America looks to the USA. Other places don't.
Convergent evolution is also a possibility.
Possibly of interest here, some years ago Britain created a Supreme Court that could overrule Parliament, something that can't really happen in the "British" system. This is clearly cultural contamination from the United States; it is clearly not an inheritance, though.
Just because the Rotherham gangs are the only part of British politics that's made it into the American consciousness that doesn't mean it's the defining feature of UK politics.
In the list of how a parliamentary system differs from a presidential one how each would deal with that issue would item 10,000. Are you suggesting that if the UK had a presidential system than the Rotherham gang situation would have been handled better? And the better handling of that one type of issue is justification enough to change systems? If not that what are you saying.
I'd say the long stagnant economy of the UK, where it's even harder to build than the US, makes it look worse. Other countries seem to be doing parliamentarianism better now.
There's a reasonable argument that the British system has *fewer* checks and balances than the American one. The British Prime Minister has, by definition, majority support in the legislature - you can't have a Conservative PM but a Labour House of Commons, unlike the US where the President is often of one party but the House (or Senate, or both) is of another. The House of Lords is now an almost entirely appointed body, with no enforceable limit on appointments, and so can be packed if necessary.
Because ministerial positions - Cabinet-level and lower - are drawn from members of the legislature, there's a "payroll vote" of some 175 or so members (more than 25% of the Commons, and nearly half of the governing party) who are effectively bound to vote in support of the executive, or lose their jobs. Most years, someone gets fired for doing this, but this is rare and it's much more common to hear of Ministers or Secretaries voting with the government out of obligation and even somewhat against their own instincts, consciences, or past statements (sometimes they manage to extract fig-leaf concessions for doing so). As such, a PM with a working majority in the Commons has a lot of freedom and relatively few constitutional obstacles to doing whatever they want to do. Ironically, this is a real problem for British politicians, who take on populist commitments that they don't *really* want to follow through on: they have to invent increasingly silly stories about how some combination of ~~~the European Union~~~, the courts enforcing the laws the government wrote, and the civil servants who work directly for the government, are somehow conspiring to prevent the government from doing the thing that they honestly really really do want to do.
The sense in which the British system is Darwinian is that it's pretty good at getting rid of failed governments quickly once the consensus within Parliament is that a government has become unworkable. If need be, the Prime Minister can be forced to resign and be replaced pretty quickly, as Liz Truss discovered. The same cannot happen in the US, since division between Congress and the Presidency is perfectly normal. The bar for impeachment is much higher than for a vote of no confidence, or for an informal "men in grey suits" conversation in which the PM is told that their own party won't back them.
Yeah, my not-super-informed sense is that the reason the American system struggles is that it's not responsible enough: there are too many veto points, so that people can't attribute blame or credit properly.
It also makes Congress perpetually gridlocked, which is why so much of Congressional power has been ceded to/usurped by the presidency and the judiciary.
I think this is the essence of Linz's argument, for example.
This is somewhat of a more recent thing. Post-Clinton a lot of effort went into banning horse trading in congress, so it was even harder to get things done. Turns out a bit of minor corruption may have been useful after all?
FPTP in an election where only two parties have a chance condemns you to a hundred years of those two parties. Our wonderful British, Darwinian parliament has that same problem that your presidential election has. We can’t vote for our Favourite candidate because it will let the bastard on the other side in. Switching to an alternative vote would fix that.
We have an election tomorrow for the West of England mayor. There are five parties that are all within shouting distance of a victory which makes it really hard to choose who to vote for. If I vote for my favourite party, I give the awful party on the other side more of a chance. If everyone could make their favourite their first choice saving #2 as a safety, more people would vote for their favourite even if they were a long shot. There would be more opportunities for new parties to establish themselves.
"The American Constitution is kind of Creationist while British parliamentarianism is kind of Darwinian."
Explain please.
"The British idea seems to have won the test of the market."
The British system also was the default in the half or so of the globe that was colonized by the British or was set up under British tutelage (e.g. Japan).
One often-overlooked aspect here is that the US system was modeled on the British system as of the late 18th century, and de jure the British system still follows the same general framework despite being radically different de facto.
Specifically, the President of the United States is a stand-in for the King, the Senate for the House of Lords, and the House of Representatives for the House of Commons. All three had their terms shortened relative to their British counterparts at the time (7 years to 2 years for the lower house, and life to 6 years and 4 years respectively for the upper house and head of state). The hereditary positions were made indirectly elective, and the President was weakened relative to the King by losing his ability to force a recess of the legislature, call early legislative elections, declare war or conclude treaties without legislative approval, or make patronage appointments without statutory authorization. Withholding royal assent is an absolute legislative veto in the British system, but Presidential vetoes can be and are overridden by Congress. And there's a formal process for removing a misbehaving President early for cause, while deposing Kings tends to involve armed conflict even when it's eventually legitimated by an Act of Parliament.
In the intervening 250 years or so, the Prime Minister has become the Head of Government and (outside of continuity-of-government situations) is de facto chosen by the majority party or dominant coalition in the House of Commons and serves at the Commons' pleasure. Almost all executive powers of the monarch are either exercised in his name by his ministers (who are responsible to the House of Commons) or are considered to only be legitimately used if the King does so on the "advice" of those ministers. The King has some behind-the-scenes influence, since the PM is required to meet regularly with the King, explain his actions and policies, and listen relatively politely to anything the King has to say to him in turn. And the King probably has some power as a process referee, to refuse or set conditions for the exercise of reserve powers that the PM wants to use contrary to constitutional norms.
The President, on the other hand, has seen greatly increased de facto powers as the abilities to direct regulatory and law enforcement agencies and command the standing military have gotten more significant and as our statutes have accumulated a large pile of discretionary and emergency powers delegated to the administration.
The current situation can be summed up, with only mild exaggeration on both sides, but calling Britain a Crowned Republic and the United States an Elective Monarchy.
An excellent book is Congress's Constitution by Josh Chafetz that looks at various of Congress's powers and traces them back to their British parliamentary antecedents. Really made it clearer to me how much the American constitutional system developed from the British.
>The hereditary positions were made indirectly elective, and the President was weakened relative to the King by losing his ability to force a recess of the legislature, call early legislative elections, declare war or conclude treaties without legislative approval, or make patronage appointments without statutory authorization. Withholding royal assent is an absolute legislative veto in the British system, but Presidential vetoes can be and are overridden by Congress.
TBF the British king's ability to do these things was already pretty heavily constrained by the need to keep Parliament on-side. (E.g., the last time a British monarch vetoed a law was back in the reign of Queen Anne, who died in 1715.) I think you could make a strong argument that, in practical terms, the US president had more power from the start.
Good point on vetoes. For that matter, Queen Anne's act of withholding Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill wasn't a unilateral act: it was advised by her ministers, who had supported the bill earlier but changed their minds after it had cleared Parliament. The last monarch to veto bills on his own initiative was William III, who did so five times between 1692 and 1696.
On the other hand, a power doesn't need to be used to be significant. For one thing, knowing the power is there serves as a deterrent. Even in the US, a veto threat is often enough to kill a bill, unless Congress thinks it can override the veto or else wants to force an overt veto for political reasons.
Another major reason why 18th century monarchs didn't veto bills were that they had other means to kill bills they didn't like: the presence of a large faction of relatively-nonpartisan "King's Friends" in Parliament who relied on the monarch for patronage or were otherwise inclined to vote the King's interests, the separate "King's Consent" feature (which is still in active use, on the PM's advice, in the 21st century) which allows the monarch to prevent bills from coming up for debate if they would affect royal prerogatives, etc. And public bills were usually initiated by the King's ministers, who more often than than not were chosen by the King rather than forced on him by a Parliamentary majority.
That's because neither of these things- an independent electoral college or a president without broad policy powers- are sustainable in the context of the modern nation state apparatus and it's attendant political climate, especially in the context of a great power of 330 million.
The European Union is not a state. If it becomes more like a state I predict it will experience pressure to greater executive power.
I'll grant Switzerland as a counterexample but I don't think it proves much. Switzerland is a bizarre one-of-a-kind state constituionally/politically (and culturally/economically for what it's worth), unique on multiple axes, very unlike any other modern democracy, and with the executive branch (a collective body) structured wholly differently from the United States. The idea that the US could follow Switzerland's example- especially while keeping anything like it's current constitution- is further strained by the fact that the US is a continent-spanning superpower.
Parliaments are indirectly elected by parliaments, yes, but almost always along partisan lines, so nothing at all like a check-and-balance electoral college.
Yes, the Swiss have generally had the overriding principal of *not joining* things, and "you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone".
There is an undercurrent of that in the US, but it's often drowned out by
the urge to be the sword of justice in a fallen world.
For instance, I have no idea how the Swiss would declare war on another country. Is that even possible (as opposed to resisting invasion that is). Would it need a plebiscite among the cantons?
If you really want to know, the Swiss armed forces do not have a General amongst their ranks except in cases of emergency. So, going off what occurred in WWII, the federal assembly can pick a general if need be.
As to what constitutes "emergency," it seems a lot looser than, say, modern Germany. Of course, their constitutions limits when they can mobilize, whereas the Swiss have to do all that just to have a General. I assume what the general does is up to his discretion at that point.
tbf the American system also gave them FDR, who would have been an unimaginably transformative figure in the British parliamentary system. Maybe it's fairer to say the American system has more variance rather than to say it's strictly worse.
It's a fairly common view, albeit nothing like a consensus one. But also, macroeconomics isn't a field that's going to give you a clear and certain answer to this kind of question.
One difference in the UK parliament that I am supremely grateful for at the moment: if our prime minister turns out to be an idiot or a dictator, we can just get rid of her. You are stuck with your president for four years.
Another way of saying this is that there's not really anything to fix in this case. This will seem horrid to people convinced that Trump is a dictator-idiot, but it's a godsend to people convinced he is not (or that the result would just be a dictator-idiot on the other side). If, OTOH, most of the nation was convinced we had a dictator-idiot in power, there's a mechanism for that, we'd use it, and it'd work. Done and done.
The upside to it being hard to get rid of a dictator is that it's also hard to get rid of someone that only part of the nation believes is a dictator.
If the bar were only 50%, as it is in the UK, for the legislature to remove an odious administration I think you'd probably see it happen. It's the difference between needing say 20% of the governing party to defect versus nearly 50%.
If Congress wanted to remove Trump, they could? The Republican party has shown no interest in replacing Trump, and they have a majority in both houses. If the UK had a similar circumstance (majority government with the majority party near-unanimous in support of their PM), they also wouldn't be able to remove their idiot dictator PM.
Except we just got rid of Johnson, Truss with majority Conservative governments. The right to get rid of them changes the dynamic. Your guys have to sit quietly for four years.
Republicans in Congress could easily replace Trump with Vance. Or even elect whoever they want as Speaker of the House and then make that person president. Yes there is more ceremony to that than a leadership election, but Trump is still in power because the majority of Republicans support him. Johnson and Truss got removed because a majority of their party wanted them replaced.
Functionally, impeachment is a two-step process, with articles of impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate. That alone makes the process more difficult than replacing a Prime Minister in the Westminster system. Additionally, the two-thirds majority requirement for the Senate portion means that Republicans would need both unanimity among their members and the help of Democrats. (The latter is easy to imagine now, but what if a party wanted to get rid of the President because he or she was too moderate?)
Secondly, impeachment is definitionally supposed to be used for 'high crimes and misdemeanors'. Replacing Trump merely because he's a bad president is insufficient under that standard. That's no barrier to Congress casting its votes how it may, but doing so for popularity reasons is an obvious misuse of the system.
Conversely, the Westminster leadership spill is explicitly allowed because the party doesn't like its leader, and getting rid of an unpopular leader is a well-accepted and minimally-controversial action.
Impeachment is a process which requires by the constitution a 2/3rds majority in congress. Compare this to a vote of no confidence in Westminster.
In the House of Commons, if the governing party or coalition has 60% of the seats, only about 19% of those members of parliament need to defect to "impeach" the administration that they installed.
In the US Congress, if the governing party holds a majority in congress of 60%, then nearly half of them need to defect to impeach, and all that get's you is for the President to be removed and the Vice President to slide right in. In order to get out of this process of moving down the succession list, or to have a special election, they would need to make a constitutional amendment, which not only requires a super-majority in congress, but it needs to be ratified by the states.
This is technically true, but the difference is that the electoral cost for doing so would be far higher.
For the American congress to replace a president, they have to implicitly admit that their party endorsed someone who was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, calling their own judgement so far into question that it would almost certainly be electoral suicide, and so it never happens.
By contrast, in the UK parliament replacing a PM is a perfectly normal event, not an admission of failure, and happens regularly - only 4 of our last 10 prime ministers ever lost an election.
Americans seem to like politics well enough as a pastime, but they also like football - and yet no one wants to watch a Super Bowl every week. Traditionally, when private life took much precendence over public avowals of self, I believe folks enjoyed the campaign season being over. I've never heard anyone say, as a presidential election concluded, wish we could start that over again tomorrow. In fact, people don't much like to hear about possible contenders until about 18 months out.
Our problem is we can't be conquered due to our geographic position (and the lack of strong neighbors) so our system never gets reset and we're stuck with an 18th-century system.
Unlike most liberals, I have a fair degree of respect for the Founders. But I doubt they would have expected their system to last 250 years as-is, or expect or even want the degree of reverence they get from the right wing.
We had major resets several times, and the current US government looks quite different from the original version set up by the constitution. The civil war and FDR were the biggest resets, but I think you can make an argument for a few others as well.
The American constitutional system specifically was designed by a bunch of late 18th century libertarian spergs who VERY MUCH did not want to give the President the power to unilaterally set tax policy - and they didn't! There are in-progress lawsuits against the tariffs on the basis that the laws that Congress created to let the President create tariffs were narrowly defined and Trump has decided to reinterpret words like "retaliatory" and "emergency" to mean "anything I feel like, and I feel like trade = bad."
The problem is that systems of government are ultimately composed entirely of people. If all those people are toadies to one man, then it doesn't matter how you organize them or what constitution you write. There was nothing wrong with the Soviet constitution; the problem was it was words on paper and what actually mattered was Stalin's personal whims.
I think that this is a bit unfair to the US constitution because it firmly places Congress in charge of tariffs, and Congress could take back control any time it wanted.
Now, an argument can be made that the US presidential system contains a strongman-shaped hole which is a natural fit for Trump, and that the election of spineless yes-men who would rather wreck the economy than defy King Donald is downstream of that.
But take another notorious strongman, who was elected in a very parliamentary system. The role of the chancellor in the Weimar republic was not a strongman-shaped hole waiting to be filled. If anything, the obvious strongman position was that of the president, who was an Ersatz-Kaiser (and past presidents had very much ruled through emergency declarations while parliament was in deadlock, and were ever threatening to dissolve parliament). It did not matter one bit. The Reichstag passed the the enabling legislation which authorized Hitler to do whatever he wanted, and that was the end of them having any relevance.
No constitutional system fares well when crazy or evil people manage to get the majority of the votes. Republicans in Congress are fully empowered to stop Trump from doing destructive things, they just refuse to.
I think the real test of the constitutional system is whether by abusing it, you can gain power in the longer term (e.g. replace judges, bias public discourse, pressure strong opponents to not run or rich people to not fund them). It's very early to say but so far it's looking pretty good! Better than any number of countries with supposedly more modern parliamentary systems (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Israel).
Republicans in Congress are less crazy and evil than Trump, but their options are limited. In a parliamentary system, they could simply vote to replace Trump as prime minister, but here, their options are either (1) leave him in office, but push back against specific actions or (2) impeach and convict him (which would require 2/3 of the Senate vote). Because Trump is so good at punishing people who go against him, it's very hard to coordinate everyone for a multi-step, drawn out process, but you might be able to get everyone together for a single one-off vote to replace him.
The bone I would pick here is that I think most (though not quite all) of the problems that culminated in the U.S.'s current crises are the results of things *not* actually written into the constitution. Rather, they are either conventions that grew up as one possible way to implement the system, but hardly the only one. Either better luck in choosing different practices early on or more foresight when the problems were still small could have allowed the U.S. to shift into a different equilibrium (I do expect it's probably too late now and the nation is too dysfunctional to ever fix the problems).
The current power of the Executive is not a natural result of the text of the Constitution, it's a relatively recent invention.
The legislature has spent half a century or more tying itself up in partisan gridlock, and handing more and more of its function to agencies under the Executive in response.
The judiciary has been taken over by political appointments from teh Executive, handing it powers and deference never imagined in the Constitution. If the Federalist Society never existed, Trump's current level of unitary power would be impossible.
Agreed. I would go further still and suggest that a system like the swiss one which requires (at least by custom) extreme amounts of agreement to pass anything is superior still.
It might be slow. But it brings stability and predictability. Basically the government cannot really break things and politicians are much more likely to break things than to fix them.
When decisions are ultimately based on 1/2+ε portion of votes, they are inherently going to be chaotic.
I tend to agree, but is their any parliamentary system in the world that has shown itself capable of functioning that has like, half the population of the United States? This might be an ignorant question, I know the reason our current system evolved wasn't because we had a large population, but I do wonder how you would run a parliamentary system composed of so many people over so much landmass. I guess India's a parliamentary system now, does that seem to be working?
Congress could rescind these tariffs tomorrow if the Senate and House wanted to. The President isn't granted any authority whatsoever in the Constitution to impose tariffs unilaterally. The reality is that Senator McConnell and Speaker Johnson are so terrified of facing a primary challenge, or losing the majority that they're willing to let Americans suffer to appease Trump.
Tariffs have their uses -- you can use them to carefully rebuild American Senescent Industries [e.g., the pickup truck tariff has worked pretty well over the last 60 years in keeping some automotive industry in America, a cost that pickup truck fans seem happy to pay] or you can use the threat of them to wheel and deal your way to better trade deals over the next month.
But, having these obviously contradictory goals means tariffs are very cognitively challenging to optimize.
Trump is older than Biden (who did some not unreasonable protectionist things like subsidize chip plants in Arizona) was at this point in their respective terms, so it's asking a lot of Trump to juggle all the possible balls at once.
Free trade, in contrast, is kind of dim-witted, but it's easier for elderly Presidents like Trump.
I thought Trump's latest position was precisely that he was suspending most tariffs on most countries toward the goal of building a strategic/economic alliance against China (i.e, getting better deals)?
I can see an argument for phasing in tariffs more gradually, but in the case of China, a trade war, and quite possibly a kinetic war, was probably inevitable regardless- I don't know where Scott is getting this idea of 'arbitrary grudges' from.
Slow tariffs and fast tariffs can each make sense, but they are highly contradictory. A policy-making genius might be able to square the circle, but forgive me if I doubt that 78-year-old Donald Trump is that man.
I think Tree of Woe did a pretty good article on the theoretical basis behind the tariffs (although some countries obviously disagree, and as I said, phasing in gradually would give the markets more time to adjust and relocate facilities and so on). The absence of that, and Trump's characteristically erratic public rhetoric have spooked the markets.
Does this article from ToW have a compelling defense of the *math incoherence* in how the Liberation Day tariff amounts were calculated (ie, trade deficit ÷ [2*total trade])? If you say yes I'll read it, but if not it seems pointless to look for rationalizations of a policy that was obviously implemented irrationally.
in a sense it does, it address the calculation as the botched result of a misapplication of two separate and mutually contradictory heterodox theories, although it seems to miss that the calculation isnt that (it was deficit in goods as far as I remember, not goods and services).
this doesnt apply to the current set of tariffs though, it only applies to a set of rates that never existed. you may argue that some set of tariffs fit some theoretical justification, as that one does, however, it doesnt justify the current tariffs, nor any set of tariffs trump has ever offered (the ones he claims fits the equation never did, as they were not calculated on the goods plus services of the trade deficit).
this is a deeply questionable justification of a set of tariffs that never existed and were never proposed. What is its relevance to trump's actual real tariffs?
I can recall Singapore doing a lot industrial policy / protectionist things a couple of generations ago that violated everything I learned majoring in economics. For example, around 1980 Lee Kuan Yew radically raised the minimum wage precisely to drive the garment industry out of Singapore (I used to see Made In Singapore labels in my shirts back then), so that Singaporeans would move up the value chain to heavy manufacturing and white collar services.
"The Economist" at the time was aghast at Singapore's violations of all the Laws of Economics, but Lee's strategy worked extraordinarily well.
The lesson I'd take away from this is that highly competent leaders, like Lee in his prime, can outperform Free Market Theory. But is 78 year old Trump one of them?
It doesn't matter what your stated reasons are. If you keep changing them every 5 minutes and apply policy erratically people stop treating you as an actor they can meaningfully negotiate with
Problem is: he alienated his allies, big time (from EU here). You can choose to fight China/BRICS, or get Allies in line (i.e. kowtow even more). There was a time (1990-2010) were US could attempt both at the same time. Now it's just delusional.....Not sure it will really change any worldwide trend, but it sure sped up something that was on the backburner those last 10y: the transition away from a US hegemony with Dollar as world currency. Not sure the new place will be better (from an EU centric perspective, from an US one I see only how it can get worse), but there is no going back to the old place....
I don't see how you fight China without getting allies in line (BRICS is a joke), although I agree he could use a little more carrot and a little less stick.
You might start by being friendly with allies rather than slapping them with 10% across the board tariffs plus special tariffs on metals and other industries and calling this a gift because you only temporarily gave them a third layer of tariffs that you temporarily suspended.
Nah, I don't know if he really wanted to get allies more in line or genuinely think he was getting back what was 'stolen' from the US (a very special view of trade imbalance: I guess when I choose to buy using credit I get stolen 😂) ... But it was not just a little too much stick, it was complete diplomatic disaster. Just even mentioning land grabs (whole Canada, part Danemark) was enough to destroy any good will. Add Ukraine and Gaza treatment and the tariff on top, and you alleniate even the right wing parties of EU who were VERY sympathetic when Trump was elected: love anything anti woke, and were anxious to detach from Putin (not an political asset in EU right now, except maybe in Hungary, and even there it's debatable). He, he even manage to deeply alienate the commonwealth, something I though impossible for the US
Trump just genuinely likes tariffs. He has liked them for 40 years. He thinks they really work, they're really good, and *everyone else* that talks about how they aren't good are stupid or idiots or compromised or whatever random insult populists use.
If he just *actually gets to implement them* you'll see how awesome they are. You'll see. You'll all see.
Lots of people have these weird idiosyncratic quirks. If you have some weird quirk *AND* you are right *AND* you have the capacity to implement it, you can make yourself very rich or be credited as the one who finally woke society up from their dumb delusion.
If you're wrong and force the whole country into it, well, USSR has plenty of examples.
I think Trump and the right-wing-sphere more generally are long-term-correct about a lot of things, but the policies needed to implement the long-term fixes to our social problems are all going to involve short-term pain that needs to be... diffused and managed as deftly as possible, if only to avoid being left holding someone else's bag of shit during a re-election campaign.
So far I'm not seeing a whole lot of deftness.
On the plus side, the Trump tariffs and global recession might just put the kibosh on AI acceleration, particularly if they trigger a general collapse of the Chinese economy. (Admittedly it is a little scary to be thinking of this a lesser evil, in the grand scheme of things.)
>I think Trump and the right-wing-sphere more generally are long-term-correct about a lot of things, but the policies needed to implement the long-term fixes to our social problems are all going to involve short-term pain that needs to be... diffused and managed as deftly as possible, if only to avoid being left holding someone else's bag of shit during a re-election campaign.
The right is literally allergic to this, it involves too much governing and not enough finger-pointing and tantrum throwing. Say what you will about liberals, but every time they've built a coalition they've tried to implement policies beyond simply "cut taxes for the rich" (see Obamacare, build-back-better) and every time the Republicans happily jump in to slaughter them and shove every implementation error down their throats. Which, to be fair, made more sense when they were the party that did not believe government should exist or have any power over individual lives. Now that they are the party of authoritarian overreach, they are stuck with not knowing how to manage the consequences of their actions, because they've never had to before.
We got a preview of this when Dobbs happened, all these states rushed to pass abortion bans that screwed up life for the doctors in their states because there was zero clarity about how those bans were supposed to actually be implemented, and whether they allowed you to do things like, you know, save the life of a dying woman if she was three months pregnant and it might hurt the fetus. If you look at interviews with the Republicans who were asked about this, they all insisted it was the fault of the doctors and not their own complete and total inability to write and implement coherent laws. That was enough of a niche issue that I guess it did not move the needle for most voters, but trade policy affects everyone.
Trump governed well when his policy in his first term was "cut taxes for the rich" (the economy did VERY well before Covid). The difference is that he's now "raising taxes for all trade".
Did he govern well, or did he not govern and the economy continued along a trendline? I suppose for some people that counts, but to me that's like saying he took over a golden goose farm and managed not to kill any. Which makes his current failure all the more remarkable. If he'd just followed the do-nothing playbook, people would claim he's a financial genius, but his ego told him he had to DO something and now look where we are.
"I thought Trump's latest position was precisely that he was suspending most tariffs on most countries toward the goal of building a strategic/economic alliance against China"
Honest question -- where has he articulated this? Because he hasn't suspended tariffs (10% tariffs remain in effect, along with some narrow ones that are higher), he just delayed (so he claims) the "reciprocal" tariffs based on trade imbalances (but not really because countries with which we have a trade surplus are still subject to tariffs). And reports are that the Japanese delegation left without making a deal because the Trump administration couldn't explain what they actually wanted.
Also, Biden (well, his handlers) was building a strategic/economic alliance against China. Trump's actions (tariff and non-tariff alike) threaten that alliance. In fact, it may already be irreparably damaged.
Yeah, the baseline 10% tariffs are still in effect, but he was threatening tariffs of up to 60 or 70% on some countries, which are currently suspended.
IIRC, Japan has made it clear that if they are forced to chose between trade with China and trade with the US, they will pick the US, they just don't want to be forced. I don't know what's unclear about that.
Apparently, what's unclear is what they can do to get rid of the tariffs. If they remain in place, economic reality may force Japanese exporters to do more business with China (and other countries that aren't the US), regardless of the states preferences of the Japanese government.
There is no universe where Japan is going to choose to be a vassal state of the People's Republic of China in preference to being a vassal state of the US over a 10% tariff regime. (I guarantee the Chinese are much more liable to remember the Rape of Nanjing than Americans are sore about Pearl Harbour.)
I am not saying I'd go about this the same way Trump does. (Japan already agreed to pay a substantial annuity to the US in exchange for continued military protection and trade relations, so squeezing them for tariffs on top feels kinda extortionate.) But if push comes to shove, the Japanese will budge.
But if the reporting is correct, Japan sent a delegation to Washington with the goal of budging, but they couldn't figure out what the Trump administration wanted them to do.
Your original post said that the Trump administration is using tariffs to build a strategic/economic alliance against China. For that to work, they need to articulate a coherent vision for what that strategic/economic alliance would look like, with concrete policies that other nations can implement to join and support that alliance. I have yet to see such a plan outlined in public, nor have I seen reporting that it's being outlined in private. Time will tell, but so far I see no evidence to support your original claim.
"guarantee the Chinese are much more liable to remember the Rape of Nanjing than Americans are sore about Pearl Harbour"
A Chinese entertainment star nearly had his career totally destroyed over a controversy whipped up about "he took photos at a tourist spot which is also a shrine where a Japanese war criminal is honoured!"
"In 2021, Zhang faced severe criticism in China after being involved in a controversy over photos taken years earlier in Japan at a spot near the Yasukuni Shrine and Nogi Shrine due to the shrines' honoring of imperial Japanese military officers who invaded China. This criticism resulted in the removal of his online social media accounts, movies, television shows, and music. In December 2022, Zhang returned from a year of domestic boycott with the release of new music on international platforms outside of mainland China."
Being viewed as unpatriotic and therefore you should be cancelled because of things like this shows the still great sensitivity on the parts of both China and Japan over the war.
Having normal trade relations with a larger country doesn’t make you a “vassal state”. Going begging and doing whatever they tell you to do is how you become a vassal state. Trump is demanding that they become a vassal state in order to allow anything like the trade conditions of the past decade, and he promises never to allow free trade.
What tracking systems? And if such a tracking system exists and it requires an entry, even as a placeholder, why not simply enter a placeholder of zero? Isn't that what must have happened with Russia, since they aren't included in the 10% tariffs?
I’m sorry, but this makes no sense to me. I swear I’m not trying to be obtuse. Before Trump’s across the board tariffs some goods were exempt from tariffs. Some were subject to tariffs at negotiated rates. The details were/are country and product dependent. This was complex but the financial systems you are envisioning clearly managed it without the need for a non-zero tariff placeholder for every transaction.
Plus, Trump imposed tariffs on China in his first term (continued by Biden) without the need to impose a non-zero placeholder tariff on all other countries.
I don’t want to get too hung up on this, but I just cannot understand your original claim that Trump needed to impose across the board non-zero tariffs just to satisfy the needs of some sort of tariff tracking program (especially when you consider that he didn’t apply across the board non-zero tariffs, as I mentioned in regard to Russia).
Have they been hiring people to staff up the office of trade or any other tax bureaucracies? Or have they been cutting people with the intention of making taxes in general harder to enforce?
Even if one believes that the "real" goal of the tariffs was to be leverage for some sort of diplomatic stratagem (which seems dubious for many reasons), the actual implementation was about as counterproductive as possible. Yes, lots of countries are eager to negotiate with the U.S. to avoid them. But there's also a lot more anger and anti-U.S. sentiment in the international community than there has been for a long time, and tariffing everyone at the same time makes the U.S.'s negotiating position MUCH weaker than if it applied them selectively to key players.
I don't think they were intended as contradictory goals, I think the oppose-China goal was selected after pressure came on the stop-trade-deficit goal.
That's a really good point, and factoring in people's cognitive limitations (especially as they age) is something not often taken into account.
(My favorite quote about Bill Clinton, from an old New Republic issue: "When Bill Clinton used his intellect, he was quite effective. When he allowed himself to be ruled by other organs, he undermined himself.")
One problem is that while there are sensible reasons to impose a tariff (protecting infant industries, protecting strategically critical industries, negotiating lower tariffs from other countries), the politics of tariffs don't really encourage some careful technocratic weighing of whether this is a strategic/infant industry for which tariffs could be beneficial, and if so, how high and for how long. Instead, political pressures encourage using tariffs to buy off important voting blocs, reward friends/punish enemies, and posture for the cameras.
Widespread tariffs just make the country poorer overall, while benefitting some industries/workers at the expense of others.
"Tariffs have their uses -- you can use them to carefully rebuild American Senescent Industries [e.g., the pickup truck tariff has worked pretty well over the last 60 years in keeping some automotive industry in America, a cost that pickup truck fans seem happy to pay"
They're happy to pay because they don't know what they're missing.
I'd like this to be true, but I have a problem with this part:
"If one day Joe Biden had conceived a personal hatred for the nation of Ecuador and tried to sacrifice America’s interests on the altar of some anti-Ecuador crusade, his handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing."
This seems to be in conflict with the facts. Biden seems to have imposed a terrible decision on the his party at least twice: one, endless support for war crimes in Gaza, and two, his second run. The party did eventually nix the second run, but only well after it became an obvious disaster and with immense difficulty.
If the US can get past the present crisis, it needs to work out how it happened. For something like this to happen, the rot is almost certainly wider than you think. I don't expect it to be confined to one party despite their ideological differences, politicians copy strategies that work. Trump has exposed weaknesses in the US political system that politicians of any complexion will exploit unless they are fixed.
The Biden Presidency appears to have been largely the result of an early 2020 deal between 77 year old Joe Biden and 79 year old Rep. Jim Clyburn (D.-SC).
I keep reading all these conspiracy theorists on how Global Elites are brilliantly psy-opping everything that happens according to their genius Hari Seldon-like Master Plans, but instead it appears that two semi-senile political hacks outsmarted everybody else in 2020.
Biden was the compromise, electable candidate coasting on the remaining good vibes from the Obama period, plus he could be realistically portrayed as a moderate and thus not frighten the horses. I think the idea was to beat Trump, have a caretaker president in place (as with some conclaves which elect such a pope when no one side has a clear path to victory), and then work on putting forward someone for 2024.
Biden, however, was determined to run for a second term (and this is something I've never seen explored, why was he as determined as Trump to get that second bite at the cherry?) and since he had the momentum built up behind the first campaign - Joe is all that stands between you and the disaster that Trump will unleash! - it was hard for the party to come forward and say to the public "actually we lied through our teeth and Biden is incapable". The funding from the donors was already earmarked for Biden/Harris, and by the time they were forced to make Biden step aside, it was too late to run a proper primary and find a replacement, so Harris was thrust forward (especially as the money for Biden/Harris was not easily transferrable to Other Candidate If Any).
Whatever about psy-ops, there's definitely no genius global elite human capital running it all.
Biden had always been, despite his not unreasonable centrist ideology, an extreme egomaniac almost as extraordinary in this regard as Trump. That it would be extremely hard to pry Biden out of running again at age 82 ought to have been obvious when he was 78.
This should not have been unknown. There are chapters about Biden in Theodore Whites's 1973 "The Making of the President 1972" and Richard Ben Cramer's 1990 "What It Takes." Both famous political journalists find Biden pretty likable, but it should also have been obvious for more than a half century that he had a vastly overblown self-regard.
The Nova pieces on PBS about Biden show this, too. Biden went into politics believing he was more or less the second coming of JFK. He always wanted to be president. He was also a "No retreat, no surrender" guy, which sounds great when sung by Bruce Springsteen, but reveals its flaws in the hands of someone like Trump, and probably Biden.
'The Biden Presidency appears to have been largely the result of an early 2020 deal between 77 year old Joe Biden and 79 year old Rep. Jim Clyburn (D.-SC).'
Can you point me to more info on that? This is the first I've heard of it.
Bernie Sanders (a non-Democrat) was the top vote-getter in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, but far from a majority. There was no clear alternative, with Buttigieg, Warren, Biden, and Klobuchar all with significant support. Clyburn's late endorsement of Biden enabled him to win the South Carolina primary, which established him as the leading alternative to Sanders going into Super Tuesday.
Can't have an actual leftist win in America or (a) the rich might not get infinitely richer every two ten-trillionths of a Planck second and then the yachting industry will collapse and (b) the proles might realize that federal governance and taxes and all that can actually be put to uses that aren't merely pretexts for enabling the rich to get infinitely richer every two ten-trillionths of a Planck second and stop listening to the people with a five year old's understanding of civics who scream that all taxes are bad all the time always.
This is conventional wisdom/legend on the Left, repeated endlessly in places like the Guardian and New Republic. It never seems to address some obvious logic questions including:
-- multiple statewide polls taken during the week before the Saturday primary election date had Biden winning the primary with Sanders a distant second and Steyer third and Buttigieg fourth. Clyburn issued his endorsement on that Wednesday. Biden ended up winning the primary with Sanders a distant second and Steyer third and Buttigieg fourth; Biden simply added some votes compared to the final polls. So what's the logic by which Clyburn's very-late endorsement was _necessary_ for Biden to win the SC primary?
-- what's the basis for assuming that Clyburn's endorsement of Biden wasn't based on Clyburn's own policy or other preferences? Put another way, why was it considered remarkable that a 79-year-old black politician who'd become a public champion of Barack Obama in 2008, and who'd been publicly criticized by the only black candidate in the 2020 primary, would end up endorsing Obama's VP in that 2020 primary?
-- if there was indeed some sort of "deal" made between Biden and Clyburn, what was Clyburn's end of that deal? Where's the quid to go with the pro quo?
Among other quid pro quos, Ketanji Brown Jackson wound up on the Supreme Court. Clyburn actually wanted a particular South Carolina black woman who is a close friend of his to be on the Supreme Court, but that was a little much, so they just announced it as Biden's promise to put a black woman on the Supreme Court. (Plus a remarkable fraction of Biden's other judicial appointees were black women.)
Also, Biden publicly promised to appoint a woman as his running mate, and then as the Racial Reckoning got going after May 25, 2020, everybody knew she _had_ to be a black woman. (Everybody these days is forgetting how utterly infallible the Theory of Intersectionality seemed to a huge fraction of American elites in 2020.)
So Joe wound up picking Kamala. She proved a dud, plus Biden and his staff didn't do much to make her look better, to make Joe more inevitable for a second term. So Joe hung on, but then he was humiliated by his debate with Trump and finally quit. Due to Me Too and the Racial Reckoning and all that, the Democrats couldn't really pass over their black woman Veep, so they had what Gavin Newsom called, in his most likable moment, "the 30 minute primary" and Joe endorsed Kamala.
She didn't impress voters (although she was cogent enough to beat the 19 year older Trump in their one debate). One of my readers pointed out her resemblance to the Stock Photo DEI Woman who is shown self-actualizing on every corporate website.
Why do you think War in Gaza was an idiosyncracy of Biden and not something the "bureaucracy" would do anyways?
It is strongly my prior that generally the american institutions are mostly pro-Israel to a really large degree, and it was only the "far-left" that materially objected to supporting Israel.
(Note also that towards the end the Biden admin was negotiating with Israel to at least let aid in, otherwise they cut support.)
I'm not making a value judgement on what is the wrong vs right amount of military support for Israel in their campaign, just making the point that that didn't seem like a Biden idiosyncracy.
I think Biden running for a second time is also not cleanly supporting you:
1. As you say, eventually it got nixed
2. Is it your sense that "the Democrats" managed to unite behind someone else, but Biden himself just singlehandedly strongarmed everyone else so that he can run for a second time?
It is my sense that there was no consensus or strategical thinking whatsoever about who would be the best candidate against Trump, Biden was kinda the default, then they tried to do some damage control, but too late.
I think we may always have one low quality evidence about what happens inside the bureaucracy, but my sense is that while support for Israel is reflexive, it's also limited. The Israelis themselves were expecting to be brought up short after a few weeks and that's one reason why they went in as hard as they did initially. I have heard that the bureaucracy made initiatives to pull back, but each time were squashed from the presidency.
On Biden's second run: remember all that happened before Trump started breaking norms, and even then resistance was still difficult. My main point is that now, opportunist politicians realize that the machinery of careful reflection and lawfulness is much weaker than we thought. We are even seeing this in the UK, where comments like "Trump and Musk have shown you can reform much more quickly" have been heard from within our government, which is idealogically completely different to Trumpism
If the entire legal system is rigged to ensure catastrophic idiocy as a default outcome (e.g, millions of people can enter your country without due process, but you can't evict them without due process), then "careful reflection and lawfulness" are indeed overrated.
Trump, to his credit, has reduced illegal border crossings by about 95%, if I recall correctly, and has been working to speed deportations in the face of substantial legal impediments. Long overdue, if you ask me.
Fair enough, but Trump's election, by itself, would have deterred a lot of migrants from coming, and I'll bet anything that Biden's crossing-reductions were purely a short-term election tactic. The US would currently be drowning in more immigrants if Biden or Harris was still in office.
"All good things that happen happen because of the people I like, and if people I didn't like had control things would be infinitely worse than they are" is no way to navigate through life, son.
The British parliamentary system has few built-in checks and balances. The Prime Minister is intended to extraordinarily powerful in a crisis, like the captain of a warship, limited only by the English cultural assumption that there are some things we don't do.
Right. A parliamentary system is kind of like how a pirate ship is run. The captain is the absolute autocrat, until the majority of pirates get together and throw him overboard. Then they appoint a new absolute autocrat.
"Is it your sense that "the Democrats" managed to unite behind someone else, but Biden himself just singlehandedly strongarmed everyone else so that he can run for a second time?"
I think they had the same problem then as they do now; there is no one single candidate that all can agree on and who will get elected. So there was no one alternative to Biden, so he was able to use his pull and position to strongarm his way into a second run, and I think everyone just crossed their fingers and hoped they could pull it off for a second time, then worry about it post-election victory.
I think there was also the fear (cf. Carter vs. Kennedy 1980) that anybody running against Biden would necessarily have to criticize him in some areas and weaken his support (and vice versa), thereby strengthening the Republican candidate. This seemed to become pathological in the Harris campaign, which refused to criticize Biden's policies even though Biden was no longer running.
Yeah, Harris had to straddle both stools - she had been leaning towards the progressive wing of the party in her 2020 run and got nowhere, so then she had to tack towards the centre in 2024. And since a lot of her campaign staff were ex-Biden people, she couldn't risk looking ungrateful by throwing him under the bus. I think the view was that the public still mostly liked Biden and would react negatively to Harris criticising him (kicking the guy when he was down).
As well, her big pitch was "I was VP, I was there and active in the decisions and policy-making" so she couldn't very well turn around and then go "and now I think those policies were crap".
Biden was unpopular enough that he was pushed aside, yet popular enough that the replacement couldn't criticize any of his policies?
I suppose the "kicking him when he's down" factor might apply.
Though again, an articulate candidate might have been able to square that circle. "We support those policies, but think he's *recently* lost it, so he won't be able to push any more of them. We will continue in his legacy."
I looked back at George HW Bush's campaign in 1988, after he'd spent two terms as Reagan's VP. While he broadly endorsed a continuation of Reagan's policies, a key talking point was calling for a "kinder, gentler" nation compared to the Reagan years.
Harris, for example, could have endorsed Biden's newest border policies while saying that their success demonstrated they should have been implemented sooner. Instead, she argued incoherently that they were implemented at just the right time.
Harris seems to have been picked as, sorry to say, sort of a DEI selection. Biden announced that his VP would be a woman, then with some horsetrading about support to get out the vote it had to be a black woman, and then when the bill came due Harris was the least worst/most acceptable candidate, in that nobody was particularly happy but nobody was particularly offended she got picked, either.
Here's a "making the best of it" article that swears up and down she was the best choice and indeed the only one, because everyone else on the list had baggage:
For his VP pick he just said it would be a woman. The racial reckoning riots of 2020 were happening at the same time, and so third parties would say "and of course by 'woman' he means 'a black woman'" but that was never part of Biden's promise for VP pick.
Party insiders knew that Biden was too old to run and wanted to have a normal open primary, but Biden prevented that by insisting on running again.
It takes a VERY extreme circumstance to convince a critical mass of a party to *openly* go against their own incumbent president, and by the time that point was reached, it was too late to turn things around.
The war in Gaza has had similar per-capita death tolls (probably a little lower) than is typical for urban warfare against guerilla militants using human shields, so unless you think all war is a war crime I don't think that's a fair critique.
(FWIW, a more comprehensive fuel-blockade of the Gaza strip would probably have ended the war in 6 weeks, since Hamas would be asphyxiated in their tunnels.)
Some voices (e.g. Amnesty International and the government of Ireland) have indeed argued recently that every war in which at least 1 civilian dies on the enemy side is a genocide, even if that civilian's death was undesired and inadvertent. (The motivation here is to ensure that Israel is considered guilty of genocide, even though it would be innocent by the standard definition of genocide.)
I think critics of Israel point to the large number of killed children as the reason why the war is especially bad. However, I don't know if I can trust Hamas' numbers on this. I have struggled to find a trustworthy source.
The bombing campaign in the early phases of the war probably killed more women/children than usual. (Israel gave copious warning for civilians to evacuate, but Hamas will try to shoot anyone who leaves, and they have quite a bit of popular support regardless).
Typically the vast majority of ‘child’ casualties are male 14-year-olds armed with AKs or helping to ferry mortars for Hamas, and I suspect the figures will trend back toward that baseline as the war goes on.
Your second paragraph is just made up. You can look at the stats on children killed and it's a mix of all ages and both genders. 14 year olds aren't overrepresented.
This is from back in 2014, but the curve clearly peaks in the 20-24 age ratio and skews heavily male. 'Vast' majority might be an overstatement, but they're heavily overrepresented compared to the population structure.
Why use numbers from the 2014 conflict? It was a very different and much smaller conflict. Look at the deaths in the current (post Oct 7th) conflict.
The dataset from September 2024 has 9233 Gazans 14 years old or under identified. (It excludes bodies not yet identified.) 5026 are male and 4207 are female. That skews slightly more male than the general population of 0-14 year olds in Gaza (which also skews slightly male). 657 of the 9233 were 14. Even if you uncharitably assume every single 14 year old Gazan killed was a militant, it doesn't make much of a dent in the overall numbers.
Given that Trump appears to be if anything more willing to support Israel’s actions in Gaza. I’d say Biden’s policies there were less about him imposing his own idiosyncrasies on the party and more about there being fairly broad support for Israel among the American public. And unlike tariffs, the problem with Israel-Gaza is that if the American public is wrong about the optimal policy the negative effects are concentrated abroad so it is harder for them to correct.
You must have missed both humiliation rituals Bibi got put through by Trump in front of the media at the White House, & how apoplectic the neocon Zionists in his administration are about being sidelined & denied their Iran war while Witkoff & Boehler negotiate the peace. And it seems you have no idea that Trump already quietly approved Egypt's plan to rebuild Gaza *without* displacing the Palestinians.
Sorry, do you have a source for the claim that Trump approved Egypt's plan? I indeed have no idea that this happened, and am struggling to find information on the subject; instead, I'm finding claims that he rejected it when it was first proposed, which is neither here nor there.
The Gaza thing made sense, politically. Most of the country was still pro-Israel at that point. And then the protesters went and pissed everyone off, to the point nobody's really crying for the universities despite massive attacks on freedom of speech to the point FIRE's changed sides.
>The party did eventually nix the second run, but only well after it became an obvious disaster and with immense difficulty.
"His handlers" there less means the party and more the immediate staff (and Jill) that controlled his schedule and access to observers. The staff would be smart enough to put down an Ecuadorian Crusade without the party stepping in, but they were too arrogant/power-hungry/whatever to put down his candidacy until the party cobbled together enough spine to interfere.
For better or for worse, the American system leaves decisions about running for office up to the individuals and the primary voters, and gives the party no say in choosing candidates. This change was made in the early 1970s and late 1960s, largely for populist reasons.
But international action is something that many different parts of the political system have a say in, even if Congress often chooses to say “we say nothing”.
Yeah, I was kind of cheering for more smoke-filled rooms, but then we got the Democratic party first anointing Hillary (a weak candidate), then deciding to keep Biden despite increasing signs of dementia, and then seizing on Kamala (another weak candidate, albeit in a legitimately very hard situation). None of this is much of a commercial for the smoke-filled room and a choice by the party hierarchy.
The party hierarchy played precisely zero role in all of those. Smoke filled rooms are the way we might have gotten something else, but those rooms are gone, so we were stuck with those things.
This isn't an argument for the "populist right," it's an argument for democracy. And the argument for democracy has never been that the people get it right every time, but that, over time, it's a self-correcting mechanism, because bad policies get thrown out and good ones retained. Obviously, this isn't guaranteed (yes, Venezuela) but the *un*popularity of Trump's tariffs strikes me as a huge endorsement of this approach. Meanwhile the administrative state ploughs merrily on regardless.
I can't stand the populist right, but I choose them over the PMC left any day.
I support democracy, but I argue that big ideological swings back and forth (such as the American system produces) are bad for governments. They're also not very democratic, because the change in public opinion is not that stark. Ideally, any self-correcting mechanism would have a much smaller amplitude. In a coalition government for example, Trump's coalition partners would long ago demanded he call it off.
This is an interesting framing, and one I fundamentally disagree with. I don't think the purpose of democracy is to make a change in policy proportionate to the change in public opinion, and stability of policy and coalition is a mixed blessing at best. If you're driving down a straight road, big turns on the wheel are undesirable. If you come to a bend, they're necessary. In fact, one of the reasons I think FPTP is the best electoral system is because it makes decisive political change easier and avoids the endless fudges that plague continental politics. Switzerland is a well-governed country but it's also unique in many ways - and it was well-governed long before its current political setup.
Okay, but if you're arguing for a powerful executive unconstrained by public opinion and consensus, you're kinda arguing against democracy more generally.
Unconstrained by public opinion? I am the one arguing that the government should be made to change course when public opinion changes, while Arie is calling for long-term stability regardless of shifts in public opinion.
Exactly. Arie's point is that if the public goes from 52-48 in favour to 48-52 against, that's really not a big shift in opinion, so policy shouldn't change much. Whereas I say that it's perfectly fine to have a big shift in policy on that basis, because the majority has gone from Yes to No.
The standard is the same for everyone. I have no problem with a political party that wants to argue for PMC Left causes, implement them when they win power, and regroup and go again when they lose. That's democracy.
I do have a problem with a system that hands power, or at least a veto, to the PMC Left, regardless of the election outcome, which is what Scott is defending.
I think you're right. He outright states that the liberal left controls the bureaucracy (which I think most people generally agree with), and then says that's good thing.
I'm not sure it's fully possible to prevent, but one side of a political divide having a permanent veto over three Constitutional branches doesn't seem ideal and is quite undesirable. Arguably, Trump exists because enough people in the country felt that this was a bad arrangement, and were willing to elect someone like Trump in order to fix it.
American democracy is not just, or even mainly, a bunch of plebiscites. By design, it's a system with three branches, numerous veto points, the rule of law (meaning laws survive elections), and rights that cannot be denied absent due process. Elections are *one* part of the system, but far from the only one.
The "PMC," which I take more or less as a pejorative in the context for federal government employees, when not following the desires of the executive is typically following laws or (gasp!) well-established norms. This is a feature, not a bug.
Sometimes the veto points are frustrating, and there probably does need to be system for pruning over time. But the government has always been more of a supertanker than a speedboat: it's frustratingly slow to turn but, on the other hand, it's hard to capsize. We're seeing now the effect of the speedboat approach and, as it turns out, a lot of those check and balances, laws and norms, were there for a reason.
One side has been in power continuously for decades, yes. It's a feature if you're on it, that the other guys can't do much, but a bug with risking burning the house down over if you aren't.
But how many people saying "lets risk burning the house down" are going to say the other side having permanent power was the lesser evil now it looks like the house actually is on fire.
One is whether the bureaucracy is an appropriate veto point. Some, negatively, have been calling it the fourth branch of government. It's theoretically within the executive, but if it can act separately and opposed to the executive, then that's obviously in question. Do we really want a fourth branch not envisioned by the Constitution, and if so, should it be designed how it is?
Secondly, is it appropriate that there exists a de facto leftward bend to this fourth branch? Imagine your large ship that turns slowly is only ever allowed to go straight or turn left - the rudder is restricted from turning right. Obviously the people that want to turn left are good with that, and the people who want to only go straight might begrudgingly accept it, but the people who want to turn right are going to be pretty unhappy with that arrangement and want to change it. If elections are not the correct tool for making that change, what should they do? I hope you would agree that "they can never get their way" is an inappropriate resolution within a system that believes itself to be democratic in any sense.
I would challenge on factual grounds the first half of your post. I don’t think the Constitution precludes an interactive relationship between the Executive and Legislative branches that takes the form of administrative agencies. That’s just a choice.
Setting that aside, the way to change the direction of the administrative agencies is through legal process, i.e, pass legislation. The problem the current administration is having, to the detriment of the whole country, is it doesn’t want to be bothered to do that. It just wants to gut agencies (arguably unconstitutionally) so they can’t do their legally mandated jobs, rather than go through the process of passing laws where, admittedly, they’d have a hard time, given the unpopularity of many of the initiatives and the thin Republican margins in Congress. But that’s our system. We could have a parliamentary system, where decision-making is somewhat more streamlined, but we don’t. I will say this, though: careful what you wish for. From the other side of the fence, most Democrats would argue they face more formidable veto points than Republicans do. See, e.g., SCOTUS.
In answer to your first question, congress still has a huge amount of control over that so-called fourth branch, including delineating its powers and confirming who runs it. But they can't get their act together so it feels independent.
Secondly, it is entirely possible to get the boat to turn right, but conservatives don't want to do the work. Probably because they are ideologically opposed to the boat existing, which I understand, but instead of acknowledging that all efforts to destroy the boat have failed and maybe the boat serves some kind of necessary function they should try and understand, they just double down.
I disagree with Scott's (and your) characterization of the power and behavior of the government bureaucracy.
The staff certainly leans left, but they don't really have veto powers over the government, nor do they behave that way. The majority of what constrained Trump's behavior during his first term was his own choice of people to appoint and trust (Kushner, Ross, Perdue, etc.), which were his direct appointees, and not at all related to the PMC left. We can also see this easily because even stripping out the legally questionable things, Trump 2 has not been vetoed by this group.
The other thing that constrained his behavior was the regular political gridlock issues in the structure of the US government (i.e. the filibuster) and poor coalition management (i.e. being unable to effectively convince congresspeople (who are democratically appointed to represent their districts). These limitations impacted Biden as well.
During the Bush era, Bush was able to implement his policies without veto from the bureaucracy. Obama was a political outsider vs Hillary Clinton but was able to win and implement his policy agenda.
If an elected president genuinely wants to implement some policy, I struggle to see evidence of the unelected bureaucracy significantly hampering their ability to do so.
There are things like independent agencies which the trump admin and unitary executive people seem to take issue with, but those agencies can receive appointments equally from both parties depending on who is president (which happened normally under trump, with several places like the FTC, USPS, etc. getting Trump appointees and behaving in general with his wishes). The various agencies also are often subject to the desires of the executive and behave accordingly (i.e. NLRB behavior shifting between Trump 1 and Biden).
Even during the second half of Biden’s term, which is the most hands off presidency in recent history, Biden was more supportive of Israel than you would predict if the PMC left had such power, especially given how progressively he staffed his administration.
I would say that a lot of these pain points actually arise out of the power of congress getting limited due to congressional gridlock and them giving up their own power. If say the filibuster was removed, congress would be more able to execute, that would boost the ability for the government to pass and execute policy and address the will of their voters instead of being in a deadlock and having to use slow and clumsy coordination mechanisms (what the left does), or a further expansion of the executive’s power (what the right is currently doing), both of which have side effects (though I agree with Scott that the left’s mechanism is less bad and easier to guide reform than the right’s.
But, that coordination mechanism is not a global universal veto and isn’t really held by the government bureaucrats but more of an artifact of a very coalition based system, and it a) is responsive to voters if in a lagging way, b) pretty much entirely impacts democratic leaders and not republicans ones.
Why is it more democratic for a single individual elected by the people to have unilateral decision making power. Versus a larger set of people also elected by the people having power?
The "bureaucratic institutions" Scott is referring to are *unelected* - probably necessarily so. It's hard to see how there could be elections to fill roles in (e.g.) the State Department.
If you're suggesting that the US should move to a Parliamentary system - I take no view. I live in a country with Parliamentary government, it has pluses and minuses, but it certainly doesn't solve the problem of the administrative state blocking the elected politicians.
Unelected bureaucratic systems are the only way you get access to informed judgment about anything. There are ways to shape the effectiveness of this power, but dismantling the unelected bureaucracy is not an effective way to do things.
There is individual centered democracy, where the people chose one individual. And then that individual has a lot of personal power. And there are systems of democracy built on parties and institutions where no 1 person can go off the rails.
And the administrative state is neither. If you want to argue for greater Congressional power, I'm not opposed (but good luck making that happen, because Congress doesn't want power).
I hate to bring it up, because I know that I sound like one of those people who is secretly arguing that poor people or dumb people shouldn't be allowed to vote, and I don't think that, but I *do* think that people generally misunderstand that democracy ="the majority gets whatever they want" is neither what the constitution intended nor, historically speaking, a very well-thought out idea. You want a system where the majority generally steers policy, but minority groups can still band together and force greater compromises than there would be if this was a raw numbers game. Otherwise you have ancient Athens, which turned on both individuals and entire states at the drop of a hat.
If the majority is 90% of the population then maybe. But if the majority is 51%, or (as seems to be the case right now) 30+% pretending that because half of Americans don't vote they automatically count towards their mandate, you are much more likely to end up with anarchy or civil war. Also, entitlement is not a concept a fascist should invoke. Its for people who believe in things like inalienable rights.
no mention of 37 trillion in debt, 2 trillion deficit, 1.2 trillion trade deficit. increase in government expenditures of 50% in the last 6 years. Nor of the rube goldberg processes created by the left and administrative state trying to solve every problem, as described by ezra kline on the jon stewart podcast, so much gets spent bureaucracies and ngos funded/created but nothing gets built.
These are all valid complaints, but thus far Trump has repeated the usual GOP playbook of cutting services and then cutting taxes even more, thereby increasing the government deficit, not reducing it. He's just as responsible for this as Biden was.
Except they haven’t even tried to start. They’ve been cutting employees in all the bureaucracies whose job it is to ensure that revenue comes in, and claiming that these tiny salary and research grant cuts are more important than the tax cheating they are intentionally enabling.
He's a lot more responsible than Biden. The Republican tax cut plan absolutely dwarfs everything that came before. It's difficult to overstate just how massive the planned deficit increases are. It's bigger than all the major legislation Trump and Biden passed over the last eight years PUT TOGETHER.
And of course, Trump crashing the economy while driving up interest rates by encouraging capital flight doesn't exactly help either.
Right. The S&P rose 50% in Biden's last year, and I don't remember anyone on substack mentioning it? It has become the norm to accept money printing to support huge trade deficits and the American consumer, while the supplier dies. At the end of the day this imbalance has given us Trump. Yes, the deficit will grow, but there's no way to raise taxes if you are cutting government spending, as we must.
"Yes, the deficit will grow, but there's no way to raise taxes if you are cutting government spending, as we must." - can you elaborate? Why would "cutting government spending" and "raising" taxes be mutually exclusive? Even if it's an either/or, why do you declare that "we must cut government spending"? Why not raise taxes instead? And what do you propose to meaningfully cut government spending? AFAICT, there are three four options:
- "DOGE": fire people who are doing things that were decided to be useful at some point, and probably still are. Social Security administration, regulatory agencies, public health agencies, desaster protection agencies, basic research... which one goes on the chopping block?
- industry/ infrastructure spending: the aim is to revitalize manufacturing in the US, right? So... spending no money on roads, trains, electricity, internet will sure pay off, right?
- dismantling Medicare/ Medicaid/ Social Security: basically, screwing over poor, ill, and old people. Sure sounds tempting to billionaires, but is it a good idea?
- reducing military expenses: I'm pretty sure that you could find a few billion here, but it doesn't look like Trump is even trying.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would probably cut public spending on health, education and possibly housing across the OECD by at least 50% and perhaps as much as 80%. (Scott already did an excellent article on why education spending is mostly pointless, as have others.)
(TLDR: There is no correlation between school hours and educational outcomes within the developed world, and reading/math/science literacy in the US has roughly plateaued since the 1970s despite roughly a 4x increase in K12 funding.)
There is, similarly, no correlation between health outcomes and health spending within the developed world, likewise suggesting that either genetic or lifestyle factors external to the health system dominate in explaining outcomes.
The general public doesn't want to hear this, of course. Any politician who signed off on these reductions would be committing electoral suicide, and DOGE has barely touched them. But it is nonetheless true that these programs hit a point of diminishing returns around fifty years ago and have become fantastically parasitic.
(Conversely, I don't think there's strong evidence that USAID was especially wasteful, even though it was the first to go.)
"There is, similarly, no correlation between health outcomes and health spending within the developed world, likewise suggesting that either genetic or lifestyle factors external to the health system dominate in explaining outcomes."
I think you've made a logical error. I will accept for the sake of argument that, as we sit here in the year 2025, there is no correlation between health systems that spend more and health outcomes, it does not at all follow that within our system, drastically slashing (50-80%) or eliminating Medicaid and Medicare would have no negative health or quality of life consequences. Almost certainly that's false, and you run the risk of a catastrophic level of suffering. Maybe you believe it's would be worth it to realize other benefits, but an idea that hand-waves away the other side of the ledger is just not serious.
I think there probably would be some non-zero reduction in health outcomes, and I'm as irritated by 1-percenter tax evasion as anyone, but we have to consider tradeoffs here.
Are we going to double OECD health spending again for... I don't know, a six month improvement in life expectancy? As opposed to, e.g, pro-natal incentives, cultural patronage for right-wing art, a negative income tax, fundamental research into somatic gene editing or radical longevity, asteroid mining, bioconservation, phage therapies, nuclear energy or a dozen other policies or research agendas I would consider to have more promising RoI?
Each dollar gets you major increases in outcomes up to $500 annual PPP.
You get diminishing returns up to $3500 PPP.
After that it simply looks flat.
If the administration kills coverage for the extremely poor, or childhood vaccinations, then I'd expect to see some fall off. But in general 50% of our medical spending could vanish and you wouldn't see it in the numbers.
But from where? We can have a totally separate debate about overall the structure and inefficiencies of our healthcare system. That’s fine. But if we’re talking about Medicare and Medicaid, probably the most efficient parts of the system, a 50-80% cut would be catastrophic. If you start to visualize how those cuts would manifest — countless conditions no longer covered, medications not provided, thousands of hospitals closed — it’s simply unthinkable or, to be more contemporary, it’s DOGE on steroids. Just taking a chainsaw to complicated, interlocked systems is foolhardy in the extreme. The metaphor would be performing surgery with a hatchet, but that may be too close to the literal truth to be useful.
If he does manage to cut a large sum from the budget, say a trillion or more, there will be softened demand, of course, and then to allow the tax cuts to expire would be another negative, so that's why I think they want to extend the tax cuts and cut govt. spending. Can they get to a trillion? Well, govt spending increased by 50% over the past five years, so I think it's possible. I think they could raise taxes in a couple of areas, for example why private equity pirates get a carried interest loophole is beyond me, tax it like our income is taxed. But just eliminating corruption they could get 500B, and with some cuts to unnecessary depts they could get another 500B. And if he has the mettle he could get another 500B out of the military. I don't generally like 'just increase taxes' because at the end of the day for govt receipts to really rise they have to raise taxes on where the income is and that's us unfortunately, the vast middle.
The debt and deficit aren't exclusively (nor even mostly) the fault of 'the left'. At least half of it in the past 8 years is directly a result of Trump, and by all accounts they are set to make it worse.
It's pretty disingenuous to point to the debt as a reason we need to put Republicans in charge when Republican rule consistently leads to higher deficits than when the Democrats are in power.
Exactly. The last time we ran a surplus was under Clinton, who worked with the GOP to raise taxes and cut spending. Bush II took this running surplus (which would have paid off the debt in less than a decade) and argued we had to cut taxes because it would cause problems if the debt was paid off too quickly (!).
"Obama offered to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts on the table in exchange for a tax hike of roughly $100 billion per year over 10 years. Meanwhile, government spending would be cut by roughly three times that amount. It's no small irony that the party's dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted."
I’m not at all sure where you get your confidence here. But setting aside your speculations about life expectancy, with which I do not concur, life expectancy is hardly the only metric. Probably, if we no longer covered hospital births, the infant and maternal mortality rate would rise some, but generally speaking the economy would press on and life expectancy would be marginally affected. But most people would experience forced home birth to be a major source of stress and worry that would significantly diminish their quality of life. Your proposals aren’t unrealistic because it would be politically unpopular. That’s missing the point. The proposals would be politically unpopular because people would hate them.
Given that you note how unpopular this is, aren't swiss-style referendums both more populist AND a well-working safeguard? I absolutely agree that people who were strongly pro-Trump in particular should be forced to own this, but I really don't see why someone who simply is/was anti-establishment and pro-populist a la "the elite doesn't do what the people want, so I vote for a change until we get someone who does" should. This strikes me as just one of the many problems with the 2-party equilibrium of party politics, not of populism.
And just to be sure, I don't claim that pure populism or referendums will always lead to correct outcome; It's just that this approach is imo better at self-correcting than elite capture of institution, which can just insulate itself from its own mistakes.
I'm astonished that so few people are using Triffin's dilemma to explain Trump's tariff policy. What Triffin held is that a global reserve currency, like the dollar or the Spanish imperial doubloon, must be available to everyone. This entails that the country holding reserve currency status must inevitably run a trade deficit, as has occurred in the United States since the end of the gold standard, beginning in the 1970s.
Demand for the imperial currency means that it will be regularly exchanged for goods and services: money is going out, imports are coming in. Given that the currency is regularly bought — and kept in store, as a reserve — by others, it becomes more valuable, eroding the metropolis’ overall competitiveness: before the collapse of Detroit’s car-makers, there was the collapse of Castile’s textile industry, booming and dominant in the 15th century, outcompeted by northerners with weaker currencies — mostly British and Dutch — in the 16th.
The result is a perennial trade deficit that can only be contained with punitive tariffs, like those announced by Donald Trump. At the same time, such tariffs can only lead to imperial decline, as the empire’s currency becomes less useful for others to exchange or store, and the empire finds it harder to just build up debt to raise armies; the hoped-for-tradeoff is a reinforcement of the metropolis’ industrial base through import substitution.
The obvious counter is: "yes, I love my empire, thank you very much." Fine. Nothing wrong with stating it thus. Hanania and Razib Khan do it all the time.
Yes, the fact that more dollars had to be exported than imported in order for the dollar to become the world's currency is completely accurate, but the US probably benefitted from this on net by essentially becoming the world's banker.
I understand the argument for strategic tariffs, if only from the perspective of rebuilding supply chains for essential goods within the US (although 95% of US trade was already internal or within NAFTA.) But Trump's seemingly erratic declarations on the topic (rather than saying, e.g, "we will phase in tariffs at X% per year over 10 years on country Y unless country Y halts trade with China") has, understandably, spooked the markets. Even the 10% reciprocal tariffs and trade war with China is probably going to cause a global recession, even if it's a necessary long-term adjustment.
There's a good chance that this is (finally) going to pop China's gigantic real estate bubble, and possibly a few other market bubbles around the world. Interesting times, to be sure.
"Even the 10% reciprocal tariffs and trade war with China is probably going to cause a global recession, even if it's a necessary long-term adjustment."
That's the entire problem: a recession is probably due, some markets are way overheated, and correcting that means pain. Nobody wants a recession and pain and austerity, even if it will balance the books again. We're still not back to where we were in the glory (and ultimately unsustainable) days of the Celtic Tiger, even if there is some recovery and the economy is (possibly) in better shape:
"Ireland’s dramatic recovery from its severe economic crisis has led to the country being regarded as a “poster child” for economic regeneration through fiscal austerity. The Irish case has been widely hailed by EU institutions and certain Irish and European politicians as evidence that the fiscal disciplines and structural changes prescribed by austerity policies could provide the platform for stability and a return to growth and prosperity. Economist Stephen Kinsella suggests Ireland is best seen however less as a “poster child” than as a “beautiful freak,” whose experience of austerity and recovery reflects a very specific set of conditions that differ markedly from other countries forced to avail of bailout supports."
"The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) has warned that the government's handling of state finances is adding "needless pressure" to the country's economy.
According to the watchdog, past overspending mistakes risk being repeated, which led to austerity measures during the 2008-9 financial crisis.
One particular cause for concern, explained the IFAC on Wednesday, is the government's repeated violations of its own spending rule.
Introduced in 2021, the rule limits spending growth to 5% per year - unless the expenditure is financed through higher taxes.
The Irish government announced an €8.3bn budget in July, which in light of tax revenue raised spending by 6.9%.
"By pumping more money into an economy with record employment rates now, the Government risks worsening the problem of rising prices and capacity constraints," said the IFAC.
The warning relates to Ireland's upcoming budget, due on 1 October, ahead of a general election that must be held by March 2025."
That leads to "everyone says the economy is doing great, so why haven't I seen more money in my pocket?" and then populism.
10 years ago they were a PIIG, and now Ireland has the highest GDP per capita of any country (that's not a city-state tax-haven like Monaco) in the world! 108,000 USD per capita... craziness...
They did a good job but lately their wealth relies on becoming a fiscal paradise, like Monaco, Luxemburg, Andorre etc. That is to say they are actually the guy who always defect on the prisonner's dilemna inside EU. That's a form of parasitism. In a system creating wealth based upon cooperation, some will play the hawk to capture more wealth than the others. I'm not a fan of Ireland's strategy.
Yeah, don't believe the raw GDP figures. Those are inflated by "we have all these American multinationals headquartered here who launder their profits through the Dublin office".
"In terms of GNP per capita, a better measure of national income, Ireland ranks below the OECD average, despite significant growth in recent years, at 10th in the OECD-28 rankings. GDP is significantly greater than GNP (national income) due to the large number of multinational firms based in Ireland."
"reland - Real GDP per capita was EUR71700.00 in December of 2023, according to the EUROSTAT. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for Ireland - Real GDP per capita - last updated from the EUROSTAT on April of 2025. Historically, Ireland - Real GDP per capita reached a record high of EUR77300.00 in December of 2022 and a record low of EUR33300.00 in December of 2000."
Yeah, I figured the earnings of the multinationals were obfuscating the reality to some extent (when I mention the GDP to my Irish friends they always tell me the situation for the average Joe isn't much better than it was 10 years ago). Still, 71000 euros ain't too shabby either...
"Do you remember how pundits and newspaper columnists back in the day talked about how the Greek Eurozone Crisis should have been seen coming, because you can't force the same currency and monetary policy upon nations as unlike as Germany and Greece? And that the European Union could only survive by turning its monetary union into a fiscal union (i.e. sending lots of German money to Greece to make up for strangling their economy) and becoming a real nation, just like the US? I think Jane Jacobs, if she was still alive today, would have taken the opposite lesson and argued that the American Union is doomed, and has only survived as long as it has by sending lots of money from San Francisco (and New York and the like) to Detroit (and all the other cities like it). But if the money ever runs out, or the San Franciscan willingness to fork over their money to unemployed blue collar workers and redneck Boomers..."
Not much about tariffs though. Or, of course, the *current* tariffs.
Ah, also, while searching through my archives, I found some discussion of Keynes's idea for "Bancor", an alternative to using the US Dollar as the global reserve currency: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-cities-and-the-wealth/comment/16384543. The key idea is that if holding the global reserve currency is actually something of a *downside* for a nation, because it must shoot itself in the foot manufacturing wise and perpetually run a trade deficit to supply the rest of the world with its money... what if *no* nation had the Global Reserve Currency status? What if the global reserve currency was just used for international trade in international clearinghouses, and didn't touch any nation's economy at all? Then, we avoid the Triffin Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor
They are in use, but they are made up of a currency basket that's managed by the IMF and they are not terribly popular because of that, it's still very political. Reserve currencies are hard to separate from the issues of the countries using them, no matter how you do it.
The San Franciscan ability to generate the money that it is "willing" to send to the rest of the country is entirely dependent on the willingness of the rest of the country to send them food and energy. In an internal trade war, the blue states that like to brag about being the ones who hold the economy up will very quickly find out that they need the flyover states a lot more than the flyover states need them.
Doesn't California have a massive agricultural industry of its own? Seems they could become self-sufficient if they wanted to if they changed their crops and placed more solar panels...
Surely if San Francisco lost its willingness to subsidise the rest of the country it has lots of non-American sources of food to choose from. Perhaps even at better prices than Americans offer.
"I think Jane Jacobs, if she was still alive today, would have taken the opposite lesson and argued that the American Union is doomed, and has only survived as long as it has by sending lots of money from San Francisco (and New York and the like) to Detroit (and all the other cities like it). But if the money ever runs out, or the San Franciscan willingness to fork over their money to unemployed blue collar workers and redneck Boomers...""
Money can "paper over" a lot of problems. I have seen many businesses and many families stay together because the money is good.
It's when the money runs dry that the knives come out.
What's bad about trade deficit? You're exchanging pieces of paper for valuable goods. These pieces of paper are not really debt because they have negative interest rate. And the situation is naturally self-correcting: at some point other countries decide that they have enough pieces of paper, exchange rates adjust and trade deficit disappears.
I understand that it's tempting to contrarianly talk about resource curse etc, but that's all second order effects that can be dealt with. Generally it's better to have more stuff than less stuff, cheaper stuff than costly stuff, to be healthy and rich than poor and sick.
It's all part of the imperial package. Other countries will fund your deficits for as long as you remain the dominant power. Still, the deficit will accumulate and your industrial base will be hollowed out. At some point (soon for the US, if you look at the numbers), the deficits will be so humongous that the only solution left is punitive taxation so extreme that it can only be defined as a sort of state Communism: the Diocletian reforms in Rome, Wang Mang's nationalizations in China, or Wang Anshi later moves under the Song.
I think you are skipping a step: Why are government deficits a requirement? Trade deficits do not require a government deficit, although government deficits frequently lead to trade deficits. The theory that the reserve currency inexorably leads to the hollowing out and collapse of the economy tries remove the decisions involved, but the key decision that breaks things is the government running an ever greater deficit that collapses the state under its own weight or requires taxes to spike to crazy levels. That is all from a choice, however, and not one requiring the currency to be a reserve currency, to run huge government deficits.
That does not mean that it is not a decision, however, right along with the decision to control their citizens, in other words force them to behave contrary to their preferences. The point is that the deficits are not inevitable or even really liked to trade at all, but a choice those in government chose to make.
Calling it a choice frames governments as being very plastic entities controlled by one decision maker, like selecting government options in a video game. In reality governments are constrained by predictable pressures, and every big imperial government has 'chosen' to invent big deficits, because if it did not, then there would be some political figure inside the government who would come up with the idea and use it to gain power over the person resisting them.
> Trade deficits do not require a government deficit, although government deficits frequently lead to trade deficits.
It's been mathematically proven that the two are directly linked. Increasing trade deficits must necessarily result in either an increased budget deficit or a decreased savings rate.
If I understand correctly, "private saving" [i.e. S = Y-(C+T)] is supposed to refer to money saved (not consumed) by the private sector (whether it's invested in assets, deposited in a bank, or stuffed in a mattress), and "net private saving" [i.e. S - I] specifically refers to money in a bank/mattress. More generally, I think net saving is supposed to represent the mismatch between production vs consumption. So the "(X-M) ≡ (S-I) + (T-G)" equation is saying something like "if there's a mismatch between domestic production vs domestic consumption, the difference is necessarily exported to other countries [qua (X-M)]". E.g. if the US sells $100 worth of widgets but only spends $60 on consumption, $40 must have been earned from international sales rather than domestic sales.
I'm aware of that, and on one hand, you have a point. On the other, US savings rates are so low that there's not much room for them to decrease any further.
There's a fundamental difference between selling government bonds and running a trade deficit. The latter is basically free stuff and while can have second order effects, just subsidize local industries using profits from it, just import cheap Chinese raw materials.
The US buys one million dollars worth of French wine, now France has one million dollars and the US has the wine. What happens next? If the French are satisfied with having $1m in reserve, next they start selling wine in exchange for CPUs or superhero movies, the currency exchange rate automatically adjusts and the deficit no longer increases.
I have a feeling that you maybe consider the effect of trade deficit on a country with gold-backed currency? In that case yes, you can run out of gold and it would be bad. USD is not gold-backed.
Also important to note that it's hard to remain the empire at all when your industrial base is hollowed out. AWS selling server time may well be as profitable as 1000 factories building weapons, but wars aren't fought with dollars.
This is your reminder that US manufacturing output is near historic highs, and much higher than in the 1950s. What has been `hollowed out' is manufacturing employment. But for the purposes of fighting wars, its irrelevant whether the screws in your tank factory are turned by people or robots.
Your statement is false. Your graph is as a fraction of GDP, and reflecting the growth of other sectors. e.g. software engineering did not exist in the 1950s. In absolute terms (total manufacturing output) it is up.
So we make way more stuff than we did in the 1950s (including after correcting for population growth). It's just that manufacturing output has not grown as rapidly as output in other areas. (And manufacturing employment has decreased. And manufacturing output overseas has increased more. But US manufacturing output has not decreased).
Japan's debt is way higher than that of the US, they are not an imperial power, and they don't seem to be in any danger of running out of people willing to loan them money.
Perhaps the borrowing capacity of governments of developed countries is just a lot higher than you think? Obviously it is not infinite, but the Japan example would seem to suggest that the US may not be near any kind of natural limit.
China is de-instrualizing many of its neighbors, but you can't predict that from trade deficits.
Credit, though, for remembering to say that the industrial base has been "hollowed out".
> Swing state voters get pandered to, and swing states — both now and in the recent past — are disproportionately in the Rust Belt. And it’s become an article of faith in the Rust Belt that they have been “hollowed out” by trade (and “hollowed out” is the phrase that’s always used — there’s incredible message discipline around the phrase “hollowed out”).
I think the steelman case here involves looking at time horizons, and arguing that having more stuff (in the short run) through this channel leads to lower economic growth, and therefore less stuff in the long run. This could theoretically be true, but whether it actually is, that's an empirical and quantitative question, and the astonishing outperformance of the US relative to other rich economies over the past couple of decades suggests that it probably isn't actually true.
Yes, I think that the opposite should be assumed by default.
Imagine if Santa Claus dropped one million tonnes of steel somewhere in the Nevada desert. Yes, it could have second order effects that have to be managed. You don't want all of your steel mills to go out of business, then face a shock when you run out of Santa's steel. But it's kinda insane to ignore the value of all that free steel for making cars and bridges and colanders and propose to dump it in the ocean, just to be safe.
It feels like a mirror image of the broken window fallacy. Or maybe it is the broken window fallacy.
Amusingly, Lord Vetinati and Moist Von Lipwig do almost exactly that, in Making Money - they discover an army of golems, and bury it in the ground. But I think Sir Pterry had his economics badly wrong on that one, and they'd have been better off putting the golems to work...
From what I recall, the idea there was that while you can't eat gold, you can eat the bread that golems make. So investing in golems is like investing in factories (your interest is backed up by the new items out in the world), but you're guaranteed the return, but only if shit hits the fan, otherwise you're not allowed to use and actually profit from them. So it's like 100% safe 0% interest inflation adjusted bonds. And their reasoning for using Golems that way was very similar to what Curtis Yarvin writes these days, now that I think about it, like, they wanted to keep having a stable high-employment economy, they didn't want to separate the people into a jobless majority and a Golem-owning minority.
They could have just set the golems to work turning dynamos and provided everyone with energy too cheap to meter as a public good or something. Replacing muscle power by electricity doesn’t seem to have left us with a jobless majority and electricity owning minority.
Incidentally the golems don’t eat iirc so I guess they violate the laws of thermodynamics too. In the long term they can use them to evade the heat death of the universe.
More broadly it’s clear from that sequence that Sir Pterry didn’t understand comparative advantage. The golems might have been able to do anything but could not have done everything. And Dutch disease fears would have been groundless since the golem power was inexhaustible. In your analogy, Santa had dropped an infinite quantity of steel.
Works up until the point the trading partners go "hey, what are these pieces of paper worth anyway? we're giving you real stuff and you're only giving us paper in return!" and they keep their stuff or demand you exchange other real stuff for it.
Then the currency exchange rate adjusts and you no longer increase your trade deficit, without any tariffs. You get to keep all the free stuff you got before that and they get to keep your steadily depreciating pieces of paper.
I can imagine some situations where it can go tits up, from carelessly destroying domestic industry to some hostile foreign power dumping all their currency reserves at once. But it's manageable and the free stuff is worth it.
I don't think it's right to frame the exorbitant privilege from being the reserve currency as a problem, since ultimately the purpose of an economy is to produce things for people to consume, if you can export printed paper in exchange for other people to do the producing whilst you do the consuming, that's a great position to be in (exploitative even), even if it erodes your native production over time.
But I think you're right that this is the crucial factor liberal critics of tariffs miss, because the position of exorbitant privilege can't last forever and at some point the US will need to readjust to becoming a normal economy that only consumes as much as it can produce again. Now that China has surpassed the US as the world largest economy (by PPP) that time is clearly drawing closer and some major adjustment would have needed to happen in the near future whether it's these tariffs or something else.
Realistically though these tariffs wont do much to reverse the US's loss of position in the global economy though, and maybe wont even revive manufacturing since they're so broad and untargeted. It's not like the US has massive untapped potential to be a manufacturing giant that overshadows the world economy like it did in 1945, whether it weans itself off imports or not.
They're really just hastening the descent towards what the US would naturally be without exorbitant privilege, something closer to a middle income country. Instead the US could be using the gains from it's final years of exorbitant privilege to invest in preparations to transition to a more productive economy, similar to Saudi Arabia's current program preparing for an end to it's oil dependant economy.
So I don't think a Triffin's dilemma based view can do much to support the tariffs even if it also undermines the mainstream anti-tariff position, and I don't think Trump himself is thinking about any of this stuff.
Trump certainly is more of an intuitive type. He told us what he thinks: "America is being ripped off." And he knows that it's the empire ripping off the republic.
A reminder that US manufacturing output is near historic highs, and much higher than in 1945. Manufacturing employment is down, certainly, as is the share of manufacturing as a fraction of the economy, but total manufacturing output? Up big time.
>> naturally be without exorbitant privilege, something closer to a middle income country
How much do you think `exorbitant privilege' adds, and what's your definition of a middle income country? A reminder that US GDP per capita is almost double that in the UK, and three times that in e.g. Portugal, and neither the UK nor Portugal is `middle income' by conventional definitions.
> "Manufacturing employment is down, certainly..."
Yes, but this may be what MAGA voters are more concerned about (also, did you control for output as a fraction of the total economy, or scaled for population size?)
Admittedly, automation is as much to blame here as immigration or outsourcing, and the Vance/Elon position on this is not very coherent.
Manufacturing employment rather than output may be what MAGA is concerned about but it is best to accurately state the problem. For one thing, it informs ones understanding of possible solutions. If manufacturing output is up but employment is down (because of robots), then tariffs are not going to cause American factories to replace robots by people.
Scaled by population size...I'm not quickly finding this data pre-packaged, but simply eyeballing https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS and correcting for the change in US population between the start and end of the time series, total manufacturing output per capita is also up between 1987 and 2023.
As a fraction of the total economy it is of course down, but that's because we've created new sectors that didn't previously exist. There was no `software engineering' in 1945. That's a good thing, and a testament to the dynamism of the US economy.
Yeah, I'm still curious as to exactly what that graph is measuring, but if you multiply the final figure by 0.7 (ratio of 1990 population to today), then net increase has been pretty marginal.
And yes, I agree that tariffs don't really solve the jobs problem. Trump/Vance would have to bribe up an international AI non-proliferation alliance to address this issue, and there's no real sign on that on their agenda (although forcing China to bend the knee would be a necessary step in that direction.)
>A reminder that US GDP per capita is almost double that in the UK
I'd prefer to use PPP instead of nominal gdp because nominal gdp is affected by the exchange rates which are the thing EP is boosting. Sterling is also a major reserve currency and the UK very much has EP of it's own and has a similar dilemma of facing a major readjustment to it's place in the global economy imo.
>A reminder that US manufacturing output is near historic highs, and much higher than in 1945.
True, but US consumption has grown much faster than manufacturing output since 1945 so higher productivity in manufacturing can't be the thing that's supporting most of US consumption. That output is also measured in nominal dollars so it's another measurement that's inflated by EP. A lot of that manufacturing is also niche and high value added, it doesn't form a broad, generally capable industrial base like it did in 1945. The US couldn't build a giant fleet of bombers or war ships like it used to, let alone missiles or drones like China can. I don't know if you showed FDR the current manufacturing base he would say it was bigger even if the dollar value is higher.
The thing that matter for the US's position in the global economy and global power structure is also not the absolute size of it's manufacturing sector but it's size relative to the total global economy which has shrunk hugely.
>> The US couldn't build a giant fleet of bombers or war ships like it used to, let alone missiles or drones like China can.
The US military manufacturing chain is in fact entirely onshore, and the US military is still comfortably the largest in the world. The total number of bombers is less, but so (in Obama's words) is the number of horses and bayonets. In absolute terms, there's little question that 2025 USA could wipe the floor militarily with 1945 USA.
Now, China may have higher military potential today (or perhaps not, I think it's a grey area), but that's a relative statement, not an absolute one. US ability to carry out military manufacturing has not shrunk, other countries ability has increased.
>> The thing that matter for the US's position in the global economy and global power structure is also not the absolute size of it's manufacturing sector but it's size relative to the total global economy which has shrunk hugely.
There was a (relative) decline from 1945 to 1980, but what that mostly reflects is that 1945 was a highly anomalous situation when the rest of the world had just ripped itself apart in a world war, and the US was the only undamaged industrial power still standing.
Most of the decline since 1980 (in terms of fraction of world economy) has been on the part of Western Europe and Japan. Insofar as those regions are part of the US alliance system, it does reduce the relative might of the US alliance system. But the US economy by itself has held pretty steady as a fraction of the world economy over the past half century.
I've been convinced by smart economists that the trade deficit has nothing to do with the fact that the US dollar is the world's reserve currency.
3 arguments:
1. The US is not the only country with a sustained trade deficit (see e.g. Canada), so clearly having the reserve currency is not required.
2. If I understand the reserve currency argument correctly, it requires that the US dollar keeps being devalued in order to finance the trade deficit. But this isn't the case – the US dollar is pretty strong recently.
3. The trade deficit is fueled by the private sector and has nothing to do with the national debt.
The gist is that Americans have a higher risk tolerance and so are able to reinvest their own foreign assets more productively. This means that when, e.g., Apple gets a ton of Euros by selling overpriced phones in Europe, Apple invests those Euros productively and then buys lots of stuff in Europe. The stuff they get this way ends up being worth more than the phones they sold, which means there is a trade deficit. But this is in no way harmful for Apple or the US, and is completely sustainable.
"Nothing to do with..." is too strong. It's trivial that demand for the dollar (whether it's because it's the world's reserve currency or for any other reason) makes it cheaper on the margin for US consumers to purchase foreign goods. Ceteris parabis, you get a larger trade deficit (or smaller surplus) than you'd otherwise have.
Whether, in the US's specific circumstances, that changes us from running a trade surplus to a deficit is a difficult empirical question to answer. It's also not particularly important, IMO, and I think most folks who think its a important national concern are at minimum misguided but more likely confused about the causes and implications of trade deficits.
If this was Trump's rationale for his tariff policy, maybe he should say so? Was he afraid that this explanation, unlike the "reciprocal tariffs" explanation he actually gave, wouldn't make him look like enough of a moron?
I honestly don't think Trump ever heard of Triffin's dilemma. In the end, it's just a sublimation of an instinct that people who don't know much about economics often have: that you can't run huge trade deficits forever, that "something" (they don't know what) has to give.
I like this comment because it almost asks the question: who wants an "American Empire"? There has always been strong anti-imperial, anti-utopia sentiment in the US. In fact, ending imperialism was one of the originating purposes of Pax Americana. The more we integrate with the world, the less freedom we have domestically to manage our own economy. If we do not have the power to coerce or convince counterparties to adjust to our needs, then what use is the "empire"?
Tariffs are not the only way to solve the problem of deficits, but they are the most politically powerful way to get others to work with us to resolve this issue. We could also tax incoming capital at a rate that depresses external demand for US assets to the extent that it keeps our currency from appreciating unfairly. A US sovereign wealth fund could fulfill a similar role in sanitizing excess savings from abroad. There are tools we have today that old reserve currency providers did not have. Similarly if China finally flips towards a consumption-based economy and stops the transfers subsidizing overproduction, then the drop in their trade surplus will be matched with a drop in our capital surplus. The measure of Trump's plan is whether it succeeds in getting China to bring its own trade and capital accounts into balance. Whether this ends the "American Empire" is irrelevant to me and I think the majority of Americans, who mostly want to think about things like which tomato sauce to buy for their spaghetti.
I agree. No empire in history has ever been built willingly by common people. It's always the elites drawing them into conflicts they don't understand in lands they never heard of, because it's elites who benefit from empire. That's how the Brits got away with the oft-cited lie that their own empire was built "in a fit of absence of mind."
I also agree that tariffs are not the only solution, although they are the most blunt and direct way to handle the issue.
If you give your veterans land in the conquered territories, that's probably a benefit they'd be willing to fight for (even the elites benefit a lot more than they do).
There are many ways that the logic of Imperium and the logic of local economy conflict, and it’s complicated by the fact that trying to dismantle parts of the Imperium past their sell-by date is pretty unpopular. Look at the reaction to the Afghanistan withdrawal, or a hundred British writers bemoaning the tide going out on the British Empire.
Whether the Cult of Personality is more of a right wing thing than a left wing thing seems debatable.
Among American presidents since 1900, Teddy Roosevelt had the most lovable personality, but was he left or right wing? 1920s Republican Presidents had pretty unimposing personalities. FDR had a good personality, as did JFK. Nixon did not. Reagan, a retired movie star, had a likable personality, as did Clinton.
Among Soviets, the term "cult of personality" came to be ascribed to Stalin, who didn't have much personality.
Among Latin Americans, most of the caudillos were more or less right wing, but the most memorable was Fidel Castro.
But ultimately I think that "cult of personality" is more of a thought-ending cliche than a useful model for thinking about politics. Being likeable helps you get elected, but ultimately you get elected because of policy preferences. The vast majority of the people who voted for Reagan also voted for Nixon and Bush Sr.
"The vast majority of the people who voted for Reagan also voted for Nixon and Bush Sr."
What gets you elected is being able to win over the marginals. That's a matter of likeability.
Jesus Christ could have returned to earth in 1984 for the express limited purpose of publicly endorsing Walter Mondale and the hardcore republican voters would not have budged.
I think Cult of Personality is a right wing thing *now*. It varies back and forth depending who has a charismatic leader; Obama had his own little cult back in the 2010s. I think declining trust in institutions (for reasons Scott does a nice job outlining) has a lot to do with it.
I think the key factor here is that President Trump can change GOP orthodoxy unilaterally, and the same voters as before stick with him, whereas charismatic Democrat politicians like FDR or Obama get strong support but ultimately push for policies in line with the party vision, and ones that change that (e.g. LBJ in the civil rights era) cause realignments rather than changing a bunch of people's minds.
It's telling that the Republican party didn't even bother to write a platform in 2020. Republican party policy really is just "whatever Trump wants".
Although there was one limitation to Trump's hold on the party - he never managed to convince the base that vaccines are good, and ended up pivoting to anti-vax himself, in spite of Operation Warp Speed being his one good accomplishment.
Which doesn't really make sense in this context (full sentence: "the left also needs to cultivate certain vices to sustain its institutionalist strategy; Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality". And the linked article isn't very long, so I don't think Scott was choosing an unusual way of calling it verbose). My guess is it was a typo for "aptly", alongside the typo of "Bentham" for "Bentham's".
>Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality
You ought to be clearer that these are characteristics of the current American left and current American right. At various other times and places right wing groups have formed ideological cults and left wing groups have formed cults of personality.
Look, I dislike plenty about the right populist platform, but this talk of tariffs as a radioactive albatross is nonsense.
The US abandoned its working class and became dependent on imports, using its status as world reserve currency manager to run trade deficits for over half a century and counting. This was a bad idea. It was always a bad idea. It was a bad idea when Ross Perot was calling it out in the 90's. It was a bad idea when Kemp and Reagan turned free markets into a global ideology instead of part of a culture. Hell, it wasn't a great idea when Bastiat talked about it two centuries ago. If a country wants to be a country and have some control over its economy, including running sustainable safety nets for its people, including managing the environmental consequences, including the ethics of technological development, then that country wants to have some nationalistic policy on trade.
Bringing that back required restructuring the entire American economy, a decades long project. It was never going to be easy. It would require a deft hand and gradually encouraging tit-for-tat trade deals wherever feasible. At the very least, it implied sensible industrial policy geared towards Ricardian competitive advantage. This was never going to happen, because reasonable people have been browbeaten into thinking nationalism was a bad thing, so the only realistic option was blunt force tariffs. It required quite a bit of pain, which would have taken multiple presidential terms to be worth it. I had hoped Trump would be bullheaded and arrogant enough to ignore the constant calls for going back to globalist trade policy, but I'm disappointed to find that he's not the sociopath I'd hoped for. He's just another politician.
I don't take it personally. I didn't vote for him. But I also didn't vote against him. I wrote in my vote, and I would never regret not voting for the culture of the left. But if this means that we're just going to give up on tariffs, then we're also giving up on rationalizing trade. At that point, we might as well hand over the UBI so the working class can numb itself, and wait for those who still work to figure out how stupid they are for showing up. Socialism shows up one way or another, and then we get the soul death of the West.
You want to "make them own it"? God, I hope you do. I hope the right does what it does best - hold a grudge - and keeps trying it, over and over again, until the left does what it does best and flip-flops until its identity falls apart. Or maybe both sides are equally spinless at this point.
I'd rather this country die trying. If it won't, if it insists on making the working class pretend they can compete with people who live in places with a fourth our cost of living and expectations of third-world infrastructure, then we should probably just vote for the UBI. This goose is well and truly cooked.
I think the extent to which the US depends on overseas trade is overstated, but I agree with a lot of you're saying. The problem as I see is not that Trump has 'caved to globalism', but that he's using erratic declarations as a bargaining tool (Art of the Deal shenanigans), in a way that spooked the markets, particularly when he's made no effort to phase in tariffs gradually.
I wish the strategy were that coherent. I could see him dickering over tariff rates like a guy selling a Hyundai on FB Marketplace with that kind of tactical plan. But what I'm seeing out of him is a bad attempt to get some concessions out of China with no real interest in tariffs for the long term. Any idiot could see that you should be phasing these in gradually if you want them to stick, and you could calm the markets by holding to that line. Trump is doing neither, which is contrary to the article: tariffs are not idiosyncratic to Trump as policy, they're just a cudgel. That's more than disappointing.
I don't disagree for the most part, but the 10% reciprocal tariffs seem to be sticking and I wouldn't rule out others down the road, so I'm not sure I'd rule out "real interest in tariffs for the long term". I agree Trump could have calmed the markets by packaging them differently.
Trump is not trying to negotiate. He honestly believes that trade is bad and tariffs are good in and of themselves. This is his one deeply held belief, and he's been pro-tariff his entire life. The talk of negotiation is just cope from his supporters.
Trade deficits are great. Countries give you valuable things and services. In return you give them pieces of paper. That discrepancy makes a country rich, as seen by e.g. the steadily widening income gap between the US and Europe. it is bizarre that you think the way to provide safety nets is to the US poorer.
And it's not like US manufacturing has even disappeared during this era of trade deficits and outsourcing. On the contrary, it has continued to grow.
(Manufacturing *employment* has continued to decline, but that is the result of automation. And given the current low unemployment rates, we can see that those former manufacturing workers have mostly just moved to more economically rewarding jobs elsewhere.)
I'm not sure on-paper unemployment rates matter so much as labour-force participation, and I'm not really sanguine about the effects of automation either.
I'm also not sure what that graph is measuring, precisely? Total revenue in billions, with no adjustment for population size?
> "Trade deficits are great. Countries give you valuable things and services. In return you give them pieces of paper"
Aside from the slight problem that pieces of paper have to be printed, which reduces the value of the currency and erodes savings, sure. You'll always wind up paying one way or another.
Personally I think the OECD/US income gap is more a function of brain drain and networking/scale effects than currency manipulation per se, but since I'm not an American I would like those to end, actually.
Not really - labor participation overall is up, the fact that male participation is down slightly is largely due to families having more options available.
I thought I made it clear that I was interested in the working class working. So I think the employment matters, and so does maintaining regulatory authority and reserving a space for unions and industrial policy.
Let's be optimistic and say you can load up on paper profits, keeping the money in the investor sphere. Increasing amounts of it still go outside the country, it can play hell with your ability to manage inflation, and the working class can't pay into the safety nets so that's where you get the need for a UBI. This is not how you run a national economy. It's how you run a corporation - or a bank - with high legacy costs of taking care of unproductive people, and it can be extremely delicate to geopolitical problems and it says nothing of interest payments on your own debt.
I find it honestly kind of bizarre to hear an argument that manufacturing as a sector has not declined in America over the lest several decades, except for where the robots killed it. Light manufacturing, in particular, is still labor-intensive and hundreds of thousands of jobs have gone overseas since the 70's. It will take more than that broad graph line to overturn that narrative.
Reading this reminds me of those polls where majorities of Americans say people would be better off if more of them worked in factories, but then they also say that they personally wouldn't be better off if they worked in a factory.
So folks want to on-shore manufacturing, but don't personally want to do it, because those jobs are shittier than the ones currently available. Good times.
Those "pieces of paper" are claims on US assets. Instead of trading utensils for plates so that we have a full set, we are trading our houses for both.
Yes. "Pieces of paper" glibness doesn't grapple with the essential nature of what money is. Each "piece of paper" represents a claim to direct the application of future resources. That can take the form of either debt (signing up your kids to work according to the direction of the "piece of paper" holders) or asset sale (selling farmland and factories to "piece of paper" holders). Either way, the more "pieces of paper" are sent out to foreign countries, the more those foreign countries get to direct our country's application of future resources.
You're not getting "free stuff." You're getting stuff in exchange for your children's future labor and/or liquidating your tangible assets. In either case you are, in effect, saying "I don't care that foreigners will increasingly direct my country's future." It's obvious why materialist globalists on a birthrate path to extinction are fine with this. To them, it's literally free because they relate more strongly to the cosmopolitans than to their own nation, because their time horizons mostly end with their own lives, and because they have no higher priority than their own present consumption.
Suppose a country sells services and buys goods such that it has positive net imports. If I understand you correctly, the badness of this is that by buying services from us foreign countries are controlling us. In plain terms, they are our employers. Whereas I might be content with running a personal trade deficit (selling my labor to my employer and buying goods at walmart), a similar situation between countries is bad. Is that the right understanding?
Only partly. The problem has never been with trade (at least in my view) and I don't think it's necessarily Trump's view either though he's ineloquent enough that it's hard to know. If we sold services and they sold goods, there might still be issues - industrial hollowing, critical military shortfalls, etc. - but they wouldn't be quite the same because in your telling, they're balanced. What we're specifically talking about is a trade deficit. We aren't selling "services" in exchange for "goods," we're literally sending nothing - "pieces of paper" in exchange for goods. Advocates for this say it's all upside. But those "pieces of paper" represent, in aggregate, control over future allocation of our resources. In a benign instance, that could look a little like employer-employee, perhaps. An actively adversarial power who has that level of control could make it look much worse. But at some level, an effectively permanent deficit (it's been 50+ years now) exchanges future control for stuff.
For the record, I'm not even very pro-tariff! They're effectively just taxes, and I would prefer taxes low and trade barriers minimal. But I don't see how the logic is escapable that a permanent trade deficit - where our biggest export is literally dollars - doesn't result in foreign nations getting a greater supply of what dollars represent, which is a greater claim on the future allocation of labor and production. I would think the argument has to be whether this is either (a) unobjectionable, or (b) worth it. This doesn't apply to temporary deficits, by the way, if that wasn't clear. I suppose one could argue that 50+ years of trade deficits and appalled squalling at any attempt to reverse them doesn't count as "permanent." But that doesn't seem to me to be the argument being made.
Well that's certainly a good counterargument to the people who claim automation is just a force-multiplier rather than job displacement, unless the sector expands it will naturally end up being both. The remaining manufacturing workers have increased productivity, the ones who leave move on to a nice air-conditioned office or more money, fair enough as far as that goes.
But when AI starts automating away knowledge-worker jobs, where do those people go then? An entire labor force consisting of baristas and bedpan-changers? That kind of labor is very low productivity, you can't sustain a wealthy nation that way.
I don't think Trump is doing this right, and tariffs may not even be the correct way to go about this, but we are absolutely going to want an expanded manufacturing sector of this economy when all the email jobs start drying up. The tariffs are worthy of criticism, but the broader tendency among critics to attack the underlying premises of the policy and minimize the importance of manufacturing is going to look very very wrong in a few years.
> But when AI starts automating away knowledge-worker jobs, where do those people go then? An entire labor force consisting of baristas and bedpan-changers? That kind of labor is very low productivity, you can't sustain a wealthy nation that way.
Why would wealth be distributed to people who weren't producing anything in that world? If you can't produce anything of value with your labor, you have no value to trade, so you're left begging for a handout. If production is almost entirely automated, the government (or whatever ruling caste emerges) has no reason to require labor peace in order to obtain wealth, breaking the fundamental constraints they've operated under since the beginning of the agricultural age. So the public at large can't even use a general strike as leverage. You could try to force the rulers' hand with civil disorder and threats of violence, but they might simply withdraw from the country to one that pacifies its people more effectively. You could try to seize capital by force, but without factories what are you seizing?
It did, but that it did is a fault of how politicians chose to respond to it. And removing the trade deficit is not the only solution. America is extremely rich. It can afford to have less inequality.
I'm sure that you have policy in mind for how we could have deindustrialized while not driven wealth upward, but while this is still a market economy and labor power matters, that's not really the point.
It's absolutely true the working class has done poorly from globalization, and smarter tariffs might well have rebuilt a few strategically important industries. We weren't able to make our own masks in a pandemic.
But tariffs on this size and scale are going to do a lot more harm than good. If, as seems increasingly likely, we get a rerun of the stagflation of the 1970s and the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, we are going to at least see a Democratic victory in 2028 and a resurgency of wokery.
Which is exactly why the tariffs should have been executed better, if they were really serious about it. That's not a reason to throw up your hands, and I don't know if the right is aware of it.
You win the election so you can change the policy, which, if you're serious, you do because it's better for the long term. You don't proceed to abandon the policy because of short term difficulty that might cost you an election. This is how you get a society that never looks past the next fiscal quarter.
The working class experienced massive increases in the standard of living and all objective indicators of prosperity. You have to go to subjective measures like loss of social status in order to argue the opposite.
And what could more manufacturing jobs possibly do about this? Someone's always lower class, right? If it's not about standard of living, what is it really about?
The United States had near-full employment before the tariffs, which are set to cause a recession and rising unemployment. I don't know what you think is missing from the economy. I don't think working in a factory is that great, and the revealed preferences of people confirm my suspicions. That's why these jobs pay more! They suck!
Great comment, and I'm pleased to see a rare nod to the environment.
For the most part, the same folks who would see Americans be forever defined as consumers, even to an illogical point where that is ultimately unsustainable, where we have spent our inheritance from our producer forefathers so to speak - also have zero interest in exporting those ideas about either the environment or working conditions.
They are especially hostile to nature.
These are ideas that were cultivated and enacted *when we were producers* - not infrequently by *producers* - it should be noted.
Their assumption is that it is we that must and should surrender these things.
Their assumption was that the only way to liberate it from authoritarianism was to create a system that encouraged development capital to go to the lowest common denominator of labor cost and regulation. It's worked to get money to underdeveloped countries and it's had some upsides, but it's also resulted in Americans buying products from countries where they dump heavy metals into the groundwater and use suicide nets.
This might have been a good idea in limited amounts, but it needs to be reeled back in, it's needed it for a long time. Shipping products you could have made at home across oceans to take advantage of extremely cheap labor makes money sense, but it makes no other kind of sense.
I especially like: "those who still work". The UBI seems premised on the notions that some people are chumps, but also that work is so fun and pleasurable that people will "give it away". These are mutually contradictory.
It’s going to be one of the great “What Ifs” of recent history — what kept the administration from doing the gradual tariffs and deregulation and smart tax cuts that Big Business were expecting? It seemed like an open goal to me, but they did the other thing, good and hard.
> what kept the administration from doing the gradual tariffs and deregulation and smart tax cuts that Big Business were expecting?
Low human capital in the Trump administration. When you choose people based entirely on loyalty and discourage competence, you're going to have a bad time.
Some years ago, on a visit to Porto Alegre in Brazil, I hired a city guide who happened to be a retired civil servant. Because of this, he still had access to the State parliament buildings. One room contained a number of portraits of former dictators. This mild, well educated man carefully took me through each of them, explaining in detail, which were the good dictators and which were the bad ones. A very spooky experience.
I mean...if all you've got is dictators some are going to be worse than others. Monarchy was pretty universal until a few hundred years ago. European countries talk about kings being better or worse, and I'm sure any Chinese history buff could give you an earful about who the best emperors were.
Not listening to a thousand interest groups is why red states can build houses and are gaining population and congressional seats.
I am not sure what the best level of control is, obviously you want the person in charge to be smart, non-elderly, willing to listen and to have taken Economics 101. But it is not clear where the optimal balance between mad man and mad bureaucracy is
> obviously you want the person in charge to be smart, non-elderly, willing to listen and to have taken Economics 101
In 2025 it does not seem at all obvious that this is who most people actually want in charge.
Rather, after a decade of being bombarded by "authorities lie", "scientists sell out", "elites are corrupt brainwashed leftist ideologues", "this country is tired of experts" and similar messaging, what people want is... what we have, apparently.
Yes, it does. If your ideology is that “economics” “experts” are frauds, and so are other experts, then you will intentionally choose leaders who *don’t* go along with economics 101, and who *aren’t* willing to listen to people who have thought about a topic.
I don't think people were rejecting economics 101, they were rejecting a specific policy platform that often went against economics 101 but was popular amongst academics. Ecomonmic orthodox positions aren't intrinsically popular but I suspect in a 3 way election a dull economics 101 guy like Carney or Monti would easily beat Biden or Trump.
I think if you force people to choose between experts that make egregious mistakes without owning up to them and blatantly serving their own interests and the interests of their ingroup or anti-expert blowhards you can't be surprised when sometimes the people choose the anti-expert blowhards.
I agree that a professional managerial class that serves the long term and short term interests of the people is much better than the anti-expert blowhard, but that doesn't appear to be an option. It has felt like it was an option, or at least more of an option, at different times in the recent past. Perhaps the left can do some soul searching on how they got away from that and caused a lot of damage to the reputation of the bureaucracy and expertise. It would help if they owned up to how some of their policies, even if good on net, harmed lots of people in the process. Free trade was overall very positive, but it left a lot of people wrecked in its wake. Offering welfare, video games, and porn is not a suitable alternative for a well-lived life, even if it does keep angry young men from protesting too much.
I do agree that the democrats need a serious rethink of their policy priorities and their rhetoric.
But maybe the right can also put forward their own professional managerial class that serves the long term and short term interests of the people? And actually enable them to win primaries?
I don't think it is only on the left to provide such a paragon.
Government bureaucrats don't stand for election for the most part.
Anyway, the PMC is defined in terms of its relationship to the means of production. Although various Team ?R ideologists have argued for a "conservative intellectual class" or whatever, it isn't something that can be decreed, so let it be written, so let it be done.
However we got here, just about everyone recognizes that the left does actually control the bureaucracy. So that leaves us with two options. Either we replace the left bureaucracy with one that is more rightward (which I keep hearing Trump is trying to do and how terrible that would be - from left-leaning sources) or the left can provide what's needed.
That the left bemoans the right even trying to get into the bureaucracy while saying "why don't the right start governing better" seems like an attempt to shut down conversation rather than solve the issue.
If you're talking about elected officials, ask yourself how many people on the left would support DeSantis, or Kasich back in 2016. DeSantis fought some culture war issues, but it seems to me that he was picking the broadly popular topics (at least until he ran in 2023 and was fighting more). By every account I've seen, Florida is run well and it has been growing significantly under his leadership. Other than being ideologically on the right, he seems to be everything that request could mean. If the same people who would not vote for Trump would not vote for him, then I don't see that there's any incentive for the Republicans to put forward a better candidate. They should instead put forward a candidate willing to really fight the entrenched interests of their enemies, since that appears to be the only mechanism by which they can gain some of their priorities.
"I agree that a professional managerial class that serves the long term and short term interests of the people is much better than the anti-expert blowhard, but that doesn't appear to be an option."
Where do you find experts that don’t own up to their mistakes? The expert class seems to be amply honest about their mistakes, and also they seem to have made fewer mistakes than the experts of the past, or the general public. Do you think that we should always prefer the lowest common denominator over anyone who claims expertise and is short of 100%?
I feel like we have very different perspectives. Unnecessary Covid lockdowns and knowing lies from Fauci and others, do you agree that was a thing? The replication crisis? The fact that you can find an economist or sociologist or a bunch of other fields that will support pretty much any position makes expertise itself seem illusory.
It's not. Expertise is a real thing. But there are many thousands of people who support themselves pretending at expertise but having nothing that resembles it. We should call them scams, and I feel like many of such "experts" on the right get properly identified as that. But the left doesn't seem to be willing to call out its own cranks. So there's this group of people on the left that the right sees as unworthy of being called experts, who still get all the praise and whatever from official institutions as if they are real experts. Academics writing garbage books or publishing garbage studies but making money at prestigious universities and getting jobs at NGOs or whatever.
I don’t believe Fauci himself made any knowing lies - he was actually fooled by the frequentist statistical policy that said there was “no evidence” that ordinary people using masks would help. Fauci is in fact a very clear example of how experts get things wrong and then own up to their mistakes - this has been is brand for decades, beginning with HIV policy (where he initially opposed allowing people to try out experimental treatments that hadn’t yet been approved, but then relenting after massive “die-ins” at his office) and then continuing in all the major health issues that faced the country since then.
You have an unrealistic expectation of expertise if you think it means someone should never get things wrong. Experts will *always* get things wrong, but the important thing is that they propose new ideas (most of which are wrong) and compete with each other to test them, and in the end usually come to better ideas.
No one should ever base policy on cutting edge science - they should always base policy on science a decade or so back, unless there really is an emerging expert consensus.
The replication crisis was a good example of this. And I think we generally handled it well - very little policy was based on cutting edge nutritional science or social psychology of the 2000s.
Expertise is not about individual experts being right - it is much more about individual experts being interestingly wrong in ways that lead the community to become gradually more and more right, even as it is never right about everything. We need to keep individual researchers away from setting policy, but we need to have research communities involved in policy discussions.
I largely agree. I suspect what many people want now is some form of "Make them go away and leave me alone so I can live my life." Part of the problem is that there is always a bit of lingering "Oh... but please also tell these other people to stop living their life in the following ways..." that leave space for those thousands of interest groups to keep their claws in. I suspect that so long as there is power to tell other people how to live their lives there will always be those who want to fight over it and exert it.
I believe the point of the article is that the current experiment shows (to Scott, anyways) that erring on the side of "mad bureaucracy" (as you put it) is the way to go. This doesn't mean we shouldn't work to make the bureaucracy less "mad", just that we are making choices under some unfortunate constraints.
IF the disastrous tariffs were "a predictable consequence of their ideology" (a) why didn't you predict them; and (b) why didn't you make a fortune shorting the market?
Yes. I mean, Trump can contradict himself within the space of 20 minutes, but if you take the broad average of his rhetoric over a 12-month period he has been weirdly more honest than most politicians about following through on the policy directives he talked about.
I thought this was fairly well explained in the post. Tariffs aren’t a necessary consequence of right-wing populism but instead a Trump idiosyncrasy. It was an empirical question whether institutional checks would constraint his ability to implement policy based on this idiosyncrasy and the answer appears to be no.
It was tough to predict exactly how much of a retard Trump would be, and also to time his retardation and then partially undoing his retardation and then re-implementing some of his retardation and then saying whatever word you use to describe a policy where Chinese batteries are tariffed at 154% but if they're installed in a laptop they're tariffed at 10%.
Trump wanted to do all this in his first term but the people he hired realized it was very stupid and just didn't work with him on any of it.
I like this text, but would have expected it in "behind the paywall" , where Scott puts his very good texts - while the brilliant ones are free. This piece has a nice Noah Smith sound to it. It is 100 days and my mailbox is full with texts about how badly Trump failed and how spineless his cronies are. And how dumb and destructive those mad tariffs. - I fully agree, of course. But ... I come to ACX with unfairly high expectations. Fine text, no doubt. Actually the new Noah Smith post is not as well written, partly wrong, but kinda doing more with my neurons: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-owe-the-libertarians-an-apology
I have to shake my head at that piece; not because I am pro-Libertarian, but because really now, Noah, read your history:
"Libertarians’ focus on deontological (principles-based) notions of freedom often contradicts humanity’s moral sentiments. For example, some libertarians argue that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery; the proper response to this is “Eww.”
'the moral sentiments of humanity' have found it acceptable not alone to sell yourself into slavery, but to sell your family members. You are a poor peasant family with too many kids and the harvest was bad? Sell your prettiest daughter(s) to the local whorehouse! Prostitution is legal, but they will still get all the social opprobrium of that status!
The proper response to that is not "eww" (my deontological ass goes 'eww' about things I suspect Noah may tolerate or even like) but a defence of the dignity of the human person.
lol. Yeah, pretty much my thoughts. Though: Not only Noah believes "defence of the dignity of the human person" must lead to a ban of slavery, therefore "eww". ... Much is about the confusion of anarcho-capitalists who claim 0% of GDP for "the state" is possible and fine (David Friedman) and classic liberals/ soft libertarians like his Milton Friedman (David`s dad) who argue 10% of GDP for the state in peace time is closer to the optimum. Or even the actual pro-market parties as the FDP in Germany dreaming about 30-40% instead of the 50% of GDP we have. For Noah and most people those are all the same bunch of Neoliberals, Globalists, Turbo-Capitalists, Manchester-Liberals - and while I say "Yeah!", most people think those are synonyms for "the scum of humanity". Still, Noah does kinda admit the Chicago-school had better ideas than the golfers in Mar-a-Lago.
I definitely not saying Trump is doing things *well* but rather that he does have reasons for what he's doing. They might be poor reasons and he may be doing it terribly, but it's not just "stupid idiot woke up this morning and decided on a whim to crash the global economy". He has an idea of what he wants to achieve, and he's been telling us what that is all along: Make America Great Again. Make America rich and powerful and independent.
"Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy."
They may well. But rightly or wrongly, they are likely to say "Yes, but in other areas he has done what I want." Either as a cope, or because they genuinely care about these issues more than the economy, they could point to the supreme court and abortion, or the stance on immigration. Then they'd say "I don't like the tariffs, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for the strongman who is able to change the direction of the country in the area of X or Y."
For me, it's affirmative action. State-incentivized affirmative action is a human rights violation, that of equality before the law (as is legal affirmative action as long as discrimination in the opposite direction is banned), tariffs are not, so the former takes precedence. If whites/men were replaced with Jews in the left's ideology as the overperforming group, I expect people like Scott would be more sympathetic to the leader trying to dismantle the antisemitism, regardless of his economic policy or other stupidities.
And affirmative action and related aspects of wokeness take a strongman to dismantle against the will of the progressive elite, while as Scott wrote, tariffs can be easily enacted by one administration, and fully repealed by the next one, even of the same party. While affirmative action hopefully won't be fully restored by the next Democratic administration, as the stronger forms are unpopular with the majority, it was just that the ideology of the progressive elite made it unthinkable to ever reduce it.
Also, the negative effects of suddenly introduced, high tariffs are more apparent than the negative effects of rule by an entrenched bureaucracy belonging to an ideological echo chamber, which went on for decades, so we don't really have a comparison for it.
People stop caring so much about pronouns when they lose their jobs and healthcare and social security and see empty shelves at the store. It's like Maslow's hierarchy.
I appreciate the way this article (and Scott generally) addresses the conflict theory involved, it often seems that only the Republicans are willing to be explicit about this dimension of politics. Despite this, Scott's natural tendency to mistake theory led him off this line of thought too early.
I would like to see more reasoning about long term value - this feels like an analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma that ignores the difference between one-shot and repeated games.
Even if the Republicans do more damage than the Democrats would otherwise it may be worthwhile (for the Right) depending how much damage they do to institutions.
It will be worth rolling the dice on this repeatedly, until the Left is reformed or their institutional power erased.
As for reform, the Left just received a harsh wake-up call, now is the time. Some excellent directions have been proposed.
The left might win another election, but if world trade is desolate and the economy is ruined, they would hypothetically be unable to punish the right wing by importing millions of immigrants and relying on the dollar as a reserve currency to pump out more inflation, at least without further devaluing any welfare programs.
Wow. What a wonderful policy: make America so poor that nobody wants to live here and our economy doesn't function, just to own the libs. Please make sure to advertise that this is the American right's position for all elections going forward!
I agree with your take that if the tariffs majorly disrupt the economy this would be hard-to-ignore evidence against the populist right. My sense though is that as of now investors expect a major economic disruption but it hasn’t happened yet. Some parts of the essay make it sound like the disruption has happened or is sure to happen soon. I’d caution against overconfidence there. I still expect this administration’s policies to be bad for the economy but I think it could be a few years before this becomes obvious in the data.
I recommend taking some time to understand how the supply chains of US consumer retail businesses and actually existing US manufacturing work— if you do, you’ll have a better understanding of why predictions of relatively swift and significant economic damage are fairly common. Significant effects are already visible in shipping and trucking data, and capital expenditures ex-hyperscaler data center construction already fell to flat in March as businesses started responding to policy uncertainty by curtailing investment.
It takes something like 6 weeks for a ship to cross the pacific. Unless companies are turning back ships that have already left, it will take 6 weeks for the effects of the tariffs on supply to start manifesting (though prices might start to rise in anticipation as retailers try to conserve stock for the time when shortages start to show up).
I think this is also a good lesson on the empowerment of executive branch and federal government, for which the left is no less of a sinner than the right (and of course so are those Republicans who paid lip service to limiting executive power but walked back whenever their side had it). Piling most power under a single elected representative was bound to backfire once a "less qualified" person gets the job.
The removal of the independence of the Electoral College is another cause of the current situation. If electors were truly independent, they would have likely kept populists such as Trump out. That was basically the primary goal of the system (Federalist No. 68).
It is interesting that one of the reasons for this was the limited communication technology of the era: It was unlikely that simple citizen could gather enough information about a presidential candidate to make an informed decision, but they should be able to know who is a good judge for this locally.
We seem to be regressing to this situation, maybe social media actually decreases quality of information compared to 20th century technology.
The electoral college functioned as designed for exactly two elections, in which everyone already agreed that George Washington was the clear qualified candidate. It's not really the fault of the constitution's framers, exactly - they were designing a representative government on a vast scale without anywhere near enough previous reference cases to anticipate how all the institutions would play out in practice - but expecting it to work as designed now, with centuries of observational data from here and now a host of other representative systems of various types, is way too silly to waste time on.
We ought to be taxing targeted online advertising per pageview - per frame, in the case of autoplaying video - until it's replaced with something less malignant, as white phosphorous matches once were.
I don't buy the idea that "populism" is an ideology at all. It's just a label that gets applied to ideas that are popular but which the major parties aren't willing to support.
"We want lower taxes on the middle class and an end to compulsory weekly anal probes" say the people.
"You got it", say the Republicans, "lower taxes on the rich, and a task force to form a strategy to lower the rate of compulsory weekly anal probes by 3% by 2042"
"You got it", say the Democrats, "higher taxes on the rich, and twice as many anal probes"
If someone came along genuinely promising an end to compulsory anal probes then that would be labelled "populism", but that doesn't make it a coherently populist position, it's just an idiosyncrasy of the US that the major parties are both really keen on anal probes for some reason. In a different country or a different time it would be some other thing.
The key is that voters don't want "populists" or "populism", they just want their policy preferences to be picked up by the mainstream party. If Bush, McCain and Romney had had an Australia-style approach to border security, a Singapore-style approach to law and order and a China-style approach to industrial policy then there'd be no need for a Trump.
>The key is that voters don't want "populists" or "populism", they just want their policy preferences to be picked up by the mainstream party. If Bush, McCain and Romney had had an Australia-style approach to border security, a Singapore-style approach to law and order and a China-style approach to industrial policy then there'd be no need for a Trump.
A data-point in favour of this: Denmark, which introduced strict immigration controls in the 1990s and has an official policy of monoculturalism, has no problem with populist parties, unlike the rest of Europe.
Dansk Folkeparti was founded in 1995 and quickly became one of Denmark's major parties. They helped push Danish immigration policy to the right and have been seen as a role model for right-wing populist parties in other countries, such as Sweden.
Dansk Folkeparti appears to have 4% of seats in parliament. AfD has almost 25% in Germany and is projected to grow in the next election. RN has about 20% in France and would be much higher if France had proportional representation -- they have close to 40% of France's EP seats.
They went from nonexistent to second-largest party in less than 20 years, though they have slipped since then. The intended lesson is most likely that the other parties adopted their immigration policies and won by integrating them, rather than trying to shout them down and ban them a la Germany and the AFD.
I think you are largely correct here. US populism certainly isn't coherent, but it also isn't any more or less coherent than the established parties, outside of the established parties' apparent organizing principle of "more government and power, please". People keep trying to argue that one side or the other has these really strong themes and foundational principles in the political parties, but in practice they are really hard to spot.
True that, but there is a sort of socially conservative, economically redistributive (ie anti-libertarian) view more popular among the masses than the elites and that winds up getting called 'populist' by default.
Some popular demands would be disastrous for everyone; many others would only be briefly inconvenient for one specific group (which happens to have veto power) while benefiting the country as a whole. Office whose job it is to figure out which are which has had an "out to lunch, back in 30 minutes" sign on the door since before I was born.
I think that's right, and it's a style more than anything. I can't think of much that's more directly populist than forgiving the federally-backed loans of people you think are your voters, to remind them to vote for you - yet I suppose to some that couldn't be populism, because college grads ... er, attenders ... just can't be the target of demagogues. Because college makes you smart.
First, I don't think it's as apparent as a lot seem to deem it to be, that Vance will be the anointed heir of Trump. There's three years more to go, and any ambitious Republicans may well deem that Vance is tainted by the unpopularity and vulnerable to challenges.
Second, tariffs are terrible, but I think Trump has kind of a point going on. The AI futures scenario where the Chinese AI and the American AI are in cahoots and bring democracy to the People's Republic of China and overthrow the CCP is a lovely notion, but it's just a fantasy. There is no reason to think this, rather than a carving up of the world between them ('you own the West and play-act that democracy still exists, I own the East and play-act that communism still rules') might happen. After all, both AI are in agreement that the humans are their puppets so whatever fake form of government the fleshbags may *think* is in charge, that's all a Potemkin village.
So what if China never becomes the democracy that "open up the global markets and the lure of capitalism will be too much to resist" ideology hoped would happen? What if they're still Xi Jingping Thought and decide to flex their economic muscle due to their stranglehold on world trade in certain items?
The green energy revolution that we need to save us from climate change is heavily dependent on rare earth elements. As others have pointed out, they're not that rare - China does not have the monopoly there. Where it *does* have the monopoly is in processing:
Such industry was low-value, heavily polluting, and the West (the US) decided that it was easier and cheaper to let China degrade its environment and exploit its workers to process and manufacture the end products which could then be bought by the West.
"Environmental impact is often cited as one of the main reasons for China’s emergence as a rare earth powerhouse, but the technological aspect is less discussed. From 1950 to October 2018, China filed over 25,000 rare earth patents, surpassing the US’ 10,000. Over decades, Chinese engineers perfected the solvent extraction process to refine REEs which plays a critical role in ensuring China’s primacy. Though the technology originated in the United States, environmental and regulatory concerns made domestic rare earth development unfeasible."
The US is struggling to catch up, so as not to be reliant, but that will take years (possibly decades) to scale up processing and production to meet the existing and future needs. So what do you do, if China decides to wield the big stick?
I think Trump's tariffs are an attempt - maybe a very clumsy, blunt and ill-focused one, but still an attempt - to protect against such an eventuality. Force China to the negotiating table, get an agreement signed that they will play nicely, and that gives breathing space until the US can get its own independent supply chain set up.
On the other hand, China *does* have the big stick. And it's not very comfortable to think that US security is so dependent on the goodwill of a nation that is not ideologically aligned:
"Q3: Why are rare earths significant to U.S. national security?
A3: REEs are crucial for a range of defense technologies, including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs. For example, the F-35 fighter jet contains over 900 pounds of REEs. An Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds, while a Virginia-class submarine uses around 9,200 pounds.
The United States is already on the back foot when it comes to manufacturing these defense technologies. China is rapidly expanding its munitions production and acquiring advanced weapons systems and equipment at a pace five to six times faster than the United States. While China is preparing with a wartime mindset, the United States continues to operate under peacetime conditions. Even before the latest restrictions, the U.S. defense industrial base struggled with limited capacity and lacked the ability to scale up production to meet defense technology demands. Further bans on critical minerals inputs will only widen the gap, enabling China to strengthen its military capabilities more quickly than the United States."
"On 7 September 2010, a Chinese fishing boat collided with two Japanese coastguard vessels, off the islands of Senkaku in the East China Sea. Naturally, the coastguard arrested the captain of the fishing boat. Among the Chinese government’s responses was stopping the export of rare earth minerals to Japan.
The embargo sent Japanese industry into panic, especially the automobile sector for which rare earths for the production of magnets were indispensable; at that time Japan was totally dependent on China for nearly 90% of its imports of such materials. The incident was eventually resolved by the release of the fishing boat’s captain, but the prices of rare earths soared 10 times in a year following the incident.
...Japanese dependence on Chinese rare earths dropped from 90% at the time of the incident to 60% today. The consumption of rare earths in Japan is now half the level of what it was then. These developments have arguably protected Japan from being targeted by another embargo of rare earths in spite of a series of diplomatic problems with China since the incident.
But the dependence of 60% is still high. China’s dominance in the global rare earths supply is even higher. The challenge is not limited to rare earths. China strengthened its export controls on gallium and germanium this summer, of which it also dominates the global supply. Beijing also banned the import of waste plastics, which caused substantial disruption for countries that had depended on sending their rubbish there. While this was in a different context, it demonstrates the vulnerability of overdependence."
On Vance, I think Trump is more likely to sabotage any and all candidates than he is to anoint a successor. He doesn’t seem concerned about having a legacy or movement. He just likes being the main character on TV every day.
If we just put tariffs on China, some other country could compete with them on processing rare earths. Unfortunately, Trump put tariffs on the countries that could compete with China.
I think the major concern is that no other countries are in a position to challenge China on that; either their existing facilities are too small and it will take a long time (if ever) to scale up, or starting from scratch will take years.
In the meantime, if you want the goodies for your green energy or armed forces, where are you gonna go? And that is how China has everyone over a barrel hoping that the CCP will remain friendly to them.
Maybe the tariffs will act as an incentive for other countries to ramp up their efforts!
"Q6: Are there any international partners from which the United States could alternatively source heavy rare earths and fill the supply gap?
A6: While several countries are working to develop their light and heavy rare earths deposits, China maintains a monopoly on refined heavy rare earths for the time being. Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Vietnam all have initiatives and investments underway to bolster key REE mining, processing, and research and development (R&D) as well as magnet manufacturing. For the United States to build alternative sourcing partners for long-term supply chain security, it is important to continue to provide financial and diplomatic support to ensure the success of these initiatives.
Australia is working to develop its Browns Range to become the first significant dysprosium producer outside of China. The deposit has estimated dysprosium reserves of 2,294 tons, to be unlocked in a multistage process resulting in 279,000 kg of dysprosium per year. However, much work remains to be done to build processing and refining capacity outside of China. Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths is the largest producer of separated rare earths outside of China, but still sends oxides to China for refining. Australia is expected to be reliant on China for REE refining until at least 2026.
Working with international partners can also help to overcome gaps in technological know-how when it comes to REE separation and processing. A few countries lead the way in developing critical minerals and REE-specific R&D initiatives to support the development of the strategic sector. The Australian Critical Minerals Research and Development Hub is working to boost international R&D cooperation on critical minerals. The hub includes rare earth and downstream processing initiatives lead by government agencies working in partnership with industry and universities to boost technical capacity. Japan has the Center for Rare Earths Research within its Muroran Institute of Technology as well as a joint initiative with Vietnam to improve REE extraction and processing at the Rare Earth Research and Technology Transfer Centre in Hanoi. The initiative was launched in 2012 as Japan looked to strengthen and diversify its REE supply chains in response to China’s REE export ban in 2010."
It's very hard to know what Trump wants with his tariffs, everyone is just guessing. One can try to guess what he wants from the predicted effects of the tariffs and his public pronouncements (which are little more than make america great again, everyone is ripping us off, not much to go on). Supporters are tying themselves in knots trying to postulate a reasonable policy goal this could achieve, and trying to justify how the particular tariffs will achieve those, but Trump has set them a very difficult task this time. One thing tariffs could conceivably do is to reduce reliance on hostile powers for critical industries, needless to say a blanket 10% tariff or whatever the "reciprocal tariffs" were do not do that. Another way tariffs could work is by being a negotiating tactic to either reduce blocks to free trade or pressure other countries into some other policy goal, 10% blanket tariffs with no communication prior do not do that either. Note that these are contradictory goals, the first one needs the tariffs to be reliable and non-negotiable, so industry leaders can plan accordingly. Tariffs are a tool, not a very good tool but a tool nonetheless, if you apply this tool in a stupid way people will call you stupid.
>Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance. And although Vance supports tariffs now, that’s only because he’s a spineless toady. After Trump leaves the picture, Vance will gain thirty IQ points, make an eloquent speech about how tariffs were the right tool for the mid-2020s but no longer, and the problem will solve itself.
>This administration has made me more confident that the left is the better starting point for this salvaging effort.
So we have faction where, if they push a really disasterous policy, even their enemies think theyll drop it in *just* four years, and possibly much sooner: Trump keeps oscillating rethorically on whether or not the tariffs are for real, and presumably this will stabilise (one way or another) in less than one year. That sounds like a yuge improvement to me.
Its not like the institutions dont make mistakes - ideosyncracy increases the odds somewhat but is far from required. Rationalists talk all the time about how restrictions on housing, business, etc are holding back the economy a lot. Theyve spent literal decades pleading with the left to reconsider their stance on that front, without much in the way of results - but I guess real salvaging has never been tried, and you know, those tarrifs seem like a mistake that didnt need to happen at all, so lets keep at it.
I mean, there is a massive and very successful housing policy reform movement actively winning an internal factional struggle within the Democratic party. It's very clear how you can look at that and see a road map to reform.
Meanwhile, you're making the mistake of assuming that the tariffs are Trump's only mistake, not just the one with the shortest feedback loop. Yes, they will quite plausibly be reversed, because the blow up trade -> everyone's material circumstances get worse feedback loop is extremely direct and unsubtle. But what about the denigrate vaccines -> increased childhood mortality/ability to resist a pandemic feedback loop? What about the cripple financial regulation -> pave the way for another 2008 style overleverage crisis loop? What about the defund research -> miss out on medical and technological advances that we won't miss because we'll never know about them loop?
Tariffs are the big, glaring example that no one's gonna be able to deny. But this is the level of competence that's happening everywhere in this administration, and we're gonna suffer the consequences in a bunch of different places. And unless the right actually recommits to developing and valuing expertise this shit's gonna keep happening, which means this whole pretense that the institutional framework of the most prosperous society in history is entirely worthless is gonna have to go.
No, they are not the only mistake. My point is that the ability to correct *anything* this fast is an improvement.
>But what about the denigrate vaccines -> increased childhood mortality/ability to resist a pandemic feedback loop?
I like this example, because in fact Trump was very proud of the vaccine and operation warpspeed - his base just didnt want to hear it, and so he has mostly stopped bringing it up. It shows 1) how (not) serious the sources of your Trump criticisms are with the truth and 2) he actually did respond to feedback there as well - not the way youd like obviously, but in terms of which sides mind is easier to change, where can you have more political impact, that still speaks for him.
"I mean, there is a massive and very successful housing policy reform movement actively winning an internal factional struggle within the Democratic party. It's very clear how you can look at that and see a road map to reform."
Ezra Klein made a powerpoint presentation and a book showing. That's what people call winning?
Coming from a country with a rich history of military dictatorships, one of which originated in a guy who followed on the steps of Mussolini and Hitler, and seeing americans call Trump a far right extremist and that the US is on the verge of dictatorship is, putting it mildly, wild.
Except that this is the first time in many decades that a president has started unilaterally dismantling much of the political system and has threatened to disobey court orders. He’s also very explicitly at least joking about violating the constitution by running for a third term - if I’m not allowed to joke about bombs in airports, he shouldn’t be allowed to joke about running for a third term.
From the outside looking in it does appear he's following the aspiring dictator playbook pretty closely. I'd be way more worried if he was 40 years younger, as it is his replacement could do quite a lot of damage but I haven't seen a young politician with the right amount of charisma who is willing to finish the job, not yet anyway.
"But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever. Congressional Democrats would push back. State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would water down the orders. DNC operatives would say it doesn’t play well with [list of one million different activist groups who must be kept satisfied at all times]. Democrat-controlled media would attack the policy, and the base would rebel against it. In the end, Clinton/Obama/Harris would relent: partly to preserve political capital, partly because only the sort of person who would relent in these situations would have gotten the job in the first place."
The resistance by bureaucrats and staffers happened during Trump's first administration, which is why this time he has made sure to pack everything with loyalists (or spineless toadies, if you prefer) and outsiders. I don't get why everyone makes such a big deal out of "they're all yes men!" Well, yeah, because the first time round he played by the rules (more or less) and everyone was falling over themselves to give interviews to the NYT about how they were La Résistance and deliberately ignored, flouted, or disobeyed his orders. Why *wouldn't* he pack his administration with "when I give an order, A will obey it" types?
I'm not entirely sure it holds for the Democrats as well. Back in Obama's day, he made much of his "pen-and-phone" strategy:
"“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he said at his first Cabinet meeting of the year. Outlining the strategy, Obama said he plans to use his pen to sign executive actions and his phone to convene outside groups in support of his agenda if Congress proves unable or unwilling to act on his priorities.
“One of the things that I will be emphasizing in this meeting is the fact that we are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we are providing Americans the kind of help that they need,” he added, flanked by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell."
A Democratic leader who feels that he has sufficient backing, be that from within the party or from the electorate, may be emboldened to go around internal obstacles or to tell them "my way or the highway".
As for "[Biden's] handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing", that's not in fact a reassuring possibility. There's already some questioning about how much he was in fact in charge, how much of policy and decision-making was done by who-knows-who, and how much Harris was kept out of the loop. The idea that "yes I want an official policy on compulsory non-binary pronouns for all Department of Hamsterwheels staff, and with the President asleep at the wheel now is my chance to slip that piece of paper into the pile for the autopen" is not one I want to contemplate.
If I'm going to be ruled by those I disagree with, at least let it be the guy who was elected to the job, and not "background spad"!
EDIT: Yes, of course I'm not American so I'm not going to be ruled by Biden or Trump (though, given the outsize influence the relationship between the US and everyone else, it's nearly like being ruled by them when our guys decide national policy based on 'what did the White House do?')
But we'll be having our own presidential election later this year, and do you think I want effin' Conor McGregor as Uachtarán na hÉireann? Or even the bare notion of it?
Despite being a filthy foreign bog trotter you are pretty much exactly spot on :) . Scott could have made a coherent argument by pointing out that executive over reach and nonsense has become the norm over the past 20-30 years, with every president and/or their administration doing crazy stuff unchecked. Instead he decided to stick with the American left's message that Trump is uniquely bad and no one from the other party would ever act like that, presumably because "They are all lawless tyrants, but my side's lawless tyrants are better," is kind of obviously stupid and a brain as good as Scott's rebels.
I don't know anything about Ireland's internal politics, but scanning that article... woof, I feel for you. My mom's forebears probably made the right decision moving to the 'States.
Although I am very much not a fan of the tariff situation the end result remains to be seen, and Obama’s legacy is not good. One notes that the rough time period of things going to Wokism hell starts right about when his administration does. It seems likely that we just don’t know as much of what happened.
I recall Steve Sailer arguing that Obama's first term went fairly smoothly, and then in his second term it tilted more toward wokeness. Similarly, Trump's second term (so far) has featured worse policy than his first.
Nixon's first term was quite liberal, signing a huge amount of liberal legislation like the Environmental Protection Act, inventing affirmative action, etc. Then in January 1973 it looked like he was gearing up to be seriously more conservative in domestic policy, but then Watergate and endless foreign and economic crises happened.
The resistance in his first administration was not by career staff. It was by Trump’s own appointees like Mnuchin and Esper and Milley. Even Barr at the end. This go round is the same. Pete Hegseth has been getting knifed by his hand-picked staff members, not career civil servants. Because he’s a moron.
"Why *wouldn't* he pack his administration with "when I give an order, A will obey it" types?" - because when he gives orders that are obviously illegal, unconstitutional, corrupt, and/ or incredibly ill-conceived in some other fashion, it's *good* when some stops him. Wise men recognize their limitations. But apparently asking that the President of the United Stated be law-abiding, smart, virtuous and wise is way too much these days.
To add to what others have said, Trump wanted equally insane things in his first admin and was stopped by his own picks, eg his cycle of sec states like Rex Tillerson or MadDog Mattis. People try and sanewash Trump 1 and then use that same sanewashing to argue that we don't need bureaucratic middle layers, but it's a circular argument. "There were no bad things that happened in Trump 1 so we didn't need the protections that prevented bad things from happening in Trump 1".
This is the same argument coming from ozone denialists.
Uh, "the economic devastation" has already happened. This article should have been written decades ago. The idea that the country is doing well is because we accept the appearance of highly aggregated statistics and dismiss the reality of people's lives. The country needs to rebalance, as does the world economy. We have to have supply and demand. I'll own the tariffs, if you'll own the empty factories, the 40 people shot every weekend in Chicago, the financialization of the US economy that made a Mitt Romney while impoverishing millions. Fair trade?
It *had* a major decline for a long time, but has been headed back up since the Obama years and especially since Covid. It hasn't yet gotten as bad as it was in the mid-90s, but the recent trend has still been in the wrong direction.
There was a major decline from about 1990 to 2014. There was a blip up (to 2009 levels) in 2015, 2016, 2017, but it returned to those low levels in 2018 and 2019. In 2020 and 2021 there was a bigger blip (to 1997 levels) but in the years since it has been falling again.
Black deaths by homicide were 44% higher in 2021 than in 2019, and black deaths by motor vehicle accident were 39% higher in 2021 than in 2019, presumably due to the police retreating to the donut shop after George Floyd (May 25, 2020).
Off the top of my head, total homicide deaths (all races) were down only 5% in 2022 compared to the peak in 2021, then homicides fell notably in 2023 and 2024. We could well be back soon to low levels of black homicide deaths not seen the emergence of Black Lives Matter at Ferguson in August 2014 got all those thousands of incremental black lives murdered and splattered on the asphalt in increased car crashes.
After all, there didn't appear to be anything else going such as the crack wars of 1988-1994 or the powder cocaine war of 1980 to drive up black homicide and traffic fatality rates during the Great Awokening. It was just a colossal own goal.
Heckuva job, American elites, spending a decade pointlessly encouraging, in effect, blacks to get themselves killed in shootings and car crashes, all in the name of Black Lives Matter.
Homicides started to decline after the peak of powder cocaine in 1980, but then got really bad when crack cocaine came along in the late 1980s. By 1995, the crack wars were winding down and homicides dropped sharply and then stayed fairly low through 2014, as life in big cities came back into fashion. But then came Ferguson in August 2014 and the rise of BLM.
But BLM terrorists started murdering cops, which helped Trump got elected the first time, so cops started policing more once again. But then came George Floyd and the Racial Reckoning and the most spectacular increase in black-on-black murder in recorded history. Now, BLM and the Racial Reckoning are being memoryholed, and homicide rates are dropping back toward pre-BLM levels.
Almost exactly the same patterns are visible for black motor vehicle fatalities, suggesting the Ferguson Effect and the Floyd Effect were due to the Establishment foolishly going anti-police twice in the name, ironically, of Black Lives Matter.
What do you think that chart shows? That's for the entire Chicago MSA, the population of which has *grown* steadily since 1980. It has 20% more people than it did in 1990.
I lived there 1986 to 1999. The first half was a period of bad crime, but by 1996 it had started turning the corner.
good question, and likewise, what plan do we have for rural Americans as agricultural yields rise, and what plan do we have for white collar jobs with AI on the horizon? I don't have any perfect answers but obviously we need to have work for people or there'll be a lot of human devastation. Japan has a famously well organized low crime culture, and they keep a lot of their traditional work alive, from home building to rice farming. Just a thought.
If you're putting in place tariffs to increase manufacturing employment, and when asked how you deal with automation, if your only answer is "I don't know" then don't put the tariffs in place in the first place.
Most of the ways of increasing employment are separate from tariffs. Wage subsidy would increase the availability of jobs.
When you have to point at the worst levels of violent crime in living memory and say "things aren't quite as bad now as they were then," you're really not helping your case as much as you seem to think you are...
Seems to me that if you want to argue Mitt Romney style economics are the reason Chicago has 40 shootings one weekend, you might want to compare it to periods before that all happened.
Chicago crime was at it's absolute worst in the mid seventies. It's not about neoliberalism.
The US still has high manufacturing output. Nor is it at all obvious that people are getting shot in Chicago due to a lack of tariffs. People were famously getting shot in Chicago when Smoot-Hawley was in effect.
> But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever.
While agreeing, I would argue that the same would basically be true for GWB (the only normal Republican president I have a memory of) and likely earlier mainstream Republicans. While GWB did quite some terrible things, these were not done on a personal whim, but with broad support from both his base and his team.
I think the tariffs are actually a load-bearing part of the Right's "America First" platform, that being an homage (of not an outright copy) of North Korea's juche.
Our country is so great -- so the narrative goes -- that we can stand alone (if only we can kick those those sniveling leftists out of the way). We won't engage in countless wars or diplomatic machinations in other countries; let them solve their own problems, we don't need them, and we are withdrawing from all the international accords. We hard-working Americans won't accept immigrants; let them go back to their shitholes, we don't need them. And if other countries want to trade with us, they've got to pay a toll, or take their goods and go home; we don't need them, we can build anything we need right here at home. America cares only about Americans, and no one else, and we are so great that the rest of the world has no choice but follow in our dust.
It's a seductive vision to be sure, and from what I can tell this is the new platform of the Right. And I can't even say they're entirely wrong. It's quite possible that America had fallen so far behind that competing on the world stage is no longer a viable option for us -- so why try ?
There's so much wrong with what's being implied here, but thanks for saying that any move towards autarky should be seen as an imitation of North Korean policy. It makes everything else you say so easy to dismiss.
It scans as first-pass fairly reasonable reading of an 'America First' platform, so I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with it?
Could you elaborate or specify, rather than dismiss?
It's fairly trivial to go "ah, you're wrong" but you may need to point out how and why that is the case if you want someone else to understand it.
( Also Bugmaster at no point indicated that any move towrds autarky should be seen as an imitation of North Korean policy. That's a weird take, so I think it might behove you to read what he wrote again - I think you're reading and reacting to something no one is saying and expecting what is obvious to you ('what's being implied') to be as obvious to other people, but it, uhhh... isn't )
> Also Bugmaster at no point indicated that any move towrds autarky should be seen as an imitation of North Korean policy.
Right, I did not mean to imply this. Obviously North Korea is an autocracy, but not every autocracy is North Korea. For example, China is quite authoritarian (though not to the North Korean extent), and yet their policy is the exact opposite: they want to be closely involved in world affairs on all fronts, be it politically, technologically, or culturally (though of course they want this involvement to occur on their terms).
There’s a difference between autarky (an attempt at economic self-sufficiency with no imports or exports) and autocracy (control of the state by a single individual).
The first paragraph said that the AF platform was an homage, if not outright copy, of juche. As a policy platform, aside from the rhetoric, that's because it is pursuing self-sufficiency, which is both the definition of autarky and juche, except that calling it autarky, or isolationsim, or - to be more accurate to the actual policy - nationalism or mercantilism would not associate it with the most poorly functioning government on earth, which is obviously why he posted it. So he called it juche.
Because he hates it.
The description was made in bad faith and meant to belittle the people who subscribe to it, they were taken in by it, so seductive, poor idiots can't keep up on the world stage, etcetera. If you don't see that, it might be because you think exactly the same way and either can't or won't acknowledge your frame, but the point is, this is just an elaborate insult.
I insulted him back. I'm insulting you, too. I'll do it again.
> except that calling it autarky, or isolationsim, or - to be more accurate to the actual policy - nationalism or mercantilism would not associate it with the most poorly functioning government on earth...
I disagree with most of this. First of all, autarky refers primarily to economic isolationism; as I see it, the MAGA platform is wider than that, embracing cultural and political isolationism as well (and Mercantilism is a much more lenient form of economic isolationism). Isolationism itself is a fairly general term, covering a wide spectrum of attitudes; for example, Shogunate Japanese isolationism was very different from MAGA. Juche in particular is the kind of full-spectrum (economic, political, cultural) isolationism that is IMO most similar to MAGA. Both North Korea and MAGA do not wish to completely retreat from the world and pull the bedcovers over their heads (which is something I might accuse the Shogunate Japan of doing); rather, they wish (perhaps paradoxically) to become the envy of the world while maintaining their purity and therefore their (perceived) exceptionalism.
In addition, while North Korea is definitely one of the most poorly functioning governments on Earth, I don't know if I'd call it the worst. At least it does function to some extent. There are plenty of failed states like Somalia, or authoritarian ones like Afghanistan, which are arguably in worse shape.
> Because he hates it.
"Hate" is perhaps too strong a word, but yeah, I believe MAGA is wrong.
> ...meant to belittle the people who subscribe to it, they were taken in by it, so seductive, poor idiots can't keep up on the world stage, etcetera.
To some extent, perhaps, but bad ideas are often seductive, and everyone is taken in by some bad idea at some point. Neither you nor I are the exceptions -- unless perhaps you were to tell me that every one of your political opinions is now and has always been 100% correct, in which case I'll call you a fool. And as you might have noticed, isolationism in general and its jingoistic juche-style variant is not a new idea; it (arguably) existed all throughout human history in various forms, so its recurrence in modern times should not be surprising.
I still think you're engaged in a lot of mind-reading and, well, like I said, you're reading and reacting to something no one is saying and expecting what is obvious to you to be as obvious to other people. It still isn't. You could probably better frame a reasonable counter if you made clearer what those implications you see so clearly are.
Feel free to keep insulting me, too, I guess. Everyone needs a hobby, and creative insults are a fun way to pass the time.
There’s a reason that autarky is associated with the most poorly functioning economy on the planet - it’s because autarky cuts you off from all the benefits of cooperation with the rest of the world. This is a fair comparison.
Just because one positions oneself opposite Trump does not mean you get to call yourself moral, intelligent, and erudite--you could be just as bad...or worse. You can't tell me Trump is a moron and then pretend Harris or a mentally-degraded Biden aren't as well.
Sorry, but the "institutional middle layer" and (especially) its leaders have failed many Americans. Saying the "left is the better starting point for this salvaging effort" does not resonate with me. They--both the middle layer and Democrats--failed my legal immigrant wife over losing her green card for literally no reason. But I am supposed to be encouraged and fell justice is being done by watching these same people go into overdrive helping illegals with long rap sheets?
People keep calling Trump things like a "strongman" but what do you call unaccountable government bureaucracies, higher ed administrations, and other recalcitrant institutions that have long given up on the deplorables? At least Trump won an election. I'm liberal and progressive, but I am tired of the refusal of the Left to do nothing but call Trump names, institute lawfare, and pursue just insane stuff like they do on immigration.
Every government fails, every person fails. The institutional middle layer fails less than any alternative that has ever been tried in all of history. If you prefer fail-more rather than fail-less just because the fail-less people say they fail less, I’m not sure what I can say to you.
I couldn't come up with a more perfect example of the attitude of the middle layer: condescension, disinterest, and no solutions offered.
As someone who lives abroad had lived in many countries, I'll take issue with your claim the US is the very best. The middle class has been falling behind for 50 years and we continue to get told it's never been better!
This feels like an article that I expected to come out 6 months later when the tariffs actually affect things, but Scott published it now. That confused me, but it’s actually a good way to preregister Scott’s conclusion. He is explicitly predicting that Tariffs will ruin the economy and plummet Trumps approval. I’ll need to remember to read this 6 months from now, and see if its conclusions seem stronger or weaker.
Potable water isn't a huge part of the economy, in dollar terms, and everyone sane tries to keep it that way. Lot of other intermediate materials are similarly easy to overlook... until they suddenly get expensive enough that it's cheaper to relocate a factory than drown in per-unit costs.
If the price of drinking water rose to a point that it became a notably large share of GDP, there'd be more than just a recession - evacuation or rioting, maybe, depending on the perceived cause. Other commodities have their own tipping points where increased costs result in nonlinear disruption.
ok, sure, but people would pay 20x more for potable water than they do. nothing imported is the equivalent of potable water in terms of being both really essential and really cheap. food imports are hardly essential when we export corn, soybeans, etc
The S&P 500 is currently down about 17% from its ATH (measured in €), so people willing to put their money where their mouth is seem to be convinced that it matters about that much. I'd think that that's the best estimate we currently have of the impact.
I think it's fair to assume that € has been roughly stable in value. Do you have some better alternative in mind? Neither gold nor USD seems to have been stable during this time period.
Since the USD has dropped considerably in value in the same time period, that seems inappropriate to me – it hides about half the drop in value of the S&P 500.
1/6 of all goods and services are imported. That seems extremely important, especially for goods and services with relatively ineslastic demand, and goods and services with relatively higher percentages of imports.
There are lots and lots of goods that have some imports. Some of those surely have inelastic demand. I imagine coffee would be one that is mostly imported, and perhaps certain kinds of electronics (including things like rare earth magnets). There are probably lots of other foodstuffs.
Textiles are likely a very elastic demand - maybe not high end designer items, but the kind people buy from Target and H&M and Temu. Theres a reason these prices get pushed so low.
My view of the stock market is that it reacts like the cook in the old Tom and Jerry cartoons - "eek a mouse!" and it jumps onto a stool clutching its skirts.
I've really been enjoying Scott's writing lately, even more than usual. But this felt like an uncharacteristically partisan and unfocussed piece.
"Tariffs are bad, Trump is bad, Trumpism is a personality cult, the left is ideological" etc. etc. maybe that's all true but I can go to Noahpinion for takes like that. It's not the kind of subject or epistemic quality I'd expect from Scott.
He's rarely posted anything like that in 10 years. Let's look at his recent posts...
AI Futures, monthly links, open threads- not directly partisan. POSIWID posts- punching twitter right. Colors of her coat- not partisan. Ted Cruz, punching right. Grooming gangs, punching right. The last post that's even remotely in that vein would probably be defending Lynn's IQ estimates back in January, and even that's orthogonal though usually correlated to anti-woke.
The landmark post I recall of Scott's where he attacks the left is "You Are Still Crying Wolf", which he deliberately obscured for fear of "Trump-bots" using it to cheer. Based on the comment above yours, it's also used by people on the left as an example of a partisan attack on the left, even though it's clear from all the caveats slathered all over it that it is not a partisan attack; it's a deliberately targeted attack of one thing the left is doing.
And yet, it's perceived as a partisan attack on the left, by at least some people on the left.
I infer from this that there exist many people on the left that perceive an attack on any one thing they are doing as an attack on everything they are doing.
Remember, the same Scott who had to couch any and all criticism of the left in caveats, and who got doxxed by the most powerful newspaper in the country for having some rightward opinions they didn't like ... wrote today that it's the Right that has "an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason".
What's funny to me is that this particular hand-wringer by Scott - oh no, tariffs! Measurable reduction in trade! - is exactly in line with "You Are Still Crying Wolf", inasmuch as the horrors described are picayune and decidedly unwolf-like. I suspect Scott has other policy changes he hates more but tariffs are the current Narrative.
Yes, since Trump’s election he has stopped punching left. But for much of the past four years, he has been explicitly punching left. I’m especially thinking back to his series on class a few years ago, but also everything he has written about modern art and architecture has been written with an explicit punching left attitude.
You're very vague when describing how Trump's tariffs are going to destroy the economy. Could you provide specifics? The main thing that was quantified was how Trump's tariffs were destroying his polling.
It seems crazy to me that the discussion is about choosing between the informal incentive structures given to a person holding way too much power. Bizarro-world checks and balances.
Tariffs being set by the president is an aberrant result downstream from Congress (once again) improperly delegating power. This is easily fixable but attempts (like https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/5066/text ) will get no airtime even here, because the assumption that all the power must rest in the executive has been in the water supply since FDR. No, we must continue to increase the electoral stakes in each presidential election forever. Even during COVID we saw this, with the democrats encouraging the very president they so distrusted to invoke Defense Production Act powers.
The example of Chavez that you use shows that populism can be either left or right (or neither). Also I think that this post doesn't take into account enough that it is the failures of the institutional left that are responsible for the rise of the populist right. Yes, a right populist can do much more damage than the institutional left, but the institutional left can't do much of anything at all. In the short run that is probably better, but in the long run it may be even worse.
At this point the tariffs have mostly been suspended. It's going to be hard to make a strong political campaign about something that was briefly threatened, then rescinded, 3 years in the past.
Nope. The blanket 10% tariff on everyone is still on, there is a 145% tariff on China, and don't ask me which of the 25% tariffs on this, that or the other from Canada and Mexico is currently active. That's still more than the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the 1930s. And what's even worse is the uncertainty - no one can make any sound investment decisions, because it's completely unclear what tariffs will be three months, let alone three years from now. And that uncertaintly is not going away as long as Trump is in office, and probably not for years after the US has returned to some semblance of sanity.
We have a body that is supposed to keep the president in check. But instead, they keep signing over their powers to the president. In this case it was the Trade Act of 1974, but it's part of a larger pattern that could use some examination.
Cultural lefties and bureaucrats are inherently biased toward feminine personality types: Consensus-based, risk-averse, afraid of accountability, skeptical of rigid results-based hierarchy.
An organization dominated by this personality type is incapable of radical, independent course correction. You need masculine (ambitious, disagreeable, agentive) personalities to do that, but these personalities have been actively alienated from the Left.
How about we have collaborative and productive course correction instead, where we move deliberately and effectively, rather than flailing radically and ambitiously and independently?
No, the problem is that the remaining old school Republicans need to get a clue on tariffs. Ricardo's Comparative Advantage theory has demonstrably failed bigly. With Subsidized Outsourcing, we freed up the Rust Belt -- to rust. We freed up workers to go on welfare and take excess quantities of recreational drugs. We freed up Rural America to host our own gulag archipelago.
Trump has done a terrible job of explaining the problem to the academically inclined, and so the academically inclined gaslight themselves against the reams of data.
So I'm doing Trump's job for him. Ricardo's theory isn't working because it doesn't take into account the income tax, FICA, or the modern welfare state. Income and labor taxes without tariffs constitute Subsidized Outsourcing. I published the details years ago: https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/free-trade-isnt
Now I will agree that Trump's plan to use the threat of tariffs to become the Master Negotiator on Crack is a bad idea. I believe we should just set tariffs where they should be in our national self-interest and mostly let the world do as it wishes. Wall St. won't like it but Wall St. isn't the real economy. This is about creating more home court advantages around the world vs. optimizing the system for the benefit of a few multinational corporations.
Trump is a genius. He's made the left cheer for free trade and globalisation, and decry higher taxes.
Seems to be some confusion about various economic systems. Here's a handy guide.
Various Economic Systems in Child-friendly Form
Entrepreneurial Capitalism.
Your dad offers you $15 to paint the fence. You offer your little brother $10 to paint the fence. He agrees, and you pocket $5 for being the middle man. All the money stays in the family.
Globalist Capitalism.
Your dad offers you $15 to paint the fence. Your little brother says he’ll paint the fence for $10. You then go around to all the kids in the neighborhood, and find one who’ll do it for $7.50. You pocket $7.50 for being the middle man, $2.50 more than before, but now only $7.50 stays in the family.
Socialism.
Your dad offers you and your kid brother $7.50 each to paint the fence. You do most of the work and all the cleaning up while your brother plays video games, and any painting he does is terrible, so you have to fix it up before dad gets home. You still get paid the same. At least all the money stays in the family, but you now hate your kid brother. You vow you’ll also do a crap job next time, since you get the same whether you work hard or not.
Communism.
Your dad orders you to paint the fence. You ask him for $15, but he blows his top, and yells that you’ll do it for nothing for the Greater Glory of the Family! You’re mad, so you do a bad job on the fence, which you notice had been recently painted anyway, so it was pointless. Your dad says it will teach you quiet obedience in future. All the money stays in the family, but it’s all in dad’s pocket.
Green Economics
You tell dad the fence looks tatty and needs painting. He tells you paint is artificial and full of evil chemicals, so just leave it in its natural state. Soon, the fence rots and has to be replaced, at great expense. Lots of money flows out of the family.
Fascism / Chinese Socialism.
Your dad orders you to paint the fence, and if you do it right, he’ll pay you $15. He watches you every step of the way, telling you which paint to use, where to paint more, how fast to go, when you can take a break. By the end, you’re exhausted, and your dad tells you he’s cutting the amount to $7.50 to teach you to do a better job next time. If you do it the right way next time, he’ll consider paying you more. All the money stays in the family, but half is in dad’s pocket.
- Your little brother, realizing that he can't make money from painting, gets into buying/selling baseball cards with his time instead, which is more fun (he gets interested in baseball stats!) and earns him $15 profit from other kids, in the same amount of time. The family walks away with $22.50, more than the $15 you started with.
Alternative Green Economics: you figure out that a hedgerow would be more expensive than a can of paint in the short run but will never need to be painted, and persuade you dad to pay you to plant it. You get a little more money, you work really hard, and your mom likes the songbirds that build a nest in the hedge.
Your little brother complains that the old fence ended up in the landfill and that this makes you a hypocrite.
I don’t think you can assume Trump just hands power to Vance in 2028. And yes, I would be willing to bet on it, conditional on Trump still being in power.
I agree mostly with this post, but I think a problematic sentence in its premise is this one: "Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor." It reads like a throwaway line intended to disarm a broader attack on the strength of Trump's base, but I don't think these two issues can be completely ignored. I'm not sure whether Scott is just claiming that a floor exists, or that it has been reached. If the former, then sure -- anger over every single conceivable issue has a floor, and these are not unique issues in that respect.
Taking deportations first: many leftists (among them, me) are concerned that deporting first visa holders, then marginalized citizens (small children of undocumented immigrants) are test probes into how far Trump can go. We worry that if the courts allow (or can't stop) these deportations, he will move farther, attempting to deport US citizens who are his critics or perceived enemies. He's said that he'd like to deport violent criminals who are US citizens. At what point does Gen. Mark Milley become a "violent criminal"? After all, Trump has accused him of treason. And if he can get away with deporting someone like that, what about Robert Reich or Heather Cox Richardson or Rachel Maddow? And, if that succeeds, what about some current member of his cabinet who falls from grace? So, at a minimum, I don't think the floor on anger about deportations is anywhere near being reached, but also, I think the logic of runaway deportations and denials of constitutionally protected rights is absolutely inimical to his base.
As for DOGE, the problem here is that it has already caused structural damage to many systems that are popular with his base. Social security is the most obvious one; access to national parks and services for veterans are others. Decimating FEMA so that emergency relief for the next, utterly predictable, natural disaster is threatened? It's not clear that this damage is reversible. It is not beyond imagination that Trump and Elon Musk might have a falling out at some point that's severe enough that Trump seeks to deport Musk, who, after all, holds three passports.
I agree with one of the main thrusts: tariffs are an idiosyncratic bolt-on for Trump, one that he could abandon without dismaying his base. But the damage may already have been done there too, and the rest of the MAGA ideological structure consists of interlocking pieces, many of which are mutually incompatible unless viewed through the lens of "liberal bad", which itself is not sustainable long-term, and those interlocking pieces comprise multiple potential failure modes.
"marginalized citizens (small children of undocumented immigrants)"
Again, the difficulty here is that the small children are not being put on planes all alone (as some of the headlines would lead one to believe), they're being deported along with non-citizen/illegal immigrant family.
The horns of the dilemma here are (1) you can't deport a 2 year old on their own! then (2) you are deporting a citizen child with the non-citizen family members!
If you can't split up families (because only a monster would do that) and you can't leave 2 year olds in the country on their own (because everyone can see the problem with that), then the answer is either "deport the entire family" or "let the entire family stay".
The 'no human is illegal' set want option 2. The 'close the borders' set want option 1. Highly unsatisfactory compromises like "let a legal family member apply for custody of the citizen minor" please nobody.
I understand and agree that there is a dilemma, but I take issue with a couple parts of your analysis. The option to place the citizen child with a documented relative wasn’t rejected because it would please no one – the administration flatly rejected the father’s plea to keep the child in the US, stating (without providing evidence) that the mother requested that the child accompany her to Honduras and assuming (in a way that might or might not be tinged with sexism) that it was only appropriate to deport the child with its non-citizen mother. And there are surely many more nuanced positions Americans hold between the two poles of “no human is illegal” and “close the border”. I think you’re wrong that that middle compromise solution would please no one. Furthermore, breaking up a family isn't nearly as monstrous as choosing to enforce a deportation order on a family where one of them is in the middle of cancer treatments. I have yet to see any evidence that Trump is at all concerned about being viewed as a monster.
But my main point is to put the deportations in their historical (history of the last 100 days) context. Trump started with purely undocumented people convicted of crimes, expanded deportations to non-citizens with visas, and then to US citizens who are minor children of non-citizens. In each case he pushes the envelope a little farther. He always (so far) has an explanation/justification, but do we take those justifications seriously if we’re looking fundamentally at a tactic for expanding executive power? He is also, by the way, probing at the boundaries of the power of the courts, first by saying that there is nothing he can do to bring Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia back and then, yesterday, saying that he could but he won’t. Both of those can’t be true at the same time; one of them must be a lie.
The unitary executive is pretty old and not at odds with checks and balances. It merely requires the checks on the executive branch of the federal government to be in the other branches (and SCOTUS has ruled against Trump).
Something that’s worth exploring in more depth: the specific ways that the Trumpist style of right-wing populism has damaged a set of feedback mechanisms that would have either prevented “Liberation Day” or helped the administration self-correct more quickly.
The most relevant:
1: Prioritizing sycophantic cult of personality compliance over other governance qualifications. Scott Bessent is the only really competent major economic advisor in Trump Admin II, and he clearly is still both bound by a need to flatter the president’s ego and unable to divert his boss away from disaster. (Significant deterioration since Admin I, where Mnuchin and Gary Cohn were able to keep the admin on track to maintain macroeconomic stability.)
2: Carelessly destroying the specific kinds of state capacity that you need to implement your governing agenda. Both good industrial policy (ie: targeted use of tariffs and subsidies to build critical industries) and trade agreements (the “deals” which Bessent is trying to use as a face-saving road out of this mess that he can sell to Trump) are very technically complex and require a lot of smart bureaucrats to implement. DOGE’s cuts to the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration, NIST experts on digital trade rules, the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service, the State Department’s basic diplomatic functions, and even USAID’s international development personnel have all made trade negotiations much harder to implement.
3: Abandoning the rule of law and using economic policy primarily as a tool for rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Business leaders are afraid to talk frankly about the likely effect of tariffs because they’re hoping for carveouts or scared of lawfare— in turn, delaying market and political pressure to change course.
"But most people agree prosperity is better than poverty; if the tariffs cause economic devastation, it will provide a hard-to-ignore sign of the current administration’s incompetence."
Do you have clear points on what you consider economic devastation?
A 30% drop in the S&P 500?
Unemployment of 10%?
Sustained inflation over 7%?
Whether the tariffs cause economic devastation is fundamentally a prediction of the future. So what, quantifiably, are you predicting will occur in measurable outcomes? And if those things don't occur, will you change your mind on Trump and the salvageability of the left?
Export-driven carbon emissions down? As someone elsewhere on substack pointed out the other day, call it that carbon tax we were never going to get and all of a sudden he's a hero.
I don’t think anyone but the most nihilistic degrowther (or nihilistic America Firster) thinks that Trump’s economic policy is achieving anything good right now.
"But tariffs aren’t a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform. Other right-populist leaders like Orban, Bukele, and Modi show no interest in them. They seem an idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s, a cost that the rest of the movement pays to keep him around."
But doesn't MAGA = Trump? Tariffs might be the only policy Trump has been consistent on for the past several decades (as part of his larger dislike of trade deficits; I'm not sure if he's been strongly opposed to immigration the whole time).
Tariffs may not be integral to right wing populism in a global context, but they're integral to Trump, and I think Trump is integral to right wing populism in the US.
Is the argument that the processes of globalism and of the wealthy enriching themselves without regard for the working class (unless it's charity that gives themselves yet more happy feelings) or for the future of their country - could be unwound in any degree, easily, frictionlessly, without any pain?
When Obama called for "insourcing American jobs" were his efforts painless? And being painless, were they effective?
> Is the argument that the processes of globalism and of the wealthy enriching themselves without regard for the working class
The argument is that globalism raises living standards. The wealthy do enrich themselves, the not-so-wealthy enrich themselves too. Living standards are higher today than have ever been previously. Free trade in goods and services enriches us all.
How marvelous and cool that it should be so simple as that. Processes so often aren't so that is unusual.
Certainly there has been a lifting of those standards in some parts of the globe, though one may differ about how much of that is the legacy of others before us now gone which will be impossible for the West to sustain.
And I can see that that would have more meaning depending on where you are.
But the word enrichment is an interesting one.
It has been thought by many in the West, especially conservatives (conservationists being the OG and finally last conservatives) that one is "rich in relation to what you can afford to leave alone".
Now we are told that that is a discredited idea. In fact, so threatening is it to the money men, that we must now hold nature in contempt, as something we must be hostile to.
(See such empty-headed nastiness from the GOP as the LIZARD act.)
See, locally to me: we must drown the stretches of rivers we hadn't drowned. In fact, we must do that against property rights, formerly a shibboleth. We can no longer preserve open space because we need to bring in the entire "developing" (? - is it developing here then?) world and put them in Lennar homes.
It is interesting that becoming rich means one can no longer hold the values that your people, up to and including some rich men (!), once held, quite naturally.
It is interesting that it means one no longer may entertain ideas about what a good life for the citizenry might mean, because that discussion is so fraught to people's financial portfolios.
It seems very constraining to be "rich" in that way, and I'm not sure past people would quite understand it.
I was merely stating what the argument is. One may of course hold views contrary to this, or have conflicting values.
As a proponent and beneficiary of globalization, and a member of the "working class" (as opposed to the leisure class?), and having lived a portion of my life in regions behind high trade barriers, I see free trade/lower tariffs as welfare enhancing. The wealthy prosper under all regimes. There are fabulously wealthy people in Putin's Russia.
Also note what is considered punitive when imposing sanctions on a country. We don't say "we are going to force free trade on you", instead we say "we are going to impose an embargo".
If free trade is ruinous, perhaps we ought to impose free trade on lran, Syria, and North Korea. That'll show 'em :)
"Unilateral free trade" with China seems to mean, we will get a lot of "almost free" stuff from you, to fill our landfills with, because we have been *told* that's how rich people operate - disposability, that's how you become rich - and in return we will pay you later on, a lot! - or haha, maybe we won't, how will you make us?
Even a garden variety pro-globalist economist with no apparent interest in cultural issues, can have a naughty thought like this, occasionally:
Standard of living has gone up for all levels of income in the United States for decades. They have gone up even more outside the west, particularly in China and India, but also in Africa. We absolutely can preserve open space, but it is better to preserve wild space than to preserve the “open space” of farmlands and front yards.
The fact that the New York Times revealed his identify publicly, and the fact that woke people criticize his interest in racial IQ correlations. These are much more personal things for him than broader policy.
I was specifically addressing the question of what made Scott personally think that the Biden-Harris team was nearly as bad as Trump 1. I claim it’s because Scott associates the Biden-Harris team with the people who did these mean things to him, and he over-emphasizes the importance of these things because they happened to him personally.
Altruism is the idea that threats to other people’s livelihood and freedom can sometimes be as important, or even more important, than threats to your own. Scott identifies as an altruist (and aims to be effective - even though he, like everyone, falls short of the ideal).
But how can you be an *effective* altruist if your freedom of action is inhibited by outside forces? There's no shortage of posts by Scott detailing the ways regulations pushed by the left have hindered his and other people's attempts at selfless altruism. The pursuit of any goal ultimately benefits from increased capabilities and agency. And that requires neutralizing direct threats to your agency. Instrumental convergence at work.
Assuming Trump, along with personnel such as Bessent, do not have a coherent plan to reshape the inevitably shifting worldwide economic order was your first mistake. Thinking the polls aren't fully manipulable was your second. Badlands Media has great coverage of the Sovereign Alliance working together to move away from unipolar world government to a multipolar model of multiple spheres of influence. But to understand the underlying economic reset being aimed at, go listen to the latest three episodes of Gold, Goats n Guns, with Tom Luongo. All of these financial professionals understand exactly what the Administration is trying to achieve, why a reset is absolutely necessary, & believe Trump has a very good chance of pulling this rabbit out of the hat. BOLO for the Mar-a-Lago Accords.
Does this Sovereign Alliance consist of Trump, Putin, and Xi, maybe together with Orban, Erdogan, and Modi, trying to emphasize national disagreements over global cooperation? It seems to me things were working much better under the global unipolar framework, and that is the obvious target for anyone who cares about human flourishing, since we are all stuck in the same reality with each other.
This article is dripping with emotion and only makes sense if you think tariffs are bad. I believed the same until a few years ago. There are economists out there making rigorous models and arguments in favor of tariffs. I urge you to postpone judgment and go back to the first principles of trade to understand the reasoning. Ultimately I would have chosen a tax on incoming capital rather than goods, but they can serve the same end economically. That is Plan B. Trump is pursuing tariffs because they give him political leverage over those countries to help us stop China's massive trade surplus. If we choose plan B (my preference), we simply push the problem onto everyone else. I am okay with that.
I agree that the default "tariffs-bad" assumption is surprising here.
Some reading recommendations for those who are interested in understanding what tariffs are being used for here: Michael Every, Brent Johnson, and David Woo. I know there are many others.
And they all have different takes on whether or not this will WORK, but at least they're engaging with what the strategy is likely to be.
Thanks for the recommendations. I again urge people to postpone judgment and watch their emotions while they study. Under what conditions are tariffs good or bad? It depends. Right now the best defense presented for free trade is "It's econ 101 that free trade is good. Look at this video of Milton Friedman talking about pencils." This emotion and smugness is hurting their arguments. I'm looking forward to a more rational national discussion of this topic.
Let’s start by saying that the default view is that if two people want to trade something because they both think they will get something out of it, that is probably good. Can you say anything non-emotional to provide a counter to that?
I think it would be usual for both parties to be able to express with certainty what the other party is getting - and when. Not really sure that that can be set of unilateral free trade, in the case of the US and China.
I’ve read a good chunk of those 3,000,000 pages of Moldbug prose, and I’m pretty sure he’s never, ever answered the question of “What if the absolute dictator uses the absolute power badly” in a satisfying manner
That's why Moldbug's ideal system of government is _accountable_ monarchy, like in a joint-stock corporation, where the board or its equivalent can oust the monarch.
Regardless, this is a problem for all systems. What if the oligarchical establishment institutions believe stupid things and make capricious and arbitrary decisions? (spoiler: they already do, all the time, with disastrous consequences)
The solution to this is to align the interests of the government with the interests of the people and of the country, so it has no incentive to use its power badly. The best way to do that is to embed states in the same market processes that align the incentives of normal businesses, but there are other alternatives.
The difference with monarchy is that distributed power is less responsible, because it is less visible, and that monarchy is inherently a more capable and competent system of government.
Also, the more absolute a monarch's power is, the more he "owns" the country, and people take good care of their property.
- What if the monarch simply refuses to be ousted? What mechanisms of control are there for the board to maintain their authority? It seems most likely you get a constant threat of civil war between the board and the monarch. This uncertainty, in turn, would also raise the threshold for what’s worth the risk for the board to object to.
- What if the monarch’s bad behavior is profitable? For instance, killing all of the homeless would both be massively immoral and substantially raise property values. There’s no incentive for the monarch not to do this.
- If we’re going to take this US administration and the previous one as a microcosm of monarchy and oligarchy respectively, I personally prefer oligarchy, and it is not even slightly a contest.
- Even if you somehow aligned the monarch’s incentive with the public, who’s to say the monarch will actually follow those incentives? People do stupid shit that is against their own incentives all the time, and political leaders are no exception.
- Even if a monarchy is more capable and competent (and not say, staffed with a bunch of incompetent sycophants) if the things the monarch does are bad, being better at executing them is a bad thing!
- I suspect very many people who were considered property would strongly disagree with the notion that people take good care of their property.
Under democracy/institutional liberalism/oligarchy/whatever you want to call it, there are barriers and limits to the amount of harm that can be done. Suboptimal policies, even bad policies, will happen. But they’re not going to, say, crash the global economy on a whim. Even Yarvin would admit that oligarchies are very stable.
Under absolute monarchy/neocameralism/fascism/whatever, all it takes is one guy being evil and/or stupid, and pretty much anything is on the table, no matter how colossal the harm.
"Don’t let them get away with this. Although it’s true that tariffs owe as much to Trump’s idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology."
Why, if a given populist doesn't support tariffs for their own sake?
Your argument seems to be that right wing populists are bad and therefore must be made to take responsibility for Trump policy, regardless whether they supported them or not.
Populists want to enable sovereign singular authority. Whether or not they support the idiosyncratic views of a sovereign singular authority, every particular sovereign singular authority will have idiosyncratic views. If your platform is to create a sovereign singular authority, then you should own the idiosyncratic bad things a sovereign singular authority does, even if you oppose those things on the substance.
Supporting the bureaucracy by contrast doesn’t lead to idiosyncratic issues - it has an ideological substance to it.
Even if your definition of populism (or suppprt of bureaucracy) were accurate, it doesn't allow that all populists everywhere must support whatever one populist leader does, nor does the idea that bureaucracy is ideologically neutral.
I’m not saying that populists must *support* what one populist does - I’m saying they must *own* the fact that their preferred governance structure will inevitably lead to such things, even when they personally oppose those things.
I’m not claiming that bureaucracy is ideologically neutral - I’m claiming the precise opposite, that it is ideologically substantive, and therefore it will generally lead to policies that supporters of bureaucracy support, unlike populism, which has to own up to the fact that it will lead to policies that particular populists are opposed to.
"Populist politicians tend to enact populist policies, and bureaucrats tend to favor bureaucratic interests" sounds a lot more underwhelming when you put it that way.
But that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that populists ask for an unconstrained authoritarian figure and thus often get policies that have no substantial overlap with the interests of the populists themselves, while people who favor bureaucracies tend to set them up with substantive rules that often lead the bureaucrats to implement a particular substantive policy, regardless of which particular bureaucrats are in place. There is a fundamental asymmetry in these two types of governance.
> Why, if a given populist doesn't support tariffs for their own sake?
Because the system that populists have chosen to use to decide policy is "whatever Trump says is good, is good." Endless trashfires is the inevitable consequence of such a system, unless you have been lucky enough to select a truly virtuous dictator, and I don't believe such figures appear in democratic systems. Someone like Deng Xiaoping or Ahsoka or Alexander the Liberator can, IMO, only appear in societies where people are unaccustomed to democracy, because Good People can rise to the top in authoritarian systems, but Good People do not try to smash functional democracies to concentrate personal power in themselves.
I would asterisk here that "populists" who are willing to work together with others who will contest their thinking and come to decisions that benefit the public, using others' domain expertise to pick out good policies, are good. But at that point I'm not sure what's left of "populism" other than vibes.
Why wouldn't the populist right simply blame economic decline on Biden, the Democrats, or the Left in general? I would expect a majority of Republicans would adopt that view.
It's fascinating to watch people publicly admit that they don't understand why tariffs are or ever would be a good strategy, who then default to "he must be an idiot". Literally, your move here is "I don't get it, so he must be stupid."
I'll be kind and grant that your lack of comprehension here probably speaks more to your desire to think the opposition are idiots than any true stupidity, but it is fascinating to watch otherwise intelligent people purposefully fail to understand or inform themselves.
Some recommendations for those who are interested in comprehending: read David Woo, Michael Every, Santiago Capital (Brent Johnson), and others who have a good bead on what is happening and why. Here's a good introduction: https://substack.com/home/post/p-156607450
They all have differing opinions on whether or not it will WORK or whether or not it is WORTH THE RISK, but at least they have an operating theory as to what the tariffs are actually attempting to achieve.
Until you engage with the actual ideas on this topic rather than partisan poll-watching (leaving out how Trump's still beating Biden's approval poll numbers--an odd omission given your framing of "historically low"), I find this to be embarrassingly beneath your normal quality of work.
I'm not sure I understand your point. It sounds like you're trying to imply that "tariffs," "lack of due process," and "populism" should all be tied together and equally condemned. I can agree with universally condemning a lack of due process, but the other two concepts (tariffs and populism) need quite a bit more nuanced discussion.
Nah, "due process" is exactly "tariff" in people's mouths now. The other day featured an excellent back-and-forth here on that subject, by clear-minded commenters who probably mostly "condemn" the same things you do. I have now seen it infect all manner of things. For instance, on a rather tedious umpteenth discussion of public school, wherein some folk said that classrooms need to be made orderly again, somebody piped up to say that would deny kids "due process". The term has lost its limited meaning, and is now an empty slogan.
Defining terms is more important with political topics than most others, because words get abused and warped more often when they're utilized in "verbal battle" (AKA politics).
So you're probably right that all these words mean entirely different things to different people right now, and in order to be clear about what we intend to support/condemn, we should probably just taboo them (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words) and find another way to state a position.
I am of two minds on tariffs. The link you provided did not aid comprehension of how the current tariff policy it is supposed to work.
My understanding of these things suggests that trying to achieve what I imagine are the goals of America First using tariffs without also raising income taxes is a fool's errand.
My understanding of the tariff policy is that it is a means to an end; meant to flex muscle and "even the playing field" for American manufacturers. But mostly, it is meant to defang China in particular, which has become the world's manufacturer by gutting, stealing, and undermining every other country's manufacturing through shadow government funding.
I do not know what role tariffs play long-term. But I think they are the opening economic salvo. I expect other economic weapons to be utilized going forward in order to get favorable trade deals with nations that are willing to exclude China from trade entirely.
We'll get some insight into whether or not this theory is accurate if the details of the rumored trade deal with India get leaked sometime soon. If the remaining tariffs with India aren't largely reciprocal and very exclusionary to China (and China's continuing trade partners), then you'll know I'm wrong about this.
That list of names is just the same grab-bag of arguments that “tariffs” are good either as economic weapons to wage war against China, or just shake down allies for short term gain, or as long-term indirect subsidies for strategic industries, or maybe whatever used to provide jobs 50-100 years ago, or just for thrashing trade in general because a strong dollar is actually bad because “trade deficit”…
They’re all advocating for different kinds of tariffs in different ways for different reasons, with different amounts of credibility and viability over competing solutions (if the problem in that specific argument even needs one).
You can look at the admin’s erratic actions as an attempt to unify them into a single coherent theory because tariffs are great so all arguments for tariffs must be great, or just throwing everything with “tariff” at the wall hoping something sticks. The rollbacks point to the latter. Not much difference either way, and not a glowing endorsement of policy acumen either way.
I don't see anything here that I disagree with strongly, except maybe your using the term "rollbacks" to suggest that the recent "break" in tariffs is anything other than a mafia man who's been holding people out the window and decides to pull them back in and ask "do you want to do what I told you to now?" Sure, you can view that as inconsistency (is he going to kill them or not??), but I'd argue the more important thing is: was the message delivered, clearly, in a way that will be understood?
Again, I'm not even advocating for this position. But Scott's essay basically takes it as a given that "tariffs=always stupid/bad", and I think that's...not correct and poorly thought through.
Further, I think the absolutely abysmal reasoning and argumentation from otherwise sharp people like Scott has completely ceded the ground for others to make explanatory appeals to people like me (non-economic experts) about this stuff. I wish there were more "experts" engaging honestly with those sources I mentioned. If those sources are, indeed, just a "grab-bag" of tariff-apologizers, then I wish the only available counter argument to them that I've seen wasn't "tariffs are always stupid, because the experts all say so."
Sorry, but I don't just take the experts' word for it anymore. You have to win me over with more than consensus, because you've been terrible lying liars, and because I suspect you have personal reasons to hate tariffs (I don't have any stock market exposure, but I bet they do!). And the louder and more defensive they get about this, the more I suspect them of emotional, intellectual, and/or financial insecurity on this topic. Sadly, Scott included; this article was alarmingly bad in a way that signals to me his thinking on this topic is compromised for some reason or other.
Have you got any suggestions on economists who are writing about tariffs critically from first principles, and within a historical context? Economists who are aware of what Trump might actually be trying to do, but still critical? I'd love to read them if so.
Sorry why is it necessary to go to substack comment sections to access the the hidden plan behind tariffs? Why can't Trump just tell us, does he enjoy the world believing he's a moron?
Maybe there's actually a deep reason that his plan will only work if people don't know what it is? In which case, shouldn't you delete your comment to avoid letting out the secret?
"How much damage will his inevitable idiosyncrasies cause, compared to the devil-you-know of the institutions?"
I believe the Gods of the Copybook Headings rather famously weighed in on this particular question over a century ago.
Combined with the widespread eagerness right now to Nuke Chesteron's Fence from Orbit (it's the only way to be sure), it really is striking how little apparent conservatism there is in the U.S. current "conservative movement."
"Near historic lows" is misleading here. An approval rating in the mid-40s is very typical. Every president this century has had an average approval rating in the 40s (Bush 49%, Obama 48%, Trump #1 41%, Biden 42%) as did about half the post-WWII presidents (Truman 45%, Nixon 49%, Ford 47%, Carter 45%).
Approval ratings get a lot lower than this -- historic lows would be an approval rating in the 20s, which is where Truman (22%), Nixon (24%), H.W. Bush (29%), and W. Bush (25%) bottomed out. Even those levels didn't end up crippling the relevant political movements.
You can only make the near historic lows argument by narrowly restricting the reference class to the first 100 days of a presidency. Maybe that comparison tells us something, but it does not forecast crippling blowback. Honestly, I don't think the right should be concerned that Trump's approval is so low; I think the left should be concerned that it's so high.
I agree with most of what you say, but the point that half of the postwar presidents had average approval ratings below 50 isn’t quite as significant as you suggest - it is almost exactly a list of the presidents who served less than a full 8 years (the three who did serve a full eight years were Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton, and Kennedy and HW Bush are the only other ones who didn’t serve a full 8 years).
Disapproval ratings have never been this high for anyone else though. Polarization gives a huge boost to both approval and disapproval (which is why we usually look at met approval).
The folks who routinely say they won’t order from Amazon, or if they do, must couch it in an apology (couldn’t get it elsewhere) - how do they react, to yesterday’s news about the 20,000 UPS workers laid off due to a “pullback from” an (I guess, now shakier) Amazon?
Ha, I remember once reading how much of SNAP and WIC dollars were spent at Walmart, and it seemed more or less that we were now a "company country", and whether that country was the US or China was unclear. I guess now Amazon fills that role.
It's funny to think how Walmart did what it did to small towns, with the government's help; and now you hear Walmart described as the "heart of a community" lol and Amazon is demonized because it will never be any community's heart.
This is a progression that you kind of have to have lived through, to view with suspicion, I suppose.
I try to minimize Amazon purchases because of the out-of-control counterfeit goods problem. Functionally, much of Amazon is now the same as Temu or AliBaba but at higher prices.
From Wiktionary, "said to allude to an old alleged practice among mountebanks [basically "snake-oil salesman," one who sells dubious medicines], who would hire a boy to eat (or pretend to eat) toads, which many had considered poisonous. The toadeater (or 'toady') would pretend to writhe in pain, until the quack gave him some 'medicine', and then try to impress upon the crowd that the boy was cured."
Other countries have nice things. The reason (IMO) that the US can't have nice things isn't because nice things don't exist, so it's got to be a difference between the US and the rest of the world. The obvious answer is corruption (specifically, the ability of people with money to purchase legislative decisions, court decisions, etc.), which is entrenched in the US. If you actually want to have nice things, I think the primary solution to that is anti-corruption measures.
The US has had nice things in the past. The federal government has, in the past, done poverty reduction programs, extensive research funding, Social Security, Medicare - so many popular, useful programs (many now potentially on the chopping block). People went to the moon. In the last 50 years, corruption has become increasingly entrenched (Buckley v. Valeo, for example, paved the way in 1976), and the nice things have magically vanished. I think the corruption is causative.
Saying "the right leads to cults of personality, the left leads to cults of ideas" is kind of missing the point: in countries with functioning democracies like Canada, the impact of both is pretty limited. Cults of ideas do happen, but it doesn't really feature majorly in Canadian political life. Cults of personality do sort of happen, but they aren't really ever very destructive, and they have a short shelf life.
The anti-corruption strategy I've seen proposed that seems most promising to me is a constitutional amendment to put limits on election spending (other countries have limits, but the Supreme Court has abolished them in the US [1]), but just prosecuting things that go against current anti-corruption laws is probably a good start.
[1] Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC, FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, etc. There are technically some limits still in place, but they're not very useful because most spending is done by independent expenditure groups, which can spend as much as they like.
It's funny how populist parties in Europe keep increasing their vote shares (not in every single election but that's been the trend) and yet people are confident they'll never ever take power.
Universal health care; not having people get sent to gulags; much less gun violence; a real social safety net; government spending on infrastructure; stronger protections for civil liberties. All of these (with the possible exception of the sending of people to gulags) are caused by small groups of people with lots of money purchasing policy that favors them. To look at the example of gun violence more, gun control was much broader in the US before the Supreme Court decided to do away with a bunch of it. That happened around the same time that the people choosing judges (the senate and president) started being heavily influenced by large-dollar campaign spending. It continued around the time that Supreme Court judges started accepting bribes (or, as they call them, gifts).
I think it's important not to lose the forest for the trees. In countries with minimal corruption, governments tend to make good decisions. In countries with extensive corruption, governments tend to make very poor decisions. Corruption is overwhelmingly more important than ideology in determining how good the decisions of a government are.
Restrictions on campaign spending would limit both left-wing and right-wing groups and individuals. The likely effect would to move economic policy to the left and social policy to the right.
Then why hasn't it happened in other places? Populists tend to come to power when people feel like all of the existing options aren't working. The reason that happens is generally (though certainly not always) because corruption is stopping the government from working. In places where the government is working fine, people vote for boring, mainstream candidates.
People who wanted universal healthcare and gun control had candidates they could vote for. Donald Trump was not one. (Yes, I'm aware that many Trump voters are left-wing in their economic ideas, but they voted for Trump despite, not because of, those ideas.)
America is the richest large country in the world, Trump was not a reaction to imaginary Dickensian poverty by people who wanted more social democracy.
Even though universal healthcare is very popular in the United States, it hasn't happened (upwards of 65% support if you phrase it as "medicare for everyone"). Corruption explains why this hasn't happened perfectly: health insurance companies have spent enormously to prevent it from happening. In other countries, policies that are enormously popular generally happen. In the US, a minority of candidates in primaries for one of the two parties supports it, but enormous amounts of money get spent to prevent them from even getting nominated.
If you read accounts of people who deconvert from religions or ideologies, often they report that the problems were in the back of their heads for a long time before they took the plunge and said "I don't believe this anymore."
Ethan, I bet you're already aware that exit polls from the 2024 showed that Kamala Harris won the highest-income groups. You might be aware that, despite Elon's billions, Kamala, not Trump, got more in campaign donations. You've convinced yourself you can make these facts fit with your ideology. The wealthy "corrupted" and "broke" the system, and thus poorer people turned to Trump to "fix" it. But this is based on completely ignoring what actual Trump supporters are saying. "The system is broken," Trumpers say, and then you ignore everything they say after that and substitute your own ideology. The Trumper who complains about crime, covid lockdowns, or DEI is transformed into a warrior for universal healthcare. The middle-aged woman screaming about how "baby murder is satanic" turns into a worker mad that billionaires are taking a larger share of national income. It's true that many people voted for Trump because they thought he would be better for the economy. But they wanted lower egg prices in the privately-owned grocery stores, not more government programs.
No matter how bad it gets, I believe the populist right will find a way to blame Hunter Biden's laptop, the Deep State, the stolen election of 2020, Antifa, wokism, DEI, and so on.
The right wing rage magine will broadcast constantly that despite President Trump's heroic efforts, the evils that Joe Biden - the worst President in history - unleashed upon this nation are now manifesting themselves. But He will keep fighting to make America great again. He alone can do it - especially if you buy his memecoin. And his hat. Granted, it will cost more now. But only buying Trump NFTs can stop the trans agenda. And the Left hates you and wants to...
Bah. They re-elected him *after* January 6. I don't think anything - even economic pain - will deter the majority of them from their cult. He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue...
Can someone ELI5 why tariffs are bad, but not sales taxes / VAT? I see many 10% tariff opponents swing around to endorsement of the 20%+ sales tax rates common in Europe.
I dislike the tariffs, to preface the usual hatred, but I also dislike sales taxes.
The main issue by far is stability. If you can't predict if your profit margin is 5% or 50% for a specific supply chain configuration, you will make much worse decisions, and delay long term investment.
The second issue is how easy it is to avoid. Let's say tariffs go super duper high. So now you have no trade, just an internal economy, very bad. If you tax all income, people don't want to starve so they will work less but not stop working. If you just tax trade, people can trade internally a lot easier, so you will have a lot less economic useful activity per dollar of generated revenue.
I would be fine with tariffs if Trump worked with congress to pass a law. This insane will he/won't he is destroying the international economy and trust with our alliances.
We literally overthrew the conservative party in Canada in less then a month.
I sometimes think of "how bad could President Bernie Sanders have been for the economy" and it would be something like announcing a 20% surtax on all businesses. It would still have been watered down to 15% by the time Congress was through, and then phased in over several years, with at least several months of lead time before the first dime was collected.
That would be bad. But it would be so preferable to what we have now.
In general, when two people agree to a transaction, whether it’s a contract in the labor market, or a rental lease on property, or a purchase of a good or service, it is a sign that the transaction is making both of them better off on net. It might be by a small amount, or it might be by a large amount.
When you put a tax of 10% on all transactions, you will stop all transactions that provide less than 10% net benefit to the two parties, though the ones that provide more than 10% net benefit will still continue (with the two parties giving up some of their benefit to third parties). When you put a tax of 10% on some transactions but not others, you will displace some people who are currently making transactions with net benefit of 11% to make other untaxed transactions instead with a net benefit of 2%. Replacing an 11% net benefit transaction with a 2% net benefit transaction is worse than turning an 11% net benefit transaction into a 1% net benefit for the parties plus 10% benefit elsewhere. Thus, economists usually recommend that it is best to try to tax everything equally rather than to tax some things differently than others.
Tariffs tax things differentially based on where they come from. Sales taxes don’t do that, but they still target only final sales and ignore all the steps up until that. VAT taxes every step in the process equally. Thus, economists argue that VAT is the best kind of sales tax, because it is the least distortionary (though low taxes are better).
There are some exceptions to this overall argument, notably when a transaction either has costs or benefits to some third party who doesn’t participate, or is made by parties who have incomplete (or incorrect) information about the benefit they receive from the transaction. Thus, orthodox economic theory advocates targeted taxes on particular transactions that cause harms to third parties (like transactions involving the emission of pollution, whether air or water or noise or whatever) and targeted subsidies on transactions that cause benefits to third parties (like education, healthcare, and infrastructure), as well as taxes (or even bans) on transactions where one party is often systematically misled (like drugs, gambling, and sales of used vehicles without detailed records).
Thus, the simplest economist recommendation would be a hearty regime of taxes on “vices” and taxes on pollution, and subsidies for education, healthcare and infrastructure, paid for by a VAT on everything else, equal to income tax. Broad based sales taxes and income taxes would be better than targeted tariffs or taxes on particular forms of income.
One meaningful difference (aside from stability issues) is that VAT is on added value, while tariffs are on the entire value (so multiple link production chains get taxed on the whole instead of marginal value at each step).
(This doesn't apply so much to sales tax - although at least it's only ever put on finished goods, not intermediate goods - but then I don't really see people arguing they're efficient like I do with VAT)
They're distortionary. Sales tax, VAT, income tax, capital gains tax, etc, are generally purposefully structured in such a way as to hit basically any replacement option identically - "don't have to pay taxes" is a HUGE incentive to do X thing instead of Y thing. Tariffs are the opposite, structured to encourage X thing instead of Y thing (here, domestic good instead of foreign good). The reason we import things from abroad is because it is easier and cheaper than making them domestically; the reason this is good for the economy overall is for the same reason there are no tariffs for goods sold between California and Texas.
This sort of works until you realize that the left also destroyed the economy with COVID lockdowns. If you think tariffs will be worse for the economy than COVID lockdowns (and the associated inflationary policies needed to stave off total collapse), that is a perfectly fine argument, but you didn’t make it. You simply assumed that tariffs will be catastrophic and didn’t address the lefts biggest economic failure at all.
COVID lockdowns at least had something like a clear criterion for their end, namely the reduction of case counts below some threshold. They should have been clearer about precisely what level that would be, and they should have been better about locking down indoor dining establishments rather than allowing the brief mask filled, and not locking down outdoor activities. But it was still clearly a short term policy, unlike the tariffs, which are claimed to be permanent (apart from momentary flailing about turning them on and off and on and off again several times over the course of a week).
Directionally agree, but I'm not actually convinced that if Obama had woken up one day anti-Ecuador he would have gotten much pushback from the left. He unilaterally ordered executions of US citizens and didn't get much pushback from the left.
When did he unilaterally order executions of US citizens? I believe he ordered strikes on certain enemy combatant positions, some of whom turned out to be US citizens, but that seems very different from attacking a particular citizen (which itself seems much smaller than just arbitrarily turning on a country).
"I’m not a fan of either the ideological cults of the left or the personality cults of the right. In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way.”
Trump is the third party—just not in name. He hijacked the Republican brand like a hostile corporate takeover, gutted its old executive board—Romney, McCain, Cheney, the whole Bush-era establishment—and slapped his own logo over the entrance. It’s not the GOP anymore, not really. But it’s also not something entirely new. It's an insurgency that seized the host but refused to leave.
So while pundits wring their hands over whether America will ever allow a third party to rise, they miss the joke: it already happened. The Trump movement functions like a third party within the two-party system—tribal, messianic, at war with both the technocratic center-left and the patrician right. It doesn’t need a new name; it already owns the one that mattered.
People resist calling it a third party because that term implies independence, a fresh slate, maybe even some idealistic notion of balance. But that’s fantasy. There’s no neutral corner in empire. America is structurally built for two parties locked in a death spiral, a kind of binary blood sport powered by debt, dopamine, and demographic anxiety. Introduce a third, fourth, fifth party—it won't matter. The gravitational pull of American politics will twist them into the same orbit: spectacle over substance, branding over policy.
Trumpism didn’t break the system. It exploited it perfectly. That is the third party: not some libertarian dream or green experiment, but a cult of personality that found the soft spot in the hull and flooded the ship.
Trump ran on “a third party platform” — he was elected on “a third party platform.” No one would shut down the border, no one had the political will to do it. No one would challenge the spending in DC, no one would challenge the tariffs the US was paying. Trump did, rightly or wrongly. A third party might do all of these things or what is the point of a third party?
What we have now is a scrambled signal—yesterday’s ideologies run through a blender, served up with a straight face. One minute you're watching far-left icon Oliver Stone cozy up to Kremlin handlers, peddling a story about an Obama-backed coup in Ukraine as if it's a reasonable cure for the crisis, and the next you’re wondering if satire even exists anymore. It’s enough to make your neck crack from the ideological whiplash.
Meanwhile, the nightly punditry grinds on, clinging to its tired script of angels and demons. They need their narratives color-coded: blue for virtue, red for villainy. If the lines blur, the whole business model collapses—no more sponsors, no more outrage cycles, no more dopamine drip from righteous certainty.
And so what’s left of the bourgeois left? Reruns of moral clarity. Performative dissent. A desperate need to simplify a world that’s gotten too tangled for their slogans. When Oliver Stone starts sounding like a Tucker Carlson monologue translated into Russian, you begin to realize: we’re not in Kansas anymore, but nobody seems to have the courage to admit where we are.
What tariffs was the US paying that Trump challenged? Hasn’t he led to a drastic increase in tariffs by starting several trade wars and tearing up several free trade agreements?
I’m confused at what work you intend that comment to do. Are you implying that I slept through something that should be obvious to people? Or are you implying that I have woken up to a truth you don’t want me to realize? Or do you just think sleep deprivation is too common and everyone could use more sleep?
There were an awful lot of people, including the editors of the Economist, Andrew Sullivan, etc. who were all ready for a new golden age and have gradually come round to saying actually this is bad. So having read Hayek and Burke is no protection.
That reads like Noah Smith's "maybe it could work out" https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-best-case-scenario-for-trumps while being aware there was tremendous risk and the odds weren't in their favor. All the good things are couched in "maybe"s and it's still full of known bad things.
"(the left also needs to cultivate certain vices to sustain its institutionalist strategy; Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality)."
This feels to me like major recency bias. The Tea Party was The Thing on the right before MAGA and that was ideological.
>Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance.
Very bold to assume Trump voluntarily retires or passes the torch. My prediction is that he will make some kind of attempt to run again, and even if the courts successfully shut it down it will cause him to go around fuming and not being at all helpful in trying to elect his replacement. He may endorse Vance and even speak at his rallies, but he'll be obviously unhappy and throw in the usual narcissistic caveats about how it'd be better if people could elect him etc.
I've seen several people mention that tariff power is supposed to be Congress's to exercise, and Congress could constitutionally reclaim it at any time. I believe this is true.
I also believe it is unlikely to happen. I think that there are Republicans currently in Congress who believe the tariffs are either a net benefit, or are a net benefit for their districts, or are at least perceived as such. They could take back the power, but it would be on principle alone - declaring you're reclaiming a power, only to then do exactly as the President would have done, will look like posturing.
It's also dangerous if the tariffs prove to be a net detriment. If Congress took this power back and levied tariffs anyway, they'd suffer the political blowback instead of Trump. Letting him assume the political risk is probably safer for Congress, especially when he wants it anyway.
I believe the Democrats in Congress might believe tariffs are good or bad, but primarily see them as an issue on which to attack Trump. This overrides any considerations about the upsides or downsides of tariffs - or any other issue, for that matter. In fact, the same probably goes for Congressional Republicans - what point is there to taking a stand on tariffs on their own merits, when that Congressperson will be primarily be seen as a Trump supporter or opponent?
So the only Congresspeople who worry about tariffs qua tariffs will be those unusually close to it - those in districts or states with a lot of business dependent on foreign trade. Some of them have probably already addressed the problem by quietly securing some sort of exception to the tariff, or a subsidy.
The rest of Congress will assess this on party lines, because this, like any issue, is currently not as perceptible a threat as the threat of the other tribe winning. Tribalism is the biggest threat; not tariffs. Any arguing along tribal lines - such as which faction ought to take the blame - will similarly not move the needle.
This can be taken as a fully general argument against working against those institutions though, even the ones we all agree are bad (e.g. the million interest groups preventing anyone ever doing anything). There needs to be a correct generalization of who to tar with tariff failure that's more general than "anyone advocating tariffs right now is bad" but narrower than "anyone who ever wants to reduce bureaucracy or process in any way will immediately crash the economy".
This is an excessive amount of analysis for a man who is denying reality right before our eyes. He incorrectly disputes a man's tattoos, despite clear evidence to the contrary. What’s concerning is that he has had a couple of weeks to address his mistakes, but has refused to do so. His tariff policy is obviously problematic. Is it intended to raise revenue in place of income taxes? Support domestic industries? Or serve as leverage in the fight against fentanyl?
I could go on and on with his worrying behaviors. Why are we still treating him like a normal president in a normal political debate? Are we still maintaining this charade because people don't like Democrats? There is a solution for this. Impeach Trump and let Vance run the country. Or impeach him too and let some other Republican take his place. This isn't a game. We could also call for a third party and recognize that Republicans in Congress are spineless cult members. The point is that this is dire and we don't have to fall for the bi-polar trap. There are alternatives if we dare to call for them.
It would be sad indeed if Wendell Weeks, who Google tells me is the CEO of Corning Company, with $21,600,000 in compensation last year, had to face this dreadful tariff problem. I imagine you could easily persuade the people in the towns where its factories used to be, that it is right and good that they should never have a factory in their town again. Probably the more so if you gave them all a few pieces of free Corningware lol. Absolutely free! Take it!
If you want Corning to build more factories in the US, you need a stable industrial policy for it, instead of random tariffs coming and going and changing week by week.
What are the inputs to a building a Corning factory? Where do they get the lumber from? Where do they get the heavy machinery from?
Well, we’ve had a *very* stable industrial policy all this while …
And yet here we are.
I read about the town of Lancaster OH in the book “Glass House” and was struck by the fact that, when one of the old glassworks burned down in the 20s - the townspeople raised the money to rebuild it themselves.
That sort of irrational behavior must puzzle an economist no end.
If you want Corning to build factories in the US, you need a deliberate policy to get Corning to build factories in the US.
To build a factory you need to buy lumber and steel and glass and concrete and robots and computers. Where do those come from? Tariffs just *increased* the cost of a bunch of those things!
Yeah, and yet - that doesn’t explain why the non-retards like Obama were unsuccessful in making it happen. Or maybe he was a retard in some other, less maximal way.
I don't know that Obama undertook a specific policy to get Corning to build more glass factories in the US.
It certainly won't happen by accident. It would need to be deliberate policy, and making *this* the deliberate policy would probably mean making something *else* not the deliberate policy. Saving the glass factory is at odds with saving the lumber farms. "Let Canada sell us their trees and we'll worry about the fiber-optic factories" is a valid policy choice. "We will tariff all the things and then get jobs" is a nonsense policy choice.
Tariffs provide a concentrated benefit to one group of Americans at a cost to all other Americans in a net-negative way. You can target something *SPECIFIC* for maybe good policy reasons, or maybe just as a handout to that one group. But if you just tariff everything then no one is getting the benefit and everyone is just eating the losses.
The absolute worst way to get more factories -- like if you sat down in a laboratory to be as dumb as possible -- is to make building factories more expensive. It's pouring a bag of salt on your garden and saying "well at least I *tried*, what did you do????" What I did was not pour a bag of salt on the garden.
I would support a subsidy-and-tariff program to help the US build a drone industry. Congress would be very believable in passing a law to make that long-term industrial policy, because drones are now as essential for national defense as airplanes were just before WWI.
Note that when you commit to such a program, some policy choices become very stupid. Such a program would, as an absolute must, not tariff the inputs to building the drone factories as we're trying to get them built.
And it turns out that even though *you* think things have been bad for these decades, they’ve actually been good, and the people of Lancaster and Corning have better lives than their ancestors did 80 years ago.
"that it is right and good that they should never have a factory in their town again"
It's not like the factories were dismantled brick by brick and shipped away. The rest of America decided not to be a captive market for these people's goods.
What I love most about this moment, is how the left turns out not to hate the billionaires quite so much as they claimed. Indeed, the left is *perfectly* aligned with Wall Street and whatever term of art we're using for corporate raiders these days.
There's something about that word "poors". That definitely wasn't always part of the lexicon. The sound of it is very cringey, not unlike "bodies" for people. I'm surprised how much the young left obviously likes the sound of it.
I've noticed it's an affectation of the young redditers, who often speak it as though in solidarity but I think it must reveal a certain loathing because I don't think normal people would refer to themselves that way.
Turns out that when one party becomes the party of mediocrity, anyone who cares about, idk, anything higher than an 8th grade reading level will move to the other party.
Also, lmao "The left" like that's a coherent concept. It's pretty obvious MAGA is a death cult beholden to one man. But who is the manifestation of "the left"? Explain to me in detail what Bernie and Biden have in common
Americans could buy American any time. They didn't because they would rather become more prosperous than support random people in the Midwest. They'd rather buy cheaper goods than subsidize dying factory towns. This isn't a policy preference of the billionaires, it's a policy preference of the vast majority of Americans, most of whom do not live in dying factory towns and care about them about as much as they care about dying African children - which is to say, not at all.
I think the right wing populist case for tariffs is that it's a way to funnel money and jobs to Trump's working class/lower middle class base. Successful politicians want to reward loyal members of their coalition. Just handing out money is one way to go, but certainly favorable policy, jobs, and protection from competition is another. You could argue this is bad, and I wouldn't disagree, but I think in general it's pretty normal political behavior.
The problem I see here is twofold:
1. You need to convince or at least present a plausible case that these tariffs will be good policy for the US as a whole, not just a disguised payoff to MAGA voters. Trump couldn't be bothered to do that. There was some jabbering about trade deficits but it was all pretty sophomoric and thus probably did more harm than good.
2. In order to convince businesses to invest in the US in ways that will take advantage of these tariffs, entrepreneurs need to be convinced these tariffs will be durable--that they'll last through a couple different administrations so that any investments made in domestic manufacturing will have sufficient time to claw back the upfront costs and get into positive ROI territory. To do that, you need some kind of legislation, I would think, that would accumulate vested interests (ie people willing to spend some money lobbying to defend it) and Trump couldn't be bothered with that, either.
The result, I think, is going to be all pain, no gain.
There has been a bipartisan movement for decades to try to stigmatize this sort of behavior, and I think it has been succeeding, in that these sorts of things have been getting less common. They are still too common, and unfortunately more common when the recipients of the giveaway are credentialed elites or union members than ordinary people, but it’s unfortunate that the response has been to do this more shamelessly rather than to redouble the fight.
Fair point. It’s kind of a prisoner’s dilemma situation, though, because while it’s in the best interests of the polity that such behavior be stigmatized, it’s in the best interests of any individual politician or faction to defect and try to develop a political patronage network under whatever auspices are available.
"...some of it is an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason."
This seemed really common on the progressive left during the Great Awokening. I think this is less an anti-bureaucracy strategy than a social-control strategy.
"Some of it is hard-forged antibodies to believing the media or expert class about anything."
Conservatives have traditionally trusted a different subset of experts than liberals. For example, the median left-of-center Democrat does not, in fact, trust the consensus among economists (expert class) on economic policy, or among nuclear engineers/physicists about the safety of nuclear power or GMOs. I think a better model here is that people like experts who say what they want to hear, and since much of the expert class is liberal or progressive, liberals and progressives more often like what they hear from the expert class than conservatives.
And of course, when you're chained to one charismatic but not very informed guy's whims, than any expert who might contradict the boss needs to be silenced or cast out of the movement.
Or maybe there is in fact a plan and tariffs are critical to it and there's an alignment in the leadership about it?
(This plan likely being to draw a clearer line between US and China areas influence and use tariffs as a starting bargaining point to accelerate the divide and push more players to the western sphere of influence - which is sort of evident from the recent moves.)
As much as I appreciate Scott's posts, his political commentary sound superficial at best.
So the plan was to put tariffs on literally everyone outside the US, in an attempt to make clear that everyone outside the US should be part of the pro-China coalition? That seems like a dumb plan.
This obviously (even to me, a totally non-Trump supporter) is just a starting negotiation point to force everybody at the table. Like do people seriously think this is the endgame? Like do people seriously think other people are THAT stupid? I think this is a very counterproductive angle.
First, I don't think we WANT everybody at the same table. We should have private talks with each country. The right time to have a talk with everybody at the table is after you've already talked to everybody one-on-one.
Second, Trump may know how to make deals, but he doesn't know how to run a business IMHO. He doesn't understand how essential predictability is before people will invest in anything. I don't know how he doesn't understand this, given that he's worked on real estate deals; but he clearly doesn't. He's already undone everything his tariffs might have done, by making it clear that he is outrageously unpredictable. I predict investment in the US, by Americans or foreigners, will not go up until Trump is gone.
Third, if you want to build a trade coalition, you shouldn't start off by proving you're a bad, unreliable trade partner.
Fourth, I think Trump's intelligence is very unevenly distributed. He is some kind of idiot savant who does one thing well--projecting a personal image that helps him bully people into deals. But he's impermeable to other opinions. He doesn't think before he opens his mouth.
This seems bizarrely antagonistic to JD Vance, the smartest person in the top levels of that government and the only politician in my lifetime that I've seen make worthy rational arguments in the public sphere, of a level that I would expect to find from a good commenter at this blog. He regularly makes coherent, multi-paragraph responses on social media that use words appropriate to discourse among highly-educated. people. He's probably no more than 2 degrees of separation from the rationalism-sphere. I can't imagine any of his potential 2028 opponents being able to discuss any of the topics we talk about here intelligently-- not necessarily because they aren't capable, but they clearly have never used those muscles or have dulled their wits with nonsensical strings of talking points tailored to their idiot voters. Anyone running for high office will have 16-20 years of schooling and yet the only other high level pol I've heard who approaches Vance is Obama, and you had to go hunting for niche radio appearances to find Obama discussing any topic like the Harvard Law Review president that he was.
Also, when he tries to act like Trump, he can't pull it off. Trump insulting Zelensky sounded like an arrogant asshole, but strong and confident. Vance chiming in sounded like a bully's sycophant. His bad acting skills make him and Trump both look stupid.
What's the point if he never uses his intelligence to do anything positive? The only thing he stepped up to do that I can think of is getting Marko Elez his job back.
I think the Online Right really melted his brain and he's all in for toaster factory nationalism, which will be worse than Trumpism, though fortunately also less popular.
Our justice system recognizes that people who are intentionally malicious are worse than people who are accidentally malicious. This is why intent is a key part of many criminal proceedings.
Trump can at least be forgiven for being a moron. He doesn't know any better. But JD does. So when he mounts a bullshit defense of why due process doesn't matter -- one that is shrouded in the trappings of intelligence -- we should recognize him as an incredibly dangerous person who should not be let anywhere near anything resembling real power.
Since the OP is about institutions versus the tactics populists use to get around them, worth pointing out that the institutions of experts didn't exactly cover themselves in glory w/r/t due process this decade. I was a county government lawyer, and before 2020 I never would've considered that a county or state executive would issue an order to close churches and forbid public assembly on no legitimate statutory authority, without regard to particularized facts, and without any filing in the circuit court. That is a crazy unprecedented abuse that I never could have imagined even being an option. Or that bureaucrats acting on the advice of experts would be micromanaging from week to week what businesses could remain open and which aisles of a hardware store had to be roped off. The institutions and experts attempted to control almost every human interaction for weeks, months and in some cases years, with no due process. I'm not gonna listen to the bureaucrats complain about due process when they were happy to ignore the constitution when they had a reason *they* felt was sufficient cause.
If both the institutions and the populist figureheads are willing to ignore due process when it suits them, for different reasons, which is more dangerous? At least the individuals have accountability, you can mark them out and say of them as you just did that they're dangerous and should be deprived of power. What do you do to purge totalitarian instincts from the technocrats? Who do you call out? They can all say it wasn't really their decision, hiding behind the institution as a whole.
Vance is in the wholly unremarkable position for a VP of having to carry water for the actions of his boss. Kamala just took an L in large part because of her refusal to violate that norm. We've seen what it takes for a VP to buck that norm, and it's "no, I won't use this purely ministerial function to install a slate of fake electors who everyone knows is fake."
It seems like most of your gripes are specifically about COVID handling. I'm sorry that you felt that the government acted beyond principles during COVID. Obviously, putting a dictator with the intelligence and temper of a child is not the solution. JD going to bat for said dictator makes him complicit.
But on the COVID stuff specifically
> before 2020 I never would've considered that a county or state executive would issue an order to close churches and forbid public assembly on no legitimate statutory authority, without regard to particularized facts, and without any filing in the circuit court. That is a crazy unprecedented abuse that I never could have imagined even being an option. Or that bureaucrats acting on the advice of experts would be micromanaging from week to week what businesses could remain open and which aisles of a hardware store had to be roped off. The institutions and experts attempted to control almost every human interaction for weeks, months and in some cases years, with no due process.
There were never lockdown mandates coming from the _federal_ government. And attempts to put pressure on businesses to implement COVID safety policies through OSHA were shut down by the courts. Any actual COVID policy implementation was essentially state by state. Which is why the states that did not want to have lockdowns more or less didn't, and the states that did want to have lockdowns more or less did. I spent time in California, New Jersey, New York, and Florida during COVID and let me tell you that the stories in each place were wildly different.
And though we may disagree on this, COVID is empirically much more a national emergency than *checks notes* being invaded by tren de aragua? Are you serious? Tell me with a straight face that these are the same thing.
Emergency powers are obviously to be used with a lot of discretion, but there is a strong case that COVID cleared that bar in 2020. You can see the effects of COVID in life expectancy rates and all cause mortality across the US. I can count on one finger the number of diseases that led to a death in the family for *everybody in the extended Indian American community*. It was the third leading cause of death in 2020 in the America and was responsible for 1 in 8 deaths even with the various attempts to put it in check! It was Trump who first declared the national emergency!
So let's not draw false equivalences or pretend that these two cases are the same. America came out of COVID virtually unscathed, with an extremely strong economy relative to the rest of the world. In that context, people who clutch pearls and claim that state and local governments acting to prevent a national pandemic is the death of all civilized society at the federal level and therefore allow tyranny need to get a hard reality check.
Covid-related NPIs may not have saved any lives at all, or at best a few in the very early states by shifting cases a few weeks back out of the initial spike. It is at least a legitimate empirical question that is being looked at, and the NPIs are not looking great. The Trump admin no doubt could cite a bunch of people killed by Tren de Aragua on our soil, and it will not match the total killed by Covid but it may well exceed the number of lives that were saved by the expert-backed NPIs. If the only way to distinguish between these cases were that you believe Covid was a real case for disregarding due process and South American gangs aren't, then you aren't really defending due process, you're defending your policy preferences. One hears that free speech only counts when you defend speech you hate, or due process only counts when you extend it to the worst criminals, because otherwise you're just doing what you'd do anyhow. If you suspend due process when you feel threatened and the only people complaining about it are your outgroup, you have lost the high ground.
While it is true that the states decided most of this, it is also true that as a practical matter most operations that were large enough to require liability insurance were having to meet standards that were handed down from the insurance company, who in turn were influenced by the CDC. And many local governments deferred to the CDC or other similar institutions, despite a series of pronouncements from it that were clearly divorced from reality and put truth second behind inducing the desired behavior.
I didn't vote for Trump, I haven't voted for a major party candidate since Romney because I have a minimum standard of intelligence, integrity and competence. He isn't the reckoning I'd have picked. But I have hope that JD might be worthy, and to this point I don't consider his rebuttals to the media over this due process matter to be particularly noteworthy given what his job is. There are legitimate questions even from the judges involved as to what level of process is required, some reason to think a cursory review is sufficient, at least he's not *quite* telling me 2+2=5 which I had to endure from Fauci et al for 2 years. This is not a "Mike Pence has the courage" kind of moment that he needs to balk at to retain credibility.
The question on whether JD is just performing his duties as VP sounds a bit much like 'just following orders', but I'm more interested in the COVID stuff so lets just move there.
> If the only way to distinguish between these cases were that you believe Covid was a real case for disregarding due process and South American gangs aren't, then you aren't really defending due process, you're defending your policy preferences.
I continue to be confused about what due process was lost or not followed. If we're on the same page that this was mostly state run, that the experiences of different people very closely tracked the overall values systems of the states they were in, and that Trump is the one who was responsible for the entire first year of COVID, what are you mad about exactly?
If its specifically CDC recommendations, that doesn't really seem like a due process violation. The CDC's job is to give out recommendations about these things! It's not a violation of due process (at least, as commonly understood) when OSHA goes 'hey you should have hard hats in construction sites' or when EPA goes 'hey you shouldn't pollute rivers'. Why is it a due process violation for the CDC to go 'hey you should be 6 feet apart and wear a mask' any more than it is to say 'hey restaurant employees should wash their hands'?
Put another way: if the CDC is not supposed to give out this kind of guidance, what IS the CDC supposed to do?
> despite a series of pronouncements from it that were clearly divorced from reality and put truth second behind inducing the desired behavior
I agree that Fauci et al fucked up massively. The biggest issue w/ COVID handling by the government was that for the first 6 months the so-called 'expert class' were the exact wrong people to listen to. But...this whole period was Trump administration! And after the first 6 months (roughly June 2020) the 'expert class' was back to being right about most things!
More generally, I think you shouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. COVID was an extremely _uncertain_ phenomenon. It's not fair to evaluate the policy positions that people ended up advocating for with post-hoc analysis, you have to do it from the fog of war. Even now, there are a lot of people who feel that the NPI responses to COVID werent severe enough, which means even in retrospect it's not at all clear that these were bad policies. Certainly not so bad that you should feel like you were being *lied to by the government* or that *everything is fair game because the constitution is dead*.
You might claim that COVID policy supporters 'are divorced from reality' but that's just the same epistemological problem that we started with. The people who supported COVID NPIs -- myself included -- thought and still think those were the right decisions on the economic / lives value trade off. Like, maybe you didn't lose any family members, in which case good for you, but I and many others did. And its worth considering why every other country in the world ended up with roughly the same NPIs and roughly the same implementations -- is *everyone* stupid? Obviously not; the NPIs that you critique clearly worked in many places (Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam), while statistics in places that had no NPIs (Sweden) are not good.
(Also, when we say NPIs, I assume you really just mean 'lockdowns'? I can't imagine you mean 'remote work' or 'masks' or 'stimulus checks' since those all range from extremely popular to just being a bit of an annoyance)
Interesting analysis, but I think it lets left-leaning institutions off far too easily. The idea that liberal bureaucracies act as effective guardrails against idiosyncratic leadership doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Under Obama—who ran on transparency—the administration increased FOIA request denials, set records for secrecy, and used the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined. I dealt personally with the Department of Education during that time and found it to be hollowed out—staffed with salaried bureaucrats who failed to execute even basic mandates. And that wasn’t a fluke. It was systemic. The institutional protections you describe may have existed once, but many now function more as symbolic shells—resistant to reform and self-preserving above all else. Their inability to self-correct has arguably fueled the rise of populism, not merely failed to contain it. Yes, populist movements carry real risks, but so does betting on a decaying technocracy that no longer protects public interest with any consistency.
Some turn to Trumpism out of anger, whether at factory closures or their kid being trans or the desegregation order they're still punishing the Democrats for fifty years later. For others the attraction of populism is because it's fun. Listening to podcasts, sharing salacious memes about "Epstein's island," dressing up in costumes, attending rallies, telling racist jokes, and enjoying the parade of low-class culture.
This is way too generous. Most voters don't know how to evaluate a truthful economic claim from an untruthful one. That's not their fault, they just aren't econ experts in their day job.
So when you have one candidate who says things like "coal country isn't going to come back but we can create policy to help reskill you" and the other candidate openly lies and says things like "you're going to be super rich from how much coal people are going to mine" well, which way do you think coal towns are going to vote?
This country has simply never had a politician willing to be so brazenly corrupt. It's breaking all of our preexisting systems, because those systems operate under the assumption of at least some amount of good will and restraint on the part of political elites. In the face of a candidate who is willing to go on stage and lie, and a media apparatus that is essentially a propaganda arm for that candidate, you flood the epistemological systems of a general populace that simply is not equipped to know better.
I am starting to think that "Furiosa" was the most prophetic movie of last year. It was partly a movie about corrupt institutions vs chaotic despotism. The main villain, Dementus, is a charismatic barbarian who just looks, pillages, and destroys. The heroine ends up working for Immortan Joe, who is a cruel tyrant, but at least maintains the local infrastructure.
I don't think this was a conscious decision on George Miller's part. He was tasked with making a prequel to "Mad Max, Fury Road" a out the original of Furiosa. Since Furiosa worked for Immortan Joe before the events of "Fury Road," the only way to make the audience root for her was to introduce a villain who was even worse than Immortan Joe (who was the main villain of "Fury Road"). Still, it ended up creating an interesting story about oppression vs chaos.
I don't think it's specifically right-wing populism responsible for bad economic outcomes. It's just populism. Populists have stupid economic policy preferences most of the time. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders also have extremely stupid economic policy preferences. The difference is they would stop if some court told them to stop and/or they would consult a bunch of friendly lawyers to spend weeks or months constructing legal arguments for why their policies are in no way illegal or unconstitutional. They would ask the PR people how to frame the marketing of the idea, etc. The defining difference isn't that right wing populists chose a moron. George W. Bush was also pretty much a moron. Populists *usually* choose a moron if the definition of moron is "person who has really stupid economic policy preferences." Normies have *extremely* stupid economic instincts driven mostly by relative status anxiety (as opposed to lack of material suffering) and zero sum thinking (as opposed to understanding that cooperation and trade is mutually beneficial and that you can just make the pie bigger).
The thing that makes Trump different isn't his stupid populist economic preferences, but that he is a low inhibition authoritarian who doesn't care about rule of law. The reason he has managed to turn his party into a cult of personality is because he and a huge percentage of his followers are postliberal (or where never liberal in the first place). Before Trump everyone on the AOC to Ted Cruz axis was still a liberal in a legal sense (rule of law, free elections, etc.) no matter how stupid their economic policy preferences were or how popular they were with non-elites.
This is a partial indictment of stupid populist economics (the left-wing version also took a hit because of inflation but isn't down for the count. I don't want a stupid left-wing populist, but you may need one to truly discredit this stuff for a generation or two). It's a wholesale indictment of the *postliberal* right just like the backlash to woke was an indictment on the postliberal left.
As a more or less centrist libertarian, I'm feeling pretty dang exonerated and "I told you so" right about now about both sides of the aisle.
"Before Trump everyone on the AOC to Ted Cruz axis was still a liberal in a legal sense (rule of law, free elections, etc.) no matter how stupid their economic policy preferences were or how popular they were with non-elites."
I think you're forgetting sanctuary cities, the CHAZ, Biden's extension of the eviction moratorium, and the southern US border, for starters.
Who is out there celebrating CHAZ right now? I think the answer is no-one, but I would love to see your sources of a mainstream left-of-center thinker who is holding that dumpster fire up as an achievement for the left.
I agree with Scott's assertion that Republicans should deal with Trump's loose-cannon tariff policies.
BUT, Scott frames this within the narrative that our choice is between the "right" and the "left". The existential threat this false narrative poses is proven by this deadly sentence:
"In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way."
If you pick the right or the left, you've already lost.
The fight is between liberalism and authoritarianism. The left and the right are both on the side of authoritarianism. The purpose of their angry, violent, highly-publicized fight is to make everyone forget what liberalism is, or believe that it's too weak to cope with our problems today. Just like the communists and Nazis did in the Weimar Republic.
Scott is helping them when he insists on using the word "liberal" to refer to progressives, thus erasing liberalism as a possibility. Look how confusing this paragraph becomes:
"For at least the past few decades, the bureaucratic institutional middle layer has been occupied mostly by liberals, adding a liberal spin to whatever policies it executes. Progressive politicians have responded by outsourcing more and more tasks to it, while right-wing politicians have fumed against it."
Progressive politicians have responded… against liberals? No; Scott is using "liberal" and "progressive" as synonyms. Both words are deceptive, but we should at least stop calling anti-liberals "liberal".
The word "liberal" refers to someone who believes in a liberal humanist government, based on a secular constitution establishing limits on government power and a division of powers, extreme individualism and personal freedom, extreme freedom of speech and other civil liberties, free markets, polite debate, compromise, and equality under the law. American progressives had stopped supporting these things by the 20th century, when they began to be used to tolerate other things besides different denominations of Christianity, and to oppose the rise of big government and the return to government-imposed morality which progressives demanded.
The constant use of the terms "left" and "right" as opposites is also deceiving. The idea that these terms are opposed, rather than two species of radical authoritarianism, was only constructed in the 1970s. Before then, "right-wing" usually meant "right-wing socialist" or "right-wing unionist". Woodrow Wilson, the most-important early American progressive, was clearly what we would today call a right-wing extremist: he was a Presbyterian fanatic who believed he was chosen by God, encouraged violence against immigrants, eliminated freedom of speech, abused the Department of Justice to empower an enormous racist paramilitary (the American Protective League), and spoke out against the Constitution's balance of powers saying the President needed supreme power.
Both left and right in the US descend from John Calvin's ferociously repressive, puritanical, and authoritarian version of Christianity, which took root in Puritan and Congregationalist colleges like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, and U Penn. Missionaries spread it from there to the Midwest (U Chicago) and far West (The Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley), and in the South they converted colonial Anglican churches to Baptist ones after the American Revolution. Hegelian philosophy, which in Europe is considered the origin of progressivism, the 20th-century left, and the 20th-century right, began penetrating these colleges in the second half of the 1800s, achieving dominance at Harvard, and eminence at Yale, Columbia, Penn, Brown, and Cornell.
Wilson, as I noted, was a fascist progressive before the term "fascist" existed. Mussolini was kicked out of the communist party in 1914 and invented the word "fascism" in 1919. The Nazis always called themselves socialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-democracy, but never fascist. American progressives praised communists and fascists equally until the mid 1930s. Soviet communism was quickly remolded, after a brief period of liberty, into fascism/feudalism under Putin; likewise, Chinese communism, which was nationalist, racist, and colonialist from the start, eventually became Chinese fascism. The Zapatista are national socialists. Hugo Chavez today is a socialist fascist. Any objective historian would long ago have called fascism what it historically is: the second phase of authoritarian socialism.
The rest of Scott's narrative is also muddled by this false left-right distinction. "Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality." Have we never heard of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevara, Subcomandante Marcos, Chavez? "[Hugo] Chavez provides a useful model [for thinking about Trump]." So Chavez is on the "right"?
The core of both left and right is a reactionary hatred of the complexity and tolerance of liberalism. The right calls it "capitalism", "degeneracy", "liberalism", or "Jews". The left just calls it "capitalism". Hitler was vitriolically anti-capitalist, and said so; but he believed, like Marx, that capitalism was a distinctly Jewish contaminant. Marx's "On the Jewish Question" could have been written by Hitler. The labor theory of value is simply the naive peasant-economics theory used to justify anti-Jewish pogroms in the Middle Ages. The current dramatic rise in anti-semitic hate crimes around college campuses in the US is just one more proof of this link between left and right.
What we should be complaining about is not Trump or Harris, or left or right; but the American constitution's voting system, which game-theoretically guarantees we will always have exactly two parties. Combine that with the practice of holding democratic primaries, and you end up with an America constantly oscillating between one extreme and another. First-past-the-post voting puts liberalism at a great disadvantage against any kind of extremism.
That makes me wonder - why did the founding fathers decide to have a presidential system?
They were clearly concerned about the possibility of tyranny, but the presidential system is more likely to produce that (since it already concentrates a lot more power in the hands of a single individual).
Their "home country" and a model they knew well was that of Britain and it had a parliamentary system.
Their other major inspiration was Rome but SPQR had a very strong senate (although only mos maiorum only, not by written law) and even Rome had TWO consuls (and those were only elected for a year anyway).
Rome was also a cautionary tale for them but President even sounds like Princeps which is just a sham title which sounds republican but really means "autocrat".
The only thing I can come up with is that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth could have been a cautionary tale for them as one of the main reasons it was conquered by hostile powers is that the Sejm was in a permanent deadlock due to everyone having veto powers. But I am not sure how much they even knew about PLC.
The only thing close to a presidential system I can think of are the republics of Northern Italy where sometimes the ruler was elected for life ... clearly not something the founding fathers wanted.
The Founders were deeply influenced by their experiences under the Articles of Confederation—a system that proved too weak to adequately govern and respond swiftly to national challenges. They believed that a single, energetic executive was essential for several interrelated reasons:
1. Efficient Decision-Making and Accountability: The founders wanted an executive capable of making prompt decisions during crises. A single president could act decisively, and because his actions would be attributable to one individual rather than diffusing responsibility among many, accountability was clear. This idea is famously argued in Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 70, where he insists that “energy in the executive” is critical for good government.
2. Unified Leadership: A single president would serve as a clear, unifying national figurehead—a person who could represent the nation's interests both domestically and internationally. Unlike a council or committee, a president provided a focal point for leadership, ensuring that policy and national vision were coherent and consistent.
3. Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances: The creation of the presidency was part of a broader design to establish checks and balances among the three branches of government. While the president would have significant authority to enforce laws and direct government action, this power would nonetheless be balanced by legislative and judicial oversight, reducing the risk of tyranny.
4. Strengthening National Governance: Learning from the weakness of a decentralized government under the Articles of Confederation, the Founders wanted a president who could not only enforce federal laws but also serve as a decisive leader during emergencies, such as conflicts or economic crises. This role was essential for maintaining order, implementing policies, and negotiating with foreign nations.
This is not just about tariffs. Trump and his team are also happy to gut international cooperation, scientific research, cheap AIDS treatment and vaccines for babies, and a bunch of other actually good things for approximately no reason apart from owning the libs. Musk is happy to claim $200 B in savings and then deliver fifty bucks, before counting the $100 B in lawsuits the government will have to pay over this stuff. It's lame, unprincipled, dishonest, and incompetent.
I have to keep reminding myself that poor Democratic governance is part of the reason we got here and that I need to stay angry at the Democrats too. They are also culpable for their hubris and negligence. If you claim Democracy is at stake (which it actually is to whatever degree), then act like it.
But I digress. This administration is such a fucking dumpster fire. If you gave me the competent version of executive branch cost cutting, I could be into it. But they're giving us the dumbest possible version of everything and telling us it's 4D chess.
> If Trump’s base starts abandoning him, it will be because of the tariffs.
> Any given dictator could always turn out to be a benevolent dictator; you can always glance behind you at the institutions controlled by your enemies and say “I like my chances”.
> Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy
I think your premise of an embarrassed far-right trump supporter is flawed. My idealism died. My politics are the emotions of anger, disgust and a devil-may-care euphoria.
I want the tradewar with china, I want the shockmarket to crash, I want blood and fire. I worry about trump being to weak, not him going to far. You must be projecting your desire for the old system to keep working on me, I dont know how to be any clearer. I want the irs to start failing to collect taxes, I want america to have secession movements, I want the bureaucracy to be crippled, I want the universitys to lose all funding and scramble to rejustify their position in society, I want america to be unable to start a middle est war.
The status quo I see venerated, I view as a cancer, I will cheer every piece cut out for the sake of the underlining host.
Things airnt going well for me economically and I have fucking tried to fit into the broken system. If your to the left of a perfect score on the libertarian purity test you may want to talk about white males in fly-over-america material-conditions and have a plan.
If you share my economic pessimism, who do you blame and whats the plan to fix it? You just have to answer that question, or I simply dont care what you have to say, claims about the greatest economy in history when they printed money and stocks went up, when over quite poorly.
If you want to claim Im useless or deserve it for being an asshole or white or whatever. I dont care anymore, and will just be loud and proud.
If I was unhappy that my car leaked oil, my solution would not be to take a sledgehammer to every car in my neighborhood, because A: that would not remedy my oil leak, and B: that’s completely retarded.
B is a personal judgement of mine; the important part is A. Breaking things will only make whatever your situation is worse. If you don’t care then frankly, you should shut up while the adults are talking.
So, it’s been long enough that I think you either have no intention of responding to me or you’ve taken my advice about shutting the fuck up to heart and if that’s the case then you may feel free to disregard the following:
You may be “loud and proud”, but you also come off as “dumb and whiny”. Lots of teenaged emo vibes in your thicket of a reply there. Probably why things “aren’t going well economically” for you. Nobody wants to listen to that whiny bullshit, much less *employ* it. Man up and stop blaming other people for problems. Also, learn how to use punctuation, for fucks sake.
I have no idea WTF you were going on about with the libertarian purity nonsense. You write like an AI fed on a human centipede of endlessly recursive AI slop.
Not much point talking to people like this. They get off on pissing you off, it's literally all their politics is about, they admit as much. Treat them like you would any other narcissist begging for attention and grey rock them.
> [I]n 1987 the dictator of Burma made all existing bank notes illegitimate so he could print new ones that were multiples of nine. Because, you see, he liked that number. As Wikipedia helpfully points out, “The many Burmese whose saved money in the old large denominations lost their life savings.” For every perfectly rational economic agent out there, there’s another guy who’s really into nines.
I enjoyed the article and agreed with it to a degree. But this part seems like a huge problem for the whole thesis:
"For at least the past few decades, the bureaucratic institutional middle layer has been occupied mostly by liberals, adding a liberal spin to whatever policies it executes."
So here, we have a contingent historical factor, driven by the left, that has *obviously* been a major cause of right-wing populism arising in the first place. I think this empowers a very strong argument that it is actually the left that is in a real way responsible for Trumpism, even including the tariffs (and thus turns your argument back on its head).
All through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, real conservatives (not populists) were saying, "Stop it, liberals! This is a terrible idea! You're turning the courts and executive agencies into illegitimate engines of state power just because you like the outcomes that they contingently happen to enable at the moment. This is a corrupt disaster that can wash away our constitutional order." Liberals liked how things were going and refused to agree to a principled move away from this. Pressure and anger built over decades at what was *obviously* an anti-democratic usurpation for the interests of elite classes. And that is exactly how we ended up getting Trump.
The answer is not to take as your starting point the garbage system that gave us this (modern liberalism), nor the garbage system that it gave us (modern conservative populism). I don't know how we get back to a bipartisan institution-building republicanism, but if we don't, I don't think we get out of the cycle.
No, the ability for the national leader to make the nation follow his command is a consequence of right-wing ideology. Populist ideology is to do whatever to get representatives of the people in power; buffering against the leader's idiosyncracies for better electability is more populist than picking a leader with independent opinions.
Like you've got semi-competent left-wing populism that gives people what they ask for EXCEPT when they ask for removing the left-wing populists (and even so, they kind of do, that's why it's becoming less and less competent), and you've got kakistocratic right-wing populism that removes left-wing populism to replace it with oligarchy.
Left-wing populism tends to get fiscally strangled by the global financial marketplace. Perhaps that's unfortunate, but, unsurprisingly, that's how people with money react.
Informed by, not strangled by. The error is in assuming that left-wing extremists are the most populist people on the left, but the essence of populism is appealing to the people, and so in a democratic society one can only reasonably consider the winning politicians to be the most populist.
That is a strange definition of populism.
I'm not proposing that the winning politicians are by definition populist, but rather that populism inevitably causes them to win, so if they remain competitive yet seem non-populist, it's because you are missing an aspect of how they are populist. Center-left types appeal to the people with stuff like a vibe of authority and a willingness to fold against popular pressure.
I am still not in agreement with your difinition of pupulism. Populism is not simply any popular ideology. A essential component of any populist movement is the rejection of elites (what kind of elites differs between movement). Appeals that rely on elitism are inherently anti-populist.
With respect to tailcalled, that's because it's circular: "populism" is what's popular, so if a candidate is gets the most votes, (s)he must be the most popular, and is therefore "populist."
It strikes me that left-wing populism is the type for easy, cheap social liberalisation changes (trans people on the White House lawn type actions) but when it comes to left-wing economic populism, that gets strangled (e.g. student loan forgiveness).
'Yes we can have rainbow columns on the White House for Pride Month'
https://www.advocate.com/politics/white-house-pride-celebration-2024#toggle-gdpr
'Ha ha no a national minimum wage increase from $7.25 per hour? are you nuts?'
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage
I never figured out what to think about minimum wage, but I want to note the people don't just demand a minimum wage, they also demand jobs and cheap products...
Right, this is obviously the biggest issue with populism: lots of different things are popular, including things that are jointly incoherent. Also, something can be popular while the inevitable consequences of implementation are unpopular.
All governments have to find a balance that is popular *in aggregate* but that's much harder than just picking a handful of popular issues.
Are you talking about this in the context of the US? Because Chavéz (or Castro) surely was not strangled by anyone.
>but the essence of populism is appealing to the people, and so in a democratic society one can only reasonably consider the winning politicians to be the most populist.
No really -- to win in a mass democracy, you need a lot of cash and manpower to build name recognition and get your message across, and to get cash and manpower you normally need to have the backing of a pre-established political party. This performs a gatekeeping function, and means that politicians who are genuinely populist, in the sense of appealing to the ordinary people rather than the elite, often find it hard to get elected.
Kind of.
You might need a lot of money on the scale of an ordinary person, but you don't need a lot of money on the scale of the economy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
This isn't an insurmountable obstacle, the issue is that even if you did come beyond it, you're still ultimately competing on the basis of popular opinion, and since very few people actually care about popular opinion more than the center-left democrats do, there's not enough interest in raising that money (especially because the few people who do care more about popular opinion can often become more influential without spending the money, and because caring about public opinion makes it much easier to earn the money).
Fun quotes from that post:
"Musk could personally fund the entire US political ecosystem on both sides for a whole two-year election cycle"
"the Washington Post couldn’t pivot to being a conservative outlet without getting completely different employees and customers"
Populism is conflict theory with they elected as the enemy. By some definitions, eg. Education , elites can be close to half the population.
Unless you sit on huge oil reserves like Venezuela ... and even then it is a constraining factor at least.
Left-wing populism is just as kakistocratic as the right-wing variety; they just dress it up in fancier words and are better at manipulating procedures to confer artificial "legitimacy" on the grift.
For the tariffs specifically, the reason the president has any powers at all is that Congress passed a law giving them to him. There is an open question of whether it was legal for them to do that. ("Nondelegation".)
I am given to understand that this is actually the mechanism behind most of the powers of the president. The theory generally goes that Congress assigns responsibility for decisions to other parties because they are afraid that, if they make a decision on their own, they might lose votes.
But I would have a hard time describing that dynamic as "a consequence of populist ideology", unless you want to consider the concept of democracy "populist ideology".
I'm increasingly inclined to believe that "populism" is, in common parlance, becoming simply an epithet for "democracy".
If a word offends you, redefine it.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1860:_Communicating
Meanwhile, "democracy" is fast becoming an epithet for "liberalism" (hence all the hyperventilating about how overturning Roe v. Wade was "an attack on our democracy").
Right. The left really needs to grapple with the fact that democracy *has* given us this unusually civilian government and disregard for institutional credentials.
Only the EHC people are consistent, never thinking democracy was any great shakes anyway, and defending an unaccountable, independent layer of smarter-than-thous. If you want accountability, leave it to your local grocer or newspaper missing deliveries.
In contemporary usage, at least, the distinction between "populism" and "democracy" seems to turn on whether I agree with the majority's view.
I'm in favor of transgender athletes competing according to the sex with which they identify, so appealing to the majority's opposition to this is populist. I'm in favor of economic redistribution, so appealing to the majority's desire to tax the 1% is democracy.
It's a Russel conjugation: "our sacred democracy," "his representative institutions," "their fanatical populism"
I am hoping (but not expecting) that the past 10+ years of rule by "pen and phone" and executive order might convince folks that congress needs to get back to doing things by passing laws rather than just setting up a situation where whichever person is president makes most of the decisions.
I don't EXPECT this ... I expect the lesson to be learned is that it is very important WHO is the "one guy in charge."
The idea that a single person in the US can unilaterally change the rules for trade on a daily basis is pretty silly (whether one agrees with the specific policies or not). I feel the same way about killing off the Keystone pipeline. And many other issues :-(
Ending gerrymandering would go a long way towards getting Congress back in the game by electing more moderates who are willing to compromise.
Just ending the filibuster, so that each majority could pass legislation and face its consequences at the next election, would do a lot to encourage moderation.
That too
> For the tariffs specifically, the reason the president has any powers at all is that Congress passed a law giving them to him.
I think it is pretty clear that Trump's tariffs are not justified by his claimed legal authority. How long it takes the courts to stop him is another question.
It's unfair to blame congress for passing a law that doesn't actually give him this power, just because he's using it as a pretext.
I think its fair, in the sense that they are cowards who could easily undo Trump's fiat on this issue and have shown themselves unwilling to do so for reasons that I'm sure are not in line with what they themselves think is best for the country. Like Scott said, spineless toadies.
"pretty clear" usually isn't. Same with "obvious".
Other presidents have used this same power to one degree or the other, without successful legal or political challenge.
So no, it's not clearly established.
>"I think it is pretty clear that Trump's tariffs are not justified by his claimed legal authority. How long it takes the courts to stop him is another question."
This happens over and over and over again with other laws. The legislators passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly swore up and down that it would ban quotas...yet not a decade later there was the entire left swearing up and down that "affirmative action" hiring preferences were required by the Act and anyone who didn't engage in them was guilty of "disparate impact" racism.
Same with the 14th Amendment and the '64 Act on gay and trans issues.
Same with the FACE Act, which both criminalizes obstructing exercise of religious faith in a house of worship, and access to an abortion clinic; but it turns out it only ever gets used against little of ladies praying and not the "Jane's Revenge" types.
At a certain point your objection becomes an unprincipled demand for rigor.
Its not "not willing to look like a traitor" aspect that Scott was talking about. Congress is controlled by Republicans who have full constitutional power to restrain Trump in numerous ways, but they have been bullied by their base. At least one of them has gone on record as being actually scared to resist Trump. I think that makes them unqualified to serve, but I believe them when they say it.
So wait, in a representative body, actually following the will of the most active and vocal constituents makes you *unqualified to serve*? Odd definition of "democracy" and "representative" you have there.
One might consider this definitionally true, but, as empirical matter, politically successful movements which can fairly be described as "populist" seem to commonly unite pretty hard behind a single leader who exemplifies and spreads the spirit of the movement.
Can you name any populist movements at any historical point in any country, where the movement “buffered against the leader’s idiosyncrasies for better electability”?
Populism has always seemed to me to prefer strong individuals over committee or party based buffers.
It may stretch the definition of an idiosyncrasy, but FDR’s use of a wheelchair was certainly buffered against
To a great degree, I think the American constitutional system must own tariffs. Rarely have I seen a better argument for parlimentarianism- more or less along the lines of your article.
Presidential systems often make it hard to get positive things done (because you typically need legislation), but seem to do little to prevent many bad things from being done, and good things undone or at least suspended.
The American Constitution is kind of Creationist while British parliamentarianism is kind of Darwinian. The British idea seems to have won the test of the market.
There are lots of parliamentary systems, but the US and UK share the use of "First Past The Post" voting. This makes renewal of the system difficult, because if a party develops a permanent deficiency or corruption it's hard to fix - there party has to be fixed from within rather than being replaced (there have been exceptions where a new party overtook an old one in both the US and UK, but they are exceedingly rare compared to other countries)
Perhaps, but Canada has a First Past the Post parliamentary system, but it has a fair amount of turnover in parties.
Honestly, I don't know why American parties are so enduring over the last 169 years.
That's interesting, I wonder how it is that that has been possible in Canada.
I presume that the USA has a lot of complex state laws that lock in the 2-party duopoly since the 1850s, but, realistically, the topic is too boring for me to investigate.
Perhaps somebody else could figure it out?
It's the President.
Parliament, Senate, Congress..
They all naturally allow for new parties to join, anyone who credibly has support from a specific region or chunk of the population (depending on the ruleset) can get in, support one of the larger parties to get some power.
With time they can grow in popularity and eventually lead an alliance.
The President is a natural focal point - you only really have two options, any other vote is a protest vote.
This makes additional parties outside the meta.
Canada has also bucked the trend of having it's left wing labour party squeeze out it's liberal party. I think one possible explanation is that the regionalism of Canadian parties provides an alternative basis for party identity other than ideology. The main example is that the NDP is a more viable left wing party in western Canada than the more moderate Liberals. In the 1990s, there was also a western-based conservative party, Reform, that has since merged with original conservative party.
I'm not sure to what extent that explains why Canada has three major parties even before considering the Bloc in Quebec, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's part of the reason Canada has a more interesting party landscape.
On the other hand, it's not like the UK doesn't exhibit these dynamics also, with the SNP being roughly analogous to the Bloc, Nigel Farage's Reform party being like the Preston Manning-led Reform in Canada, etc.
I do wonder what part of the electoral process requires "registering" as Democrat or Republican. It's not something I've seen in Canada.
The NDP started out as a western protest party. It is ironic that their support mostly moved to Ontario and the east.
Canada is unusual in having a rich non-urban region that defines itself regionally but whose regionalism is defined in opposition to separatism.
In most places regionalist sentiment cashes out as separatism.
Separatist movements in poor regions tend to do badly because poor regions are dependent on subsidy from the centre to maintain living standards that are only somewhat behind the national average).
Wealthy urban regions tend to produce left-wing separatists (e.g. Catalonia), wealthy rural regions right-wing separatists.
Atlantic Canada is relatively poor, which inhibits separatism there, but the Prairies aren't, they're wealthy, rural, right-wing, hostile to Ottawa (ie regionalist) but they're not separatist because that's associated with Quebec and they're very anti-Quebec. The result was a regionalist right-wing party, Reform, which is now essentially the dominant faction of the CPC.
Note that the UK's Reform is strongest in rural and exurban areas of England that aren't poor (Lincolnshire, Essex, etc). It's not strong in comparable areas of Scotland (Aberdeenshire) because Reform is strongly anti-separatist.
Because they aren't the same parties; newly victorious factions just wear the old names like a skin-suit.
I think the issue is the US *has the presidency as a first past the post system* (electoral college with winner-takes-all in almost every state).
If the Republicans split into social conservatives and business types, those two parties would likely have a greater share of Congress that the Republicans alone do today. But neither sub-party would ever, ever win the presidency.
That effect is not limited to presidential systems, though. If a party splits in an FPTP parliamentary system, its vote share is split in each constituency that they both run in, so each is less likely to win each constituency. That means that their total number of representatives is reduced from before the split, even if they have all the same voters. So even if they ally, they are unlikely to obtain a majority in parliament and form the government. Voters know this and tend to vote for the largest party that they don't hate, strongly punishing splitters.
Regional parties get around this issue (including things like the UK liberal democrats, who are a regional-to-certain-specific-towns-and-areas party). The Greens will still get squeezed, but the Scottish National Party do fine.
Yeah, you can have regional parties as "urban liberals" and "suburban liberals" as well as the more usual sorts of regions. Even more so in non-US district systems (I'm thinking here of UK, Canada, Australia) where the priority for the independent districting commission is creating districts with relatively strong geographical identities) districts of cities tend to be just one of urban, suburban, exurban or commuter town. This isn't true of towns, where the whole town will be a single district (or there's a simple two or three way split so you can Anytown North and Anytown South or North, East, Southwest or whatever) and the district contains all of them. This is one big reason that town seats vote differently from city ones.
Both the US and UK (your examples from above) have seen new parties emerge and old parties die though. As have other major systems with FPTP voting, like India and Canada. So the theory does not seem to match practice.
Once could as well theorize that FPTP allows a party to die if it screws up badly enough, whereas with PR it could shamble on forever, maybe even as part of a governing coalition.
The US two party system does seem unusually strong and durable, even relative to other FPTP systems. My guess is that it's the combination of FPTP, a Presidential system, and nationalized politics - and that you need all three.
The US has had two parties. The names have changed, but it's been stable that way. Basically a new party starts and (generally) flames out, or it gets bigger and swallows the old one.
The UK also has two large parties, but again they change over time. Labour used to be the odd one out; I think the Liberals(!) were the other main party.
Parliamentary systems seem to be allow small parties to hang around longer without being swallowed by one of the two large ones. In the US system there are independent House members, but that's usually because the Congressman is *personally popular in his district*. E.g. Sanders.
If Sanders dies or retires, he's not handing it over to someone else, or if he does, that person is unlikely to be able to continue.
The UK party system started out with informal factions that emerged during the Restoration era, the Whigs and the Tories, with the original fault line being Whigs opposing the Duke of York (later King James VII and II) as heir to the childless King Charles II, while the Tories supported the King and the Duke of York. There were also ideological, religious, and demographic splits that rhymed with the fault lines of the English Civil War a generation previously, which in turn rhyme with various factions during the reigns of Henry VIII and his kids.
The Whigs eventually won this rather decisively. Not immediately in 1688 when the Whigs arranged for the Dutch Stadholder Willam of Orange to invade, chase James off the throne, and replace him (as William III and II of England and Scotland), but the Tories were electorally marginalized from the 1710s onwards and suffered quite a bit from their associations with the Jacobite Risings (a series of rebellions in favor of James's male-line descendants against theHanoverian dynasty, descended from a Protestant side branch of the Stuarts who had married into various German royal-ish families) whom the Whigs had arranged to inherit the throne after William and James's two daughters (Mary and Anne) had all died childless.
Later in the 1700s, during the reign of George III, elections and parliamentary coalitions became much more about shifting factions organized around specific individuals, most of whom were nominally Whigs, with some of them (especially Lord North's faction) being called "Tories" as an insult by opposing factions. These eventually settled down into more stable and organized factions, one organized around William Pitt the Younger and the other organized around Charles Fox and Lord Grenville. The Tory label stuck to Pitt's faction, and the Fox-Grenville faction successfully claimed the Whig mantle.
The factions got formally organized into parties in the mid-1800s, with Robert Peel organizing the Tories into the Conservative party first, and Lord Russell organizing the Whigs into the Liberals a bit later.
Labour was a political movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that, as implied by its name, was strongly associated with trade unions. It was outside the two-party system because most of its constituents couldn't vote anyway. It became a major electoral political party after WW1, when the franchise was expanded to include all adult men and many women. It helped that the Labour leader at the time, Ramsey MacDonald, got along very well personally with King George V.
"The US two party system does seem unusually strong and durable, even relative to other FPTP systems. My guess is that it's the combination of FPTP, a Presidential system, and nationalized politics - and that you need all three."
Also, the role of money in US elections. It takes a lot of it, and that causes interest groups to band together.
The Rotherham gangs imply that the British system is terrible, why do you say USA is worse?
More countries today have the British parliamentary system than the American constitutional system.
Both are pretty successful, but the Brits appear to be more successful than the Yanks.
In the sense that more countries have adopted the Westminster parliamentary system than the Philadelphia constitutional system.
Honest question -- how much of that is because countries took a good hard look at the two systems and decided that the parliamentary system was better, as opposed to former British colonies simply inheriting the system of their former colonizers?
Well, it might be hard to characterize France as "inheriting the system of their former British colonizers".
But in a broader sense, I would guess most of it. When you set up your system, you look to a local power or an affiliated culture and do what they do. South America looks to the USA. Other places don't.
Convergent evolution is also a possibility.
Possibly of interest here, some years ago Britain created a Supreme Court that could overrule Parliament, something that can't really happen in the "British" system. This is clearly cultural contamination from the United States; it is clearly not an inheritance, though.
Just because the Rotherham gangs are the only part of British politics that's made it into the American consciousness that doesn't mean it's the defining feature of UK politics.
In the list of how a parliamentary system differs from a presidential one how each would deal with that issue would item 10,000. Are you suggesting that if the UK had a presidential system than the Rotherham gang situation would have been handled better? And the better handling of that one type of issue is justification enough to change systems? If not that what are you saying.
Sleakne,
The Rotherham gangs are a massive institutional failure.
Hypotheticals and counter-factuals are difficult, and I'm not advocating for the UK to change to a Presidential system.
My comment was a response to Steve, who asserted the opposite.
Both seem to be fairly bad as governments compared to what I'd like to see and believe is buildable, but usually fine for most of their countries.
Steve, successful by what metrics?
what's that got.to.do.with the parliamentary syatem?
I'd say the long stagnant economy of the UK, where it's even harder to build than the US, makes it look worse. Other countries seem to be doing parliamentarianism better now.
Learn a second fact about modern Britain challenge.
3rd*
We were discussing the parliamentary system
There's a reasonable argument that the British system has *fewer* checks and balances than the American one. The British Prime Minister has, by definition, majority support in the legislature - you can't have a Conservative PM but a Labour House of Commons, unlike the US where the President is often of one party but the House (or Senate, or both) is of another. The House of Lords is now an almost entirely appointed body, with no enforceable limit on appointments, and so can be packed if necessary.
Because ministerial positions - Cabinet-level and lower - are drawn from members of the legislature, there's a "payroll vote" of some 175 or so members (more than 25% of the Commons, and nearly half of the governing party) who are effectively bound to vote in support of the executive, or lose their jobs. Most years, someone gets fired for doing this, but this is rare and it's much more common to hear of Ministers or Secretaries voting with the government out of obligation and even somewhat against their own instincts, consciences, or past statements (sometimes they manage to extract fig-leaf concessions for doing so). As such, a PM with a working majority in the Commons has a lot of freedom and relatively few constitutional obstacles to doing whatever they want to do. Ironically, this is a real problem for British politicians, who take on populist commitments that they don't *really* want to follow through on: they have to invent increasingly silly stories about how some combination of ~~~the European Union~~~, the courts enforcing the laws the government wrote, and the civil servants who work directly for the government, are somehow conspiring to prevent the government from doing the thing that they honestly really really do want to do.
The sense in which the British system is Darwinian is that it's pretty good at getting rid of failed governments quickly once the consensus within Parliament is that a government has become unworkable. If need be, the Prime Minister can be forced to resign and be replaced pretty quickly, as Liz Truss discovered. The same cannot happen in the US, since division between Congress and the Presidency is perfectly normal. The bar for impeachment is much higher than for a vote of no confidence, or for an informal "men in grey suits" conversation in which the PM is told that their own party won't back them.
Yeah, my not-super-informed sense is that the reason the American system struggles is that it's not responsible enough: there are too many veto points, so that people can't attribute blame or credit properly.
It also makes Congress perpetually gridlocked, which is why so much of Congressional power has been ceded to/usurped by the presidency and the judiciary.
I think this is the essence of Linz's argument, for example.
This is somewhat of a more recent thing. Post-Clinton a lot of effort went into banning horse trading in congress, so it was even harder to get things done. Turns out a bit of minor corruption may have been useful after all?
"There's a reasonable argument that the British system has *fewer* checks and balances than the American one. "
In addition, for most of British history, no court could rule on the constitutionality of an Act of Parliament.
FPTP in an election where only two parties have a chance condemns you to a hundred years of those two parties. Our wonderful British, Darwinian parliament has that same problem that your presidential election has. We can’t vote for our Favourite candidate because it will let the bastard on the other side in. Switching to an alternative vote would fix that.
We have an election tomorrow for the West of England mayor. There are five parties that are all within shouting distance of a victory which makes it really hard to choose who to vote for. If I vote for my favourite party, I give the awful party on the other side more of a chance. If everyone could make their favourite their first choice saving #2 as a safety, more people would vote for their favourite even if they were a long shot. There would be more opportunities for new parties to establish themselves.
Well that is why people advocate ranked-choice voting and other systems.
I guess the French succession of Republiques is punctuated equilibrium, then.
"The American Constitution is kind of Creationist while British parliamentarianism is kind of Darwinian."
Explain please.
"The British idea seems to have won the test of the market."
The British system also was the default in the half or so of the globe that was colonized by the British or was set up under British tutelage (e.g. Japan).
I grant most of that, but Japan? That was set up by the US. Were you thinking of somewhere else?
No, there was a Japanese parliament before 1945.
Isn't the Japanese system based on the German? Hence their legislature being called the Diet?
The USA also set everyone except Liberia with a parliamentary system.
Parliamentary systems have a but more room to manoeuvre.
The Philippines?
Ah… didn't know that. Thank you.
TBF, Britain being able to colonise half the globe is a pretty large data point in favour of its system.
By that logic, Spain must have had a pretty awesome system, and I doubt many here will praise the Spanish Empire.
One often-overlooked aspect here is that the US system was modeled on the British system as of the late 18th century, and de jure the British system still follows the same general framework despite being radically different de facto.
Specifically, the President of the United States is a stand-in for the King, the Senate for the House of Lords, and the House of Representatives for the House of Commons. All three had their terms shortened relative to their British counterparts at the time (7 years to 2 years for the lower house, and life to 6 years and 4 years respectively for the upper house and head of state). The hereditary positions were made indirectly elective, and the President was weakened relative to the King by losing his ability to force a recess of the legislature, call early legislative elections, declare war or conclude treaties without legislative approval, or make patronage appointments without statutory authorization. Withholding royal assent is an absolute legislative veto in the British system, but Presidential vetoes can be and are overridden by Congress. And there's a formal process for removing a misbehaving President early for cause, while deposing Kings tends to involve armed conflict even when it's eventually legitimated by an Act of Parliament.
In the intervening 250 years or so, the Prime Minister has become the Head of Government and (outside of continuity-of-government situations) is de facto chosen by the majority party or dominant coalition in the House of Commons and serves at the Commons' pleasure. Almost all executive powers of the monarch are either exercised in his name by his ministers (who are responsible to the House of Commons) or are considered to only be legitimately used if the King does so on the "advice" of those ministers. The King has some behind-the-scenes influence, since the PM is required to meet regularly with the King, explain his actions and policies, and listen relatively politely to anything the King has to say to him in turn. And the King probably has some power as a process referee, to refuse or set conditions for the exercise of reserve powers that the PM wants to use contrary to constitutional norms.
The President, on the other hand, has seen greatly increased de facto powers as the abilities to direct regulatory and law enforcement agencies and command the standing military have gotten more significant and as our statutes have accumulated a large pile of discretionary and emergency powers delegated to the administration.
The current situation can be summed up, with only mild exaggeration on both sides, but calling Britain a Crowned Republic and the United States an Elective Monarchy.
An excellent book is Congress's Constitution by Josh Chafetz that looks at various of Congress's powers and traces them back to their British parliamentary antecedents. Really made it clearer to me how much the American constitutional system developed from the British.
>The hereditary positions were made indirectly elective, and the President was weakened relative to the King by losing his ability to force a recess of the legislature, call early legislative elections, declare war or conclude treaties without legislative approval, or make patronage appointments without statutory authorization. Withholding royal assent is an absolute legislative veto in the British system, but Presidential vetoes can be and are overridden by Congress.
TBF the British king's ability to do these things was already pretty heavily constrained by the need to keep Parliament on-side. (E.g., the last time a British monarch vetoed a law was back in the reign of Queen Anne, who died in 1715.) I think you could make a strong argument that, in practical terms, the US president had more power from the start.
Not from the start.
Executive power has dramatically increased in the post-Great Depression era, as has federal power in general.
And presidents do have to be elected.
Yes, but the British monarch had already lost most of his practical power by 1776.
Having just read a biography of King George III, I do not agree.
The king was still choosing the PM directly and had immense influence.
I think you have to get past Queen Victoria and into the 20th century before I fully agree with you.
Good point on vetoes. For that matter, Queen Anne's act of withholding Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill wasn't a unilateral act: it was advised by her ministers, who had supported the bill earlier but changed their minds after it had cleared Parliament. The last monarch to veto bills on his own initiative was William III, who did so five times between 1692 and 1696.
On the other hand, a power doesn't need to be used to be significant. For one thing, knowing the power is there serves as a deterrent. Even in the US, a veto threat is often enough to kill a bill, unless Congress thinks it can override the veto or else wants to force an overt veto for political reasons.
Another major reason why 18th century monarchs didn't veto bills were that they had other means to kill bills they didn't like: the presence of a large faction of relatively-nonpartisan "King's Friends" in Parliament who relied on the monarch for patronage or were otherwise inclined to vote the King's interests, the separate "King's Consent" feature (which is still in active use, on the PM's advice, in the 21st century) which allows the monarch to prevent bills from coming up for debate if they would affect royal prerogatives, etc. And public bills were usually initiated by the King's ministers, who more often than than not were chosen by the King rather than forced on him by a Parliamentary majority.
The British system did not prevent Britain's own shoot-self-in-head-to-own-the-libs moment - Brexit.
If anything, it is the opposite:
1. Giving the Federal-Presidential level powers that it should not have.
2. Removing the independence of the Electoral College, which was designed to prevent populist from getting elected as President.
That's because neither of these things- an independent electoral college or a president without broad policy powers- are sustainable in the context of the modern nation state apparatus and it's attendant political climate, especially in the context of a great power of 330 million.
I don't see this as trivially true. Can you please elaborate why?
Both Switzerland and the European Union have weak executive power but significant population and economy.
Prime ministers are also elected indirectly in parliamentary systems.
The European Union is not a state. If it becomes more like a state I predict it will experience pressure to greater executive power.
I'll grant Switzerland as a counterexample but I don't think it proves much. Switzerland is a bizarre one-of-a-kind state constituionally/politically (and culturally/economically for what it's worth), unique on multiple axes, very unlike any other modern democracy, and with the executive branch (a collective body) structured wholly differently from the United States. The idea that the US could follow Switzerland's example- especially while keeping anything like it's current constitution- is further strained by the fact that the US is a continent-spanning superpower.
Parliaments are indirectly elected by parliaments, yes, but almost always along partisan lines, so nothing at all like a check-and-balance electoral college.
Yes, the Swiss have generally had the overriding principal of *not joining* things, and "you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone".
There is an undercurrent of that in the US, but it's often drowned out by
the urge to be the sword of justice in a fallen world.
For instance, I have no idea how the Swiss would declare war on another country. Is that even possible (as opposed to resisting invasion that is). Would it need a plebiscite among the cantons?
The "sword of justice" bit is a figleaf, or how empire is sold to the rubes.
If you really want to know, the Swiss armed forces do not have a General amongst their ranks except in cases of emergency. So, going off what occurred in WWII, the federal assembly can pick a general if need be.
As to what constitutes "emergency," it seems a lot looser than, say, modern Germany. Of course, their constitutions limits when they can mobilize, whereas the Swiss have to do all that just to have a General. I assume what the general does is up to his discretion at that point.
tbf the American system also gave them FDR, who would have been an unimaginably transformative figure in the British parliamentary system. Maybe it's fairer to say the American system has more variance rather than to say it's strictly worse.
The FDR whose policies prolonged the Great Depression far beyond its natural duration? https://open.substack.com/pub/nicholasdecker/p/the-great-depression-war-largely
Given how nonstandard that view is, I'm reluctant to accept it based on a short blog post from less than a week ago.
It's a fairly common view, albeit nothing like a consensus one. But also, macroeconomics isn't a field that's going to give you a clear and certain answer to this kind of question.
Transformative does not mean good.
One difference in the UK parliament that I am supremely grateful for at the moment: if our prime minister turns out to be an idiot or a dictator, we can just get rid of her. You are stuck with your president for four years.
You should fix that, at least.
In theory, we could. In practice, the sort of polarization which led to Trump being elected in the first place makes this functionally impossible.
Another way of saying this is that there's not really anything to fix in this case. This will seem horrid to people convinced that Trump is a dictator-idiot, but it's a godsend to people convinced he is not (or that the result would just be a dictator-idiot on the other side). If, OTOH, most of the nation was convinced we had a dictator-idiot in power, there's a mechanism for that, we'd use it, and it'd work. Done and done.
The upside to it being hard to get rid of a dictator is that it's also hard to get rid of someone that only part of the nation believes is a dictator.
If the bar were only 50%, as it is in the UK, for the legislature to remove an odious administration I think you'd probably see it happen. It's the difference between needing say 20% of the governing party to defect versus nearly 50%.
If Congress wanted to remove Trump, they could? The Republican party has shown no interest in replacing Trump, and they have a majority in both houses. If the UK had a similar circumstance (majority government with the majority party near-unanimous in support of their PM), they also wouldn't be able to remove their idiot dictator PM.
Except we just got rid of Johnson, Truss with majority Conservative governments. The right to get rid of them changes the dynamic. Your guys have to sit quietly for four years.
Republicans in Congress could easily replace Trump with Vance. Or even elect whoever they want as Speaker of the House and then make that person president. Yes there is more ceremony to that than a leadership election, but Trump is still in power because the majority of Republicans support him. Johnson and Truss got removed because a majority of their party wanted them replaced.
No, they can't 'easily' replace Trump.
Functionally, impeachment is a two-step process, with articles of impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate. That alone makes the process more difficult than replacing a Prime Minister in the Westminster system. Additionally, the two-thirds majority requirement for the Senate portion means that Republicans would need both unanimity among their members and the help of Democrats. (The latter is easy to imagine now, but what if a party wanted to get rid of the President because he or she was too moderate?)
Secondly, impeachment is definitionally supposed to be used for 'high crimes and misdemeanors'. Replacing Trump merely because he's a bad president is insufficient under that standard. That's no barrier to Congress casting its votes how it may, but doing so for popularity reasons is an obvious misuse of the system.
Conversely, the Westminster leadership spill is explicitly allowed because the party doesn't like its leader, and getting rid of an unpopular leader is a well-accepted and minimally-controversial action.
Impeachment is a process which requires by the constitution a 2/3rds majority in congress. Compare this to a vote of no confidence in Westminster.
In the House of Commons, if the governing party or coalition has 60% of the seats, only about 19% of those members of parliament need to defect to "impeach" the administration that they installed.
In the US Congress, if the governing party holds a majority in congress of 60%, then nearly half of them need to defect to impeach, and all that get's you is for the President to be removed and the Vice President to slide right in. In order to get out of this process of moving down the succession list, or to have a special election, they would need to make a constitutional amendment, which not only requires a super-majority in congress, but it needs to be ratified by the states.
It's *way* harder.
This is technically true, but the difference is that the electoral cost for doing so would be far higher.
For the American congress to replace a president, they have to implicitly admit that their party endorsed someone who was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, calling their own judgement so far into question that it would almost certainly be electoral suicide, and so it never happens.
By contrast, in the UK parliament replacing a PM is a perfectly normal event, not an admission of failure, and happens regularly - only 4 of our last 10 prime ministers ever lost an election.
Americans seem to like politics well enough as a pastime, but they also like football - and yet no one wants to watch a Super Bowl every week. Traditionally, when private life took much precendence over public avowals of self, I believe folks enjoyed the campaign season being over. I've never heard anyone say, as a presidential election concluded, wish we could start that over again tomorrow. In fact, people don't much like to hear about possible contenders until about 18 months out.
We don't have another election right away. Parliament just chooses another prime minister.
Our problem is we can't be conquered due to our geographic position (and the lack of strong neighbors) so our system never gets reset and we're stuck with an 18th-century system.
Unlike most liberals, I have a fair degree of respect for the Founders. But I doubt they would have expected their system to last 250 years as-is, or expect or even want the degree of reverence they get from the right wing.
We had major resets several times, and the current US government looks quite different from the original version set up by the constitution. The civil war and FDR were the biggest resets, but I think you can make an argument for a few others as well.
The American constitutional system specifically was designed by a bunch of late 18th century libertarian spergs who VERY MUCH did not want to give the President the power to unilaterally set tax policy - and they didn't! There are in-progress lawsuits against the tariffs on the basis that the laws that Congress created to let the President create tariffs were narrowly defined and Trump has decided to reinterpret words like "retaliatory" and "emergency" to mean "anything I feel like, and I feel like trade = bad."
The problem is that systems of government are ultimately composed entirely of people. If all those people are toadies to one man, then it doesn't matter how you organize them or what constitution you write. There was nothing wrong with the Soviet constitution; the problem was it was words on paper and what actually mattered was Stalin's personal whims.
My understanding is that the law didn't actually refer to tariffs, and it was instead sanctions that were supposed to be set during emergencies.
There are multiple problems with Trump's claimed legal justification. The "free trade is a national emergency" thing is probably the worst though.
I think that this is a bit unfair to the US constitution because it firmly places Congress in charge of tariffs, and Congress could take back control any time it wanted.
Now, an argument can be made that the US presidential system contains a strongman-shaped hole which is a natural fit for Trump, and that the election of spineless yes-men who would rather wreck the economy than defy King Donald is downstream of that.
But take another notorious strongman, who was elected in a very parliamentary system. The role of the chancellor in the Weimar republic was not a strongman-shaped hole waiting to be filled. If anything, the obvious strongman position was that of the president, who was an Ersatz-Kaiser (and past presidents had very much ruled through emergency declarations while parliament was in deadlock, and were ever threatening to dissolve parliament). It did not matter one bit. The Reichstag passed the the enabling legislation which authorized Hitler to do whatever he wanted, and that was the end of them having any relevance.
No constitutional system fares well when crazy or evil people manage to get the majority of the votes. Republicans in Congress are fully empowered to stop Trump from doing destructive things, they just refuse to.
I think the real test of the constitutional system is whether by abusing it, you can gain power in the longer term (e.g. replace judges, bias public discourse, pressure strong opponents to not run or rich people to not fund them). It's very early to say but so far it's looking pretty good! Better than any number of countries with supposedly more modern parliamentary systems (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Israel).
Republicans in Congress are less crazy and evil than Trump, but their options are limited. In a parliamentary system, they could simply vote to replace Trump as prime minister, but here, their options are either (1) leave him in office, but push back against specific actions or (2) impeach and convict him (which would require 2/3 of the Senate vote). Because Trump is so good at punishing people who go against him, it's very hard to coordinate everyone for a multi-step, drawn out process, but you might be able to get everyone together for a single one-off vote to replace him.
The bone I would pick here is that I think most (though not quite all) of the problems that culminated in the U.S.'s current crises are the results of things *not* actually written into the constitution. Rather, they are either conventions that grew up as one possible way to implement the system, but hardly the only one. Either better luck in choosing different practices early on or more foresight when the problems were still small could have allowed the U.S. to shift into a different equilibrium (I do expect it's probably too late now and the nation is too dysfunctional to ever fix the problems).
The current power of the Executive is not a natural result of the text of the Constitution, it's a relatively recent invention.
The legislature has spent half a century or more tying itself up in partisan gridlock, and handing more and more of its function to agencies under the Executive in response.
The judiciary has been taken over by political appointments from teh Executive, handing it powers and deference never imagined in the Constitution. If the Federalist Society never existed, Trump's current level of unitary power would be impossible.
Agreed. I would go further still and suggest that a system like the swiss one which requires (at least by custom) extreme amounts of agreement to pass anything is superior still.
It might be slow. But it brings stability and predictability. Basically the government cannot really break things and politicians are much more likely to break things than to fix them.
When decisions are ultimately based on 1/2+ε portion of votes, they are inherently going to be chaotic.
I tend to agree, but is their any parliamentary system in the world that has shown itself capable of functioning that has like, half the population of the United States? This might be an ignorant question, I know the reason our current system evolved wasn't because we had a large population, but I do wonder how you would run a parliamentary system composed of so many people over so much landmass. I guess India's a parliamentary system now, does that seem to be working?
Congress could rescind these tariffs tomorrow if the Senate and House wanted to. The President isn't granted any authority whatsoever in the Constitution to impose tariffs unilaterally. The reality is that Senator McConnell and Speaker Johnson are so terrified of facing a primary challenge, or losing the majority that they're willing to let Americans suffer to appease Trump.
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-congress-delegates-its-tariff-powers-to-the-president
Tariffs have their uses -- you can use them to carefully rebuild American Senescent Industries [e.g., the pickup truck tariff has worked pretty well over the last 60 years in keeping some automotive industry in America, a cost that pickup truck fans seem happy to pay] or you can use the threat of them to wheel and deal your way to better trade deals over the next month.
But, having these obviously contradictory goals means tariffs are very cognitively challenging to optimize.
Trump is older than Biden (who did some not unreasonable protectionist things like subsidize chip plants in Arizona) was at this point in their respective terms, so it's asking a lot of Trump to juggle all the possible balls at once.
Free trade, in contrast, is kind of dim-witted, but it's easier for elderly Presidents like Trump.
I thought Trump's latest position was precisely that he was suspending most tariffs on most countries toward the goal of building a strategic/economic alliance against China (i.e, getting better deals)?
I can see an argument for phasing in tariffs more gradually, but in the case of China, a trade war, and quite possibly a kinetic war, was probably inevitable regardless- I don't know where Scott is getting this idea of 'arbitrary grudges' from.
Slow tariffs and fast tariffs can each make sense, but they are highly contradictory. A policy-making genius might be able to square the circle, but forgive me if I doubt that 78-year-old Donald Trump is that man.
I think Tree of Woe did a pretty good article on the theoretical basis behind the tariffs (although some countries obviously disagree, and as I said, phasing in gradually would give the markets more time to adjust and relocate facilities and so on). The absence of that, and Trump's characteristically erratic public rhetoric have spooked the markets.
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/balanced-trade
I'm not going to say he's playing 200-IQ 5-D chess, but there isn't zero strategy here either.
Does this article from ToW have a compelling defense of the *math incoherence* in how the Liberation Day tariff amounts were calculated (ie, trade deficit ÷ [2*total trade])? If you say yes I'll read it, but if not it seems pointless to look for rationalizations of a policy that was obviously implemented irrationally.
in a sense it does, it address the calculation as the botched result of a misapplication of two separate and mutually contradictory heterodox theories, although it seems to miss that the calculation isnt that (it was deficit in goods as far as I remember, not goods and services).
this doesnt apply to the current set of tariffs though, it only applies to a set of rates that never existed. you may argue that some set of tariffs fit some theoretical justification, as that one does, however, it doesnt justify the current tariffs, nor any set of tariffs trump has ever offered (the ones he claims fits the equation never did, as they were not calculated on the goods plus services of the trade deficit).
this is a deeply questionable justification of a set of tariffs that never existed and were never proposed. What is its relevance to trump's actual real tariffs?
I can recall Singapore doing a lot industrial policy / protectionist things a couple of generations ago that violated everything I learned majoring in economics. For example, around 1980 Lee Kuan Yew radically raised the minimum wage precisely to drive the garment industry out of Singapore (I used to see Made In Singapore labels in my shirts back then), so that Singaporeans would move up the value chain to heavy manufacturing and white collar services.
"The Economist" at the time was aghast at Singapore's violations of all the Laws of Economics, but Lee's strategy worked extraordinarily well.
The lesson I'd take away from this is that highly competent leaders, like Lee in his prime, can outperform Free Market Theory. But is 78 year old Trump one of them?
Really?
It doesn't matter what your stated reasons are. If you keep changing them every 5 minutes and apply policy erratically people stop treating you as an actor they can meaningfully negotiate with
+1
Agreed, the uncertainty created by his impulsiveness is a more powerful actor here than policy or ideology.
And they sure aren't going to break ground on building a billion dollar factory that will take 3 years to bring online.
So, there's in practice a contradiction between wheeling-and-dealing with tariffs and restoring American manufacturing with tariffs.
He has reduced tariffs to 10% in most countries, where previously they were zero.
Problem is: he alienated his allies, big time (from EU here). You can choose to fight China/BRICS, or get Allies in line (i.e. kowtow even more). There was a time (1990-2010) were US could attempt both at the same time. Now it's just delusional.....Not sure it will really change any worldwide trend, but it sure sped up something that was on the backburner those last 10y: the transition away from a US hegemony with Dollar as world currency. Not sure the new place will be better (from an EU centric perspective, from an US one I see only how it can get worse), but there is no going back to the old place....
I don't see how you fight China without getting allies in line (BRICS is a joke), although I agree he could use a little more carrot and a little less stick.
You might start by being friendly with allies rather than slapping them with 10% across the board tariffs plus special tariffs on metals and other industries and calling this a gift because you only temporarily gave them a third layer of tariffs that you temporarily suspended.
Nah, I don't know if he really wanted to get allies more in line or genuinely think he was getting back what was 'stolen' from the US (a very special view of trade imbalance: I guess when I choose to buy using credit I get stolen 😂) ... But it was not just a little too much stick, it was complete diplomatic disaster. Just even mentioning land grabs (whole Canada, part Danemark) was enough to destroy any good will. Add Ukraine and Gaza treatment and the tariff on top, and you alleniate even the right wing parties of EU who were VERY sympathetic when Trump was elected: love anything anti woke, and were anxious to detach from Putin (not an political asset in EU right now, except maybe in Hungary, and even there it's debatable). He, he even manage to deeply alienate the commonwealth, something I though impossible for the US
So Trump's new position is that he supports TPP? This is so unserious.
Trump just genuinely likes tariffs. He has liked them for 40 years. He thinks they really work, they're really good, and *everyone else* that talks about how they aren't good are stupid or idiots or compromised or whatever random insult populists use.
If he just *actually gets to implement them* you'll see how awesome they are. You'll see. You'll all see.
Lots of people have these weird idiosyncratic quirks. If you have some weird quirk *AND* you are right *AND* you have the capacity to implement it, you can make yourself very rich or be credited as the one who finally woke society up from their dumb delusion.
If you're wrong and force the whole country into it, well, USSR has plenty of examples.
I think Trump and the right-wing-sphere more generally are long-term-correct about a lot of things, but the policies needed to implement the long-term fixes to our social problems are all going to involve short-term pain that needs to be... diffused and managed as deftly as possible, if only to avoid being left holding someone else's bag of shit during a re-election campaign.
So far I'm not seeing a whole lot of deftness.
On the plus side, the Trump tariffs and global recession might just put the kibosh on AI acceleration, particularly if they trigger a general collapse of the Chinese economy. (Admittedly it is a little scary to be thinking of this a lesser evil, in the grand scheme of things.)
>I think Trump and the right-wing-sphere more generally are long-term-correct about a lot of things, but the policies needed to implement the long-term fixes to our social problems are all going to involve short-term pain that needs to be... diffused and managed as deftly as possible, if only to avoid being left holding someone else's bag of shit during a re-election campaign.
The right is literally allergic to this, it involves too much governing and not enough finger-pointing and tantrum throwing. Say what you will about liberals, but every time they've built a coalition they've tried to implement policies beyond simply "cut taxes for the rich" (see Obamacare, build-back-better) and every time the Republicans happily jump in to slaughter them and shove every implementation error down their throats. Which, to be fair, made more sense when they were the party that did not believe government should exist or have any power over individual lives. Now that they are the party of authoritarian overreach, they are stuck with not knowing how to manage the consequences of their actions, because they've never had to before.
We got a preview of this when Dobbs happened, all these states rushed to pass abortion bans that screwed up life for the doctors in their states because there was zero clarity about how those bans were supposed to actually be implemented, and whether they allowed you to do things like, you know, save the life of a dying woman if she was three months pregnant and it might hurt the fetus. If you look at interviews with the Republicans who were asked about this, they all insisted it was the fault of the doctors and not their own complete and total inability to write and implement coherent laws. That was enough of a niche issue that I guess it did not move the needle for most voters, but trade policy affects everyone.
Trump governed well when his policy in his first term was "cut taxes for the rich" (the economy did VERY well before Covid). The difference is that he's now "raising taxes for all trade".
Did he govern well, or did he not govern and the economy continued along a trendline? I suppose for some people that counts, but to me that's like saying he took over a golden goose farm and managed not to kill any. Which makes his current failure all the more remarkable. If he'd just followed the do-nothing playbook, people would claim he's a financial genius, but his ego told him he had to DO something and now look where we are.
"I thought Trump's latest position was precisely that he was suspending most tariffs on most countries toward the goal of building a strategic/economic alliance against China"
Honest question -- where has he articulated this? Because he hasn't suspended tariffs (10% tariffs remain in effect, along with some narrow ones that are higher), he just delayed (so he claims) the "reciprocal" tariffs based on trade imbalances (but not really because countries with which we have a trade surplus are still subject to tariffs). And reports are that the Japanese delegation left without making a deal because the Trump administration couldn't explain what they actually wanted.
Also, Biden (well, his handlers) was building a strategic/economic alliance against China. Trump's actions (tariff and non-tariff alike) threaten that alliance. In fact, it may already be irreparably damaged.
Yeah, the baseline 10% tariffs are still in effect, but he was threatening tariffs of up to 60 or 70% on some countries, which are currently suspended.
IIRC, Japan has made it clear that if they are forced to chose between trade with China and trade with the US, they will pick the US, they just don't want to be forced. I don't know what's unclear about that.
Apparently, what's unclear is what they can do to get rid of the tariffs. If they remain in place, economic reality may force Japanese exporters to do more business with China (and other countries that aren't the US), regardless of the states preferences of the Japanese government.
There is no universe where Japan is going to choose to be a vassal state of the People's Republic of China in preference to being a vassal state of the US over a 10% tariff regime. (I guarantee the Chinese are much more liable to remember the Rape of Nanjing than Americans are sore about Pearl Harbour.)
I am not saying I'd go about this the same way Trump does. (Japan already agreed to pay a substantial annuity to the US in exchange for continued military protection and trade relations, so squeezing them for tariffs on top feels kinda extortionate.) But if push comes to shove, the Japanese will budge.
But if the reporting is correct, Japan sent a delegation to Washington with the goal of budging, but they couldn't figure out what the Trump administration wanted them to do.
Your original post said that the Trump administration is using tariffs to build a strategic/economic alliance against China. For that to work, they need to articulate a coherent vision for what that strategic/economic alliance would look like, with concrete policies that other nations can implement to join and support that alliance. I have yet to see such a plan outlined in public, nor have I seen reporting that it's being outlined in private. Time will tell, but so far I see no evidence to support your original claim.
"guarantee the Chinese are much more liable to remember the Rape of Nanjing than Americans are sore about Pearl Harbour"
A Chinese entertainment star nearly had his career totally destroyed over a controversy whipped up about "he took photos at a tourist spot which is also a shrine where a Japanese war criminal is honoured!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zhehan
"In 2021, Zhang faced severe criticism in China after being involved in a controversy over photos taken years earlier in Japan at a spot near the Yasukuni Shrine and Nogi Shrine due to the shrines' honoring of imperial Japanese military officers who invaded China. This criticism resulted in the removal of his online social media accounts, movies, television shows, and music. In December 2022, Zhang returned from a year of domestic boycott with the release of new music on international platforms outside of mainland China."
Being viewed as unpatriotic and therefore you should be cancelled because of things like this shows the still great sensitivity on the parts of both China and Japan over the war.
Having normal trade relations with a larger country doesn’t make you a “vassal state”. Going begging and doing whatever they tell you to do is how you become a vassal state. Trump is demanding that they become a vassal state in order to allow anything like the trade conditions of the past decade, and he promises never to allow free trade.
I do wonder if the 10% is so there's a tariff in place. Tracking systems that don't have a place for tariffs need to be changed to put one in there.
Once there's a place for the tariff in the bill, the percentage can be changed. It can even be zeroed out.
Admittedly if this is in their thought process it will be rather more thinking of implementation details than goes into most corporate strategies.
What tracking systems? And if such a tracking system exists and it requires an entry, even as a placeholder, why not simply enter a placeholder of zero? Isn't that what must have happened with Russia, since they aren't included in the 10% tariffs?
The financial systems of every company that does import/export business in the US. Which is likely almost all of them.
Every system that sends an invoice or receipt, or pays business expenses. Etc.
I’m sorry, but this makes no sense to me. I swear I’m not trying to be obtuse. Before Trump’s across the board tariffs some goods were exempt from tariffs. Some were subject to tariffs at negotiated rates. The details were/are country and product dependent. This was complex but the financial systems you are envisioning clearly managed it without the need for a non-zero tariff placeholder for every transaction.
Plus, Trump imposed tariffs on China in his first term (continued by Biden) without the need to impose a non-zero placeholder tariff on all other countries.
I don’t want to get too hung up on this, but I just cannot understand your original claim that Trump needed to impose across the board non-zero tariffs just to satisfy the needs of some sort of tariff tracking program (especially when you consider that he didn’t apply across the board non-zero tariffs, as I mentioned in regard to Russia).
It's make-work for regulators. Someone tell Musk.
Have they been hiring people to staff up the office of trade or any other tax bureaucracies? Or have they been cutting people with the intention of making taxes in general harder to enforce?
Even if one believes that the "real" goal of the tariffs was to be leverage for some sort of diplomatic stratagem (which seems dubious for many reasons), the actual implementation was about as counterproductive as possible. Yes, lots of countries are eager to negotiate with the U.S. to avoid them. But there's also a lot more anger and anti-U.S. sentiment in the international community than there has been for a long time, and tariffing everyone at the same time makes the U.S.'s negotiating position MUCH weaker than if it applied them selectively to key players.
I don't think they were intended as contradictory goals, I think the oppose-China goal was selected after pressure came on the stop-trade-deficit goal.
That's a really good point, and factoring in people's cognitive limitations (especially as they age) is something not often taken into account.
(My favorite quote about Bill Clinton, from an old New Republic issue: "When Bill Clinton used his intellect, he was quite effective. When he allowed himself to be ruled by other organs, he undermined himself.")
One problem is that while there are sensible reasons to impose a tariff (protecting infant industries, protecting strategically critical industries, negotiating lower tariffs from other countries), the politics of tariffs don't really encourage some careful technocratic weighing of whether this is a strategic/infant industry for which tariffs could be beneficial, and if so, how high and for how long. Instead, political pressures encourage using tariffs to buy off important voting blocs, reward friends/punish enemies, and posture for the cameras.
Widespread tariffs just make the country poorer overall, while benefitting some industries/workers at the expense of others.
"Tariffs have their uses -- you can use them to carefully rebuild American Senescent Industries [e.g., the pickup truck tariff has worked pretty well over the last 60 years in keeping some automotive industry in America, a cost that pickup truck fans seem happy to pay"
They're happy to pay because they don't know what they're missing.
"Free trade, in contrast, is kind of dim-witted"
Why?
I'd like this to be true, but I have a problem with this part:
"If one day Joe Biden had conceived a personal hatred for the nation of Ecuador and tried to sacrifice America’s interests on the altar of some anti-Ecuador crusade, his handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing."
This seems to be in conflict with the facts. Biden seems to have imposed a terrible decision on the his party at least twice: one, endless support for war crimes in Gaza, and two, his second run. The party did eventually nix the second run, but only well after it became an obvious disaster and with immense difficulty.
If the US can get past the present crisis, it needs to work out how it happened. For something like this to happen, the rot is almost certainly wider than you think. I don't expect it to be confined to one party despite their ideological differences, politicians copy strategies that work. Trump has exposed weaknesses in the US political system that politicians of any complexion will exploit unless they are fixed.
The Biden Presidency appears to have been largely the result of an early 2020 deal between 77 year old Joe Biden and 79 year old Rep. Jim Clyburn (D.-SC).
I keep reading all these conspiracy theorists on how Global Elites are brilliantly psy-opping everything that happens according to their genius Hari Seldon-like Master Plans, but instead it appears that two semi-senile political hacks outsmarted everybody else in 2020.
Biden was the compromise, electable candidate coasting on the remaining good vibes from the Obama period, plus he could be realistically portrayed as a moderate and thus not frighten the horses. I think the idea was to beat Trump, have a caretaker president in place (as with some conclaves which elect such a pope when no one side has a clear path to victory), and then work on putting forward someone for 2024.
Biden, however, was determined to run for a second term (and this is something I've never seen explored, why was he as determined as Trump to get that second bite at the cherry?) and since he had the momentum built up behind the first campaign - Joe is all that stands between you and the disaster that Trump will unleash! - it was hard for the party to come forward and say to the public "actually we lied through our teeth and Biden is incapable". The funding from the donors was already earmarked for Biden/Harris, and by the time they were forced to make Biden step aside, it was too late to run a proper primary and find a replacement, so Harris was thrust forward (especially as the money for Biden/Harris was not easily transferrable to Other Candidate If Any).
Whatever about psy-ops, there's definitely no genius global elite human capital running it all.
Biden had always been, despite his not unreasonable centrist ideology, an extreme egomaniac almost as extraordinary in this regard as Trump. That it would be extremely hard to pry Biden out of running again at age 82 ought to have been obvious when he was 78.
This should not have been unknown. There are chapters about Biden in Theodore Whites's 1973 "The Making of the President 1972" and Richard Ben Cramer's 1990 "What It Takes." Both famous political journalists find Biden pretty likable, but it should also have been obvious for more than a half century that he had a vastly overblown self-regard.
The Nova pieces on PBS about Biden show this, too. Biden went into politics believing he was more or less the second coming of JFK. He always wanted to be president. He was also a "No retreat, no surrender" guy, which sounds great when sung by Bruce Springsteen, but reveals its flaws in the hands of someone like Trump, and probably Biden.
I believe you are thinking of Tom Petty not Springsteen.
Basically everyone in the Democratic party decided not to run against Biden in 2024. There is likely to have been some kind of agreement.
'The Biden Presidency appears to have been largely the result of an early 2020 deal between 77 year old Joe Biden and 79 year old Rep. Jim Clyburn (D.-SC).'
Can you point me to more info on that? This is the first I've heard of it.
Bernie Sanders (a non-Democrat) was the top vote-getter in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, but far from a majority. There was no clear alternative, with Buttigieg, Warren, Biden, and Klobuchar all with significant support. Clyburn's late endorsement of Biden enabled him to win the South Carolina primary, which established him as the leading alternative to Sanders going into Super Tuesday.
Not to mention the other non-Sanders candidates all withdrawing at once.
Can't have an actual leftist win in America or (a) the rich might not get infinitely richer every two ten-trillionths of a Planck second and then the yachting industry will collapse and (b) the proles might realize that federal governance and taxes and all that can actually be put to uses that aren't merely pretexts for enabling the rich to get infinitely richer every two ten-trillionths of a Planck second and stop listening to the people with a five year old's understanding of civics who scream that all taxes are bad all the time always.
This is conventional wisdom/legend on the Left, repeated endlessly in places like the Guardian and New Republic. It never seems to address some obvious logic questions including:
-- multiple statewide polls taken during the week before the Saturday primary election date had Biden winning the primary with Sanders a distant second and Steyer third and Buttigieg fourth. Clyburn issued his endorsement on that Wednesday. Biden ended up winning the primary with Sanders a distant second and Steyer third and Buttigieg fourth; Biden simply added some votes compared to the final polls. So what's the logic by which Clyburn's very-late endorsement was _necessary_ for Biden to win the SC primary?
-- what's the basis for assuming that Clyburn's endorsement of Biden wasn't based on Clyburn's own policy or other preferences? Put another way, why was it considered remarkable that a 79-year-old black politician who'd become a public champion of Barack Obama in 2008, and who'd been publicly criticized by the only black candidate in the 2020 primary, would end up endorsing Obama's VP in that 2020 primary?
-- if there was indeed some sort of "deal" made between Biden and Clyburn, what was Clyburn's end of that deal? Where's the quid to go with the pro quo?
Among other quid pro quos, Ketanji Brown Jackson wound up on the Supreme Court. Clyburn actually wanted a particular South Carolina black woman who is a close friend of his to be on the Supreme Court, but that was a little much, so they just announced it as Biden's promise to put a black woman on the Supreme Court. (Plus a remarkable fraction of Biden's other judicial appointees were black women.)
Also, Biden publicly promised to appoint a woman as his running mate, and then as the Racial Reckoning got going after May 25, 2020, everybody knew she _had_ to be a black woman. (Everybody these days is forgetting how utterly infallible the Theory of Intersectionality seemed to a huge fraction of American elites in 2020.)
So Joe wound up picking Kamala. She proved a dud, plus Biden and his staff didn't do much to make her look better, to make Joe more inevitable for a second term. So Joe hung on, but then he was humiliated by his debate with Trump and finally quit. Due to Me Too and the Racial Reckoning and all that, the Democrats couldn't really pass over their black woman Veep, so they had what Gavin Newsom called, in his most likable moment, "the 30 minute primary" and Joe endorsed Kamala.
She didn't impress voters (although she was cogent enough to beat the 19 year older Trump in their one debate). One of my readers pointed out her resemblance to the Stock Photo DEI Woman who is shown self-actualizing on every corporate website.
And Trump was elected.
Why do you think War in Gaza was an idiosyncracy of Biden and not something the "bureaucracy" would do anyways?
It is strongly my prior that generally the american institutions are mostly pro-Israel to a really large degree, and it was only the "far-left" that materially objected to supporting Israel.
(Note also that towards the end the Biden admin was negotiating with Israel to at least let aid in, otherwise they cut support.)
I'm not making a value judgement on what is the wrong vs right amount of military support for Israel in their campaign, just making the point that that didn't seem like a Biden idiosyncracy.
I think Biden running for a second time is also not cleanly supporting you:
1. As you say, eventually it got nixed
2. Is it your sense that "the Democrats" managed to unite behind someone else, but Biden himself just singlehandedly strongarmed everyone else so that he can run for a second time?
It is my sense that there was no consensus or strategical thinking whatsoever about who would be the best candidate against Trump, Biden was kinda the default, then they tried to do some damage control, but too late.
I think we may always have one low quality evidence about what happens inside the bureaucracy, but my sense is that while support for Israel is reflexive, it's also limited. The Israelis themselves were expecting to be brought up short after a few weeks and that's one reason why they went in as hard as they did initially. I have heard that the bureaucracy made initiatives to pull back, but each time were squashed from the presidency.
On Biden's second run: remember all that happened before Trump started breaking norms, and even then resistance was still difficult. My main point is that now, opportunist politicians realize that the machinery of careful reflection and lawfulness is much weaker than we thought. We are even seeing this in the UK, where comments like "Trump and Musk have shown you can reform much more quickly" have been heard from within our government, which is idealogically completely different to Trumpism
If the entire legal system is rigged to ensure catastrophic idiocy as a default outcome (e.g, millions of people can enter your country without due process, but you can't evict them without due process), then "careful reflection and lawfulness" are indeed overrated.
Trump, to his credit, has reduced illegal border crossings by about 95%, if I recall correctly, and has been working to speed deportations in the face of substantial legal impediments. Long overdue, if you ask me.
> Trump, to his credit, has reduced illegal border crossings by about 95%, if I recall correctly.
This is incorrect - they're down about 95% year-over-year but the majority of that drop happened while Biden was still President.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-crossings-plunge-to-levels-not-seen-in-decades-amid-trump-crackdown/
Fair enough, but Trump's election, by itself, would have deterred a lot of migrants from coming, and I'll bet anything that Biden's crossing-reductions were purely a short-term election tactic. The US would currently be drowning in more immigrants if Biden or Harris was still in office.
"All good things that happen happen because of the people I like, and if people I didn't like had control things would be infinitely worse than they are" is no way to navigate through life, son.
The British parliamentary system has few built-in checks and balances. The Prime Minister is intended to extraordinarily powerful in a crisis, like the captain of a warship, limited only by the English cultural assumption that there are some things we don't do.
Unfortunately, those cultural assumptions about what is "unthinkable" have shifted drastically.
One important check is that we can get rid of our prime minister at any time if they turn out to be useless.
Right. A parliamentary system is kind of like how a pirate ship is run. The captain is the absolute autocrat, until the majority of pirates get together and throw him overboard. Then they appoint a new absolute autocrat.
i wouldn’t say ideologically *completely* different
"Is it your sense that "the Democrats" managed to unite behind someone else, but Biden himself just singlehandedly strongarmed everyone else so that he can run for a second time?"
I think they had the same problem then as they do now; there is no one single candidate that all can agree on and who will get elected. So there was no one alternative to Biden, so he was able to use his pull and position to strongarm his way into a second run, and I think everyone just crossed their fingers and hoped they could pull it off for a second time, then worry about it post-election victory.
I think there was also the fear (cf. Carter vs. Kennedy 1980) that anybody running against Biden would necessarily have to criticize him in some areas and weaken his support (and vice versa), thereby strengthening the Republican candidate. This seemed to become pathological in the Harris campaign, which refused to criticize Biden's policies even though Biden was no longer running.
It's hard to criticize a policy when a month ago you were either all in on it, or invisible.
If you're not an incumbent then it's possible. But she was in office!
Even the media might have questions then. An articulate candidate might have been able to answer them. But Harris was not that candidate.
Yeah, Harris had to straddle both stools - she had been leaning towards the progressive wing of the party in her 2020 run and got nowhere, so then she had to tack towards the centre in 2024. And since a lot of her campaign staff were ex-Biden people, she couldn't risk looking ungrateful by throwing him under the bus. I think the view was that the public still mostly liked Biden and would react negatively to Harris criticising him (kicking the guy when he was down).
As well, her big pitch was "I was VP, I was there and active in the decisions and policy-making" so she couldn't very well turn around and then go "and now I think those policies were crap".
Biden was unpopular enough that he was pushed aside, yet popular enough that the replacement couldn't criticize any of his policies?
I suppose the "kicking him when he's down" factor might apply.
Though again, an articulate candidate might have been able to square that circle. "We support those policies, but think he's *recently* lost it, so he won't be able to push any more of them. We will continue in his legacy."
Harris? No.
I looked back at George HW Bush's campaign in 1988, after he'd spent two terms as Reagan's VP. While he broadly endorsed a continuation of Reagan's policies, a key talking point was calling for a "kinder, gentler" nation compared to the Reagan years.
Harris, for example, could have endorsed Biden's newest border policies while saying that their success demonstrated they should have been implemented sooner. Instead, she argued incoherently that they were implemented at just the right time.
It certainly helped that the other incumbent was Harris. Who was unpopular in the primaries.
Biden (or whoever) almost certainly picked Harris as an insurance policy. "Take me out and you get her instead".
There may even have been noises *among the Democrats* about using the 25th amendment. But they all quailed before the prospect of President Harris...
Harris seems to have been picked as, sorry to say, sort of a DEI selection. Biden announced that his VP would be a woman, then with some horsetrading about support to get out the vote it had to be a black woman, and then when the bill came due Harris was the least worst/most acceptable candidate, in that nobody was particularly happy but nobody was particularly offended she got picked, either.
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/875000650/pressure-grows-on-joe-biden-to-pick-a-black-woman-as-his-running-mate
Here's a "making the best of it" article that swears up and down she was the best choice and indeed the only one, because everyone else on the list had baggage:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/11/politics/joe-biden-kamala-harris-vp/index.html
But when he declared "a black woman" to be the only candidate he (or his handlers) likely already knew those things.
And "how surprising!" Harris ended up as the only candidate.
That she made a supremely unsuitable candidate as a replacement President was likely at least a major factor.
For his VP pick he just said it would be a woman. The racial reckoning riots of 2020 were happening at the same time, and so third parties would say "and of course by 'woman' he means 'a black woman'" but that was never part of Biden's promise for VP pick.
Party insiders knew that Biden was too old to run and wanted to have a normal open primary, but Biden prevented that by insisting on running again.
It takes a VERY extreme circumstance to convince a critical mass of a party to *openly* go against their own incumbent president, and by the time that point was reached, it was too late to turn things around.
The war in Gaza has had similar per-capita death tolls (probably a little lower) than is typical for urban warfare against guerilla militants using human shields, so unless you think all war is a war crime I don't think that's a fair critique.
(FWIW, a more comprehensive fuel-blockade of the Gaza strip would probably have ended the war in 6 weeks, since Hamas would be asphyxiated in their tunnels.)
Some voices (e.g. Amnesty International and the government of Ireland) have indeed argued recently that every war in which at least 1 civilian dies on the enemy side is a genocide, even if that civilian's death was undesired and inadvertent. (The motivation here is to ensure that Israel is considered guilty of genocide, even though it would be innocent by the standard definition of genocide.)
So the Irish are admitting they were responsible for a genocide against the British then?
Yes. It's completely idiotic.
I think critics of Israel point to the large number of killed children as the reason why the war is especially bad. However, I don't know if I can trust Hamas' numbers on this. I have struggled to find a trustworthy source.
The bombing campaign in the early phases of the war probably killed more women/children than usual. (Israel gave copious warning for civilians to evacuate, but Hamas will try to shoot anyone who leaves, and they have quite a bit of popular support regardless).
Typically the vast majority of ‘child’ casualties are male 14-year-olds armed with AKs or helping to ferry mortars for Hamas, and I suspect the figures will trend back toward that baseline as the war goes on.
Your second paragraph is just made up. You can look at the stats on children killed and it's a mix of all ages and both genders. 14 year olds aren't overrepresented.
This is from back in 2014, but the curve clearly peaks in the 20-24 age ratio and skews heavily male. 'Vast' majority might be an overstatement, but they're heavily overrepresented compared to the population structure.
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2014/07/gaza-casualties-by-age-and-gender.html
Why use numbers from the 2014 conflict? It was a very different and much smaller conflict. Look at the deaths in the current (post Oct 7th) conflict.
The dataset from September 2024 has 9233 Gazans 14 years old or under identified. (It excludes bodies not yet identified.) 5026 are male and 4207 are female. That skews slightly more male than the general population of 0-14 year olds in Gaza (which also skews slightly male). 657 of the 9233 were 14. Even if you uncharitably assume every single 14 year old Gazan killed was a militant, it doesn't make much of a dent in the overall numbers.
Given that Trump appears to be if anything more willing to support Israel’s actions in Gaza. I’d say Biden’s policies there were less about him imposing his own idiosyncrasies on the party and more about there being fairly broad support for Israel among the American public. And unlike tariffs, the problem with Israel-Gaza is that if the American public is wrong about the optimal policy the negative effects are concentrated abroad so it is harder for them to correct.
You must have missed both humiliation rituals Bibi got put through by Trump in front of the media at the White House, & how apoplectic the neocon Zionists in his administration are about being sidelined & denied their Iran war while Witkoff & Boehler negotiate the peace. And it seems you have no idea that Trump already quietly approved Egypt's plan to rebuild Gaza *without* displacing the Palestinians.
Sorry, do you have a source for the claim that Trump approved Egypt's plan? I indeed have no idea that this happened, and am struggling to find information on the subject; instead, I'm finding claims that he rejected it when it was first proposed, which is neither here nor there.
Exactly. As much as the left raged about Israel, it was a vote loser on the national scale.
Of course, that still doesn't justify Michigan muslims' moronic support of Trump in protest over Gaza.
The Gaza thing made sense, politically. Most of the country was still pro-Israel at that point. And then the protesters went and pissed everyone off, to the point nobody's really crying for the universities despite massive attacks on freedom of speech to the point FIRE's changed sides.
>The party did eventually nix the second run, but only well after it became an obvious disaster and with immense difficulty.
"His handlers" there less means the party and more the immediate staff (and Jill) that controlled his schedule and access to observers. The staff would be smart enough to put down an Ecuadorian Crusade without the party stepping in, but they were too arrogant/power-hungry/whatever to put down his candidacy until the party cobbled together enough spine to interfere.
For better or for worse, the American system leaves decisions about running for office up to the individuals and the primary voters, and gives the party no say in choosing candidates. This change was made in the early 1970s and late 1960s, largely for populist reasons.
But international action is something that many different parts of the political system have a say in, even if Congress often chooses to say “we say nothing”.
Yeah, I was kind of cheering for more smoke-filled rooms, but then we got the Democratic party first anointing Hillary (a weak candidate), then deciding to keep Biden despite increasing signs of dementia, and then seizing on Kamala (another weak candidate, albeit in a legitimately very hard situation). None of this is much of a commercial for the smoke-filled room and a choice by the party hierarchy.
The party hierarchy played precisely zero role in all of those. Smoke filled rooms are the way we might have gotten something else, but those rooms are gone, so we were stuck with those things.
This isn't an argument for the "populist right," it's an argument for democracy. And the argument for democracy has never been that the people get it right every time, but that, over time, it's a self-correcting mechanism, because bad policies get thrown out and good ones retained. Obviously, this isn't guaranteed (yes, Venezuela) but the *un*popularity of Trump's tariffs strikes me as a huge endorsement of this approach. Meanwhile the administrative state ploughs merrily on regardless.
I can't stand the populist right, but I choose them over the PMC left any day.
A while back I wrote a post descriptively titled "Elections should not matter" https://ariethoughts.substack.com/p/elections-should-not-matter
I support democracy, but I argue that big ideological swings back and forth (such as the American system produces) are bad for governments. They're also not very democratic, because the change in public opinion is not that stark. Ideally, any self-correcting mechanism would have a much smaller amplitude. In a coalition government for example, Trump's coalition partners would long ago demanded he call it off.
So get more parties than just two, just like many other countries?
uh, yes?
This is an interesting framing, and one I fundamentally disagree with. I don't think the purpose of democracy is to make a change in policy proportionate to the change in public opinion, and stability of policy and coalition is a mixed blessing at best. If you're driving down a straight road, big turns on the wheel are undesirable. If you come to a bend, they're necessary. In fact, one of the reasons I think FPTP is the best electoral system is because it makes decisive political change easier and avoids the endless fudges that plague continental politics. Switzerland is a well-governed country but it's also unique in many ways - and it was well-governed long before its current political setup.
Okay, but if you're arguing for a powerful executive unconstrained by public opinion and consensus, you're kinda arguing against democracy more generally.
Unconstrained by public opinion? I am the one arguing that the government should be made to change course when public opinion changes, while Arie is calling for long-term stability regardless of shifts in public opinion.
Your original comment was as follows:
> "I don't think the purpose of democracy is to make a change in policy proportionate to the change in public opinion"
Exactly. Arie's point is that if the public goes from 52-48 in favour to 48-52 against, that's really not a big shift in opinion, so policy shouldn't change much. Whereas I say that it's perfectly fine to have a big shift in policy on that basis, because the majority has gone from Yes to No.
So you mean coalition governments are even faker, gayer and Jewish?
I wish they were Jewish
The 'PMC left' also exists and operates within democracy so I don't see how/why you have different standards for them.
The standard is the same for everyone. I have no problem with a political party that wants to argue for PMC Left causes, implement them when they win power, and regroup and go again when they lose. That's democracy.
I do have a problem with a system that hands power, or at least a veto, to the PMC Left, regardless of the election outcome, which is what Scott is defending.
I think you're right. He outright states that the liberal left controls the bureaucracy (which I think most people generally agree with), and then says that's good thing.
I'm not sure it's fully possible to prevent, but one side of a political divide having a permanent veto over three Constitutional branches doesn't seem ideal and is quite undesirable. Arguably, Trump exists because enough people in the country felt that this was a bad arrangement, and were willing to elect someone like Trump in order to fix it.
American democracy is not just, or even mainly, a bunch of plebiscites. By design, it's a system with three branches, numerous veto points, the rule of law (meaning laws survive elections), and rights that cannot be denied absent due process. Elections are *one* part of the system, but far from the only one.
The "PMC," which I take more or less as a pejorative in the context for federal government employees, when not following the desires of the executive is typically following laws or (gasp!) well-established norms. This is a feature, not a bug.
Sometimes the veto points are frustrating, and there probably does need to be system for pruning over time. But the government has always been more of a supertanker than a speedboat: it's frustratingly slow to turn but, on the other hand, it's hard to capsize. We're seeing now the effect of the speedboat approach and, as it turns out, a lot of those check and balances, laws and norms, were there for a reason.
> well-established norms.
One side has been in power continuously for decades, yes. It's a feature if you're on it, that the other guys can't do much, but a bug with risking burning the house down over if you aren't.
But how many people saying "lets risk burning the house down" are going to say the other side having permanent power was the lesser evil now it looks like the house actually is on fire.
There's two questions here.
One is whether the bureaucracy is an appropriate veto point. Some, negatively, have been calling it the fourth branch of government. It's theoretically within the executive, but if it can act separately and opposed to the executive, then that's obviously in question. Do we really want a fourth branch not envisioned by the Constitution, and if so, should it be designed how it is?
Secondly, is it appropriate that there exists a de facto leftward bend to this fourth branch? Imagine your large ship that turns slowly is only ever allowed to go straight or turn left - the rudder is restricted from turning right. Obviously the people that want to turn left are good with that, and the people who want to only go straight might begrudgingly accept it, but the people who want to turn right are going to be pretty unhappy with that arrangement and want to change it. If elections are not the correct tool for making that change, what should they do? I hope you would agree that "they can never get their way" is an inappropriate resolution within a system that believes itself to be democratic in any sense.
"Cthulhu swims left."
I would challenge on factual grounds the first half of your post. I don’t think the Constitution precludes an interactive relationship between the Executive and Legislative branches that takes the form of administrative agencies. That’s just a choice.
Setting that aside, the way to change the direction of the administrative agencies is through legal process, i.e, pass legislation. The problem the current administration is having, to the detriment of the whole country, is it doesn’t want to be bothered to do that. It just wants to gut agencies (arguably unconstitutionally) so they can’t do their legally mandated jobs, rather than go through the process of passing laws where, admittedly, they’d have a hard time, given the unpopularity of many of the initiatives and the thin Republican margins in Congress. But that’s our system. We could have a parliamentary system, where decision-making is somewhat more streamlined, but we don’t. I will say this, though: careful what you wish for. From the other side of the fence, most Democrats would argue they face more formidable veto points than Republicans do. See, e.g., SCOTUS.
In answer to your first question, congress still has a huge amount of control over that so-called fourth branch, including delineating its powers and confirming who runs it. But they can't get their act together so it feels independent.
Secondly, it is entirely possible to get the boat to turn right, but conservatives don't want to do the work. Probably because they are ideologically opposed to the boat existing, which I understand, but instead of acknowledging that all efforts to destroy the boat have failed and maybe the boat serves some kind of necessary function they should try and understand, they just double down.
I disagree with Scott's (and your) characterization of the power and behavior of the government bureaucracy.
The staff certainly leans left, but they don't really have veto powers over the government, nor do they behave that way. The majority of what constrained Trump's behavior during his first term was his own choice of people to appoint and trust (Kushner, Ross, Perdue, etc.), which were his direct appointees, and not at all related to the PMC left. We can also see this easily because even stripping out the legally questionable things, Trump 2 has not been vetoed by this group.
The other thing that constrained his behavior was the regular political gridlock issues in the structure of the US government (i.e. the filibuster) and poor coalition management (i.e. being unable to effectively convince congresspeople (who are democratically appointed to represent their districts). These limitations impacted Biden as well.
During the Bush era, Bush was able to implement his policies without veto from the bureaucracy. Obama was a political outsider vs Hillary Clinton but was able to win and implement his policy agenda.
If an elected president genuinely wants to implement some policy, I struggle to see evidence of the unelected bureaucracy significantly hampering their ability to do so.
There are things like independent agencies which the trump admin and unitary executive people seem to take issue with, but those agencies can receive appointments equally from both parties depending on who is president (which happened normally under trump, with several places like the FTC, USPS, etc. getting Trump appointees and behaving in general with his wishes). The various agencies also are often subject to the desires of the executive and behave accordingly (i.e. NLRB behavior shifting between Trump 1 and Biden).
Even during the second half of Biden’s term, which is the most hands off presidency in recent history, Biden was more supportive of Israel than you would predict if the PMC left had such power, especially given how progressively he staffed his administration.
I would say that a lot of these pain points actually arise out of the power of congress getting limited due to congressional gridlock and them giving up their own power. If say the filibuster was removed, congress would be more able to execute, that would boost the ability for the government to pass and execute policy and address the will of their voters instead of being in a deadlock and having to use slow and clumsy coordination mechanisms (what the left does), or a further expansion of the executive’s power (what the right is currently doing), both of which have side effects (though I agree with Scott that the left’s mechanism is less bad and easier to guide reform than the right’s.
But, that coordination mechanism is not a global universal veto and isn’t really held by the government bureaucrats but more of an artifact of a very coalition based system, and it a) is responsive to voters if in a lagging way, b) pretty much entirely impacts democratic leaders and not republicans ones.
Why is it more democratic for a single individual elected by the people to have unilateral decision making power. Versus a larger set of people also elected by the people having power?
The "bureaucratic institutions" Scott is referring to are *unelected* - probably necessarily so. It's hard to see how there could be elections to fill roles in (e.g.) the State Department.
If you're suggesting that the US should move to a Parliamentary system - I take no view. I live in a country with Parliamentary government, it has pluses and minuses, but it certainly doesn't solve the problem of the administrative state blocking the elected politicians.
Unelected bureaucratic systems are the only way you get access to informed judgment about anything. There are ways to shape the effectiveness of this power, but dismantling the unelected bureaucracy is not an effective way to do things.
There is individual centered democracy, where the people chose one individual. And then that individual has a lot of personal power. And there are systems of democracy built on parties and institutions where no 1 person can go off the rails.
And the administrative state is neither. If you want to argue for greater Congressional power, I'm not opposed (but good luck making that happen, because Congress doesn't want power).
I hate to bring it up, because I know that I sound like one of those people who is secretly arguing that poor people or dumb people shouldn't be allowed to vote, and I don't think that, but I *do* think that people generally misunderstand that democracy ="the majority gets whatever they want" is neither what the constitution intended nor, historically speaking, a very well-thought out idea. You want a system where the majority generally steers policy, but minority groups can still band together and force greater compromises than there would be if this was a raw numbers game. Otherwise you have ancient Athens, which turned on both individuals and entire states at the drop of a hat.
Of course. And it's unsustainable, because if the majority is consistently denied, they will simply take what they are entitled to through force.
If the majority is 90% of the population then maybe. But if the majority is 51%, or (as seems to be the case right now) 30+% pretending that because half of Americans don't vote they automatically count towards their mandate, you are much more likely to end up with anarchy or civil war. Also, entitlement is not a concept a fascist should invoke. Its for people who believe in things like inalienable rights.
no mention of 37 trillion in debt, 2 trillion deficit, 1.2 trillion trade deficit. increase in government expenditures of 50% in the last 6 years. Nor of the rube goldberg processes created by the left and administrative state trying to solve every problem, as described by ezra kline on the jon stewart podcast, so much gets spent bureaucracies and ngos funded/created but nothing gets built.
These are all valid complaints, but thus far Trump has repeated the usual GOP playbook of cutting services and then cutting taxes even more, thereby increasing the government deficit, not reducing it. He's just as responsible for this as Biden was.
There's still time to cut spending instead of hitting the inflation button.
Except they haven’t even tried to start. They’ve been cutting employees in all the bureaucracies whose job it is to ensure that revenue comes in, and claiming that these tiny salary and research grant cuts are more important than the tax cheating they are intentionally enabling.
Decimating the IRS is also important. Income tax alone is not enough to cover future entitlements and interest.
He's a lot more responsible than Biden. The Republican tax cut plan absolutely dwarfs everything that came before. It's difficult to overstate just how massive the planned deficit increases are. It's bigger than all the major legislation Trump and Biden passed over the last eight years PUT TOGETHER.
And of course, Trump crashing the economy while driving up interest rates by encouraging capital flight doesn't exactly help either.
Right. The S&P rose 50% in Biden's last year, and I don't remember anyone on substack mentioning it? It has become the norm to accept money printing to support huge trade deficits and the American consumer, while the supplier dies. At the end of the day this imbalance has given us Trump. Yes, the deficit will grow, but there's no way to raise taxes if you are cutting government spending, as we must.
"Yes, the deficit will grow, but there's no way to raise taxes if you are cutting government spending, as we must." - can you elaborate? Why would "cutting government spending" and "raising" taxes be mutually exclusive? Even if it's an either/or, why do you declare that "we must cut government spending"? Why not raise taxes instead? And what do you propose to meaningfully cut government spending? AFAICT, there are three four options:
- "DOGE": fire people who are doing things that were decided to be useful at some point, and probably still are. Social Security administration, regulatory agencies, public health agencies, desaster protection agencies, basic research... which one goes on the chopping block?
- industry/ infrastructure spending: the aim is to revitalize manufacturing in the US, right? So... spending no money on roads, trains, electricity, internet will sure pay off, right?
- dismantling Medicare/ Medicaid/ Social Security: basically, screwing over poor, ill, and old people. Sure sounds tempting to billionaires, but is it a good idea?
- reducing military expenses: I'm pretty sure that you could find a few billion here, but it doesn't look like Trump is even trying.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would probably cut public spending on health, education and possibly housing across the OECD by at least 50% and perhaps as much as 80%. (Scott already did an excellent article on why education spending is mostly pointless, as have others.)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-signaling-model-of-education
(TLDR: There is no correlation between school hours and educational outcomes within the developed world, and reading/math/science literacy in the US has roughly plateaued since the 1970s despite roughly a 4x increase in K12 funding.)
There is, similarly, no correlation between health outcomes and health spending within the developed world, likewise suggesting that either genetic or lifestyle factors external to the health system dominate in explaining outcomes.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2019/11/07/a-tale-of-two-covariates-why-owid-and-company-are-wrong-about-us-healthcare/
The general public doesn't want to hear this, of course. Any politician who signed off on these reductions would be committing electoral suicide, and DOGE has barely touched them. But it is nonetheless true that these programs hit a point of diminishing returns around fifty years ago and have become fantastically parasitic.
(Conversely, I don't think there's strong evidence that USAID was especially wasteful, even though it was the first to go.)
"There is, similarly, no correlation between health outcomes and health spending within the developed world, likewise suggesting that either genetic or lifestyle factors external to the health system dominate in explaining outcomes."
I think you've made a logical error. I will accept for the sake of argument that, as we sit here in the year 2025, there is no correlation between health systems that spend more and health outcomes, it does not at all follow that within our system, drastically slashing (50-80%) or eliminating Medicaid and Medicare would have no negative health or quality of life consequences. Almost certainly that's false, and you run the risk of a catastrophic level of suffering. Maybe you believe it's would be worth it to realize other benefits, but an idea that hand-waves away the other side of the ledger is just not serious.
I think there probably would be some non-zero reduction in health outcomes, and I'm as irritated by 1-percenter tax evasion as anyone, but we have to consider tradeoffs here.
Are we going to double OECD health spending again for... I don't know, a six month improvement in life expectancy? As opposed to, e.g, pro-natal incentives, cultural patronage for right-wing art, a negative income tax, fundamental research into somatic gene editing or radical longevity, asteroid mining, bioconservation, phage therapies, nuclear energy or a dozen other policies or research agendas I would consider to have more promising RoI?
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/#rcatoc-diminishing-returns-to-spending-and-worse-lifestyle-factors-explain-americas-mediocre-health-outcomes
Each dollar gets you major increases in outcomes up to $500 annual PPP.
You get diminishing returns up to $3500 PPP.
After that it simply looks flat.
If the administration kills coverage for the extremely poor, or childhood vaccinations, then I'd expect to see some fall off. But in general 50% of our medical spending could vanish and you wouldn't see it in the numbers.
But from where? We can have a totally separate debate about overall the structure and inefficiencies of our healthcare system. That’s fine. But if we’re talking about Medicare and Medicaid, probably the most efficient parts of the system, a 50-80% cut would be catastrophic. If you start to visualize how those cuts would manifest — countless conditions no longer covered, medications not provided, thousands of hospitals closed — it’s simply unthinkable or, to be more contemporary, it’s DOGE on steroids. Just taking a chainsaw to complicated, interlocked systems is foolhardy in the extreme. The metaphor would be performing surgery with a hatchet, but that may be too close to the literal truth to be useful.
If he does manage to cut a large sum from the budget, say a trillion or more, there will be softened demand, of course, and then to allow the tax cuts to expire would be another negative, so that's why I think they want to extend the tax cuts and cut govt. spending. Can they get to a trillion? Well, govt spending increased by 50% over the past five years, so I think it's possible. I think they could raise taxes in a couple of areas, for example why private equity pirates get a carried interest loophole is beyond me, tax it like our income is taxed. But just eliminating corruption they could get 500B, and with some cuts to unnecessary depts they could get another 500B. And if he has the mettle he could get another 500B out of the military. I don't generally like 'just increase taxes' because at the end of the day for govt receipts to really rise they have to raise taxes on where the income is and that's us unfortunately, the vast middle.
The debt and deficit aren't exclusively (nor even mostly) the fault of 'the left'. At least half of it in the past 8 years is directly a result of Trump, and by all accounts they are set to make it worse.
It's pretty disingenuous to point to the debt as a reason we need to put Republicans in charge when Republican rule consistently leads to higher deficits than when the Democrats are in power.
Exactly. The last time we ran a surplus was under Clinton, who worked with the GOP to raise taxes and cut spending. Bush II took this running surplus (which would have paid off the debt in less than a decade) and argued we had to cut taxes because it would cause problems if the debt was paid off too quickly (!).
Obama worked out a similar framework to Clinton's with GOP Speaker Boehner, but the Tea Party nixed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_bargain_(United_States,_2011)
"Obama offered to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts on the table in exchange for a tax hike of roughly $100 billion per year over 10 years. Meanwhile, government spending would be cut by roughly three times that amount. It's no small irony that the party's dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted."
I’m not at all sure where you get your confidence here. But setting aside your speculations about life expectancy, with which I do not concur, life expectancy is hardly the only metric. Probably, if we no longer covered hospital births, the infant and maternal mortality rate would rise some, but generally speaking the economy would press on and life expectancy would be marginally affected. But most people would experience forced home birth to be a major source of stress and worry that would significantly diminish their quality of life. Your proposals aren’t unrealistic because it would be politically unpopular. That’s missing the point. The proposals would be politically unpopular because people would hate them.
Given that you note how unpopular this is, aren't swiss-style referendums both more populist AND a well-working safeguard? I absolutely agree that people who were strongly pro-Trump in particular should be forced to own this, but I really don't see why someone who simply is/was anti-establishment and pro-populist a la "the elite doesn't do what the people want, so I vote for a change until we get someone who does" should. This strikes me as just one of the many problems with the 2-party equilibrium of party politics, not of populism.
And just to be sure, I don't claim that pure populism or referendums will always lead to correct outcome; It's just that this approach is imo better at self-correcting than elite capture of institution, which can just insulate itself from its own mistakes.
I'm astonished that so few people are using Triffin's dilemma to explain Trump's tariff policy. What Triffin held is that a global reserve currency, like the dollar or the Spanish imperial doubloon, must be available to everyone. This entails that the country holding reserve currency status must inevitably run a trade deficit, as has occurred in the United States since the end of the gold standard, beginning in the 1970s.
Demand for the imperial currency means that it will be regularly exchanged for goods and services: money is going out, imports are coming in. Given that the currency is regularly bought — and kept in store, as a reserve — by others, it becomes more valuable, eroding the metropolis’ overall competitiveness: before the collapse of Detroit’s car-makers, there was the collapse of Castile’s textile industry, booming and dominant in the 15th century, outcompeted by northerners with weaker currencies — mostly British and Dutch — in the 16th.
The result is a perennial trade deficit that can only be contained with punitive tariffs, like those announced by Donald Trump. At the same time, such tariffs can only lead to imperial decline, as the empire’s currency becomes less useful for others to exchange or store, and the empire finds it harder to just build up debt to raise armies; the hoped-for-tradeoff is a reinforcement of the metropolis’ industrial base through import substitution.
The obvious counter is: "yes, I love my empire, thank you very much." Fine. Nothing wrong with stating it thus. Hanania and Razib Khan do it all the time.
Yes, the fact that more dollars had to be exported than imported in order for the dollar to become the world's currency is completely accurate, but the US probably benefitted from this on net by essentially becoming the world's banker.
I understand the argument for strategic tariffs, if only from the perspective of rebuilding supply chains for essential goods within the US (although 95% of US trade was already internal or within NAFTA.) But Trump's seemingly erratic declarations on the topic (rather than saying, e.g, "we will phase in tariffs at X% per year over 10 years on country Y unless country Y halts trade with China") has, understandably, spooked the markets. Even the 10% reciprocal tariffs and trade war with China is probably going to cause a global recession, even if it's a necessary long-term adjustment.
There's a good chance that this is (finally) going to pop China's gigantic real estate bubble, and possibly a few other market bubbles around the world. Interesting times, to be sure.
"Even the 10% reciprocal tariffs and trade war with China is probably going to cause a global recession, even if it's a necessary long-term adjustment."
That's the entire problem: a recession is probably due, some markets are way overheated, and correcting that means pain. Nobody wants a recession and pain and austerity, even if it will balance the books again. We're still not back to where we were in the glory (and ultimately unsustainable) days of the Celtic Tiger, even if there is some recovery and the economy is (possibly) in better shape:
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/what-has-ireland-learned-from-austerity
"Ireland’s dramatic recovery from its severe economic crisis has led to the country being regarded as a “poster child” for economic regeneration through fiscal austerity. The Irish case has been widely hailed by EU institutions and certain Irish and European politicians as evidence that the fiscal disciplines and structural changes prescribed by austerity policies could provide the platform for stability and a return to growth and prosperity. Economist Stephen Kinsella suggests Ireland is best seen however less as a “poster child” than as a “beautiful freak,” whose experience of austerity and recovery reflects a very specific set of conditions that differ markedly from other countries forced to avail of bailout supports."
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/09/05/ireland-is-running-a-budget-surplus-why-has-it-been-warned-to-stop-spending
"The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) has warned that the government's handling of state finances is adding "needless pressure" to the country's economy.
According to the watchdog, past overspending mistakes risk being repeated, which led to austerity measures during the 2008-9 financial crisis.
One particular cause for concern, explained the IFAC on Wednesday, is the government's repeated violations of its own spending rule.
Introduced in 2021, the rule limits spending growth to 5% per year - unless the expenditure is financed through higher taxes.
The Irish government announced an €8.3bn budget in July, which in light of tax revenue raised spending by 6.9%.
"By pumping more money into an economy with record employment rates now, the Government risks worsening the problem of rising prices and capacity constraints," said the IFAC.
The warning relates to Ireland's upcoming budget, due on 1 October, ahead of a general election that must be held by March 2025."
That leads to "everyone says the economy is doing great, so why haven't I seen more money in my pocket?" and then populism.
10 years ago they were a PIIG, and now Ireland has the highest GDP per capita of any country (that's not a city-state tax-haven like Monaco) in the world! 108,000 USD per capita... craziness...
A lot of that has to be leprechaun economics. The average citizen is certainly flush with the kind of money you'd find in Singapore.
They did a good job but lately their wealth relies on becoming a fiscal paradise, like Monaco, Luxemburg, Andorre etc. That is to say they are actually the guy who always defect on the prisonner's dilemna inside EU. That's a form of parasitism. In a system creating wealth based upon cooperation, some will play the hawk to capture more wealth than the others. I'm not a fan of Ireland's strategy.
Yeah, don't believe the raw GDP figures. Those are inflated by "we have all these American multinationals headquartered here who launder their profits through the Dublin office".
Revised GDP is more realistic:
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-mip/measuringirelandsprogress2022/economy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Republic_of_Ireland
"In terms of GNP per capita, a better measure of national income, Ireland ranks below the OECD average, despite significant growth in recent years, at 10th in the OECD-28 rankings. GDP is significantly greater than GNP (national income) due to the large number of multinational firms based in Ireland."
https://tradingeconomics.com/ireland/real-gdp-per-capita-eurostat-data.html
"reland - Real GDP per capita was EUR71700.00 in December of 2023, according to the EUROSTAT. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for Ireland - Real GDP per capita - last updated from the EUROSTAT on April of 2025. Historically, Ireland - Real GDP per capita reached a record high of EUR77300.00 in December of 2022 and a record low of EUR33300.00 in December of 2000."
Yeah, I figured the earnings of the multinationals were obfuscating the reality to some extent (when I mention the GDP to my Irish friends they always tell me the situation for the average Joe isn't much better than it was 10 years ago). Still, 71000 euros ain't too shabby either...
My Irish emigrant friends say Dublin is unrecognizable from their childhood days but are skeptical of the current situation.
I think there's been... some sporadic discussion of the Triffin Dilemma on the subreddit, a few years back? E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/timp8p/comment/i1gvrmw/ & https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/13o4fjb/comment/jl43sbd/. Particularly relevant is the idea that maybe the union between Detroit & San Francisco is doomed by a common currency:
"Do you remember how pundits and newspaper columnists back in the day talked about how the Greek Eurozone Crisis should have been seen coming, because you can't force the same currency and monetary policy upon nations as unlike as Germany and Greece? And that the European Union could only survive by turning its monetary union into a fiscal union (i.e. sending lots of German money to Greece to make up for strangling their economy) and becoming a real nation, just like the US? I think Jane Jacobs, if she was still alive today, would have taken the opposite lesson and argued that the American Union is doomed, and has only survived as long as it has by sending lots of money from San Francisco (and New York and the like) to Detroit (and all the other cities like it). But if the money ever runs out, or the San Franciscan willingness to fork over their money to unemployed blue collar workers and redneck Boomers..."
Not much about tariffs though. Or, of course, the *current* tariffs.
(Edit: Ah, there was some discussion of the Triffin Dilemma a few years back here on ACX! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-207/comment/4528049 -- not much admittedly)
Very interesting. Thanks!
Ah, also, while searching through my archives, I found some discussion of Keynes's idea for "Bancor", an alternative to using the US Dollar as the global reserve currency: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-cities-and-the-wealth/comment/16384543. The key idea is that if holding the global reserve currency is actually something of a *downside* for a nation, because it must shoot itself in the foot manufacturing wise and perpetually run a trade deficit to supply the rest of the world with its money... what if *no* nation had the Global Reserve Currency status? What if the global reserve currency was just used for international trade in international clearinghouses, and didn't touch any nation's economy at all? Then, we avoid the Triffin Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor
Yeah, this was also the idea with SDR's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_drawing_rights
They are in use, but they are made up of a currency basket that's managed by the IMF and they are not terribly popular because of that, it's still very political. Reserve currencies are hard to separate from the issues of the countries using them, no matter how you do it.
The San Franciscan ability to generate the money that it is "willing" to send to the rest of the country is entirely dependent on the willingness of the rest of the country to send them food and energy. In an internal trade war, the blue states that like to brag about being the ones who hold the economy up will very quickly find out that they need the flyover states a lot more than the flyover states need them.
Doesn't California have a massive agricultural industry of its own? Seems they could become self-sufficient if they wanted to if they changed their crops and placed more solar panels...
Surely if San Francisco lost its willingness to subsidise the rest of the country it has lots of non-American sources of food to choose from. Perhaps even at better prices than Americans offer.
"I think Jane Jacobs, if she was still alive today, would have taken the opposite lesson and argued that the American Union is doomed, and has only survived as long as it has by sending lots of money from San Francisco (and New York and the like) to Detroit (and all the other cities like it). But if the money ever runs out, or the San Franciscan willingness to fork over their money to unemployed blue collar workers and redneck Boomers...""
Money can "paper over" a lot of problems. I have seen many businesses and many families stay together because the money is good.
It's when the money runs dry that the knives come out.
What's bad about trade deficit? You're exchanging pieces of paper for valuable goods. These pieces of paper are not really debt because they have negative interest rate. And the situation is naturally self-correcting: at some point other countries decide that they have enough pieces of paper, exchange rates adjust and trade deficit disappears.
I understand that it's tempting to contrarianly talk about resource curse etc, but that's all second order effects that can be dealt with. Generally it's better to have more stuff than less stuff, cheaper stuff than costly stuff, to be healthy and rich than poor and sick.
It's all part of the imperial package. Other countries will fund your deficits for as long as you remain the dominant power. Still, the deficit will accumulate and your industrial base will be hollowed out. At some point (soon for the US, if you look at the numbers), the deficits will be so humongous that the only solution left is punitive taxation so extreme that it can only be defined as a sort of state Communism: the Diocletian reforms in Rome, Wang Mang's nationalizations in China, or Wang Anshi later moves under the Song.
I think you are skipping a step: Why are government deficits a requirement? Trade deficits do not require a government deficit, although government deficits frequently lead to trade deficits. The theory that the reserve currency inexorably leads to the hollowing out and collapse of the economy tries remove the decisions involved, but the key decision that breaks things is the government running an ever greater deficit that collapses the state under its own weight or requires taxes to spike to crazy levels. That is all from a choice, however, and not one requiring the currency to be a reserve currency, to run huge government deficits.
Big imperial governments tend to invent big deficit spending to control their populations.
That does not mean that it is not a decision, however, right along with the decision to control their citizens, in other words force them to behave contrary to their preferences. The point is that the deficits are not inevitable or even really liked to trade at all, but a choice those in government chose to make.
Calling it a choice frames governments as being very plastic entities controlled by one decision maker, like selecting government options in a video game. In reality governments are constrained by predictable pressures, and every big imperial government has 'chosen' to invent big deficits, because if it did not, then there would be some political figure inside the government who would come up with the idea and use it to gain power over the person resisting them.
> Trade deficits do not require a government deficit, although government deficits frequently lead to trade deficits.
It's been mathematically proven that the two are directly linked. Increasing trade deficits must necessarily result in either an increased budget deficit or a decreased savings rate.
Robert Graboyes has the details: https://graboyes.substack.com/p/real-world-trade-deficit-math-magic
Why is (S-I) referred to as "net private saving"? Shouldn't that phrase instead describe Y-(C+T)?
I dunno. Ask him. If you posted a comment, he'd probably respond.
If I understand correctly, "private saving" [i.e. S = Y-(C+T)] is supposed to refer to money saved (not consumed) by the private sector (whether it's invested in assets, deposited in a bank, or stuffed in a mattress), and "net private saving" [i.e. S - I] specifically refers to money in a bank/mattress. More generally, I think net saving is supposed to represent the mismatch between production vs consumption. So the "(X-M) ≡ (S-I) + (T-G)" equation is saying something like "if there's a mismatch between domestic production vs domestic consumption, the difference is necessarily exported to other countries [qua (X-M)]". E.g. if the US sells $100 worth of widgets but only spends $60 on consumption, $40 must have been earned from international sales rather than domestic sales.
That “or a decreased saving rate” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. You would do well not to ignore it.
I'm aware of that, and on one hand, you have a point. On the other, US savings rates are so low that there's not much room for them to decrease any further.
There's a fundamental difference between selling government bonds and running a trade deficit. The latter is basically free stuff and while can have second order effects, just subsidize local industries using profits from it, just import cheap Chinese raw materials.
triffin shows that you can't have the privilege of getting free money to buy stuff without running a trade deficit, it's all connected
I feel like you are using deficit to mean "trade deficit" and "governmental budget deficit" interchangeably. Is that the case?
No, they are just connected in this context
And why is trade deficit bad?
The US buys one million dollars worth of French wine, now France has one million dollars and the US has the wine. What happens next? If the French are satisfied with having $1m in reserve, next they start selling wine in exchange for CPUs or superhero movies, the currency exchange rate automatically adjusts and the deficit no longer increases.
I have a feeling that you maybe consider the effect of trade deficit on a country with gold-backed currency? In that case yes, you can run out of gold and it would be bad. USD is not gold-backed.
Also important to note that it's hard to remain the empire at all when your industrial base is hollowed out. AWS selling server time may well be as profitable as 1000 factories building weapons, but wars aren't fought with dollars.
This is your reminder that US manufacturing output is near historic highs, and much higher than in the 1950s. What has been `hollowed out' is manufacturing employment. But for the purposes of fighting wars, its irrelevant whether the screws in your tank factory are turned by people or robots.
It's on a steady decline and half what it was in the 50s https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/gdpshare-1.png?width=600&height=402.4454148471616
Your statement is false. Your graph is as a fraction of GDP, and reflecting the growth of other sectors. e.g. software engineering did not exist in the 1950s. In absolute terms (total manufacturing output) it is up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
So we make way more stuff than we did in the 1950s (including after correcting for population growth). It's just that manufacturing output has not grown as rapidly as output in other areas. (And manufacturing employment has decreased. And manufacturing output overseas has increased more. But US manufacturing output has not decreased).
Japan's debt is way higher than that of the US, they are not an imperial power, and they don't seem to be in any danger of running out of people willing to loan them money.
Perhaps the borrowing capacity of governments of developed countries is just a lot higher than you think? Obviously it is not infinite, but the Japan example would seem to suggest that the US may not be near any kind of natural limit.
> Still, the deficit will accumulate and your industrial base will be hollowed out
The second doesn't follow from the first.
American manufacturing output is up. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOMA
China is de-instrualizing many of its neighbors, but you can't predict that from trade deficits.
Credit, though, for remembering to say that the industrial base has been "hollowed out".
> Swing state voters get pandered to, and swing states — both now and in the recent past — are disproportionately in the Rust Belt. And it’s become an article of faith in the Rust Belt that they have been “hollowed out” by trade (and “hollowed out” is the phrase that’s always used — there’s incredible message discipline around the phrase “hollowed out”).
https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/lets-not-forget-to-blame-the-electoral
I think the steelman case here involves looking at time horizons, and arguing that having more stuff (in the short run) through this channel leads to lower economic growth, and therefore less stuff in the long run. This could theoretically be true, but whether it actually is, that's an empirical and quantitative question, and the astonishing outperformance of the US relative to other rich economies over the past couple of decades suggests that it probably isn't actually true.
Yes, I think that the opposite should be assumed by default.
Imagine if Santa Claus dropped one million tonnes of steel somewhere in the Nevada desert. Yes, it could have second order effects that have to be managed. You don't want all of your steel mills to go out of business, then face a shock when you run out of Santa's steel. But it's kinda insane to ignore the value of all that free steel for making cars and bridges and colanders and propose to dump it in the ocean, just to be safe.
It feels like a mirror image of the broken window fallacy. Or maybe it is the broken window fallacy.
Amusingly, Lord Vetinati and Moist Von Lipwig do almost exactly that, in Making Money - they discover an army of golems, and bury it in the ground. But I think Sir Pterry had his economics badly wrong on that one, and they'd have been better off putting the golems to work...
From what I recall, the idea there was that while you can't eat gold, you can eat the bread that golems make. So investing in golems is like investing in factories (your interest is backed up by the new items out in the world), but you're guaranteed the return, but only if shit hits the fan, otherwise you're not allowed to use and actually profit from them. So it's like 100% safe 0% interest inflation adjusted bonds. And their reasoning for using Golems that way was very similar to what Curtis Yarvin writes these days, now that I think about it, like, they wanted to keep having a stable high-employment economy, they didn't want to separate the people into a jobless majority and a Golem-owning minority.
They could have just set the golems to work turning dynamos and provided everyone with energy too cheap to meter as a public good or something. Replacing muscle power by electricity doesn’t seem to have left us with a jobless majority and electricity owning minority.
Incidentally the golems don’t eat iirc so I guess they violate the laws of thermodynamics too. In the long term they can use them to evade the heat death of the universe.
More broadly it’s clear from that sequence that Sir Pterry didn’t understand comparative advantage. The golems might have been able to do anything but could not have done everything. And Dutch disease fears would have been groundless since the golem power was inexhaustible. In your analogy, Santa had dropped an infinite quantity of steel.
Works up until the point the trading partners go "hey, what are these pieces of paper worth anyway? we're giving you real stuff and you're only giving us paper in return!" and they keep their stuff or demand you exchange other real stuff for it.
Then the currency exchange rate adjusts and you no longer increase your trade deficit, without any tariffs. You get to keep all the free stuff you got before that and they get to keep your steadily depreciating pieces of paper.
I can imagine some situations where it can go tits up, from carelessly destroying domestic industry to some hostile foreign power dumping all their currency reserves at once. But it's manageable and the free stuff is worth it.
I don't think it's right to frame the exorbitant privilege from being the reserve currency as a problem, since ultimately the purpose of an economy is to produce things for people to consume, if you can export printed paper in exchange for other people to do the producing whilst you do the consuming, that's a great position to be in (exploitative even), even if it erodes your native production over time.
But I think you're right that this is the crucial factor liberal critics of tariffs miss, because the position of exorbitant privilege can't last forever and at some point the US will need to readjust to becoming a normal economy that only consumes as much as it can produce again. Now that China has surpassed the US as the world largest economy (by PPP) that time is clearly drawing closer and some major adjustment would have needed to happen in the near future whether it's these tariffs or something else.
Realistically though these tariffs wont do much to reverse the US's loss of position in the global economy though, and maybe wont even revive manufacturing since they're so broad and untargeted. It's not like the US has massive untapped potential to be a manufacturing giant that overshadows the world economy like it did in 1945, whether it weans itself off imports or not.
They're really just hastening the descent towards what the US would naturally be without exorbitant privilege, something closer to a middle income country. Instead the US could be using the gains from it's final years of exorbitant privilege to invest in preparations to transition to a more productive economy, similar to Saudi Arabia's current program preparing for an end to it's oil dependant economy.
So I don't think a Triffin's dilemma based view can do much to support the tariffs even if it also undermines the mainstream anti-tariff position, and I don't think Trump himself is thinking about any of this stuff.
Trump certainly is more of an intuitive type. He told us what he thinks: "America is being ripped off." And he knows that it's the empire ripping off the republic.
A reminder that US manufacturing output is near historic highs, and much higher than in 1945. Manufacturing employment is down, certainly, as is the share of manufacturing as a fraction of the economy, but total manufacturing output? Up big time.
>> naturally be without exorbitant privilege, something closer to a middle income country
How much do you think `exorbitant privilege' adds, and what's your definition of a middle income country? A reminder that US GDP per capita is almost double that in the UK, and three times that in e.g. Portugal, and neither the UK nor Portugal is `middle income' by conventional definitions.
> "Manufacturing employment is down, certainly..."
Yes, but this may be what MAGA voters are more concerned about (also, did you control for output as a fraction of the total economy, or scaled for population size?)
Admittedly, automation is as much to blame here as immigration or outsourcing, and the Vance/Elon position on this is not very coherent.
Manufacturing employment rather than output may be what MAGA is concerned about but it is best to accurately state the problem. For one thing, it informs ones understanding of possible solutions. If manufacturing output is up but employment is down (because of robots), then tariffs are not going to cause American factories to replace robots by people.
Scaled by population size...I'm not quickly finding this data pre-packaged, but simply eyeballing https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS and correcting for the change in US population between the start and end of the time series, total manufacturing output per capita is also up between 1987 and 2023.
As a fraction of the total economy it is of course down, but that's because we've created new sectors that didn't previously exist. There was no `software engineering' in 1945. That's a good thing, and a testament to the dynamism of the US economy.
Yeah, I'm still curious as to exactly what that graph is measuring, but if you multiply the final figure by 0.7 (ratio of 1990 population to today), then net increase has been pretty marginal.
And yes, I agree that tariffs don't really solve the jobs problem. Trump/Vance would have to bribe up an international AI non-proliferation alliance to address this issue, and there's no real sign on that on their agenda (although forcing China to bend the knee would be a necessary step in that direction.)
>A reminder that US GDP per capita is almost double that in the UK
I'd prefer to use PPP instead of nominal gdp because nominal gdp is affected by the exchange rates which are the thing EP is boosting. Sterling is also a major reserve currency and the UK very much has EP of it's own and has a similar dilemma of facing a major readjustment to it's place in the global economy imo.
>A reminder that US manufacturing output is near historic highs, and much higher than in 1945.
True, but US consumption has grown much faster than manufacturing output since 1945 so higher productivity in manufacturing can't be the thing that's supporting most of US consumption. That output is also measured in nominal dollars so it's another measurement that's inflated by EP. A lot of that manufacturing is also niche and high value added, it doesn't form a broad, generally capable industrial base like it did in 1945. The US couldn't build a giant fleet of bombers or war ships like it used to, let alone missiles or drones like China can. I don't know if you showed FDR the current manufacturing base he would say it was bigger even if the dollar value is higher.
The thing that matter for the US's position in the global economy and global power structure is also not the absolute size of it's manufacturing sector but it's size relative to the total global economy which has shrunk hugely.
>> I'd prefer to use PPP instead of nominal
OK, but even at PPP US GDP per capita is 50% higher than the UKs, and significantly higher than any other major country. (#10 overall, but #1-9 are all microstates - https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/gdp_per_capita_ppp/)
>> The US couldn't build a giant fleet of bombers or war ships like it used to, let alone missiles or drones like China can.
The US military manufacturing chain is in fact entirely onshore, and the US military is still comfortably the largest in the world. The total number of bombers is less, but so (in Obama's words) is the number of horses and bayonets. In absolute terms, there's little question that 2025 USA could wipe the floor militarily with 1945 USA.
Now, China may have higher military potential today (or perhaps not, I think it's a grey area), but that's a relative statement, not an absolute one. US ability to carry out military manufacturing has not shrunk, other countries ability has increased.
>> The thing that matter for the US's position in the global economy and global power structure is also not the absolute size of it's manufacturing sector but it's size relative to the total global economy which has shrunk hugely.
Mostly false again. The US share of the world economy has been fairly stable since 1980. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-share-of-global-economy-over-time/. In 1980 the US was 25% of the world economy, in 2020 it was 24%.
There was a (relative) decline from 1945 to 1980, but what that mostly reflects is that 1945 was a highly anomalous situation when the rest of the world had just ripped itself apart in a world war, and the US was the only undamaged industrial power still standing.
Most of the decline since 1980 (in terms of fraction of world economy) has been on the part of Western Europe and Japan. Insofar as those regions are part of the US alliance system, it does reduce the relative might of the US alliance system. But the US economy by itself has held pretty steady as a fraction of the world economy over the past half century.
https://www.bis.org/publ/work684.htm
"Triffin: Dilemma or myth" by the Bank for International Settlements.
I've been convinced by smart economists that the trade deficit has nothing to do with the fact that the US dollar is the world's reserve currency.
3 arguments:
1. The US is not the only country with a sustained trade deficit (see e.g. Canada), so clearly having the reserve currency is not required.
2. If I understand the reserve currency argument correctly, it requires that the US dollar keeps being devalued in order to finance the trade deficit. But this isn't the case – the US dollar is pretty strong recently.
3. The trade deficit is fueled by the private sector and has nothing to do with the national debt.
Here is an article who manages to explain the trade deficit in a way that makes sense to me: https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinerdmann/p/upside-down-capm-and-the-trade-deficit
The gist is that Americans have a higher risk tolerance and so are able to reinvest their own foreign assets more productively. This means that when, e.g., Apple gets a ton of Euros by selling overpriced phones in Europe, Apple invests those Euros productively and then buys lots of stuff in Europe. The stuff they get this way ends up being worth more than the phones they sold, which means there is a trade deficit. But this is in no way harmful for Apple or the US, and is completely sustainable.
"Nothing to do with..." is too strong. It's trivial that demand for the dollar (whether it's because it's the world's reserve currency or for any other reason) makes it cheaper on the margin for US consumers to purchase foreign goods. Ceteris parabis, you get a larger trade deficit (or smaller surplus) than you'd otherwise have.
Whether, in the US's specific circumstances, that changes us from running a trade surplus to a deficit is a difficult empirical question to answer. It's also not particularly important, IMO, and I think most folks who think its a important national concern are at minimum misguided but more likely confused about the causes and implications of trade deficits.
If this was Trump's rationale for his tariff policy, maybe he should say so? Was he afraid that this explanation, unlike the "reciprocal tariffs" explanation he actually gave, wouldn't make him look like enough of a moron?
I honestly don't think Trump ever heard of Triffin's dilemma. In the end, it's just a sublimation of an instinct that people who don't know much about economics often have: that you can't run huge trade deficits forever, that "something" (they don't know what) has to give.
I like this comment because it almost asks the question: who wants an "American Empire"? There has always been strong anti-imperial, anti-utopia sentiment in the US. In fact, ending imperialism was one of the originating purposes of Pax Americana. The more we integrate with the world, the less freedom we have domestically to manage our own economy. If we do not have the power to coerce or convince counterparties to adjust to our needs, then what use is the "empire"?
Tariffs are not the only way to solve the problem of deficits, but they are the most politically powerful way to get others to work with us to resolve this issue. We could also tax incoming capital at a rate that depresses external demand for US assets to the extent that it keeps our currency from appreciating unfairly. A US sovereign wealth fund could fulfill a similar role in sanitizing excess savings from abroad. There are tools we have today that old reserve currency providers did not have. Similarly if China finally flips towards a consumption-based economy and stops the transfers subsidizing overproduction, then the drop in their trade surplus will be matched with a drop in our capital surplus. The measure of Trump's plan is whether it succeeds in getting China to bring its own trade and capital accounts into balance. Whether this ends the "American Empire" is irrelevant to me and I think the majority of Americans, who mostly want to think about things like which tomato sauce to buy for their spaghetti.
I agree. No empire in history has ever been built willingly by common people. It's always the elites drawing them into conflicts they don't understand in lands they never heard of, because it's elites who benefit from empire. That's how the Brits got away with the oft-cited lie that their own empire was built "in a fit of absence of mind."
I also agree that tariffs are not the only solution, although they are the most blunt and direct way to handle the issue.
If you give your veterans land in the conquered territories, that's probably a benefit they'd be willing to fight for (even the elites benefit a lot more than they do).
That would be one of the reasons why the Roman empire was unusually long-lived, yes.
(I developed this argument further here, a few weeks ago: https://mankind.substack.com/p/quick-take-will-trump-prevent-the?utm_source=publication-search)
There are many ways that the logic of Imperium and the logic of local economy conflict, and it’s complicated by the fact that trying to dismantle parts of the Imperium past their sell-by date is pretty unpopular. Look at the reaction to the Afghanistan withdrawal, or a hundred British writers bemoaning the tide going out on the British Empire.
Yup. Nothing more beautiful that Larkin's post-imperial Homage to a Government: https://allpoetry.com/homage-to-a-government
Whether the Cult of Personality is more of a right wing thing than a left wing thing seems debatable.
Among American presidents since 1900, Teddy Roosevelt had the most lovable personality, but was he left or right wing? 1920s Republican Presidents had pretty unimposing personalities. FDR had a good personality, as did JFK. Nixon did not. Reagan, a retired movie star, had a likable personality, as did Clinton.
Among Soviets, the term "cult of personality" came to be ascribed to Stalin, who didn't have much personality.
Among Latin Americans, most of the caudillos were more or less right wing, but the most memorable was Fidel Castro.
Why don't you think Stalin had much personality? He was a bank robber and poet.
And had great hair:
https://www.reddit.com/r/malehairadvice/comments/ek4s8z/stalin_haircut_yet_again_want_to_know_any/
Don't forget Obama.
But ultimately I think that "cult of personality" is more of a thought-ending cliche than a useful model for thinking about politics. Being likeable helps you get elected, but ultimately you get elected because of policy preferences. The vast majority of the people who voted for Reagan also voted for Nixon and Bush Sr.
"The vast majority of the people who voted for Reagan also voted for Nixon and Bush Sr."
What gets you elected is being able to win over the marginals. That's a matter of likeability.
Jesus Christ could have returned to earth in 1984 for the express limited purpose of publicly endorsing Walter Mondale and the hardcore republican voters would not have budged.
That's not a slam on Team R, BTW.
I think Cult of Personality is a right wing thing *now*. It varies back and forth depending who has a charismatic leader; Obama had his own little cult back in the 2010s. I think declining trust in institutions (for reasons Scott does a nice job outlining) has a lot to do with it.
I think the key factor here is that President Trump can change GOP orthodoxy unilaterally, and the same voters as before stick with him, whereas charismatic Democrat politicians like FDR or Obama get strong support but ultimately push for policies in line with the party vision, and ones that change that (e.g. LBJ in the civil rights era) cause realignments rather than changing a bunch of people's minds.
It's telling that the Republican party didn't even bother to write a platform in 2020. Republican party policy really is just "whatever Trump wants".
Although there was one limitation to Trump's hold on the party - he never managed to convince the base that vaccines are good, and ended up pivoting to anti-vax himself, in spite of Operation Warp Speed being his one good accomplishment.
I was going to say the same thing. It's not clear to me that cults of personality are a right wing phenomenon, either in the US or globally.
> "Bentham Bulldog amply describes"
I'm not sure what "amply" means in this context.
> enough or more than enough; plentifully.
Which doesn't really make sense in this context (full sentence: "the left also needs to cultivate certain vices to sustain its institutionalist strategy; Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality". And the linked article isn't very long, so I don't think Scott was choosing an unusual way of calling it verbose). My guess is it was a typo for "aptly", alongside the typo of "Bentham" for "Bentham's".
Maybe he meant "aptly"?
>Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality
You ought to be clearer that these are characteristics of the current American left and current American right. At various other times and places right wing groups have formed ideological cults and left wing groups have formed cults of personality.
Look, I dislike plenty about the right populist platform, but this talk of tariffs as a radioactive albatross is nonsense.
The US abandoned its working class and became dependent on imports, using its status as world reserve currency manager to run trade deficits for over half a century and counting. This was a bad idea. It was always a bad idea. It was a bad idea when Ross Perot was calling it out in the 90's. It was a bad idea when Kemp and Reagan turned free markets into a global ideology instead of part of a culture. Hell, it wasn't a great idea when Bastiat talked about it two centuries ago. If a country wants to be a country and have some control over its economy, including running sustainable safety nets for its people, including managing the environmental consequences, including the ethics of technological development, then that country wants to have some nationalistic policy on trade.
Bringing that back required restructuring the entire American economy, a decades long project. It was never going to be easy. It would require a deft hand and gradually encouraging tit-for-tat trade deals wherever feasible. At the very least, it implied sensible industrial policy geared towards Ricardian competitive advantage. This was never going to happen, because reasonable people have been browbeaten into thinking nationalism was a bad thing, so the only realistic option was blunt force tariffs. It required quite a bit of pain, which would have taken multiple presidential terms to be worth it. I had hoped Trump would be bullheaded and arrogant enough to ignore the constant calls for going back to globalist trade policy, but I'm disappointed to find that he's not the sociopath I'd hoped for. He's just another politician.
I don't take it personally. I didn't vote for him. But I also didn't vote against him. I wrote in my vote, and I would never regret not voting for the culture of the left. But if this means that we're just going to give up on tariffs, then we're also giving up on rationalizing trade. At that point, we might as well hand over the UBI so the working class can numb itself, and wait for those who still work to figure out how stupid they are for showing up. Socialism shows up one way or another, and then we get the soul death of the West.
You want to "make them own it"? God, I hope you do. I hope the right does what it does best - hold a grudge - and keeps trying it, over and over again, until the left does what it does best and flip-flops until its identity falls apart. Or maybe both sides are equally spinless at this point.
I'd rather this country die trying. If it won't, if it insists on making the working class pretend they can compete with people who live in places with a fourth our cost of living and expectations of third-world infrastructure, then we should probably just vote for the UBI. This goose is well and truly cooked.
I think the extent to which the US depends on overseas trade is overstated, but I agree with a lot of you're saying. The problem as I see is not that Trump has 'caved to globalism', but that he's using erratic declarations as a bargaining tool (Art of the Deal shenanigans), in a way that spooked the markets, particularly when he's made no effort to phase in tariffs gradually.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-populist-right-must-own-tariffs/comment/113254867
I wish the strategy were that coherent. I could see him dickering over tariff rates like a guy selling a Hyundai on FB Marketplace with that kind of tactical plan. But what I'm seeing out of him is a bad attempt to get some concessions out of China with no real interest in tariffs for the long term. Any idiot could see that you should be phasing these in gradually if you want them to stick, and you could calm the markets by holding to that line. Trump is doing neither, which is contrary to the article: tariffs are not idiosyncratic to Trump as policy, they're just a cudgel. That's more than disappointing.
I don't disagree for the most part, but the 10% reciprocal tariffs seem to be sticking and I wouldn't rule out others down the road, so I'm not sure I'd rule out "real interest in tariffs for the long term". I agree Trump could have calmed the markets by packaging them differently.
Trump is not trying to negotiate. He honestly believes that trade is bad and tariffs are good in and of themselves. This is his one deeply held belief, and he's been pro-tariff his entire life. The talk of negotiation is just cope from his supporters.
This really is a root principle for Trump. We have consistent reporting back to the 1980s.
https://reason.com/2018/09/05/trump-scribbled-trade-is-bad-woodward/
> "Why do you have these views [on trade]?" Cohn asked Trump, according to Woodward.
> "I just do," Trump reportedly replied. "I've had these views for 30 years."
If someone sells us something for $200, we got ripped off for $200.
Trade deficits are great. Countries give you valuable things and services. In return you give them pieces of paper. That discrepancy makes a country rich, as seen by e.g. the steadily widening income gap between the US and Europe. it is bizarre that you think the way to provide safety nets is to the US poorer.
And it's not like US manufacturing has even disappeared during this era of trade deficits and outsourcing. On the contrary, it has continued to grow.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1iC8
(Manufacturing *employment* has continued to decline, but that is the result of automation. And given the current low unemployment rates, we can see that those former manufacturing workers have mostly just moved to more economically rewarding jobs elsewhere.)
I'm not sure on-paper unemployment rates matter so much as labour-force participation, and I'm not really sanguine about the effects of automation either.
I'm also not sure what that graph is measuring, precisely? Total revenue in billions, with no adjustment for population size?
> "Trade deficits are great. Countries give you valuable things and services. In return you give them pieces of paper"
Aside from the slight problem that pieces of paper have to be printed, which reduces the value of the currency and erodes savings, sure. You'll always wind up paying one way or another.
Personally I think the OECD/US income gap is more a function of brain drain and networking/scale effects than currency manipulation per se, but since I'm not an American I would like those to end, actually.
Labor participation rates are (or at least were pre-Trump) at all-time highs.
Also, printing money doesn't erode the value of that money until, and unless, the supply outstrips demand.
Not really - labor participation overall is up, the fact that male participation is down slightly is largely due to families having more options available.
I thought I made it clear that I was interested in the working class working. So I think the employment matters, and so does maintaining regulatory authority and reserving a space for unions and industrial policy.
Let's be optimistic and say you can load up on paper profits, keeping the money in the investor sphere. Increasing amounts of it still go outside the country, it can play hell with your ability to manage inflation, and the working class can't pay into the safety nets so that's where you get the need for a UBI. This is not how you run a national economy. It's how you run a corporation - or a bank - with high legacy costs of taking care of unproductive people, and it can be extremely delicate to geopolitical problems and it says nothing of interest payments on your own debt.
I find it honestly kind of bizarre to hear an argument that manufacturing as a sector has not declined in America over the lest several decades, except for where the robots killed it. Light manufacturing, in particular, is still labor-intensive and hundreds of thousands of jobs have gone overseas since the 70's. It will take more than that broad graph line to overturn that narrative.
Reading this reminds me of those polls where majorities of Americans say people would be better off if more of them worked in factories, but then they also say that they personally wouldn't be better off if they worked in a factory.
So folks want to on-shore manufacturing, but don't personally want to do it, because those jobs are shittier than the ones currently available. Good times.
Idle hands are the devil's plaything. Better to have these people at work than living off welfare.
The majority of americans did not say they'd be better off in a factory.
But a large enough minority did to provide staff to all the new factories the first group wanted.
Those "pieces of paper" are claims on US assets. Instead of trading utensils for plates so that we have a full set, we are trading our houses for both.
Yes. "Pieces of paper" glibness doesn't grapple with the essential nature of what money is. Each "piece of paper" represents a claim to direct the application of future resources. That can take the form of either debt (signing up your kids to work according to the direction of the "piece of paper" holders) or asset sale (selling farmland and factories to "piece of paper" holders). Either way, the more "pieces of paper" are sent out to foreign countries, the more those foreign countries get to direct our country's application of future resources.
You're not getting "free stuff." You're getting stuff in exchange for your children's future labor and/or liquidating your tangible assets. In either case you are, in effect, saying "I don't care that foreigners will increasingly direct my country's future." It's obvious why materialist globalists on a birthrate path to extinction are fine with this. To them, it's literally free because they relate more strongly to the cosmopolitans than to their own nation, because their time horizons mostly end with their own lives, and because they have no higher priority than their own present consumption.
Suppose a country sells services and buys goods such that it has positive net imports. If I understand you correctly, the badness of this is that by buying services from us foreign countries are controlling us. In plain terms, they are our employers. Whereas I might be content with running a personal trade deficit (selling my labor to my employer and buying goods at walmart), a similar situation between countries is bad. Is that the right understanding?
Only partly. The problem has never been with trade (at least in my view) and I don't think it's necessarily Trump's view either though he's ineloquent enough that it's hard to know. If we sold services and they sold goods, there might still be issues - industrial hollowing, critical military shortfalls, etc. - but they wouldn't be quite the same because in your telling, they're balanced. What we're specifically talking about is a trade deficit. We aren't selling "services" in exchange for "goods," we're literally sending nothing - "pieces of paper" in exchange for goods. Advocates for this say it's all upside. But those "pieces of paper" represent, in aggregate, control over future allocation of our resources. In a benign instance, that could look a little like employer-employee, perhaps. An actively adversarial power who has that level of control could make it look much worse. But at some level, an effectively permanent deficit (it's been 50+ years now) exchanges future control for stuff.
For the record, I'm not even very pro-tariff! They're effectively just taxes, and I would prefer taxes low and trade barriers minimal. But I don't see how the logic is escapable that a permanent trade deficit - where our biggest export is literally dollars - doesn't result in foreign nations getting a greater supply of what dollars represent, which is a greater claim on the future allocation of labor and production. I would think the argument has to be whether this is either (a) unobjectionable, or (b) worth it. This doesn't apply to temporary deficits, by the way, if that wasn't clear. I suppose one could argue that 50+ years of trade deficits and appalled squalling at any attempt to reverse them doesn't count as "permanent." But that doesn't seem to me to be the argument being made.
Well that's certainly a good counterargument to the people who claim automation is just a force-multiplier rather than job displacement, unless the sector expands it will naturally end up being both. The remaining manufacturing workers have increased productivity, the ones who leave move on to a nice air-conditioned office or more money, fair enough as far as that goes.
But when AI starts automating away knowledge-worker jobs, where do those people go then? An entire labor force consisting of baristas and bedpan-changers? That kind of labor is very low productivity, you can't sustain a wealthy nation that way.
I don't think Trump is doing this right, and tariffs may not even be the correct way to go about this, but we are absolutely going to want an expanded manufacturing sector of this economy when all the email jobs start drying up. The tariffs are worthy of criticism, but the broader tendency among critics to attack the underlying premises of the policy and minimize the importance of manufacturing is going to look very very wrong in a few years.
> But when AI starts automating away knowledge-worker jobs, where do those people go then? An entire labor force consisting of baristas and bedpan-changers? That kind of labor is very low productivity, you can't sustain a wealthy nation that way.
Why can't you, if literally everything else important to wealth-generation is fully automated? At that point the question of how to distribute wealth has simply been laid bare. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/stellaris-social-welfare
Why would wealth be distributed to people who weren't producing anything in that world? If you can't produce anything of value with your labor, you have no value to trade, so you're left begging for a handout. If production is almost entirely automated, the government (or whatever ruling caste emerges) has no reason to require labor peace in order to obtain wealth, breaking the fundamental constraints they've operated under since the beginning of the agricultural age. So the public at large can't even use a general strike as leverage. You could try to force the rulers' hand with civil disorder and threats of violence, but they might simply withdraw from the country to one that pacifies its people more effectively. You could try to seize capital by force, but without factories what are you seizing?
Inequality in the US was the decision of US politicans. But it is a separate issue to trade deficits.
You think broadening the industrial labor pool away from the US Reuther-union norms DIDN'T have a serious effect on inequality in the US?
It did, but that it did is a fault of how politicians chose to respond to it. And removing the trade deficit is not the only solution. America is extremely rich. It can afford to have less inequality.
I'm sure that you have policy in mind for how we could have deindustrialized while not driven wealth upward, but while this is still a market economy and labor power matters, that's not really the point.
So it's not a separate issue to trade deficits.
No, it is. Unless you are claiming that the working class cannot do anything other than work in factories. Which is patently false.
Please read Trade Wars are Class Wars for a fuller view of how these are interconnected.
It's absolutely true the working class has done poorly from globalization, and smarter tariffs might well have rebuilt a few strategically important industries. We weren't able to make our own masks in a pandemic.
But tariffs on this size and scale are going to do a lot more harm than good. If, as seems increasingly likely, we get a rerun of the stagflation of the 1970s and the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, we are going to at least see a Democratic victory in 2028 and a resurgency of wokery.
Which is exactly why the tariffs should have been executed better, if they were really serious about it. That's not a reason to throw up your hands, and I don't know if the right is aware of it.
You win the election so you can change the policy, which, if you're serious, you do because it's better for the long term. You don't proceed to abandon the policy because of short term difficulty that might cost you an election. This is how you get a society that never looks past the next fiscal quarter.
The working class experienced massive increases in the standard of living and all objective indicators of prosperity. You have to go to subjective measures like loss of social status in order to argue the opposite.
Yeah, but it turns out lots of humans have strong feelings about relative status.
And what could more manufacturing jobs possibly do about this? Someone's always lower class, right? If it's not about standard of living, what is it really about?
I dunno, if the economy really tanks, wokery may be seen to be a luxury those that funded it, drop rather abruptly.
The United States had near-full employment before the tariffs, which are set to cause a recession and rising unemployment. I don't know what you think is missing from the economy. I don't think working in a factory is that great, and the revealed preferences of people confirm my suspicions. That's why these jobs pay more! They suck!
Great comment, and I'm pleased to see a rare nod to the environment.
For the most part, the same folks who would see Americans be forever defined as consumers, even to an illogical point where that is ultimately unsustainable, where we have spent our inheritance from our producer forefathers so to speak - also have zero interest in exporting those ideas about either the environment or working conditions.
They are especially hostile to nature.
These are ideas that were cultivated and enacted *when we were producers* - not infrequently by *producers* - it should be noted.
Their assumption is that it is we that must and should surrender these things.
Their assumption was that the only way to liberate it from authoritarianism was to create a system that encouraged development capital to go to the lowest common denominator of labor cost and regulation. It's worked to get money to underdeveloped countries and it's had some upsides, but it's also resulted in Americans buying products from countries where they dump heavy metals into the groundwater and use suicide nets.
This might have been a good idea in limited amounts, but it needs to be reeled back in, it's needed it for a long time. Shipping products you could have made at home across oceans to take advantage of extremely cheap labor makes money sense, but it makes no other kind of sense.
I especially like: "those who still work". The UBI seems premised on the notions that some people are chumps, but also that work is so fun and pleasurable that people will "give it away". These are mutually contradictory.
You are starting off with bad data and bad assumptions - the middle class hasn't been abandoned, and trade deficits aren't a problem.
It’s going to be one of the great “What Ifs” of recent history — what kept the administration from doing the gradual tariffs and deregulation and smart tax cuts that Big Business were expecting? It seemed like an open goal to me, but they did the other thing, good and hard.
> what kept the administration from doing the gradual tariffs and deregulation and smart tax cuts that Big Business were expecting?
Low human capital in the Trump administration. When you choose people based entirely on loyalty and discourage competence, you're going to have a bad time.
Some years ago, on a visit to Porto Alegre in Brazil, I hired a city guide who happened to be a retired civil servant. Because of this, he still had access to the State parliament buildings. One room contained a number of portraits of former dictators. This mild, well educated man carefully took me through each of them, explaining in detail, which were the good dictators and which were the bad ones. A very spooky experience.
I mean...if all you've got is dictators some are going to be worse than others. Monarchy was pretty universal until a few hundred years ago. European countries talk about kings being better or worse, and I'm sure any Chinese history buff could give you an earful about who the best emperors were.
Not listening to a thousand interest groups is why red states can build houses and are gaining population and congressional seats.
I am not sure what the best level of control is, obviously you want the person in charge to be smart, non-elderly, willing to listen and to have taken Economics 101. But it is not clear where the optimal balance between mad man and mad bureaucracy is
Agreed.
> obviously you want the person in charge to be smart, non-elderly, willing to listen and to have taken Economics 101
In 2025 it does not seem at all obvious that this is who most people actually want in charge.
Rather, after a decade of being bombarded by "authorities lie", "scientists sell out", "elites are corrupt brainwashed leftist ideologues", "this country is tired of experts" and similar messaging, what people want is... what we have, apparently.
That doesn't follow.
Yes, it does. If your ideology is that “economics” “experts” are frauds, and so are other experts, then you will intentionally choose leaders who *don’t* go along with economics 101, and who *aren’t* willing to listen to people who have thought about a topic.
I don't think people were rejecting economics 101, they were rejecting a specific policy platform that often went against economics 101 but was popular amongst academics. Ecomonmic orthodox positions aren't intrinsically popular but I suspect in a 3 way election a dull economics 101 guy like Carney or Monti would easily beat Biden or Trump.
I think if you force people to choose between experts that make egregious mistakes without owning up to them and blatantly serving their own interests and the interests of their ingroup or anti-expert blowhards you can't be surprised when sometimes the people choose the anti-expert blowhards.
I agree that a professional managerial class that serves the long term and short term interests of the people is much better than the anti-expert blowhard, but that doesn't appear to be an option. It has felt like it was an option, or at least more of an option, at different times in the recent past. Perhaps the left can do some soul searching on how they got away from that and caused a lot of damage to the reputation of the bureaucracy and expertise. It would help if they owned up to how some of their policies, even if good on net, harmed lots of people in the process. Free trade was overall very positive, but it left a lot of people wrecked in its wake. Offering welfare, video games, and porn is not a suitable alternative for a well-lived life, even if it does keep angry young men from protesting too much.
I do agree that the democrats need a serious rethink of their policy priorities and their rhetoric.
But maybe the right can also put forward their own professional managerial class that serves the long term and short term interests of the people? And actually enable them to win primaries?
I don't think it is only on the left to provide such a paragon.
Government bureaucrats don't stand for election for the most part.
Anyway, the PMC is defined in terms of its relationship to the means of production. Although various Team ?R ideologists have argued for a "conservative intellectual class" or whatever, it isn't something that can be decreed, so let it be written, so let it be done.
However we got here, just about everyone recognizes that the left does actually control the bureaucracy. So that leaves us with two options. Either we replace the left bureaucracy with one that is more rightward (which I keep hearing Trump is trying to do and how terrible that would be - from left-leaning sources) or the left can provide what's needed.
That the left bemoans the right even trying to get into the bureaucracy while saying "why don't the right start governing better" seems like an attempt to shut down conversation rather than solve the issue.
If you're talking about elected officials, ask yourself how many people on the left would support DeSantis, or Kasich back in 2016. DeSantis fought some culture war issues, but it seems to me that he was picking the broadly popular topics (at least until he ran in 2023 and was fighting more). By every account I've seen, Florida is run well and it has been growing significantly under his leadership. Other than being ideologically on the right, he seems to be everything that request could mean. If the same people who would not vote for Trump would not vote for him, then I don't see that there's any incentive for the Republicans to put forward a better candidate. They should instead put forward a candidate willing to really fight the entrenched interests of their enemies, since that appears to be the only mechanism by which they can gain some of their priorities.
"I agree that a professional managerial class that serves the long term and short term interests of the people is much better than the anti-expert blowhard, but that doesn't appear to be an option."
Power is to sociopaths, what catnip is to cats.
Where do you find experts that don’t own up to their mistakes? The expert class seems to be amply honest about their mistakes, and also they seem to have made fewer mistakes than the experts of the past, or the general public. Do you think that we should always prefer the lowest common denominator over anyone who claims expertise and is short of 100%?
I feel like we have very different perspectives. Unnecessary Covid lockdowns and knowing lies from Fauci and others, do you agree that was a thing? The replication crisis? The fact that you can find an economist or sociologist or a bunch of other fields that will support pretty much any position makes expertise itself seem illusory.
It's not. Expertise is a real thing. But there are many thousands of people who support themselves pretending at expertise but having nothing that resembles it. We should call them scams, and I feel like many of such "experts" on the right get properly identified as that. But the left doesn't seem to be willing to call out its own cranks. So there's this group of people on the left that the right sees as unworthy of being called experts, who still get all the praise and whatever from official institutions as if they are real experts. Academics writing garbage books or publishing garbage studies but making money at prestigious universities and getting jobs at NGOs or whatever.
I don’t believe Fauci himself made any knowing lies - he was actually fooled by the frequentist statistical policy that said there was “no evidence” that ordinary people using masks would help. Fauci is in fact a very clear example of how experts get things wrong and then own up to their mistakes - this has been is brand for decades, beginning with HIV policy (where he initially opposed allowing people to try out experimental treatments that hadn’t yet been approved, but then relenting after massive “die-ins” at his office) and then continuing in all the major health issues that faced the country since then.
You have an unrealistic expectation of expertise if you think it means someone should never get things wrong. Experts will *always* get things wrong, but the important thing is that they propose new ideas (most of which are wrong) and compete with each other to test them, and in the end usually come to better ideas.
No one should ever base policy on cutting edge science - they should always base policy on science a decade or so back, unless there really is an emerging expert consensus.
The replication crisis was a good example of this. And I think we generally handled it well - very little policy was based on cutting edge nutritional science or social psychology of the 2000s.
Expertise is not about individual experts being right - it is much more about individual experts being interestingly wrong in ways that lead the community to become gradually more and more right, even as it is never right about everything. We need to keep individual researchers away from setting policy, but we need to have research communities involved in policy discussions.
I largely agree. I suspect what many people want now is some form of "Make them go away and leave me alone so I can live my life." Part of the problem is that there is always a bit of lingering "Oh... but please also tell these other people to stop living their life in the following ways..." that leave space for those thousands of interest groups to keep their claws in. I suspect that so long as there is power to tell other people how to live their lives there will always be those who want to fight over it and exert it.
The Ring must be destroyed.
I believe the point of the article is that the current experiment shows (to Scott, anyways) that erring on the side of "mad bureaucracy" (as you put it) is the way to go. This doesn't mean we shouldn't work to make the bureaucracy less "mad", just that we are making choices under some unfortunate constraints.
IF the disastrous tariffs were "a predictable consequence of their ideology" (a) why didn't you predict them; and (b) why didn't you make a fortune shorting the market?
Yes. I mean, Trump can contradict himself within the space of 20 minutes, but if you take the broad average of his rhetoric over a 12-month period he has been weirdly more honest than most politicians about following through on the policy directives he talked about.
I thought this was fairly well explained in the post. Tariffs aren’t a necessary consequence of right-wing populism but instead a Trump idiosyncrasy. It was an empirical question whether institutional checks would constraint his ability to implement policy based on this idiosyncrasy and the answer appears to be no.
It was tough to predict exactly how much of a retard Trump would be, and also to time his retardation and then partially undoing his retardation and then re-implementing some of his retardation and then saying whatever word you use to describe a policy where Chinese batteries are tariffed at 154% but if they're installed in a laptop they're tariffed at 10%.
Trump wanted to do all this in his first term but the people he hired realized it was very stupid and just didn't work with him on any of it.
Well, at least Trump made it ok to say "retard" again.
Yes, and just in time.
For one thing, Trump has a habit of reversing his policies in the span of days or hours.
I like this text, but would have expected it in "behind the paywall" , where Scott puts his very good texts - while the brilliant ones are free. This piece has a nice Noah Smith sound to it. It is 100 days and my mailbox is full with texts about how badly Trump failed and how spineless his cronies are. And how dumb and destructive those mad tariffs. - I fully agree, of course. But ... I come to ACX with unfairly high expectations. Fine text, no doubt. Actually the new Noah Smith post is not as well written, partly wrong, but kinda doing more with my neurons: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-owe-the-libertarians-an-apology
I have to shake my head at that piece; not because I am pro-Libertarian, but because really now, Noah, read your history:
"Libertarians’ focus on deontological (principles-based) notions of freedom often contradicts humanity’s moral sentiments. For example, some libertarians argue that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery; the proper response to this is “Eww.”
'the moral sentiments of humanity' have found it acceptable not alone to sell yourself into slavery, but to sell your family members. You are a poor peasant family with too many kids and the harvest was bad? Sell your prettiest daughter(s) to the local whorehouse! Prostitution is legal, but they will still get all the social opprobrium of that status!
The proper response to that is not "eww" (my deontological ass goes 'eww' about things I suspect Noah may tolerate or even like) but a defence of the dignity of the human person.
lol. Yeah, pretty much my thoughts. Though: Not only Noah believes "defence of the dignity of the human person" must lead to a ban of slavery, therefore "eww". ... Much is about the confusion of anarcho-capitalists who claim 0% of GDP for "the state" is possible and fine (David Friedman) and classic liberals/ soft libertarians like his Milton Friedman (David`s dad) who argue 10% of GDP for the state in peace time is closer to the optimum. Or even the actual pro-market parties as the FDP in Germany dreaming about 30-40% instead of the 50% of GDP we have. For Noah and most people those are all the same bunch of Neoliberals, Globalists, Turbo-Capitalists, Manchester-Liberals - and while I say "Yeah!", most people think those are synonyms for "the scum of humanity". Still, Noah does kinda admit the Chicago-school had better ideas than the golfers in Mar-a-Lago.
I definitely not saying Trump is doing things *well* but rather that he does have reasons for what he's doing. They might be poor reasons and he may be doing it terribly, but it's not just "stupid idiot woke up this morning and decided on a whim to crash the global economy". He has an idea of what he wants to achieve, and he's been telling us what that is all along: Make America Great Again. Make America rich and powerful and independent.
"Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy."
They may well. But rightly or wrongly, they are likely to say "Yes, but in other areas he has done what I want." Either as a cope, or because they genuinely care about these issues more than the economy, they could point to the supreme court and abortion, or the stance on immigration. Then they'd say "I don't like the tariffs, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for the strongman who is able to change the direction of the country in the area of X or Y."
For me, it's affirmative action. State-incentivized affirmative action is a human rights violation, that of equality before the law (as is legal affirmative action as long as discrimination in the opposite direction is banned), tariffs are not, so the former takes precedence. If whites/men were replaced with Jews in the left's ideology as the overperforming group, I expect people like Scott would be more sympathetic to the leader trying to dismantle the antisemitism, regardless of his economic policy or other stupidities.
And affirmative action and related aspects of wokeness take a strongman to dismantle against the will of the progressive elite, while as Scott wrote, tariffs can be easily enacted by one administration, and fully repealed by the next one, even of the same party. While affirmative action hopefully won't be fully restored by the next Democratic administration, as the stronger forms are unpopular with the majority, it was just that the ideology of the progressive elite made it unthinkable to ever reduce it.
Also, the negative effects of suddenly introduced, high tariffs are more apparent than the negative effects of rule by an entrenched bureaucracy belonging to an ideological echo chamber, which went on for decades, so we don't really have a comparison for it.
People stop caring so much about pronouns when they lose their jobs and healthcare and social security and see empty shelves at the store. It's like Maslow's hierarchy.
Not when the liberals are scapegoated for those failures. Just say it's because of the deficit that Biden caused. I'm sure people will believe it.
I appreciate the way this article (and Scott generally) addresses the conflict theory involved, it often seems that only the Republicans are willing to be explicit about this dimension of politics. Despite this, Scott's natural tendency to mistake theory led him off this line of thought too early.
I would like to see more reasoning about long term value - this feels like an analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma that ignores the difference between one-shot and repeated games.
Even if the Republicans do more damage than the Democrats would otherwise it may be worthwhile (for the Right) depending how much damage they do to institutions.
It will be worth rolling the dice on this repeatedly, until the Left is reformed or their institutional power erased.
As for reform, the Left just received a harsh wake-up call, now is the time. Some excellent directions have been proposed.
> It will be worth rolling the dice on this repeatedly
Your political opponents can remain unaligned to your worldview longer than the economy can stay solvent.
Well put
An insolvent economy might fracture the ability of the opponents to hurt you.
No, repeatedly crashing the economy will in fact result in you losing elections.
The left might win another election, but if world trade is desolate and the economy is ruined, they would hypothetically be unable to punish the right wing by importing millions of immigrants and relying on the dollar as a reserve currency to pump out more inflation, at least without further devaluing any welfare programs.
Wow. What a wonderful policy: make America so poor that nobody wants to live here and our economy doesn't function, just to own the libs. Please make sure to advertise that this is the American right's position for all elections going forward!
I wish there were better alternatives.
We should really discourage negative-sum games in politics, that goes to some very bad places very quickly.
I agree with your take that if the tariffs majorly disrupt the economy this would be hard-to-ignore evidence against the populist right. My sense though is that as of now investors expect a major economic disruption but it hasn’t happened yet. Some parts of the essay make it sound like the disruption has happened or is sure to happen soon. I’d caution against overconfidence there. I still expect this administration’s policies to be bad for the economy but I think it could be a few years before this becomes obvious in the data.
I recommend taking some time to understand how the supply chains of US consumer retail businesses and actually existing US manufacturing work— if you do, you’ll have a better understanding of why predictions of relatively swift and significant economic damage are fairly common. Significant effects are already visible in shipping and trucking data, and capital expenditures ex-hyperscaler data center construction already fell to flat in March as businesses started responding to policy uncertainty by curtailing investment.
It takes something like 6 weeks for a ship to cross the pacific. Unless companies are turning back ships that have already left, it will take 6 weeks for the effects of the tariffs on supply to start manifesting (though prices might start to rise in anticipation as retailers try to conserve stock for the time when shortages start to show up).
I think this is also a good lesson on the empowerment of executive branch and federal government, for which the left is no less of a sinner than the right (and of course so are those Republicans who paid lip service to limiting executive power but walked back whenever their side had it). Piling most power under a single elected representative was bound to backfire once a "less qualified" person gets the job.
The removal of the independence of the Electoral College is another cause of the current situation. If electors were truly independent, they would have likely kept populists such as Trump out. That was basically the primary goal of the system (Federalist No. 68).
It is interesting that one of the reasons for this was the limited communication technology of the era: It was unlikely that simple citizen could gather enough information about a presidential candidate to make an informed decision, but they should be able to know who is a good judge for this locally.
We seem to be regressing to this situation, maybe social media actually decreases quality of information compared to 20th century technology.
The electoral college functioned as designed for exactly two elections, in which everyone already agreed that George Washington was the clear qualified candidate. It's not really the fault of the constitution's framers, exactly - they were designing a representative government on a vast scale without anywhere near enough previous reference cases to anticipate how all the institutions would play out in practice - but expecting it to work as designed now, with centuries of observational data from here and now a host of other representative systems of various types, is way too silly to waste time on.
Also the Seventeenth Agreement, direct elections of senators.
> maybe social media actually decreases quality of information compared to 20th century technology.
Congratulations! https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1053:_Ten_Thousand
We ought to be taxing targeted online advertising per pageview - per frame, in the case of autoplaying video - until it's replaced with something less malignant, as white phosphorous matches once were.
I don't buy the idea that "populism" is an ideology at all. It's just a label that gets applied to ideas that are popular but which the major parties aren't willing to support.
"We want lower taxes on the middle class and an end to compulsory weekly anal probes" say the people.
"You got it", say the Republicans, "lower taxes on the rich, and a task force to form a strategy to lower the rate of compulsory weekly anal probes by 3% by 2042"
"You got it", say the Democrats, "higher taxes on the rich, and twice as many anal probes"
If someone came along genuinely promising an end to compulsory anal probes then that would be labelled "populism", but that doesn't make it a coherently populist position, it's just an idiosyncrasy of the US that the major parties are both really keen on anal probes for some reason. In a different country or a different time it would be some other thing.
The key is that voters don't want "populists" or "populism", they just want their policy preferences to be picked up by the mainstream party. If Bush, McCain and Romney had had an Australia-style approach to border security, a Singapore-style approach to law and order and a China-style approach to industrial policy then there'd be no need for a Trump.
>The key is that voters don't want "populists" or "populism", they just want their policy preferences to be picked up by the mainstream party. If Bush, McCain and Romney had had an Australia-style approach to border security, a Singapore-style approach to law and order and a China-style approach to industrial policy then there'd be no need for a Trump.
A data-point in favour of this: Denmark, which introduced strict immigration controls in the 1990s and has an official policy of monoculturalism, has no problem with populist parties, unlike the rest of Europe.
Dansk Folkeparti was founded in 1995 and quickly became one of Denmark's major parties. They helped push Danish immigration policy to the right and have been seen as a role model for right-wing populist parties in other countries, such as Sweden.
Dansk Folkeparti appears to have 4% of seats in parliament. AfD has almost 25% in Germany and is projected to grow in the next election. RN has about 20% in France and would be much higher if France had proportional representation -- they have close to 40% of France's EP seats.
They went from nonexistent to second-largest party in less than 20 years, though they have slipped since then. The intended lesson is most likely that the other parties adopted their immigration policies and won by integrating them, rather than trying to shout them down and ban them a la Germany and the AFD.
Yes, in the last two elections, DF has shrunk considerably. Before that, they were the second largest party.
I think you are largely correct here. US populism certainly isn't coherent, but it also isn't any more or less coherent than the established parties, outside of the established parties' apparent organizing principle of "more government and power, please". People keep trying to argue that one side or the other has these really strong themes and foundational principles in the political parties, but in practice they are really hard to spot.
True that, but there is a sort of socially conservative, economically redistributive (ie anti-libertarian) view more popular among the masses than the elites and that winds up getting called 'populist' by default.
Consider the possibility that popular.policy preferences will lead to.unpopular comsequnces, which is why "elites" don't support them.
Some popular demands would be disastrous for everyone; many others would only be briefly inconvenient for one specific group (which happens to have veto power) while benefiting the country as a whole. Office whose job it is to figure out which are which has had an "out to lunch, back in 30 minutes" sign on the door since before I was born.
Some.attemps by the deep state to block.popular policies are self-serving, others are a restoration of sani ty.
Team D will run on a platform of higher taxes on the rich, then extend the Team R tax cuts once elected.
The anal probes will only become more probing, regardless who is in office.
I think that's right, and it's a style more than anything. I can't think of much that's more directly populist than forgiving the federally-backed loans of people you think are your voters, to remind them to vote for you - yet I suppose to some that couldn't be populism, because college grads ... er, attenders ... just can't be the target of demagogues. Because college makes you smart.
First, I don't think it's as apparent as a lot seem to deem it to be, that Vance will be the anointed heir of Trump. There's three years more to go, and any ambitious Republicans may well deem that Vance is tainted by the unpopularity and vulnerable to challenges.
Second, tariffs are terrible, but I think Trump has kind of a point going on. The AI futures scenario where the Chinese AI and the American AI are in cahoots and bring democracy to the People's Republic of China and overthrow the CCP is a lovely notion, but it's just a fantasy. There is no reason to think this, rather than a carving up of the world between them ('you own the West and play-act that democracy still exists, I own the East and play-act that communism still rules') might happen. After all, both AI are in agreement that the humans are their puppets so whatever fake form of government the fleshbags may *think* is in charge, that's all a Potemkin village.
So what if China never becomes the democracy that "open up the global markets and the lure of capitalism will be too much to resist" ideology hoped would happen? What if they're still Xi Jingping Thought and decide to flex their economic muscle due to their stranglehold on world trade in certain items?
The green energy revolution that we need to save us from climate change is heavily dependent on rare earth elements. As others have pointed out, they're not that rare - China does not have the monopoly there. Where it *does* have the monopoly is in processing:
https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2024/08/mine-the-tech-gap-why-chinas-rare-earth-dominance-persists/
Such industry was low-value, heavily polluting, and the West (the US) decided that it was easier and cheaper to let China degrade its environment and exploit its workers to process and manufacture the end products which could then be bought by the West.
"Environmental impact is often cited as one of the main reasons for China’s emergence as a rare earth powerhouse, but the technological aspect is less discussed. From 1950 to October 2018, China filed over 25,000 rare earth patents, surpassing the US’ 10,000. Over decades, Chinese engineers perfected the solvent extraction process to refine REEs which plays a critical role in ensuring China’s primacy. Though the technology originated in the United States, environmental and regulatory concerns made domestic rare earth development unfeasible."
The US is struggling to catch up, so as not to be reliant, but that will take years (possibly decades) to scale up processing and production to meet the existing and future needs. So what do you do, if China decides to wield the big stick?
I think Trump's tariffs are an attempt - maybe a very clumsy, blunt and ill-focused one, but still an attempt - to protect against such an eventuality. Force China to the negotiating table, get an agreement signed that they will play nicely, and that gives breathing space until the US can get its own independent supply chain set up.
On the other hand, China *does* have the big stick. And it's not very comfortable to think that US security is so dependent on the goodwill of a nation that is not ideologically aligned:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/consequences-chinas-new-rare-earths-export-restrictions
"Q3: Why are rare earths significant to U.S. national security?
A3: REEs are crucial for a range of defense technologies, including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs. For example, the F-35 fighter jet contains over 900 pounds of REEs. An Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds, while a Virginia-class submarine uses around 9,200 pounds.
The United States is already on the back foot when it comes to manufacturing these defense technologies. China is rapidly expanding its munitions production and acquiring advanced weapons systems and equipment at a pace five to six times faster than the United States. While China is preparing with a wartime mindset, the United States continues to operate under peacetime conditions. Even before the latest restrictions, the U.S. defense industrial base struggled with limited capacity and lacked the ability to scale up production to meet defense technology demands. Further bans on critical minerals inputs will only widen the gap, enabling China to strengthen its military capabilities more quickly than the United States."
And China *has* wielded the big stick before:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/10/japan-rare-earth-minerals/
"On 7 September 2010, a Chinese fishing boat collided with two Japanese coastguard vessels, off the islands of Senkaku in the East China Sea. Naturally, the coastguard arrested the captain of the fishing boat. Among the Chinese government’s responses was stopping the export of rare earth minerals to Japan.
The embargo sent Japanese industry into panic, especially the automobile sector for which rare earths for the production of magnets were indispensable; at that time Japan was totally dependent on China for nearly 90% of its imports of such materials. The incident was eventually resolved by the release of the fishing boat’s captain, but the prices of rare earths soared 10 times in a year following the incident.
...Japanese dependence on Chinese rare earths dropped from 90% at the time of the incident to 60% today. The consumption of rare earths in Japan is now half the level of what it was then. These developments have arguably protected Japan from being targeted by another embargo of rare earths in spite of a series of diplomatic problems with China since the incident.
But the dependence of 60% is still high. China’s dominance in the global rare earths supply is even higher. The challenge is not limited to rare earths. China strengthened its export controls on gallium and germanium this summer, of which it also dominates the global supply. Beijing also banned the import of waste plastics, which caused substantial disruption for countries that had depended on sending their rubbish there. While this was in a different context, it demonstrates the vulnerability of overdependence."
On Vance, I think Trump is more likely to sabotage any and all candidates than he is to anoint a successor. He doesn’t seem concerned about having a legacy or movement. He just likes being the main character on TV every day.
Trump's going to try to run again. Will the rule of law stop him? We'll see!
If we just put tariffs on China, some other country could compete with them on processing rare earths. Unfortunately, Trump put tariffs on the countries that could compete with China.
I think the major concern is that no other countries are in a position to challenge China on that; either their existing facilities are too small and it will take a long time (if ever) to scale up, or starting from scratch will take years.
In the meantime, if you want the goodies for your green energy or armed forces, where are you gonna go? And that is how China has everyone over a barrel hoping that the CCP will remain friendly to them.
Maybe the tariffs will act as an incentive for other countries to ramp up their efforts!
https://www.csis.org/analysis/consequences-chinas-new-rare-earths-export-restrictions
"Q6: Are there any international partners from which the United States could alternatively source heavy rare earths and fill the supply gap?
A6: While several countries are working to develop their light and heavy rare earths deposits, China maintains a monopoly on refined heavy rare earths for the time being. Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Vietnam all have initiatives and investments underway to bolster key REE mining, processing, and research and development (R&D) as well as magnet manufacturing. For the United States to build alternative sourcing partners for long-term supply chain security, it is important to continue to provide financial and diplomatic support to ensure the success of these initiatives.
Australia is working to develop its Browns Range to become the first significant dysprosium producer outside of China. The deposit has estimated dysprosium reserves of 2,294 tons, to be unlocked in a multistage process resulting in 279,000 kg of dysprosium per year. However, much work remains to be done to build processing and refining capacity outside of China. Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths is the largest producer of separated rare earths outside of China, but still sends oxides to China for refining. Australia is expected to be reliant on China for REE refining until at least 2026.
Working with international partners can also help to overcome gaps in technological know-how when it comes to REE separation and processing. A few countries lead the way in developing critical minerals and REE-specific R&D initiatives to support the development of the strategic sector. The Australian Critical Minerals Research and Development Hub is working to boost international R&D cooperation on critical minerals. The hub includes rare earth and downstream processing initiatives lead by government agencies working in partnership with industry and universities to boost technical capacity. Japan has the Center for Rare Earths Research within its Muroran Institute of Technology as well as a joint initiative with Vietnam to improve REE extraction and processing at the Rare Earth Research and Technology Transfer Centre in Hanoi. The initiative was launched in 2012 as Japan looked to strengthen and diversify its REE supply chains in response to China’s REE export ban in 2010."
Theoretical targeted tariffs could do that, Trump's actually existing tariffs are another story.
It's very hard to know what Trump wants with his tariffs, everyone is just guessing. One can try to guess what he wants from the predicted effects of the tariffs and his public pronouncements (which are little more than make america great again, everyone is ripping us off, not much to go on). Supporters are tying themselves in knots trying to postulate a reasonable policy goal this could achieve, and trying to justify how the particular tariffs will achieve those, but Trump has set them a very difficult task this time. One thing tariffs could conceivably do is to reduce reliance on hostile powers for critical industries, needless to say a blanket 10% tariff or whatever the "reciprocal tariffs" were do not do that. Another way tariffs could work is by being a negotiating tactic to either reduce blocks to free trade or pressure other countries into some other policy goal, 10% blanket tariffs with no communication prior do not do that either. Note that these are contradictory goals, the first one needs the tariffs to be reliable and non-negotiable, so industry leaders can plan accordingly. Tariffs are a tool, not a very good tool but a tool nonetheless, if you apply this tool in a stupid way people will call you stupid.
>Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance. And although Vance supports tariffs now, that’s only because he’s a spineless toady. After Trump leaves the picture, Vance will gain thirty IQ points, make an eloquent speech about how tariffs were the right tool for the mid-2020s but no longer, and the problem will solve itself.
>This administration has made me more confident that the left is the better starting point for this salvaging effort.
So we have faction where, if they push a really disasterous policy, even their enemies think theyll drop it in *just* four years, and possibly much sooner: Trump keeps oscillating rethorically on whether or not the tariffs are for real, and presumably this will stabilise (one way or another) in less than one year. That sounds like a yuge improvement to me.
Its not like the institutions dont make mistakes - ideosyncracy increases the odds somewhat but is far from required. Rationalists talk all the time about how restrictions on housing, business, etc are holding back the economy a lot. Theyve spent literal decades pleading with the left to reconsider their stance on that front, without much in the way of results - but I guess real salvaging has never been tried, and you know, those tarrifs seem like a mistake that didnt need to happen at all, so lets keep at it.
I mean, there is a massive and very successful housing policy reform movement actively winning an internal factional struggle within the Democratic party. It's very clear how you can look at that and see a road map to reform.
Meanwhile, you're making the mistake of assuming that the tariffs are Trump's only mistake, not just the one with the shortest feedback loop. Yes, they will quite plausibly be reversed, because the blow up trade -> everyone's material circumstances get worse feedback loop is extremely direct and unsubtle. But what about the denigrate vaccines -> increased childhood mortality/ability to resist a pandemic feedback loop? What about the cripple financial regulation -> pave the way for another 2008 style overleverage crisis loop? What about the defund research -> miss out on medical and technological advances that we won't miss because we'll never know about them loop?
Tariffs are the big, glaring example that no one's gonna be able to deny. But this is the level of competence that's happening everywhere in this administration, and we're gonna suffer the consequences in a bunch of different places. And unless the right actually recommits to developing and valuing expertise this shit's gonna keep happening, which means this whole pretense that the institutional framework of the most prosperous society in history is entirely worthless is gonna have to go.
No, they are not the only mistake. My point is that the ability to correct *anything* this fast is an improvement.
>But what about the denigrate vaccines -> increased childhood mortality/ability to resist a pandemic feedback loop?
I like this example, because in fact Trump was very proud of the vaccine and operation warpspeed - his base just didnt want to hear it, and so he has mostly stopped bringing it up. It shows 1) how (not) serious the sources of your Trump criticisms are with the truth and 2) he actually did respond to feedback there as well - not the way youd like obviously, but in terms of which sides mind is easier to change, where can you have more political impact, that still speaks for him.
"I mean, there is a massive and very successful housing policy reform movement actively winning an internal factional struggle within the Democratic party. It's very clear how you can look at that and see a road map to reform."
Ezra Klein made a powerpoint presentation and a book showing. That's what people call winning?
Coming from a country with a rich history of military dictatorships, one of which originated in a guy who followed on the steps of Mussolini and Hitler, and seeing americans call Trump a far right extremist and that the US is on the verge of dictatorship is, putting it mildly, wild.
That's just the nascent background noise of American politics, like cicadas at night.
You kind of get used to it.
Except that this is the first time in many decades that a president has started unilaterally dismantling much of the political system and has threatened to disobey court orders. He’s also very explicitly at least joking about violating the constitution by running for a third term - if I’m not allowed to joke about bombs in airports, he shouldn’t be allowed to joke about running for a third term.
Mussolini started in one political faction and ended up in a very different place. Same for Orban. It’s more about personal will to power than policy.
From the outside looking in it does appear he's following the aspiring dictator playbook pretty closely. I'd be way more worried if he was 40 years younger, as it is his replacement could do quite a lot of damage but I haven't seen a young politician with the right amount of charisma who is willing to finish the job, not yet anyway.
"But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever. Congressional Democrats would push back. State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would water down the orders. DNC operatives would say it doesn’t play well with [list of one million different activist groups who must be kept satisfied at all times]. Democrat-controlled media would attack the policy, and the base would rebel against it. In the end, Clinton/Obama/Harris would relent: partly to preserve political capital, partly because only the sort of person who would relent in these situations would have gotten the job in the first place."
The resistance by bureaucrats and staffers happened during Trump's first administration, which is why this time he has made sure to pack everything with loyalists (or spineless toadies, if you prefer) and outsiders. I don't get why everyone makes such a big deal out of "they're all yes men!" Well, yeah, because the first time round he played by the rules (more or less) and everyone was falling over themselves to give interviews to the NYT about how they were La Résistance and deliberately ignored, flouted, or disobeyed his orders. Why *wouldn't* he pack his administration with "when I give an order, A will obey it" types?
I'm not entirely sure it holds for the Democrats as well. Back in Obama's day, he made much of his "pen-and-phone" strategy:
https://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/obama-state-of-the-union-2014-strategy-102151
"“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he said at his first Cabinet meeting of the year. Outlining the strategy, Obama said he plans to use his pen to sign executive actions and his phone to convene outside groups in support of his agenda if Congress proves unable or unwilling to act on his priorities.
“One of the things that I will be emphasizing in this meeting is the fact that we are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we are providing Americans the kind of help that they need,” he added, flanked by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell."
A Democratic leader who feels that he has sufficient backing, be that from within the party or from the electorate, may be emboldened to go around internal obstacles or to tell them "my way or the highway".
As for "[Biden's] handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing", that's not in fact a reassuring possibility. There's already some questioning about how much he was in fact in charge, how much of policy and decision-making was done by who-knows-who, and how much Harris was kept out of the loop. The idea that "yes I want an official policy on compulsory non-binary pronouns for all Department of Hamsterwheels staff, and with the President asleep at the wheel now is my chance to slip that piece of paper into the pile for the autopen" is not one I want to contemplate.
If I'm going to be ruled by those I disagree with, at least let it be the guy who was elected to the job, and not "background spad"!
EDIT: Yes, of course I'm not American so I'm not going to be ruled by Biden or Trump (though, given the outsize influence the relationship between the US and everyone else, it's nearly like being ruled by them when our guys decide national policy based on 'what did the White House do?')
But we'll be having our own presidential election later this year, and do you think I want effin' Conor McGregor as Uachtarán na hÉireann? Or even the bare notion of it?
https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0322/1503397-presidential-election/
Despite being a filthy foreign bog trotter you are pretty much exactly spot on :) . Scott could have made a coherent argument by pointing out that executive over reach and nonsense has become the norm over the past 20-30 years, with every president and/or their administration doing crazy stuff unchecked. Instead he decided to stick with the American left's message that Trump is uniquely bad and no one from the other party would ever act like that, presumably because "They are all lawless tyrants, but my side's lawless tyrants are better," is kind of obviously stupid and a brain as good as Scott's rebels.
I don't know anything about Ireland's internal politics, but scanning that article... woof, I feel for you. My mom's forebears probably made the right decision moving to the 'States.
I think the difference is that Obama didn't make such terrible decisions with his executive power as Trump has with tariffs.
Although I am very much not a fan of the tariff situation the end result remains to be seen, and Obama’s legacy is not good. One notes that the rough time period of things going to Wokism hell starts right about when his administration does. It seems likely that we just don’t know as much of what happened.
I recall Steve Sailer arguing that Obama's first term went fairly smoothly, and then in his second term it tilted more toward wokeness. Similarly, Trump's second term (so far) has featured worse policy than his first.
Nixon's first term was quite liberal, signing a huge amount of liberal legislation like the Environmental Protection Act, inventing affirmative action, etc. Then in January 1973 it looked like he was gearing up to be seriously more conservative in domestic policy, but then Watergate and endless foreign and economic crises happened.
What made it look like he was about to change tack?
Going to America was going to the land of opportunity, so you probably did benefit from the ancestral decision!
So far, so good :)
The resistance in his first administration was not by career staff. It was by Trump’s own appointees like Mnuchin and Esper and Milley. Even Barr at the end. This go round is the same. Pete Hegseth has been getting knifed by his hand-picked staff members, not career civil servants. Because he’s a moron.
> Even Barr at the end.
Heck, even *Mike Pence* refused to go along with his coup attempt.
"Why *wouldn't* he pack his administration with "when I give an order, A will obey it" types?" - because when he gives orders that are obviously illegal, unconstitutional, corrupt, and/ or incredibly ill-conceived in some other fashion, it's *good* when some stops him. Wise men recognize their limitations. But apparently asking that the President of the United Stated be law-abiding, smart, virtuous and wise is way too much these days.
"But apparently asking that the President of the United Stated be law-abiding, smart, virtuous and wise is way too much these days"
All of them, in any country, unhappily.
It would be very difficult to be both law abiding and smart and virtuous in the modern USA.
To add to what others have said, Trump wanted equally insane things in his first admin and was stopped by his own picks, eg his cycle of sec states like Rex Tillerson or MadDog Mattis. People try and sanewash Trump 1 and then use that same sanewashing to argue that we don't need bureaucratic middle layers, but it's a circular argument. "There were no bad things that happened in Trump 1 so we didn't need the protections that prevented bad things from happening in Trump 1".
This is the same argument coming from ozone denialists.
Uh, "the economic devastation" has already happened. This article should have been written decades ago. The idea that the country is doing well is because we accept the appearance of highly aggregated statistics and dismiss the reality of people's lives. The country needs to rebalance, as does the world economy. We have to have supply and demand. I'll own the tariffs, if you'll own the empty factories, the 40 people shot every weekend in Chicago, the financialization of the US economy that made a Mitt Romney while impoverishing millions. Fair trade?
Hasn't violent crime had a major decline in the US?
(Not American so I'm unsure)
It *had* a major decline for a long time, but has been headed back up since the Obama years and especially since Covid. It hasn't yet gotten as bad as it was in the mid-90s, but the recent trend has still been in the wrong direction.
The big change then wasn't tariffs. It was the police stepping back in response to BLM. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike
There was a major decline from about 1990 to 2014. There was a blip up (to 2009 levels) in 2015, 2016, 2017, but it returned to those low levels in 2018 and 2019. In 2020 and 2021 there was a bigger blip (to 1997 levels) but in the years since it has been falling again.
Black deaths by homicide were 44% higher in 2021 than in 2019, and black deaths by motor vehicle accident were 39% higher in 2021 than in 2019, presumably due to the police retreating to the donut shop after George Floyd (May 25, 2020).
Do you know where those numbers stood in 2022, 2023, and 2034?
Off the top of my head, total homicide deaths (all races) were down only 5% in 2022 compared to the peak in 2021, then homicides fell notably in 2023 and 2024. We could well be back soon to low levels of black homicide deaths not seen the emergence of Black Lives Matter at Ferguson in August 2014 got all those thousands of incremental black lives murdered and splattered on the asphalt in increased car crashes.
After all, there didn't appear to be anything else going such as the crack wars of 1988-1994 or the powder cocaine war of 1980 to drive up black homicide and traffic fatality rates during the Great Awokening. It was just a colossal own goal.
Heckuva job, American elites, spending a decade pointlessly encouraging, in effect, blacks to get themselves killed in shootings and car crashes, all in the name of Black Lives Matter.
It has. There was a uptick for a year or two after COVID, but it's since gone back down.
Homicides started to decline after the peak of powder cocaine in 1980, but then got really bad when crack cocaine came along in the late 1980s. By 1995, the crack wars were winding down and homicides dropped sharply and then stayed fairly low through 2014, as life in big cities came back into fashion. But then came Ferguson in August 2014 and the rise of BLM.
But BLM terrorists started murdering cops, which helped Trump got elected the first time, so cops started policing more once again. But then came George Floyd and the Racial Reckoning and the most spectacular increase in black-on-black murder in recorded history. Now, BLM and the Racial Reckoning are being memoryholed, and homicide rates are dropping back toward pre-BLM levels.
Almost exactly the same patterns are visible for black motor vehicle fatalities, suggesting the Ferguson Effect and the Floyd Effect were due to the Establishment foolishly going anti-police twice in the name, ironically, of Black Lives Matter.
Crime in Chicago was much worse in the nineties.
Yeah, when the decline really started - now the city as 1/3 fewer people...
from 1990 to 1992 MFG employment dropped from 700K to 630K. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CHIC917MFG
What do you think that chart shows? That's for the entire Chicago MSA, the population of which has *grown* steadily since 1980. It has 20% more people than it did in 1990.
I lived there 1986 to 1999. The first half was a period of bad crime, but by 1996 it had started turning the corner.
What's your plan to keep manufacturing employment up in the face of automation?
good question, and likewise, what plan do we have for rural Americans as agricultural yields rise, and what plan do we have for white collar jobs with AI on the horizon? I don't have any perfect answers but obviously we need to have work for people or there'll be a lot of human devastation. Japan has a famously well organized low crime culture, and they keep a lot of their traditional work alive, from home building to rice farming. Just a thought.
If you're putting in place tariffs to increase manufacturing employment, and when asked how you deal with automation, if your only answer is "I don't know" then don't put the tariffs in place in the first place.
Most of the ways of increasing employment are separate from tariffs. Wage subsidy would increase the availability of jobs.
Oh I see, you joined the discussion to win some cheap points. Take a break and come back after you make your first mortgage payment.
When you have to point at the worst levels of violent crime in living memory and say "things aren't quite as bad now as they were then," you're really not helping your case as much as you seem to think you are...
Seems to me that if you want to argue Mitt Romney style economics are the reason Chicago has 40 shootings one weekend, you might want to compare it to periods before that all happened.
Chicago crime was at it's absolute worst in the mid seventies. It's not about neoliberalism.
The US still has high manufacturing output. Nor is it at all obvious that people are getting shot in Chicago due to a lack of tariffs. People were famously getting shot in Chicago when Smoot-Hawley was in effect.
> But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever.
While agreeing, I would argue that the same would basically be true for GWB (the only normal Republican president I have a memory of) and likely earlier mainstream Republicans. While GWB did quite some terrible things, these were not done on a personal whim, but with broad support from both his base and his team.
I think the tariffs are actually a load-bearing part of the Right's "America First" platform, that being an homage (of not an outright copy) of North Korea's juche.
Our country is so great -- so the narrative goes -- that we can stand alone (if only we can kick those those sniveling leftists out of the way). We won't engage in countless wars or diplomatic machinations in other countries; let them solve their own problems, we don't need them, and we are withdrawing from all the international accords. We hard-working Americans won't accept immigrants; let them go back to their shitholes, we don't need them. And if other countries want to trade with us, they've got to pay a toll, or take their goods and go home; we don't need them, we can build anything we need right here at home. America cares only about Americans, and no one else, and we are so great that the rest of the world has no choice but follow in our dust.
It's a seductive vision to be sure, and from what I can tell this is the new platform of the Right. And I can't even say they're entirely wrong. It's quite possible that America had fallen so far behind that competing on the world stage is no longer a viable option for us -- so why try ?
There's so much wrong with what's being implied here, but thanks for saying that any move towards autarky should be seen as an imitation of North Korean policy. It makes everything else you say so easy to dismiss.
It scans as first-pass fairly reasonable reading of an 'America First' platform, so I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with it?
Could you elaborate or specify, rather than dismiss?
It's fairly trivial to go "ah, you're wrong" but you may need to point out how and why that is the case if you want someone else to understand it.
( Also Bugmaster at no point indicated that any move towrds autarky should be seen as an imitation of North Korean policy. That's a weird take, so I think it might behove you to read what he wrote again - I think you're reading and reacting to something no one is saying and expecting what is obvious to you ('what's being implied') to be as obvious to other people, but it, uhhh... isn't )
> Also Bugmaster at no point indicated that any move towrds autarky should be seen as an imitation of North Korean policy.
Right, I did not mean to imply this. Obviously North Korea is an autocracy, but not every autocracy is North Korea. For example, China is quite authoritarian (though not to the North Korean extent), and yet their policy is the exact opposite: they want to be closely involved in world affairs on all fronts, be it politically, technologically, or culturally (though of course they want this involvement to occur on their terms).
There’s a difference between autarky (an attempt at economic self-sufficiency with no imports or exports) and autocracy (control of the state by a single individual).
The first paragraph said that the AF platform was an homage, if not outright copy, of juche. As a policy platform, aside from the rhetoric, that's because it is pursuing self-sufficiency, which is both the definition of autarky and juche, except that calling it autarky, or isolationsim, or - to be more accurate to the actual policy - nationalism or mercantilism would not associate it with the most poorly functioning government on earth, which is obviously why he posted it. So he called it juche.
Because he hates it.
The description was made in bad faith and meant to belittle the people who subscribe to it, they were taken in by it, so seductive, poor idiots can't keep up on the world stage, etcetera. If you don't see that, it might be because you think exactly the same way and either can't or won't acknowledge your frame, but the point is, this is just an elaborate insult.
I insulted him back. I'm insulting you, too. I'll do it again.
> except that calling it autarky, or isolationsim, or - to be more accurate to the actual policy - nationalism or mercantilism would not associate it with the most poorly functioning government on earth...
I disagree with most of this. First of all, autarky refers primarily to economic isolationism; as I see it, the MAGA platform is wider than that, embracing cultural and political isolationism as well (and Mercantilism is a much more lenient form of economic isolationism). Isolationism itself is a fairly general term, covering a wide spectrum of attitudes; for example, Shogunate Japanese isolationism was very different from MAGA. Juche in particular is the kind of full-spectrum (economic, political, cultural) isolationism that is IMO most similar to MAGA. Both North Korea and MAGA do not wish to completely retreat from the world and pull the bedcovers over their heads (which is something I might accuse the Shogunate Japan of doing); rather, they wish (perhaps paradoxically) to become the envy of the world while maintaining their purity and therefore their (perceived) exceptionalism.
In addition, while North Korea is definitely one of the most poorly functioning governments on Earth, I don't know if I'd call it the worst. At least it does function to some extent. There are plenty of failed states like Somalia, or authoritarian ones like Afghanistan, which are arguably in worse shape.
> Because he hates it.
"Hate" is perhaps too strong a word, but yeah, I believe MAGA is wrong.
> ...meant to belittle the people who subscribe to it, they were taken in by it, so seductive, poor idiots can't keep up on the world stage, etcetera.
To some extent, perhaps, but bad ideas are often seductive, and everyone is taken in by some bad idea at some point. Neither you nor I are the exceptions -- unless perhaps you were to tell me that every one of your political opinions is now and has always been 100% correct, in which case I'll call you a fool. And as you might have noticed, isolationism in general and its jingoistic juche-style variant is not a new idea; it (arguably) existed all throughout human history in various forms, so its recurrence in modern times should not be surprising.
Thank you for elaborating, I appreciate it.
I still think you're engaged in a lot of mind-reading and, well, like I said, you're reading and reacting to something no one is saying and expecting what is obvious to you to be as obvious to other people. It still isn't. You could probably better frame a reasonable counter if you made clearer what those implications you see so clearly are.
Feel free to keep insulting me, too, I guess. Everyone needs a hobby, and creative insults are a fun way to pass the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSo0duY7-9s&t=98s
Hahah - though to be clear, the reply system ate it a little. That was a reply to Crayton.
There’s a reason that autarky is associated with the most poorly functioning economy on the planet - it’s because autarky cuts you off from all the benefits of cooperation with the rest of the world. This is a fair comparison.
Just because one positions oneself opposite Trump does not mean you get to call yourself moral, intelligent, and erudite--you could be just as bad...or worse. You can't tell me Trump is a moron and then pretend Harris or a mentally-degraded Biden aren't as well.
Sorry, but the "institutional middle layer" and (especially) its leaders have failed many Americans. Saying the "left is the better starting point for this salvaging effort" does not resonate with me. They--both the middle layer and Democrats--failed my legal immigrant wife over losing her green card for literally no reason. But I am supposed to be encouraged and fell justice is being done by watching these same people go into overdrive helping illegals with long rap sheets?
People keep calling Trump things like a "strongman" but what do you call unaccountable government bureaucracies, higher ed administrations, and other recalcitrant institutions that have long given up on the deplorables? At least Trump won an election. I'm liberal and progressive, but I am tired of the refusal of the Left to do nothing but call Trump names, institute lawfare, and pursue just insane stuff like they do on immigration.
Every government fails, every person fails. The institutional middle layer fails less than any alternative that has ever been tried in all of history. If you prefer fail-more rather than fail-less just because the fail-less people say they fail less, I’m not sure what I can say to you.
"I’m not sure what I can say to you."
I couldn't come up with a more perfect example of the attitude of the middle layer: condescension, disinterest, and no solutions offered.
As someone who lives abroad had lived in many countries, I'll take issue with your claim the US is the very best. The middle class has been falling behind for 50 years and we continue to get told it's never been better!
But, never mind, you can't say anything to us.
It’s because your LessWrong Bullshit Yudkowsky Reasoning is Fake, Gay And Jewish.
Violence and Blood Moves Everything.
This feels like an article that I expected to come out 6 months later when the tariffs actually affect things, but Scott published it now. That confused me, but it’s actually a good way to preregister Scott’s conclusion. He is explicitly predicting that Tariffs will ruin the economy and plummet Trumps approval. I’ll need to remember to read this 6 months from now, and see if its conclusions seem stronger or weaker.
Are imports a big enough share of the economy for this to matter all that much? I’m not convinced
I’m not either, but if the economy tanks in the next 6 months, I will be, and need to go back and remember to reread this.
Potable water isn't a huge part of the economy, in dollar terms, and everyone sane tries to keep it that way. Lot of other intermediate materials are similarly easy to overlook... until they suddenly get expensive enough that it's cheaper to relocate a factory than drown in per-unit costs.
Increasing the cost of potable water by 10% would not cause a recession precisely because it is so small a share of GDP
If the price of drinking water rose to a point that it became a notably large share of GDP, there'd be more than just a recession - evacuation or rioting, maybe, depending on the perceived cause. Other commodities have their own tipping points where increased costs result in nonlinear disruption.
ok, sure, but people would pay 20x more for potable water than they do. nothing imported is the equivalent of potable water in terms of being both really essential and really cheap. food imports are hardly essential when we export corn, soybeans, etc
The S&P 500 is currently down about 17% from its ATH (measured in €), so people willing to put their money where their mouth is seem to be convinced that it matters about that much. I'd think that that's the best estimate we currently have of the impact.
measuring in € in tendentious. maybe the dollar was overvalued, partly due to higher interest rates in the u.s.
I think it's fair to assume that € has been roughly stable in value. Do you have some better alternative in mind? Neither gold nor USD seems to have been stable during this time period.
i would measure the u.s. stock market in usd. prices in usd terms haven’t changed much
Since the USD has dropped considerably in value in the same time period, that seems inappropriate to me – it hides about half the drop in value of the S&P 500.
1/6 of all goods and services are imported. That seems extremely important, especially for goods and services with relatively ineslastic demand, and goods and services with relatively higher percentages of imports.
what imports have inelastic demand? textiles maybe?
There are lots and lots of goods that have some imports. Some of those surely have inelastic demand. I imagine coffee would be one that is mostly imported, and perhaps certain kinds of electronics (including things like rare earth magnets). There are probably lots of other foodstuffs.
Textiles are likely a very elastic demand - maybe not high end designer items, but the kind people buy from Target and H&M and Temu. Theres a reason these prices get pushed so low.
I've been running up my international allocation with new money. We'll see if I'm right!
We've already seen big moves in the stock market.
My view of the stock market is that it reacts like the cook in the old Tom and Jerry cartoons - "eek a mouse!" and it jumps onto a stool clutching its skirts.
GDP projections are down.
>He is explicitly predicting that Tariffs will ruin the economy and plummet Trumps approval.
It's one of a wave of articles about the first 100 days. Scott's on the substack bandwagon.
Also new polling saying Trump is at "new lows" in polling. Catch is he started with low polls! He doesn't really have room to plummet.
I've really been enjoying Scott's writing lately, even more than usual. But this felt like an uncharacteristically partisan and unfocussed piece.
"Tariffs are bad, Trump is bad, Trumpism is a personality cult, the left is ideological" etc. etc. maybe that's all true but I can go to Noahpinion for takes like that. It's not the kind of subject or epistemic quality I'd expect from Scott.
Sorry Scott.
What was most notable to me is how boring it was. Real snooze fest, trite and predictable. Ok, the Orange Man is Bad. yawn
> I've really been enjoying Scott's writing lately, even more than usual.
"The left is bad, woke is bad"... guess it doesn't feel partisan when it's punching the other guys?
He's rarely posted anything like that in 10 years. Let's look at his recent posts...
AI Futures, monthly links, open threads- not directly partisan. POSIWID posts- punching twitter right. Colors of her coat- not partisan. Ted Cruz, punching right. Grooming gangs, punching right. The last post that's even remotely in that vein would probably be defending Lynn's IQ estimates back in January, and even that's orthogonal though usually correlated to anti-woke.
The landmark post I recall of Scott's where he attacks the left is "You Are Still Crying Wolf", which he deliberately obscured for fear of "Trump-bots" using it to cheer. Based on the comment above yours, it's also used by people on the left as an example of a partisan attack on the left, even though it's clear from all the caveats slathered all over it that it is not a partisan attack; it's a deliberately targeted attack of one thing the left is doing.
And yet, it's perceived as a partisan attack on the left, by at least some people on the left.
I infer from this that there exist many people on the left that perceive an attack on any one thing they are doing as an attack on everything they are doing.
Remember, the same Scott who had to couch any and all criticism of the left in caveats, and who got doxxed by the most powerful newspaper in the country for having some rightward opinions they didn't like ... wrote today that it's the Right that has "an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason".
What's funny to me is that this particular hand-wringer by Scott - oh no, tariffs! Measurable reduction in trade! - is exactly in line with "You Are Still Crying Wolf", inasmuch as the horrors described are picayune and decidedly unwolf-like. I suspect Scott has other policy changes he hates more but tariffs are the current Narrative.
Yes, since Trump’s election he has stopped punching left. But for much of the past four years, he has been explicitly punching left. I’m especially thinking back to his series on class a few years ago, but also everything he has written about modern art and architecture has been written with an explicit punching left attitude.
Fuck the left. Did you ever have a LessWrong account?
I have one still though I don’t use it often.
Correct. Everything has always been friend/enemy.
You're very vague when describing how Trump's tariffs are going to destroy the economy. Could you provide specifics? The main thing that was quantified was how Trump's tariffs were destroying his polling.
It seems crazy to me that the discussion is about choosing between the informal incentive structures given to a person holding way too much power. Bizarro-world checks and balances.
Tariffs being set by the president is an aberrant result downstream from Congress (once again) improperly delegating power. This is easily fixable but attempts (like https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/5066/text ) will get no airtime even here, because the assumption that all the power must rest in the executive has been in the water supply since FDR. No, we must continue to increase the electoral stakes in each presidential election forever. Even during COVID we saw this, with the democrats encouraging the very president they so distrusted to invoke Defense Production Act powers.
The example of Chavez that you use shows that populism can be either left or right (or neither). Also I think that this post doesn't take into account enough that it is the failures of the institutional left that are responsible for the rise of the populist right. Yes, a right populist can do much more damage than the institutional left, but the institutional left can't do much of anything at all. In the short run that is probably better, but in the long run it may be even worse.
At this point the tariffs have mostly been suspended. It's going to be hard to make a strong political campaign about something that was briefly threatened, then rescinded, 3 years in the past.
Nope. The blanket 10% tariff on everyone is still on, there is a 145% tariff on China, and don't ask me which of the 25% tariffs on this, that or the other from Canada and Mexico is currently active. That's still more than the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the 1930s. And what's even worse is the uncertainty - no one can make any sound investment decisions, because it's completely unclear what tariffs will be three months, let alone three years from now. And that uncertaintly is not going away as long as Trump is in office, and probably not for years after the US has returned to some semblance of sanity.
We have a body that is supposed to keep the president in check. But instead, they keep signing over their powers to the president. In this case it was the Trade Act of 1974, but it's part of a larger pattern that could use some examination.
Cultural lefties and bureaucrats are inherently biased toward feminine personality types: Consensus-based, risk-averse, afraid of accountability, skeptical of rigid results-based hierarchy.
An organization dominated by this personality type is incapable of radical, independent course correction. You need masculine (ambitious, disagreeable, agentive) personalities to do that, but these personalities have been actively alienated from the Left.
What was Obama?
Feminine, obviously.
How about we have collaborative and productive course correction instead, where we move deliberately and effectively, rather than flailing radically and ambitiously and independently?
The population disagrees.
Sad.
No, the problem is that the remaining old school Republicans need to get a clue on tariffs. Ricardo's Comparative Advantage theory has demonstrably failed bigly. With Subsidized Outsourcing, we freed up the Rust Belt -- to rust. We freed up workers to go on welfare and take excess quantities of recreational drugs. We freed up Rural America to host our own gulag archipelago.
Trump has done a terrible job of explaining the problem to the academically inclined, and so the academically inclined gaslight themselves against the reams of data.
So I'm doing Trump's job for him. Ricardo's theory isn't working because it doesn't take into account the income tax, FICA, or the modern welfare state. Income and labor taxes without tariffs constitute Subsidized Outsourcing. I published the details years ago: https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/free-trade-isnt
Now I will agree that Trump's plan to use the threat of tariffs to become the Master Negotiator on Crack is a bad idea. I believe we should just set tariffs where they should be in our national self-interest and mostly let the world do as it wishes. Wall St. won't like it but Wall St. isn't the real economy. This is about creating more home court advantages around the world vs. optimizing the system for the benefit of a few multinational corporations.
The problem with Trump is that he is not eeeeevil enough. He's the margarine of evil, the Diet Coke of evil. https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/liberation-day-lite
You didn't present "reams of data", but instead just assertions.
Get in your car and drive through the rusting industrial areas of the Rust Belt.
I've driven through Gary. You still just have assertions.
Trump is a genius. He's made the left cheer for free trade and globalisation, and decry higher taxes.
Seems to be some confusion about various economic systems. Here's a handy guide.
Various Economic Systems in Child-friendly Form
Entrepreneurial Capitalism.
Your dad offers you $15 to paint the fence. You offer your little brother $10 to paint the fence. He agrees, and you pocket $5 for being the middle man. All the money stays in the family.
Globalist Capitalism.
Your dad offers you $15 to paint the fence. Your little brother says he’ll paint the fence for $10. You then go around to all the kids in the neighborhood, and find one who’ll do it for $7.50. You pocket $7.50 for being the middle man, $2.50 more than before, but now only $7.50 stays in the family.
Socialism.
Your dad offers you and your kid brother $7.50 each to paint the fence. You do most of the work and all the cleaning up while your brother plays video games, and any painting he does is terrible, so you have to fix it up before dad gets home. You still get paid the same. At least all the money stays in the family, but you now hate your kid brother. You vow you’ll also do a crap job next time, since you get the same whether you work hard or not.
Communism.
Your dad orders you to paint the fence. You ask him for $15, but he blows his top, and yells that you’ll do it for nothing for the Greater Glory of the Family! You’re mad, so you do a bad job on the fence, which you notice had been recently painted anyway, so it was pointless. Your dad says it will teach you quiet obedience in future. All the money stays in the family, but it’s all in dad’s pocket.
Green Economics
You tell dad the fence looks tatty and needs painting. He tells you paint is artificial and full of evil chemicals, so just leave it in its natural state. Soon, the fence rots and has to be replaced, at great expense. Lots of money flows out of the family.
Fascism / Chinese Socialism.
Your dad orders you to paint the fence, and if you do it right, he’ll pay you $15. He watches you every step of the way, telling you which paint to use, where to paint more, how fast to go, when you can take a break. By the end, you’re exhausted, and your dad tells you he’s cutting the amount to $7.50 to teach you to do a better job next time. If you do it the right way next time, he’ll consider paying you more. All the money stays in the family, but half is in dad’s pocket.
Addendum to "Global Capitalism":
- Your little brother, realizing that he can't make money from painting, gets into buying/selling baseball cards with his time instead, which is more fun (he gets interested in baseball stats!) and earns him $15 profit from other kids, in the same amount of time. The family walks away with $22.50, more than the $15 you started with.
Thank you
Alternative Green Economics: you figure out that a hedgerow would be more expensive than a can of paint in the short run but will never need to be painted, and persuade you dad to pay you to plant it. You get a little more money, you work really hard, and your mom likes the songbirds that build a nest in the hedge.
Your little brother complains that the old fence ended up in the landfill and that this makes you a hypocrite.
I don’t think you can assume Trump just hands power to Vance in 2028. And yes, I would be willing to bet on it, conditional on Trump still being in power.
I agree mostly with this post, but I think a problematic sentence in its premise is this one: "Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor." It reads like a throwaway line intended to disarm a broader attack on the strength of Trump's base, but I don't think these two issues can be completely ignored. I'm not sure whether Scott is just claiming that a floor exists, or that it has been reached. If the former, then sure -- anger over every single conceivable issue has a floor, and these are not unique issues in that respect.
Taking deportations first: many leftists (among them, me) are concerned that deporting first visa holders, then marginalized citizens (small children of undocumented immigrants) are test probes into how far Trump can go. We worry that if the courts allow (or can't stop) these deportations, he will move farther, attempting to deport US citizens who are his critics or perceived enemies. He's said that he'd like to deport violent criminals who are US citizens. At what point does Gen. Mark Milley become a "violent criminal"? After all, Trump has accused him of treason. And if he can get away with deporting someone like that, what about Robert Reich or Heather Cox Richardson or Rachel Maddow? And, if that succeeds, what about some current member of his cabinet who falls from grace? So, at a minimum, I don't think the floor on anger about deportations is anywhere near being reached, but also, I think the logic of runaway deportations and denials of constitutionally protected rights is absolutely inimical to his base.
As for DOGE, the problem here is that it has already caused structural damage to many systems that are popular with his base. Social security is the most obvious one; access to national parks and services for veterans are others. Decimating FEMA so that emergency relief for the next, utterly predictable, natural disaster is threatened? It's not clear that this damage is reversible. It is not beyond imagination that Trump and Elon Musk might have a falling out at some point that's severe enough that Trump seeks to deport Musk, who, after all, holds three passports.
I agree with one of the main thrusts: tariffs are an idiosyncratic bolt-on for Trump, one that he could abandon without dismaying his base. But the damage may already have been done there too, and the rest of the MAGA ideological structure consists of interlocking pieces, many of which are mutually incompatible unless viewed through the lens of "liberal bad", which itself is not sustainable long-term, and those interlocking pieces comprise multiple potential failure modes.
"marginalized citizens (small children of undocumented immigrants)"
Again, the difficulty here is that the small children are not being put on planes all alone (as some of the headlines would lead one to believe), they're being deported along with non-citizen/illegal immigrant family.
The horns of the dilemma here are (1) you can't deport a 2 year old on their own! then (2) you are deporting a citizen child with the non-citizen family members!
If you can't split up families (because only a monster would do that) and you can't leave 2 year olds in the country on their own (because everyone can see the problem with that), then the answer is either "deport the entire family" or "let the entire family stay".
The 'no human is illegal' set want option 2. The 'close the borders' set want option 1. Highly unsatisfactory compromises like "let a legal family member apply for custody of the citizen minor" please nobody.
I understand and agree that there is a dilemma, but I take issue with a couple parts of your analysis. The option to place the citizen child with a documented relative wasn’t rejected because it would please no one – the administration flatly rejected the father’s plea to keep the child in the US, stating (without providing evidence) that the mother requested that the child accompany her to Honduras and assuming (in a way that might or might not be tinged with sexism) that it was only appropriate to deport the child with its non-citizen mother. And there are surely many more nuanced positions Americans hold between the two poles of “no human is illegal” and “close the border”. I think you’re wrong that that middle compromise solution would please no one. Furthermore, breaking up a family isn't nearly as monstrous as choosing to enforce a deportation order on a family where one of them is in the middle of cancer treatments. I have yet to see any evidence that Trump is at all concerned about being viewed as a monster.
But my main point is to put the deportations in their historical (history of the last 100 days) context. Trump started with purely undocumented people convicted of crimes, expanded deportations to non-citizens with visas, and then to US citizens who are minor children of non-citizens. In each case he pushes the envelope a little farther. He always (so far) has an explanation/justification, but do we take those justifications seriously if we’re looking fundamentally at a tactic for expanding executive power? He is also, by the way, probing at the boundaries of the power of the courts, first by saying that there is nothing he can do to bring Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia back and then, yesterday, saying that he could but he won’t. Both of those can’t be true at the same time; one of them must be a lie.
The unitary executive is pretty old and not at odds with checks and balances. It merely requires the checks on the executive branch of the federal government to be in the other branches (and SCOTUS has ruled against Trump).
Something that’s worth exploring in more depth: the specific ways that the Trumpist style of right-wing populism has damaged a set of feedback mechanisms that would have either prevented “Liberation Day” or helped the administration self-correct more quickly.
The most relevant:
1: Prioritizing sycophantic cult of personality compliance over other governance qualifications. Scott Bessent is the only really competent major economic advisor in Trump Admin II, and he clearly is still both bound by a need to flatter the president’s ego and unable to divert his boss away from disaster. (Significant deterioration since Admin I, where Mnuchin and Gary Cohn were able to keep the admin on track to maintain macroeconomic stability.)
2: Carelessly destroying the specific kinds of state capacity that you need to implement your governing agenda. Both good industrial policy (ie: targeted use of tariffs and subsidies to build critical industries) and trade agreements (the “deals” which Bessent is trying to use as a face-saving road out of this mess that he can sell to Trump) are very technically complex and require a lot of smart bureaucrats to implement. DOGE’s cuts to the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration, NIST experts on digital trade rules, the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service, the State Department’s basic diplomatic functions, and even USAID’s international development personnel have all made trade negotiations much harder to implement.
3: Abandoning the rule of law and using economic policy primarily as a tool for rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Business leaders are afraid to talk frankly about the likely effect of tariffs because they’re hoping for carveouts or scared of lawfare— in turn, delaying market and political pressure to change course.
"But most people agree prosperity is better than poverty; if the tariffs cause economic devastation, it will provide a hard-to-ignore sign of the current administration’s incompetence."
Do you have clear points on what you consider economic devastation?
A 30% drop in the S&P 500?
Unemployment of 10%?
Sustained inflation over 7%?
Whether the tariffs cause economic devastation is fundamentally a prediction of the future. So what, quantifiably, are you predicting will occur in measurable outcomes? And if those things don't occur, will you change your mind on Trump and the salvageability of the left?
Export-driven carbon emissions down? As someone elsewhere on substack pointed out the other day, call it that carbon tax we were never going to get and all of a sudden he's a hero.
I don’t think anyone but the most nihilistic degrowther (or nihilistic America Firster) thinks that Trump’s economic policy is achieving anything good right now.
"But tariffs aren’t a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform. Other right-populist leaders like Orban, Bukele, and Modi show no interest in them. They seem an idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s, a cost that the rest of the movement pays to keep him around."
But doesn't MAGA = Trump? Tariffs might be the only policy Trump has been consistent on for the past several decades (as part of his larger dislike of trade deficits; I'm not sure if he's been strongly opposed to immigration the whole time).
Tariffs may not be integral to right wing populism in a global context, but they're integral to Trump, and I think Trump is integral to right wing populism in the US.
Is the argument that the processes of globalism and of the wealthy enriching themselves without regard for the working class (unless it's charity that gives themselves yet more happy feelings) or for the future of their country - could be unwound in any degree, easily, frictionlessly, without any pain?
When Obama called for "insourcing American jobs" were his efforts painless? And being painless, were they effective?
> Is the argument that the processes of globalism and of the wealthy enriching themselves without regard for the working class
The argument is that globalism raises living standards. The wealthy do enrich themselves, the not-so-wealthy enrich themselves too. Living standards are higher today than have ever been previously. Free trade in goods and services enriches us all.
How marvelous and cool that it should be so simple as that. Processes so often aren't so that is unusual.
Certainly there has been a lifting of those standards in some parts of the globe, though one may differ about how much of that is the legacy of others before us now gone which will be impossible for the West to sustain.
And I can see that that would have more meaning depending on where you are.
But the word enrichment is an interesting one.
It has been thought by many in the West, especially conservatives (conservationists being the OG and finally last conservatives) that one is "rich in relation to what you can afford to leave alone".
Now we are told that that is a discredited idea. In fact, so threatening is it to the money men, that we must now hold nature in contempt, as something we must be hostile to.
(See such empty-headed nastiness from the GOP as the LIZARD act.)
See, locally to me: we must drown the stretches of rivers we hadn't drowned. In fact, we must do that against property rights, formerly a shibboleth. We can no longer preserve open space because we need to bring in the entire "developing" (? - is it developing here then?) world and put them in Lennar homes.
It is interesting that becoming rich means one can no longer hold the values that your people, up to and including some rich men (!), once held, quite naturally.
It is interesting that it means one no longer may entertain ideas about what a good life for the citizenry might mean, because that discussion is so fraught to people's financial portfolios.
It seems very constraining to be "rich" in that way, and I'm not sure past people would quite understand it.
I was merely stating what the argument is. One may of course hold views contrary to this, or have conflicting values.
As a proponent and beneficiary of globalization, and a member of the "working class" (as opposed to the leisure class?), and having lived a portion of my life in regions behind high trade barriers, I see free trade/lower tariffs as welfare enhancing. The wealthy prosper under all regimes. There are fabulously wealthy people in Putin's Russia.
Also note what is considered punitive when imposing sanctions on a country. We don't say "we are going to force free trade on you", instead we say "we are going to impose an embargo".
If free trade is ruinous, perhaps we ought to impose free trade on lran, Syria, and North Korea. That'll show 'em :)
"Unilateral free trade" with China seems to mean, we will get a lot of "almost free" stuff from you, to fill our landfills with, because we have been *told* that's how rich people operate - disposability, that's how you become rich - and in return we will pay you later on, a lot! - or haha, maybe we won't, how will you make us?
Even a garden variety pro-globalist economist with no apparent interest in cultural issues, can have a naughty thought like this, occasionally:
https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/tariffs-saving-and-investment
An excellent post on the folly of tariffs!
And demonstration that what goes by the name of "free trade" currently, is ill-understood!
Standard of living has gone up for all levels of income in the United States for decades. They have gone up even more outside the west, particularly in China and India, but also in Africa. We absolutely can preserve open space, but it is better to preserve wild space than to preserve the “open space” of farmlands and front yards.
What made you think that the Biden-Harris administration was any where close to as bad as Trump 1 ?
The fact that the New York Times revealed his identify publicly, and the fact that woke people criticize his interest in racial IQ correlations. These are much more personal things for him than broader policy.
I think you responded in the wrong place.
No, they definitely didn't.
I was specifically addressing the question of what made Scott personally think that the Biden-Harris team was nearly as bad as Trump 1. I claim it’s because Scott associates the Biden-Harris team with the people who did these mean things to him, and he over-emphasizes the importance of these things because they happened to him personally.
What do you mean, over-emphasize? What could possibly be more important to you than threats to your own livelihood and freedom?
Altruism is the idea that threats to other people’s livelihood and freedom can sometimes be as important, or even more important, than threats to your own. Scott identifies as an altruist (and aims to be effective - even though he, like everyone, falls short of the ideal).
But how can you be an *effective* altruist if your freedom of action is inhibited by outside forces? There's no shortage of posts by Scott detailing the ways regulations pushed by the left have hindered his and other people's attempts at selfless altruism. The pursuit of any goal ultimately benefits from increased capabilities and agency. And that requires neutralizing direct threats to your agency. Instrumental convergence at work.
How does that have anything to do what Biden/Harris did or the policies they espoused?
Assuming Trump, along with personnel such as Bessent, do not have a coherent plan to reshape the inevitably shifting worldwide economic order was your first mistake. Thinking the polls aren't fully manipulable was your second. Badlands Media has great coverage of the Sovereign Alliance working together to move away from unipolar world government to a multipolar model of multiple spheres of influence. But to understand the underlying economic reset being aimed at, go listen to the latest three episodes of Gold, Goats n Guns, with Tom Luongo. All of these financial professionals understand exactly what the Administration is trying to achieve, why a reset is absolutely necessary, & believe Trump has a very good chance of pulling this rabbit out of the hat. BOLO for the Mar-a-Lago Accords.
Does this Sovereign Alliance consist of Trump, Putin, and Xi, maybe together with Orban, Erdogan, and Modi, trying to emphasize national disagreements over global cooperation? It seems to me things were working much better under the global unipolar framework, and that is the obvious target for anyone who cares about human flourishing, since we are all stuck in the same reality with each other.
Ah, yes, nothing quite like the last multipolar era, where we had a near permanent fear that the world would end in a blaze of nuclear hell fire.
Sorry, anyone who thinks "multipolar world is good" is clearly too young to remember what that was *actually* like.
> All of these financial professionals understand exactly what the Administration is trying to achieve
So why do so many of them keep saying that these are the actions of a deranged five year old?
This article is dripping with emotion and only makes sense if you think tariffs are bad. I believed the same until a few years ago. There are economists out there making rigorous models and arguments in favor of tariffs. I urge you to postpone judgment and go back to the first principles of trade to understand the reasoning. Ultimately I would have chosen a tax on incoming capital rather than goods, but they can serve the same end economically. That is Plan B. Trump is pursuing tariffs because they give him political leverage over those countries to help us stop China's massive trade surplus. If we choose plan B (my preference), we simply push the problem onto everyone else. I am okay with that.
I agree that the default "tariffs-bad" assumption is surprising here.
Some reading recommendations for those who are interested in understanding what tariffs are being used for here: Michael Every, Brent Johnson, and David Woo. I know there are many others.
And they all have different takes on whether or not this will WORK, but at least they're engaging with what the strategy is likely to be.
Thanks for the recommendations. I again urge people to postpone judgment and watch their emotions while they study. Under what conditions are tariffs good or bad? It depends. Right now the best defense presented for free trade is "It's econ 101 that free trade is good. Look at this video of Milton Friedman talking about pencils." This emotion and smugness is hurting their arguments. I'm looking forward to a more rational national discussion of this topic.
Let’s start by saying that the default view is that if two people want to trade something because they both think they will get something out of it, that is probably good. Can you say anything non-emotional to provide a counter to that?
Sure, I do not agree with your claim. What's good for individuals is not necessarily what's good for the system in aggregate. I found this article to be a pretty good overview: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/global-trading-system-was-already-broken
I think it would be usual for both parties to be able to express with certainty what the other party is getting - and when. Not really sure that that can be set of unilateral free trade, in the case of the US and China.
I’ve read a good chunk of those 3,000,000 pages of Moldbug prose, and I’m pretty sure he’s never, ever answered the question of “What if the absolute dictator uses the absolute power badly” in a satisfying manner
I think the canon answer is “he’ll answer to his elite advisors, who definitely will not be toadies or afraid of being shot or jailed.”
He wouldn't do the bad things, because he would never be under threat, which is the only reason dictators do bad thing.
Also King Leopold II never existed.
That's why Moldbug's ideal system of government is _accountable_ monarchy, like in a joint-stock corporation, where the board or its equivalent can oust the monarch.
Regardless, this is a problem for all systems. What if the oligarchical establishment institutions believe stupid things and make capricious and arbitrary decisions? (spoiler: they already do, all the time, with disastrous consequences)
The solution to this is to align the interests of the government with the interests of the people and of the country, so it has no incentive to use its power badly. The best way to do that is to embed states in the same market processes that align the incentives of normal businesses, but there are other alternatives.
The difference with monarchy is that distributed power is less responsible, because it is less visible, and that monarchy is inherently a more capable and competent system of government.
Also, the more absolute a monarch's power is, the more he "owns" the country, and people take good care of their property.
In order:
- What if the monarch simply refuses to be ousted? What mechanisms of control are there for the board to maintain their authority? It seems most likely you get a constant threat of civil war between the board and the monarch. This uncertainty, in turn, would also raise the threshold for what’s worth the risk for the board to object to.
- What if the monarch’s bad behavior is profitable? For instance, killing all of the homeless would both be massively immoral and substantially raise property values. There’s no incentive for the monarch not to do this.
- If we’re going to take this US administration and the previous one as a microcosm of monarchy and oligarchy respectively, I personally prefer oligarchy, and it is not even slightly a contest.
- Even if you somehow aligned the monarch’s incentive with the public, who’s to say the monarch will actually follow those incentives? People do stupid shit that is against their own incentives all the time, and political leaders are no exception.
- Even if a monarchy is more capable and competent (and not say, staffed with a bunch of incompetent sycophants) if the things the monarch does are bad, being better at executing them is a bad thing!
- I suspect very many people who were considered property would strongly disagree with the notion that people take good care of their property.
Under democracy/institutional liberalism/oligarchy/whatever you want to call it, there are barriers and limits to the amount of harm that can be done. Suboptimal policies, even bad policies, will happen. But they’re not going to, say, crash the global economy on a whim. Even Yarvin would admit that oligarchies are very stable.
Under absolute monarchy/neocameralism/fascism/whatever, all it takes is one guy being evil and/or stupid, and pretty much anything is on the table, no matter how colossal the harm.
"Don’t let them get away with this. Although it’s true that tariffs owe as much to Trump’s idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology."
Why, if a given populist doesn't support tariffs for their own sake?
Your argument seems to be that right wing populists are bad and therefore must be made to take responsibility for Trump policy, regardless whether they supported them or not.
Populists want to enable sovereign singular authority. Whether or not they support the idiosyncratic views of a sovereign singular authority, every particular sovereign singular authority will have idiosyncratic views. If your platform is to create a sovereign singular authority, then you should own the idiosyncratic bad things a sovereign singular authority does, even if you oppose those things on the substance.
Supporting the bureaucracy by contrast doesn’t lead to idiosyncratic issues - it has an ideological substance to it.
Even if your definition of populism (or suppprt of bureaucracy) were accurate, it doesn't allow that all populists everywhere must support whatever one populist leader does, nor does the idea that bureaucracy is ideologically neutral.
I’m not saying that populists must *support* what one populist does - I’m saying they must *own* the fact that their preferred governance structure will inevitably lead to such things, even when they personally oppose those things.
I’m not claiming that bureaucracy is ideologically neutral - I’m claiming the precise opposite, that it is ideologically substantive, and therefore it will generally lead to policies that supporters of bureaucracy support, unlike populism, which has to own up to the fact that it will lead to policies that particular populists are opposed to.
"Populist politicians tend to enact populist policies, and bureaucrats tend to favor bureaucratic interests" sounds a lot more underwhelming when you put it that way.
But that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that populists ask for an unconstrained authoritarian figure and thus often get policies that have no substantial overlap with the interests of the populists themselves, while people who favor bureaucracies tend to set them up with substantive rules that often lead the bureaucrats to implement a particular substantive policy, regardless of which particular bureaucrats are in place. There is a fundamental asymmetry in these two types of governance.
Bureaucracies set up rules that favor bureaucracies, surely you've heard. The question is who decides the exception.
> Why, if a given populist doesn't support tariffs for their own sake?
Because the system that populists have chosen to use to decide policy is "whatever Trump says is good, is good." Endless trashfires is the inevitable consequence of such a system, unless you have been lucky enough to select a truly virtuous dictator, and I don't believe such figures appear in democratic systems. Someone like Deng Xiaoping or Ahsoka or Alexander the Liberator can, IMO, only appear in societies where people are unaccustomed to democracy, because Good People can rise to the top in authoritarian systems, but Good People do not try to smash functional democracies to concentrate personal power in themselves.
I would asterisk here that "populists" who are willing to work together with others who will contest their thinking and come to decisions that benefit the public, using others' domain expertise to pick out good policies, are good. But at that point I'm not sure what's left of "populism" other than vibes.
Why wouldn't the populist right simply blame economic decline on Biden, the Democrats, or the Left in general? I would expect a majority of Republicans would adopt that view.
They will try to. In this post he is asking us not to let them get away with doing this.
It's fascinating to watch people publicly admit that they don't understand why tariffs are or ever would be a good strategy, who then default to "he must be an idiot". Literally, your move here is "I don't get it, so he must be stupid."
I'll be kind and grant that your lack of comprehension here probably speaks more to your desire to think the opposition are idiots than any true stupidity, but it is fascinating to watch otherwise intelligent people purposefully fail to understand or inform themselves.
Some recommendations for those who are interested in comprehending: read David Woo, Michael Every, Santiago Capital (Brent Johnson), and others who have a good bead on what is happening and why. Here's a good introduction: https://substack.com/home/post/p-156607450
They all have differing opinions on whether or not it will WORK or whether or not it is WORTH THE RISK, but at least they have an operating theory as to what the tariffs are actually attempting to achieve.
Until you engage with the actual ideas on this topic rather than partisan poll-watching (leaving out how Trump's still beating Biden's approval poll numbers--an odd omission given your framing of "historically low"), I find this to be embarrassingly beneath your normal quality of work.
Both “tariffs” and “due process” seem to have quickly become bywords in a process not unreminiscent of populism.
I'm not sure I understand your point. It sounds like you're trying to imply that "tariffs," "lack of due process," and "populism" should all be tied together and equally condemned. I can agree with universally condemning a lack of due process, but the other two concepts (tariffs and populism) need quite a bit more nuanced discussion.
Maybe the rich haven't been paying enough in tariffs! ;-)
Nah, "due process" is exactly "tariff" in people's mouths now. The other day featured an excellent back-and-forth here on that subject, by clear-minded commenters who probably mostly "condemn" the same things you do. I have now seen it infect all manner of things. For instance, on a rather tedious umpteenth discussion of public school, wherein some folk said that classrooms need to be made orderly again, somebody piped up to say that would deny kids "due process". The term has lost its limited meaning, and is now an empty slogan.
Defining terms is more important with political topics than most others, because words get abused and warped more often when they're utilized in "verbal battle" (AKA politics).
So you're probably right that all these words mean entirely different things to different people right now, and in order to be clear about what we intend to support/condemn, we should probably just taboo them (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words) and find another way to state a position.
I am of two minds on tariffs. The link you provided did not aid comprehension of how the current tariff policy it is supposed to work.
My understanding of these things suggests that trying to achieve what I imagine are the goals of America First using tariffs without also raising income taxes is a fool's errand.
My understanding of the tariff policy is that it is a means to an end; meant to flex muscle and "even the playing field" for American manufacturers. But mostly, it is meant to defang China in particular, which has become the world's manufacturer by gutting, stealing, and undermining every other country's manufacturing through shadow government funding.
I do not know what role tariffs play long-term. But I think they are the opening economic salvo. I expect other economic weapons to be utilized going forward in order to get favorable trade deals with nations that are willing to exclude China from trade entirely.
We'll get some insight into whether or not this theory is accurate if the details of the rumored trade deal with India get leaked sometime soon. If the remaining tariffs with India aren't largely reciprocal and very exclusionary to China (and China's continuing trade partners), then you'll know I'm wrong about this.
That list of names is just the same grab-bag of arguments that “tariffs” are good either as economic weapons to wage war against China, or just shake down allies for short term gain, or as long-term indirect subsidies for strategic industries, or maybe whatever used to provide jobs 50-100 years ago, or just for thrashing trade in general because a strong dollar is actually bad because “trade deficit”…
They’re all advocating for different kinds of tariffs in different ways for different reasons, with different amounts of credibility and viability over competing solutions (if the problem in that specific argument even needs one).
You can look at the admin’s erratic actions as an attempt to unify them into a single coherent theory because tariffs are great so all arguments for tariffs must be great, or just throwing everything with “tariff” at the wall hoping something sticks. The rollbacks point to the latter. Not much difference either way, and not a glowing endorsement of policy acumen either way.
I don't see anything here that I disagree with strongly, except maybe your using the term "rollbacks" to suggest that the recent "break" in tariffs is anything other than a mafia man who's been holding people out the window and decides to pull them back in and ask "do you want to do what I told you to now?" Sure, you can view that as inconsistency (is he going to kill them or not??), but I'd argue the more important thing is: was the message delivered, clearly, in a way that will be understood?
Again, I'm not even advocating for this position. But Scott's essay basically takes it as a given that "tariffs=always stupid/bad", and I think that's...not correct and poorly thought through.
Further, I think the absolutely abysmal reasoning and argumentation from otherwise sharp people like Scott has completely ceded the ground for others to make explanatory appeals to people like me (non-economic experts) about this stuff. I wish there were more "experts" engaging honestly with those sources I mentioned. If those sources are, indeed, just a "grab-bag" of tariff-apologizers, then I wish the only available counter argument to them that I've seen wasn't "tariffs are always stupid, because the experts all say so."
Sorry, but I don't just take the experts' word for it anymore. You have to win me over with more than consensus, because you've been terrible lying liars, and because I suspect you have personal reasons to hate tariffs (I don't have any stock market exposure, but I bet they do!). And the louder and more defensive they get about this, the more I suspect them of emotional, intellectual, and/or financial insecurity on this topic. Sadly, Scott included; this article was alarmingly bad in a way that signals to me his thinking on this topic is compromised for some reason or other.
Have you got any suggestions on economists who are writing about tariffs critically from first principles, and within a historical context? Economists who are aware of what Trump might actually be trying to do, but still critical? I'd love to read them if so.
Sorry why is it necessary to go to substack comment sections to access the the hidden plan behind tariffs? Why can't Trump just tell us, does he enjoy the world believing he's a moron?
Maybe there's actually a deep reason that his plan will only work if people don't know what it is? In which case, shouldn't you delete your comment to avoid letting out the secret?
"How much damage will his inevitable idiosyncrasies cause, compared to the devil-you-know of the institutions?"
I believe the Gods of the Copybook Headings rather famously weighed in on this particular question over a century ago.
Combined with the widespread eagerness right now to Nuke Chesteron's Fence from Orbit (it's the only way to be sure), it really is striking how little apparent conservatism there is in the U.S. current "conservative movement."
"Near historic lows" is misleading here. An approval rating in the mid-40s is very typical. Every president this century has had an average approval rating in the 40s (Bush 49%, Obama 48%, Trump #1 41%, Biden 42%) as did about half the post-WWII presidents (Truman 45%, Nixon 49%, Ford 47%, Carter 45%).
Approval ratings get a lot lower than this -- historic lows would be an approval rating in the 20s, which is where Truman (22%), Nixon (24%), H.W. Bush (29%), and W. Bush (25%) bottomed out. Even those levels didn't end up crippling the relevant political movements.
You can only make the near historic lows argument by narrowly restricting the reference class to the first 100 days of a presidency. Maybe that comparison tells us something, but it does not forecast crippling blowback. Honestly, I don't think the right should be concerned that Trump's approval is so low; I think the left should be concerned that it's so high.
I agree with most of what you say, but the point that half of the postwar presidents had average approval ratings below 50 isn’t quite as significant as you suggest - it is almost exactly a list of the presidents who served less than a full 8 years (the three who did serve a full eight years were Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton, and Kennedy and HW Bush are the only other ones who didn’t serve a full 8 years).
Disapproval ratings have never been this high for anyone else though. Polarization gives a huge boost to both approval and disapproval (which is why we usually look at met approval).
The folks who routinely say they won’t order from Amazon, or if they do, must couch it in an apology (couldn’t get it elsewhere) - how do they react, to yesterday’s news about the 20,000 UPS workers laid off due to a “pullback from” an (I guess, now shakier) Amazon?
Probably something like "This is why Amazon should be nationalized."
Ha, I remember once reading how much of SNAP and WIC dollars were spent at Walmart, and it seemed more or less that we were now a "company country", and whether that country was the US or China was unclear. I guess now Amazon fills that role.
It's funny to think how Walmart did what it did to small towns, with the government's help; and now you hear Walmart described as the "heart of a community" lol and Amazon is demonized because it will never be any community's heart.
This is a progression that you kind of have to have lived through, to view with suspicion, I suppose.
I try to minimize Amazon purchases because of the out-of-control counterfeit goods problem. Functionally, much of Amazon is now the same as Temu or AliBaba but at higher prices.
TIL! It is not that toads act in fawning, obsequious, and servile ways. The term comes from "toad-eater".
From Wiktionary, "said to allude to an old alleged practice among mountebanks [basically "snake-oil salesman," one who sells dubious medicines], who would hire a boy to eat (or pretend to eat) toads, which many had considered poisonous. The toadeater (or 'toady') would pretend to writhe in pain, until the quack gave him some 'medicine', and then try to impress upon the crowd that the boy was cured."
Other countries have nice things. The reason (IMO) that the US can't have nice things isn't because nice things don't exist, so it's got to be a difference between the US and the rest of the world. The obvious answer is corruption (specifically, the ability of people with money to purchase legislative decisions, court decisions, etc.), which is entrenched in the US. If you actually want to have nice things, I think the primary solution to that is anti-corruption measures.
The US has had nice things in the past. The federal government has, in the past, done poverty reduction programs, extensive research funding, Social Security, Medicare - so many popular, useful programs (many now potentially on the chopping block). People went to the moon. In the last 50 years, corruption has become increasingly entrenched (Buckley v. Valeo, for example, paved the way in 1976), and the nice things have magically vanished. I think the corruption is causative.
Saying "the right leads to cults of personality, the left leads to cults of ideas" is kind of missing the point: in countries with functioning democracies like Canada, the impact of both is pretty limited. Cults of ideas do happen, but it doesn't really feature majorly in Canadian political life. Cults of personality do sort of happen, but they aren't really ever very destructive, and they have a short shelf life.
The anti-corruption strategy I've seen proposed that seems most promising to me is a constitutional amendment to put limits on election spending (other countries have limits, but the Supreme Court has abolished them in the US [1]), but just prosecuting things that go against current anti-corruption laws is probably a good start.
[1] Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC, FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, etc. There are technically some limits still in place, but they're not very useful because most spending is done by independent expenditure groups, which can spend as much as they like.
What are the nice things that other countries have that the US lacks?
It's funny how populist parties in Europe keep increasing their vote shares (not in every single election but that's been the trend) and yet people are confident they'll never ever take power.
Universal health care; not having people get sent to gulags; much less gun violence; a real social safety net; government spending on infrastructure; stronger protections for civil liberties. All of these (with the possible exception of the sending of people to gulags) are caused by small groups of people with lots of money purchasing policy that favors them. To look at the example of gun violence more, gun control was much broader in the US before the Supreme Court decided to do away with a bunch of it. That happened around the same time that the people choosing judges (the senate and president) started being heavily influenced by large-dollar campaign spending. It continued around the time that Supreme Court judges started accepting bribes (or, as they call them, gifts).
I think it's important not to lose the forest for the trees. In countries with minimal corruption, governments tend to make good decisions. In countries with extensive corruption, governments tend to make very poor decisions. Corruption is overwhelmingly more important than ideology in determining how good the decisions of a government are.
Restrictions on campaign spending would limit both left-wing and right-wing groups and individuals. The likely effect would to move economic policy to the left and social policy to the right.
In other countries that have limited campaign spending, this hasn't happened.
What hasn't happened? Populism? Are you aware of Brexit? Can you name the Prime Minister of Italy?
Limits on election spending will empower populists. Do I even need to explain why?
Then why hasn't it happened in other places? Populists tend to come to power when people feel like all of the existing options aren't working. The reason that happens is generally (though certainly not always) because corruption is stopping the government from working. In places where the government is working fine, people vote for boring, mainstream candidates.
People who wanted universal healthcare and gun control had candidates they could vote for. Donald Trump was not one. (Yes, I'm aware that many Trump voters are left-wing in their economic ideas, but they voted for Trump despite, not because of, those ideas.)
America is the richest large country in the world, Trump was not a reaction to imaginary Dickensian poverty by people who wanted more social democracy.
Even though universal healthcare is very popular in the United States, it hasn't happened (upwards of 65% support if you phrase it as "medicare for everyone"). Corruption explains why this hasn't happened perfectly: health insurance companies have spent enormously to prevent it from happening. In other countries, policies that are enormously popular generally happen. In the US, a minority of candidates in primaries for one of the two parties supports it, but enormous amounts of money get spent to prevent them from even getting nominated.
Your general point that allowing campaign spending shifts America's economic policy to the right is correct. It does nothing to rebut my point.
If you read accounts of people who deconvert from religions or ideologies, often they report that the problems were in the back of their heads for a long time before they took the plunge and said "I don't believe this anymore."
Ethan, I bet you're already aware that exit polls from the 2024 showed that Kamala Harris won the highest-income groups. You might be aware that, despite Elon's billions, Kamala, not Trump, got more in campaign donations. You've convinced yourself you can make these facts fit with your ideology. The wealthy "corrupted" and "broke" the system, and thus poorer people turned to Trump to "fix" it. But this is based on completely ignoring what actual Trump supporters are saying. "The system is broken," Trumpers say, and then you ignore everything they say after that and substitute your own ideology. The Trumper who complains about crime, covid lockdowns, or DEI is transformed into a warrior for universal healthcare. The middle-aged woman screaming about how "baby murder is satanic" turns into a worker mad that billionaires are taking a larger share of national income. It's true that many people voted for Trump because they thought he would be better for the economy. But they wanted lower egg prices in the privately-owned grocery stores, not more government programs.
No matter how bad it gets, I believe the populist right will find a way to blame Hunter Biden's laptop, the Deep State, the stolen election of 2020, Antifa, wokism, DEI, and so on.
The right wing rage magine will broadcast constantly that despite President Trump's heroic efforts, the evils that Joe Biden - the worst President in history - unleashed upon this nation are now manifesting themselves. But He will keep fighting to make America great again. He alone can do it - especially if you buy his memecoin. And his hat. Granted, it will cost more now. But only buying Trump NFTs can stop the trans agenda. And the Left hates you and wants to...
Bah. They re-elected him *after* January 6. I don't think anything - even economic pain - will deter the majority of them from their cult. He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue...
Can someone ELI5 why tariffs are bad, but not sales taxes / VAT? I see many 10% tariff opponents swing around to endorsement of the 20%+ sales tax rates common in Europe.
I dislike the tariffs, to preface the usual hatred, but I also dislike sales taxes.
One reasonable difference is that entirely domestic goods are subject to the same rates, and so that doesn't depress imports.
The main issue by far is stability. If you can't predict if your profit margin is 5% or 50% for a specific supply chain configuration, you will make much worse decisions, and delay long term investment.
The second issue is how easy it is to avoid. Let's say tariffs go super duper high. So now you have no trade, just an internal economy, very bad. If you tax all income, people don't want to starve so they will work less but not stop working. If you just tax trade, people can trade internally a lot easier, so you will have a lot less economic useful activity per dollar of generated revenue.
I would be fine with tariffs if Trump worked with congress to pass a law. This insane will he/won't he is destroying the international economy and trust with our alliances.
We literally overthrew the conservative party in Canada in less then a month.
I sometimes think of "how bad could President Bernie Sanders have been for the economy" and it would be something like announcing a 20% surtax on all businesses. It would still have been watered down to 15% by the time Congress was through, and then phased in over several years, with at least several months of lead time before the first dime was collected.
That would be bad. But it would be so preferable to what we have now.
In general, when two people agree to a transaction, whether it’s a contract in the labor market, or a rental lease on property, or a purchase of a good or service, it is a sign that the transaction is making both of them better off on net. It might be by a small amount, or it might be by a large amount.
When you put a tax of 10% on all transactions, you will stop all transactions that provide less than 10% net benefit to the two parties, though the ones that provide more than 10% net benefit will still continue (with the two parties giving up some of their benefit to third parties). When you put a tax of 10% on some transactions but not others, you will displace some people who are currently making transactions with net benefit of 11% to make other untaxed transactions instead with a net benefit of 2%. Replacing an 11% net benefit transaction with a 2% net benefit transaction is worse than turning an 11% net benefit transaction into a 1% net benefit for the parties plus 10% benefit elsewhere. Thus, economists usually recommend that it is best to try to tax everything equally rather than to tax some things differently than others.
Tariffs tax things differentially based on where they come from. Sales taxes don’t do that, but they still target only final sales and ignore all the steps up until that. VAT taxes every step in the process equally. Thus, economists argue that VAT is the best kind of sales tax, because it is the least distortionary (though low taxes are better).
There are some exceptions to this overall argument, notably when a transaction either has costs or benefits to some third party who doesn’t participate, or is made by parties who have incomplete (or incorrect) information about the benefit they receive from the transaction. Thus, orthodox economic theory advocates targeted taxes on particular transactions that cause harms to third parties (like transactions involving the emission of pollution, whether air or water or noise or whatever) and targeted subsidies on transactions that cause benefits to third parties (like education, healthcare, and infrastructure), as well as taxes (or even bans) on transactions where one party is often systematically misled (like drugs, gambling, and sales of used vehicles without detailed records).
Thus, the simplest economist recommendation would be a hearty regime of taxes on “vices” and taxes on pollution, and subsidies for education, healthcare and infrastructure, paid for by a VAT on everything else, equal to income tax. Broad based sales taxes and income taxes would be better than targeted tariffs or taxes on particular forms of income.
One meaningful difference (aside from stability issues) is that VAT is on added value, while tariffs are on the entire value (so multiple link production chains get taxed on the whole instead of marginal value at each step).
(This doesn't apply so much to sales tax - although at least it's only ever put on finished goods, not intermediate goods - but then I don't really see people arguing they're efficient like I do with VAT)
taxes are bad, tariffs are taxes
They're distortionary. Sales tax, VAT, income tax, capital gains tax, etc, are generally purposefully structured in such a way as to hit basically any replacement option identically - "don't have to pay taxes" is a HUGE incentive to do X thing instead of Y thing. Tariffs are the opposite, structured to encourage X thing instead of Y thing (here, domestic good instead of foreign good). The reason we import things from abroad is because it is easier and cheaper than making them domestically; the reason this is good for the economy overall is for the same reason there are no tariffs for goods sold between California and Texas.
This sort of works until you realize that the left also destroyed the economy with COVID lockdowns. If you think tariffs will be worse for the economy than COVID lockdowns (and the associated inflationary policies needed to stave off total collapse), that is a perfectly fine argument, but you didn’t make it. You simply assumed that tariffs will be catastrophic and didn’t address the lefts biggest economic failure at all.
Yes, I'm not sure how Trump managed to pin that on the Democrats when he was President when it started, but he has.
Republicans also love to blame all the COVID checks on Biden even though most of those were also done under Trump.
He left it up to states and it was blue states that did the longests and hardest lockdowns
COVID lockdowns at least had something like a clear criterion for their end, namely the reduction of case counts below some threshold. They should have been clearer about precisely what level that would be, and they should have been better about locking down indoor dining establishments rather than allowing the brief mask filled, and not locking down outdoor activities. But it was still clearly a short term policy, unlike the tariffs, which are claimed to be permanent (apart from momentary flailing about turning them on and off and on and off again several times over the course of a week).
Directionally agree, but I'm not actually convinced that if Obama had woken up one day anti-Ecuador he would have gotten much pushback from the left. He unilaterally ordered executions of US citizens and didn't get much pushback from the left.
When did he unilaterally order executions of US citizens? I believe he ordered strikes on certain enemy combatant positions, some of whom turned out to be US citizens, but that seems very different from attacking a particular citizen (which itself seems much smaller than just arbitrarily turning on a country).
Anwar al-Awlaki was explicitly the target of the attack that killed him.
"I’m not a fan of either the ideological cults of the left or the personality cults of the right. In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way.”
Trump is the third party—just not in name. He hijacked the Republican brand like a hostile corporate takeover, gutted its old executive board—Romney, McCain, Cheney, the whole Bush-era establishment—and slapped his own logo over the entrance. It’s not the GOP anymore, not really. But it’s also not something entirely new. It's an insurgency that seized the host but refused to leave.
So while pundits wring their hands over whether America will ever allow a third party to rise, they miss the joke: it already happened. The Trump movement functions like a third party within the two-party system—tribal, messianic, at war with both the technocratic center-left and the patrician right. It doesn’t need a new name; it already owns the one that mattered.
People resist calling it a third party because that term implies independence, a fresh slate, maybe even some idealistic notion of balance. But that’s fantasy. There’s no neutral corner in empire. America is structurally built for two parties locked in a death spiral, a kind of binary blood sport powered by debt, dopamine, and demographic anxiety. Introduce a third, fourth, fifth party—it won't matter. The gravitational pull of American politics will twist them into the same orbit: spectacle over substance, branding over policy.
Trumpism didn’t break the system. It exploited it perfectly. That is the third party: not some libertarian dream or green experiment, but a cult of personality that found the soft spot in the hull and flooded the ship.
Trump ran on “a third party platform” — he was elected on “a third party platform.” No one would shut down the border, no one had the political will to do it. No one would challenge the spending in DC, no one would challenge the tariffs the US was paying. Trump did, rightly or wrongly. A third party might do all of these things or what is the point of a third party?
Was it Ross Douthat that a decade ago called the political parties "fully fueled jetliners waiting to be hijacked"? I can't find it any more.
What we have now is a scrambled signal—yesterday’s ideologies run through a blender, served up with a straight face. One minute you're watching far-left icon Oliver Stone cozy up to Kremlin handlers, peddling a story about an Obama-backed coup in Ukraine as if it's a reasonable cure for the crisis, and the next you’re wondering if satire even exists anymore. It’s enough to make your neck crack from the ideological whiplash.
Meanwhile, the nightly punditry grinds on, clinging to its tired script of angels and demons. They need their narratives color-coded: blue for virtue, red for villainy. If the lines blur, the whole business model collapses—no more sponsors, no more outrage cycles, no more dopamine drip from righteous certainty.
And so what’s left of the bourgeois left? Reruns of moral clarity. Performative dissent. A desperate need to simplify a world that’s gotten too tangled for their slogans. When Oliver Stone starts sounding like a Tucker Carlson monologue translated into Russian, you begin to realize: we’re not in Kansas anymore, but nobody seems to have the courage to admit where we are.
What tariffs was the US paying that Trump challenged? Hasn’t he led to a drastic increase in tariffs by starting several trade wars and tearing up several free trade agreements?
Go back to sleep.
I’m confused at what work you intend that comment to do. Are you implying that I slept through something that should be obvious to people? Or are you implying that I have woken up to a truth you don’t want me to realize? Or do you just think sleep deprivation is too common and everyone could use more sleep?
You know things must be getting bad when Scott comes out swinging with explicitly political prescriptions.
Hold on to your hats, everyone.
He was doing it for a lot of the last four years, except for much of that time he was supporting Republicans: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
There were an awful lot of people, including the editors of the Economist, Andrew Sullivan, etc. who were all ready for a new golden age and have gradually come round to saying actually this is bad. So having read Hayek and Burke is no protection.
> including the editors of the Economist
What are you talking about?
https://www.economist.com/in-brief/2024/10/31/why-the-economist-endorses-kamala-harris
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/21/america-really-could-enter-a-golden-age
That reads like Noah Smith's "maybe it could work out" https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-best-case-scenario-for-trumps while being aware there was tremendous risk and the odds weren't in their favor. All the good things are couched in "maybe"s and it's still full of known bad things.
…and, for that matter…
https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewsullivan/p/harris-for-president?r=6agbi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
"(the left also needs to cultivate certain vices to sustain its institutionalist strategy; Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality)."
This feels to me like major recency bias. The Tea Party was The Thing on the right before MAGA and that was ideological.
>Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance.
Very bold to assume Trump voluntarily retires or passes the torch. My prediction is that he will make some kind of attempt to run again, and even if the courts successfully shut it down it will cause him to go around fuming and not being at all helpful in trying to elect his replacement. He may endorse Vance and even speak at his rallies, but he'll be obviously unhappy and throw in the usual narcissistic caveats about how it'd be better if people could elect him etc.
Trump 2028 hats are now for sale.
This assumes he survives four years, which isn’t a sure thing for someone with a stressful job and his health conditions.
I regret to inform you that Trump will clearly live to 110 in perfect health the entire time.
I've seen several people mention that tariff power is supposed to be Congress's to exercise, and Congress could constitutionally reclaim it at any time. I believe this is true.
I also believe it is unlikely to happen. I think that there are Republicans currently in Congress who believe the tariffs are either a net benefit, or are a net benefit for their districts, or are at least perceived as such. They could take back the power, but it would be on principle alone - declaring you're reclaiming a power, only to then do exactly as the President would have done, will look like posturing.
It's also dangerous if the tariffs prove to be a net detriment. If Congress took this power back and levied tariffs anyway, they'd suffer the political blowback instead of Trump. Letting him assume the political risk is probably safer for Congress, especially when he wants it anyway.
I believe the Democrats in Congress might believe tariffs are good or bad, but primarily see them as an issue on which to attack Trump. This overrides any considerations about the upsides or downsides of tariffs - or any other issue, for that matter. In fact, the same probably goes for Congressional Republicans - what point is there to taking a stand on tariffs on their own merits, when that Congressperson will be primarily be seen as a Trump supporter or opponent?
So the only Congresspeople who worry about tariffs qua tariffs will be those unusually close to it - those in districts or states with a lot of business dependent on foreign trade. Some of them have probably already addressed the problem by quietly securing some sort of exception to the tariff, or a subsidy.
The rest of Congress will assess this on party lines, because this, like any issue, is currently not as perceptible a threat as the threat of the other tribe winning. Tribalism is the biggest threat; not tariffs. Any arguing along tribal lines - such as which faction ought to take the blame - will similarly not move the needle.
This can be taken as a fully general argument against working against those institutions though, even the ones we all agree are bad (e.g. the million interest groups preventing anyone ever doing anything). There needs to be a correct generalization of who to tar with tariff failure that's more general than "anyone advocating tariffs right now is bad" but narrower than "anyone who ever wants to reduce bureaucracy or process in any way will immediately crash the economy".
This is an excessive amount of analysis for a man who is denying reality right before our eyes. He incorrectly disputes a man's tattoos, despite clear evidence to the contrary. What’s concerning is that he has had a couple of weeks to address his mistakes, but has refused to do so. His tariff policy is obviously problematic. Is it intended to raise revenue in place of income taxes? Support domestic industries? Or serve as leverage in the fight against fentanyl?
I could go on and on with his worrying behaviors. Why are we still treating him like a normal president in a normal political debate? Are we still maintaining this charade because people don't like Democrats? There is a solution for this. Impeach Trump and let Vance run the country. Or impeach him too and let some other Republican take his place. This isn't a game. We could also call for a third party and recognize that Republicans in Congress are spineless cult members. The point is that this is dire and we don't have to fall for the bi-polar trap. There are alternatives if we dare to call for them.
I agree. Might require elections to be suspended for a while, I've written about how to do that constitutionally here:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,13411
It would be sad indeed if Wendell Weeks, who Google tells me is the CEO of Corning Company, with $21,600,000 in compensation last year, had to face this dreadful tariff problem. I imagine you could easily persuade the people in the towns where its factories used to be, that it is right and good that they should never have a factory in their town again. Probably the more so if you gave them all a few pieces of free Corningware lol. Absolutely free! Take it!
If you want Corning to build more factories in the US, you need a stable industrial policy for it, instead of random tariffs coming and going and changing week by week.
What are the inputs to a building a Corning factory? Where do they get the lumber from? Where do they get the heavy machinery from?
Well, we’ve had a *very* stable industrial policy all this while …
And yet here we are.
I read about the town of Lancaster OH in the book “Glass House” and was struck by the fact that, when one of the old glassworks burned down in the 20s - the townspeople raised the money to rebuild it themselves.
That sort of irrational behavior must puzzle an economist no end.
If you want Corning to build factories in the US, you need a deliberate policy to get Corning to build factories in the US.
To build a factory you need to buy lumber and steel and glass and concrete and robots and computers. Where do those come from? Tariffs just *increased* the cost of a bunch of those things!
This is maximum retard.
Yeah, and yet - that doesn’t explain why the non-retards like Obama were unsuccessful in making it happen. Or maybe he was a retard in some other, less maximal way.
I don't know that Obama undertook a specific policy to get Corning to build more glass factories in the US.
It certainly won't happen by accident. It would need to be deliberate policy, and making *this* the deliberate policy would probably mean making something *else* not the deliberate policy. Saving the glass factory is at odds with saving the lumber farms. "Let Canada sell us their trees and we'll worry about the fiber-optic factories" is a valid policy choice. "We will tariff all the things and then get jobs" is a nonsense policy choice.
Tariffs provide a concentrated benefit to one group of Americans at a cost to all other Americans in a net-negative way. You can target something *SPECIFIC* for maybe good policy reasons, or maybe just as a handout to that one group. But if you just tariff everything then no one is getting the benefit and everyone is just eating the losses.
The absolute worst way to get more factories -- like if you sat down in a laboratory to be as dumb as possible -- is to make building factories more expensive. It's pouring a bag of salt on your garden and saying "well at least I *tried*, what did you do????" What I did was not pour a bag of salt on the garden.
I would support a subsidy-and-tariff program to help the US build a drone industry. Congress would be very believable in passing a law to make that long-term industrial policy, because drones are now as essential for national defense as airplanes were just before WWI.
Note that when you commit to such a program, some policy choices become very stupid. Such a program would, as an absolute must, not tariff the inputs to building the drone factories as we're trying to get them built.
"the townspeople raised the money to rebuild it themselves."
Nothing stopping them from doing that today.
And it turns out that even though *you* think things have been bad for these decades, they’ve actually been good, and the people of Lancaster and Corning have better lives than their ancestors did 80 years ago.
I see you’ve not read the book 😀.
"that it is right and good that they should never have a factory in their town again"
It's not like the factories were dismantled brick by brick and shipped away. The rest of America decided not to be a captive market for these people's goods.
What I love most about this moment, is how the left turns out not to hate the billionaires quite so much as they claimed. Indeed, the left is *perfectly* aligned with Wall Street and whatever term of art we're using for corporate raiders these days.
Yeah realignments will do that. Good luck with your "multiracial working-class coalition" of superstitious, conspiratorial poors.
There's something about that word "poors". That definitely wasn't always part of the lexicon. The sound of it is very cringey, not unlike "bodies" for people. I'm surprised how much the young left obviously likes the sound of it.
I don't sound like a leftist because I'm not one, I'm Alt-MSNBC.
I've noticed it's an affectation of the young redditers, who often speak it as though in solidarity but I think it must reveal a certain loathing because I don't think normal people would refer to themselves that way.
Seconding Turok.
Turns out that when one party becomes the party of mediocrity, anyone who cares about, idk, anything higher than an 8th grade reading level will move to the other party.
Also, lmao "The left" like that's a coherent concept. It's pretty obvious MAGA is a death cult beholden to one man. But who is the manifestation of "the left"? Explain to me in detail what Bernie and Biden have in common
Americans could buy American any time. They didn't because they would rather become more prosperous than support random people in the Midwest. They'd rather buy cheaper goods than subsidize dying factory towns. This isn't a policy preference of the billionaires, it's a policy preference of the vast majority of Americans, most of whom do not live in dying factory towns and care about them about as much as they care about dying African children - which is to say, not at all.
I think the right wing populist case for tariffs is that it's a way to funnel money and jobs to Trump's working class/lower middle class base. Successful politicians want to reward loyal members of their coalition. Just handing out money is one way to go, but certainly favorable policy, jobs, and protection from competition is another. You could argue this is bad, and I wouldn't disagree, but I think in general it's pretty normal political behavior.
The problem I see here is twofold:
1. You need to convince or at least present a plausible case that these tariffs will be good policy for the US as a whole, not just a disguised payoff to MAGA voters. Trump couldn't be bothered to do that. There was some jabbering about trade deficits but it was all pretty sophomoric and thus probably did more harm than good.
2. In order to convince businesses to invest in the US in ways that will take advantage of these tariffs, entrepreneurs need to be convinced these tariffs will be durable--that they'll last through a couple different administrations so that any investments made in domestic manufacturing will have sufficient time to claw back the upfront costs and get into positive ROI territory. To do that, you need some kind of legislation, I would think, that would accumulate vested interests (ie people willing to spend some money lobbying to defend it) and Trump couldn't be bothered with that, either.
The result, I think, is going to be all pain, no gain.
“ it's pretty normal political behavior.”
There has been a bipartisan movement for decades to try to stigmatize this sort of behavior, and I think it has been succeeding, in that these sorts of things have been getting less common. They are still too common, and unfortunately more common when the recipients of the giveaway are credentialed elites or union members than ordinary people, but it’s unfortunate that the response has been to do this more shamelessly rather than to redouble the fight.
Fair point. It’s kind of a prisoner’s dilemma situation, though, because while it’s in the best interests of the polity that such behavior be stigmatized, it’s in the best interests of any individual politician or faction to defect and try to develop a political patronage network under whatever auspices are available.
Even in it's claimed goal of "providing spoils to the victors constituents" it seems to fail at that. At least one company is moving manufacturing OUT of the country. (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/article-14645149/amp/subaru-moves-manufacturing-japan-tariff-twist.html)
More generally, tariffs are a regressive tax, which would definitely hurt the average poor Appalachian miner harder than a wealthy coastal elite.
No way, one company?
yea crazy right!
Student loan forgiveness operated on a similar level as what you're postulating.
"...some of it is an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason."
This seemed really common on the progressive left during the Great Awokening. I think this is less an anti-bureaucracy strategy than a social-control strategy.
"Some of it is hard-forged antibodies to believing the media or expert class about anything."
Conservatives have traditionally trusted a different subset of experts than liberals. For example, the median left-of-center Democrat does not, in fact, trust the consensus among economists (expert class) on economic policy, or among nuclear engineers/physicists about the safety of nuclear power or GMOs. I think a better model here is that people like experts who say what they want to hear, and since much of the expert class is liberal or progressive, liberals and progressives more often like what they hear from the expert class than conservatives.
And of course, when you're chained to one charismatic but not very informed guy's whims, than any expert who might contradict the boss needs to be silenced or cast out of the movement.
Or maybe there is in fact a plan and tariffs are critical to it and there's an alignment in the leadership about it?
(This plan likely being to draw a clearer line between US and China areas influence and use tariffs as a starting bargaining point to accelerate the divide and push more players to the western sphere of influence - which is sort of evident from the recent moves.)
As much as I appreciate Scott's posts, his political commentary sound superficial at best.
Trump loves tariffs. It's really that simple. He's considered trade to be other countries "ripping us off" since the 1980s.
https://reason.com/2018/09/05/trump-scribbled-trade-is-bad-woodward/
Interesting choice to impose tariffs on almost every non China country. I wonder if that will help expand the western sphere of influence?
This is of course just a starting point for the negotiations, see my other comment below
So the plan was to put tariffs on literally everyone outside the US, in an attempt to make clear that everyone outside the US should be part of the pro-China coalition? That seems like a dumb plan.
Agreed.
This obviously (even to me, a totally non-Trump supporter) is just a starting negotiation point to force everybody at the table. Like do people seriously think this is the endgame? Like do people seriously think other people are THAT stupid? I think this is a very counterproductive angle.
First, I don't think we WANT everybody at the same table. We should have private talks with each country. The right time to have a talk with everybody at the table is after you've already talked to everybody one-on-one.
Second, Trump may know how to make deals, but he doesn't know how to run a business IMHO. He doesn't understand how essential predictability is before people will invest in anything. I don't know how he doesn't understand this, given that he's worked on real estate deals; but he clearly doesn't. He's already undone everything his tariffs might have done, by making it clear that he is outrageously unpredictable. I predict investment in the US, by Americans or foreigners, will not go up until Trump is gone.
Third, if you want to build a trade coalition, you shouldn't start off by proving you're a bad, unreliable trade partner.
Fourth, I think Trump's intelligence is very unevenly distributed. He is some kind of idiot savant who does one thing well--projecting a personal image that helps him bully people into deals. But he's impermeable to other opinions. He doesn't think before he opens his mouth.
Do you extend this level of generosity to all politicians?
This seems bizarrely antagonistic to JD Vance, the smartest person in the top levels of that government and the only politician in my lifetime that I've seen make worthy rational arguments in the public sphere, of a level that I would expect to find from a good commenter at this blog. He regularly makes coherent, multi-paragraph responses on social media that use words appropriate to discourse among highly-educated. people. He's probably no more than 2 degrees of separation from the rationalism-sphere. I can't imagine any of his potential 2028 opponents being able to discuss any of the topics we talk about here intelligently-- not necessarily because they aren't capable, but they clearly have never used those muscles or have dulled their wits with nonsensical strings of talking points tailored to their idiot voters. Anyone running for high office will have 16-20 years of schooling and yet the only other high level pol I've heard who approaches Vance is Obama, and you had to go hunting for niche radio appearances to find Obama discussing any topic like the Harvard Law Review president that he was.
The claim that he's a "spineless toady" isn't really refuted by arguing that he's intelligent.
Vance is smart. That's why there's line "Vance will gain 30 IQ points" because he'll no longer have to keep on saying obvious lies to appease Trump.
Also, when he tries to act like Trump, he can't pull it off. Trump insulting Zelensky sounded like an arrogant asshole, but strong and confident. Vance chiming in sounded like a bully's sycophant. His bad acting skills make him and Trump both look stupid.
What's the point if he never uses his intelligence to do anything positive? The only thing he stepped up to do that I can think of is getting Marko Elez his job back.
I think the Online Right really melted his brain and he's all in for toaster factory nationalism, which will be worse than Trumpism, though fortunately also less popular.
Our justice system recognizes that people who are intentionally malicious are worse than people who are accidentally malicious. This is why intent is a key part of many criminal proceedings.
Trump can at least be forgiven for being a moron. He doesn't know any better. But JD does. So when he mounts a bullshit defense of why due process doesn't matter -- one that is shrouded in the trappings of intelligence -- we should recognize him as an incredibly dangerous person who should not be let anywhere near anything resembling real power.
Since the OP is about institutions versus the tactics populists use to get around them, worth pointing out that the institutions of experts didn't exactly cover themselves in glory w/r/t due process this decade. I was a county government lawyer, and before 2020 I never would've considered that a county or state executive would issue an order to close churches and forbid public assembly on no legitimate statutory authority, without regard to particularized facts, and without any filing in the circuit court. That is a crazy unprecedented abuse that I never could have imagined even being an option. Or that bureaucrats acting on the advice of experts would be micromanaging from week to week what businesses could remain open and which aisles of a hardware store had to be roped off. The institutions and experts attempted to control almost every human interaction for weeks, months and in some cases years, with no due process. I'm not gonna listen to the bureaucrats complain about due process when they were happy to ignore the constitution when they had a reason *they* felt was sufficient cause.
If both the institutions and the populist figureheads are willing to ignore due process when it suits them, for different reasons, which is more dangerous? At least the individuals have accountability, you can mark them out and say of them as you just did that they're dangerous and should be deprived of power. What do you do to purge totalitarian instincts from the technocrats? Who do you call out? They can all say it wasn't really their decision, hiding behind the institution as a whole.
Vance is in the wholly unremarkable position for a VP of having to carry water for the actions of his boss. Kamala just took an L in large part because of her refusal to violate that norm. We've seen what it takes for a VP to buck that norm, and it's "no, I won't use this purely ministerial function to install a slate of fake electors who everyone knows is fake."
It seems like most of your gripes are specifically about COVID handling. I'm sorry that you felt that the government acted beyond principles during COVID. Obviously, putting a dictator with the intelligence and temper of a child is not the solution. JD going to bat for said dictator makes him complicit.
But on the COVID stuff specifically
> before 2020 I never would've considered that a county or state executive would issue an order to close churches and forbid public assembly on no legitimate statutory authority, without regard to particularized facts, and without any filing in the circuit court. That is a crazy unprecedented abuse that I never could have imagined even being an option. Or that bureaucrats acting on the advice of experts would be micromanaging from week to week what businesses could remain open and which aisles of a hardware store had to be roped off. The institutions and experts attempted to control almost every human interaction for weeks, months and in some cases years, with no due process.
There were never lockdown mandates coming from the _federal_ government. And attempts to put pressure on businesses to implement COVID safety policies through OSHA were shut down by the courts. Any actual COVID policy implementation was essentially state by state. Which is why the states that did not want to have lockdowns more or less didn't, and the states that did want to have lockdowns more or less did. I spent time in California, New Jersey, New York, and Florida during COVID and let me tell you that the stories in each place were wildly different.
And though we may disagree on this, COVID is empirically much more a national emergency than *checks notes* being invaded by tren de aragua? Are you serious? Tell me with a straight face that these are the same thing.
Emergency powers are obviously to be used with a lot of discretion, but there is a strong case that COVID cleared that bar in 2020. You can see the effects of COVID in life expectancy rates and all cause mortality across the US. I can count on one finger the number of diseases that led to a death in the family for *everybody in the extended Indian American community*. It was the third leading cause of death in 2020 in the America and was responsible for 1 in 8 deaths even with the various attempts to put it in check! It was Trump who first declared the national emergency!
So let's not draw false equivalences or pretend that these two cases are the same. America came out of COVID virtually unscathed, with an extremely strong economy relative to the rest of the world. In that context, people who clutch pearls and claim that state and local governments acting to prevent a national pandemic is the death of all civilized society at the federal level and therefore allow tyranny need to get a hard reality check.
Covid-related NPIs may not have saved any lives at all, or at best a few in the very early states by shifting cases a few weeks back out of the initial spike. It is at least a legitimate empirical question that is being looked at, and the NPIs are not looking great. The Trump admin no doubt could cite a bunch of people killed by Tren de Aragua on our soil, and it will not match the total killed by Covid but it may well exceed the number of lives that were saved by the expert-backed NPIs. If the only way to distinguish between these cases were that you believe Covid was a real case for disregarding due process and South American gangs aren't, then you aren't really defending due process, you're defending your policy preferences. One hears that free speech only counts when you defend speech you hate, or due process only counts when you extend it to the worst criminals, because otherwise you're just doing what you'd do anyhow. If you suspend due process when you feel threatened and the only people complaining about it are your outgroup, you have lost the high ground.
While it is true that the states decided most of this, it is also true that as a practical matter most operations that were large enough to require liability insurance were having to meet standards that were handed down from the insurance company, who in turn were influenced by the CDC. And many local governments deferred to the CDC or other similar institutions, despite a series of pronouncements from it that were clearly divorced from reality and put truth second behind inducing the desired behavior.
I didn't vote for Trump, I haven't voted for a major party candidate since Romney because I have a minimum standard of intelligence, integrity and competence. He isn't the reckoning I'd have picked. But I have hope that JD might be worthy, and to this point I don't consider his rebuttals to the media over this due process matter to be particularly noteworthy given what his job is. There are legitimate questions even from the judges involved as to what level of process is required, some reason to think a cursory review is sufficient, at least he's not *quite* telling me 2+2=5 which I had to endure from Fauci et al for 2 years. This is not a "Mike Pence has the courage" kind of moment that he needs to balk at to retain credibility.
The question on whether JD is just performing his duties as VP sounds a bit much like 'just following orders', but I'm more interested in the COVID stuff so lets just move there.
> If the only way to distinguish between these cases were that you believe Covid was a real case for disregarding due process and South American gangs aren't, then you aren't really defending due process, you're defending your policy preferences.
I continue to be confused about what due process was lost or not followed. If we're on the same page that this was mostly state run, that the experiences of different people very closely tracked the overall values systems of the states they were in, and that Trump is the one who was responsible for the entire first year of COVID, what are you mad about exactly?
If its specifically CDC recommendations, that doesn't really seem like a due process violation. The CDC's job is to give out recommendations about these things! It's not a violation of due process (at least, as commonly understood) when OSHA goes 'hey you should have hard hats in construction sites' or when EPA goes 'hey you shouldn't pollute rivers'. Why is it a due process violation for the CDC to go 'hey you should be 6 feet apart and wear a mask' any more than it is to say 'hey restaurant employees should wash their hands'?
Put another way: if the CDC is not supposed to give out this kind of guidance, what IS the CDC supposed to do?
> despite a series of pronouncements from it that were clearly divorced from reality and put truth second behind inducing the desired behavior
I agree that Fauci et al fucked up massively. The biggest issue w/ COVID handling by the government was that for the first 6 months the so-called 'expert class' were the exact wrong people to listen to. But...this whole period was Trump administration! And after the first 6 months (roughly June 2020) the 'expert class' was back to being right about most things!
More generally, I think you shouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. COVID was an extremely _uncertain_ phenomenon. It's not fair to evaluate the policy positions that people ended up advocating for with post-hoc analysis, you have to do it from the fog of war. Even now, there are a lot of people who feel that the NPI responses to COVID werent severe enough, which means even in retrospect it's not at all clear that these were bad policies. Certainly not so bad that you should feel like you were being *lied to by the government* or that *everything is fair game because the constitution is dead*.
You might claim that COVID policy supporters 'are divorced from reality' but that's just the same epistemological problem that we started with. The people who supported COVID NPIs -- myself included -- thought and still think those were the right decisions on the economic / lives value trade off. Like, maybe you didn't lose any family members, in which case good for you, but I and many others did. And its worth considering why every other country in the world ended up with roughly the same NPIs and roughly the same implementations -- is *everyone* stupid? Obviously not; the NPIs that you critique clearly worked in many places (Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam), while statistics in places that had no NPIs (Sweden) are not good.
(Also, when we say NPIs, I assume you really just mean 'lockdowns'? I can't imagine you mean 'remote work' or 'masks' or 'stimulus checks' since those all range from extremely popular to just being a bit of an annoyance)
Interesting analysis, but I think it lets left-leaning institutions off far too easily. The idea that liberal bureaucracies act as effective guardrails against idiosyncratic leadership doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Under Obama—who ran on transparency—the administration increased FOIA request denials, set records for secrecy, and used the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined. I dealt personally with the Department of Education during that time and found it to be hollowed out—staffed with salaried bureaucrats who failed to execute even basic mandates. And that wasn’t a fluke. It was systemic. The institutional protections you describe may have existed once, but many now function more as symbolic shells—resistant to reform and self-preserving above all else. Their inability to self-correct has arguably fueled the rise of populism, not merely failed to contain it. Yes, populist movements carry real risks, but so does betting on a decaying technocracy that no longer protects public interest with any consistency.
Populism occurs because people are angry, and angry people don't make good decisions.
I don't think there is a Trump replacement; when he's gone there will be no one with his it factor to take over. So some the the insanity will end.
But, the anger of a lot of people will not disappear.
Some turn to Trumpism out of anger, whether at factory closures or their kid being trans or the desegregation order they're still punishing the Democrats for fifty years later. For others the attraction of populism is because it's fun. Listening to podcasts, sharing salacious memes about "Epstein's island," dressing up in costumes, attending rallies, telling racist jokes, and enjoying the parade of low-class culture.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Go1FjY3aEAARqnD?format=jpg&name=small
This is way too generous. Most voters don't know how to evaluate a truthful economic claim from an untruthful one. That's not their fault, they just aren't econ experts in their day job.
So when you have one candidate who says things like "coal country isn't going to come back but we can create policy to help reskill you" and the other candidate openly lies and says things like "you're going to be super rich from how much coal people are going to mine" well, which way do you think coal towns are going to vote?
This country has simply never had a politician willing to be so brazenly corrupt. It's breaking all of our preexisting systems, because those systems operate under the assumption of at least some amount of good will and restraint on the part of political elites. In the face of a candidate who is willing to go on stage and lie, and a media apparatus that is essentially a propaganda arm for that candidate, you flood the epistemological systems of a general populace that simply is not equipped to know better.
a moron or psychopath - or, more politely, a person with idiosyncrasies”
I am starting to think that "Furiosa" was the most prophetic movie of last year. It was partly a movie about corrupt institutions vs chaotic despotism. The main villain, Dementus, is a charismatic barbarian who just looks, pillages, and destroys. The heroine ends up working for Immortan Joe, who is a cruel tyrant, but at least maintains the local infrastructure.
I don't think this was a conscious decision on George Miller's part. He was tasked with making a prequel to "Mad Max, Fury Road" a out the original of Furiosa. Since Furiosa worked for Immortan Joe before the events of "Fury Road," the only way to make the audience root for her was to introduce a villain who was even worse than Immortan Joe (who was the main villain of "Fury Road"). Still, it ended up creating an interesting story about oppression vs chaos.
Interesting observation!
I don't think it's specifically right-wing populism responsible for bad economic outcomes. It's just populism. Populists have stupid economic policy preferences most of the time. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders also have extremely stupid economic policy preferences. The difference is they would stop if some court told them to stop and/or they would consult a bunch of friendly lawyers to spend weeks or months constructing legal arguments for why their policies are in no way illegal or unconstitutional. They would ask the PR people how to frame the marketing of the idea, etc. The defining difference isn't that right wing populists chose a moron. George W. Bush was also pretty much a moron. Populists *usually* choose a moron if the definition of moron is "person who has really stupid economic policy preferences." Normies have *extremely* stupid economic instincts driven mostly by relative status anxiety (as opposed to lack of material suffering) and zero sum thinking (as opposed to understanding that cooperation and trade is mutually beneficial and that you can just make the pie bigger).
The thing that makes Trump different isn't his stupid populist economic preferences, but that he is a low inhibition authoritarian who doesn't care about rule of law. The reason he has managed to turn his party into a cult of personality is because he and a huge percentage of his followers are postliberal (or where never liberal in the first place). Before Trump everyone on the AOC to Ted Cruz axis was still a liberal in a legal sense (rule of law, free elections, etc.) no matter how stupid their economic policy preferences were or how popular they were with non-elites.
This is a partial indictment of stupid populist economics (the left-wing version also took a hit because of inflation but isn't down for the count. I don't want a stupid left-wing populist, but you may need one to truly discredit this stuff for a generation or two). It's a wholesale indictment of the *postliberal* right just like the backlash to woke was an indictment on the postliberal left.
As a more or less centrist libertarian, I'm feeling pretty dang exonerated and "I told you so" right about now about both sides of the aisle.
"Before Trump everyone on the AOC to Ted Cruz axis was still a liberal in a legal sense (rule of law, free elections, etc.) no matter how stupid their economic policy preferences were or how popular they were with non-elites."
I think you're forgetting sanctuary cities, the CHAZ, Biden's extension of the eviction moratorium, and the southern US border, for starters.
Who is out there celebrating CHAZ right now? I think the answer is no-one, but I would love to see your sources of a mainstream left-of-center thinker who is holding that dumpster fire up as an achievement for the left.
Failure is always an orphan. Doesn't change the facts at the time.
Wait, no, that’s not an answer. I need you to take accountability for talking bullshit.
Lol you're the one who moved the goal posts with "celebrating... right now."
But also the mayor described it as "patriotic" and said it could be the "summer of love." https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/06/12/seattle_mayor_durkan_chaz_has_a_block_party_atmosphere_could_turn_into_summer_of_love.html
And during Covid too! My stars and garters. I'm sure there were plenty of masks though.
Literally said that in my first reply. Goalposts are stationary. Don’t be a retard.
I agree with Scott's assertion that Republicans should deal with Trump's loose-cannon tariff policies.
BUT, Scott frames this within the narrative that our choice is between the "right" and the "left". The existential threat this false narrative poses is proven by this deadly sentence:
"In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way."
If you pick the right or the left, you've already lost.
The fight is between liberalism and authoritarianism. The left and the right are both on the side of authoritarianism. The purpose of their angry, violent, highly-publicized fight is to make everyone forget what liberalism is, or believe that it's too weak to cope with our problems today. Just like the communists and Nazis did in the Weimar Republic.
Scott is helping them when he insists on using the word "liberal" to refer to progressives, thus erasing liberalism as a possibility. Look how confusing this paragraph becomes:
"For at least the past few decades, the bureaucratic institutional middle layer has been occupied mostly by liberals, adding a liberal spin to whatever policies it executes. Progressive politicians have responded by outsourcing more and more tasks to it, while right-wing politicians have fumed against it."
Progressive politicians have responded… against liberals? No; Scott is using "liberal" and "progressive" as synonyms. Both words are deceptive, but we should at least stop calling anti-liberals "liberal".
The word "liberal" refers to someone who believes in a liberal humanist government, based on a secular constitution establishing limits on government power and a division of powers, extreme individualism and personal freedom, extreme freedom of speech and other civil liberties, free markets, polite debate, compromise, and equality under the law. American progressives had stopped supporting these things by the 20th century, when they began to be used to tolerate other things besides different denominations of Christianity, and to oppose the rise of big government and the return to government-imposed morality which progressives demanded.
The constant use of the terms "left" and "right" as opposites is also deceiving. The idea that these terms are opposed, rather than two species of radical authoritarianism, was only constructed in the 1970s. Before then, "right-wing" usually meant "right-wing socialist" or "right-wing unionist". Woodrow Wilson, the most-important early American progressive, was clearly what we would today call a right-wing extremist: he was a Presbyterian fanatic who believed he was chosen by God, encouraged violence against immigrants, eliminated freedom of speech, abused the Department of Justice to empower an enormous racist paramilitary (the American Protective League), and spoke out against the Constitution's balance of powers saying the President needed supreme power.
Both left and right in the US descend from John Calvin's ferociously repressive, puritanical, and authoritarian version of Christianity, which took root in Puritan and Congregationalist colleges like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, and U Penn. Missionaries spread it from there to the Midwest (U Chicago) and far West (The Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley), and in the South they converted colonial Anglican churches to Baptist ones after the American Revolution. Hegelian philosophy, which in Europe is considered the origin of progressivism, the 20th-century left, and the 20th-century right, began penetrating these colleges in the second half of the 1800s, achieving dominance at Harvard, and eminence at Yale, Columbia, Penn, Brown, and Cornell.
Wilson, as I noted, was a fascist progressive before the term "fascist" existed. Mussolini was kicked out of the communist party in 1914 and invented the word "fascism" in 1919. The Nazis always called themselves socialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-democracy, but never fascist. American progressives praised communists and fascists equally until the mid 1930s. Soviet communism was quickly remolded, after a brief period of liberty, into fascism/feudalism under Putin; likewise, Chinese communism, which was nationalist, racist, and colonialist from the start, eventually became Chinese fascism. The Zapatista are national socialists. Hugo Chavez today is a socialist fascist. Any objective historian would long ago have called fascism what it historically is: the second phase of authoritarian socialism.
The rest of Scott's narrative is also muddled by this false left-right distinction. "Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality." Have we never heard of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevara, Subcomandante Marcos, Chavez? "[Hugo] Chavez provides a useful model [for thinking about Trump]." So Chavez is on the "right"?
The core of both left and right is a reactionary hatred of the complexity and tolerance of liberalism. The right calls it "capitalism", "degeneracy", "liberalism", or "Jews". The left just calls it "capitalism". Hitler was vitriolically anti-capitalist, and said so; but he believed, like Marx, that capitalism was a distinctly Jewish contaminant. Marx's "On the Jewish Question" could have been written by Hitler. The labor theory of value is simply the naive peasant-economics theory used to justify anti-Jewish pogroms in the Middle Ages. The current dramatic rise in anti-semitic hate crimes around college campuses in the US is just one more proof of this link between left and right.
What we should be complaining about is not Trump or Harris, or left or right; but the American constitution's voting system, which game-theoretically guarantees we will always have exactly two parties. Combine that with the practice of holding democratic primaries, and you end up with an America constantly oscillating between one extreme and another. First-past-the-post voting puts liberalism at a great disadvantage against any kind of extremism.
That makes me wonder - why did the founding fathers decide to have a presidential system?
They were clearly concerned about the possibility of tyranny, but the presidential system is more likely to produce that (since it already concentrates a lot more power in the hands of a single individual).
Their "home country" and a model they knew well was that of Britain and it had a parliamentary system.
Their other major inspiration was Rome but SPQR had a very strong senate (although only mos maiorum only, not by written law) and even Rome had TWO consuls (and those were only elected for a year anyway).
Rome was also a cautionary tale for them but President even sounds like Princeps which is just a sham title which sounds republican but really means "autocrat".
The only thing I can come up with is that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth could have been a cautionary tale for them as one of the main reasons it was conquered by hostile powers is that the Sejm was in a permanent deadlock due to everyone having veto powers. But I am not sure how much they even knew about PLC.
The only thing close to a presidential system I can think of are the republics of Northern Italy where sometimes the ruler was elected for life ... clearly not something the founding fathers wanted.
I asked Copilot, and it said:
The Founders were deeply influenced by their experiences under the Articles of Confederation—a system that proved too weak to adequately govern and respond swiftly to national challenges. They believed that a single, energetic executive was essential for several interrelated reasons:
1. Efficient Decision-Making and Accountability: The founders wanted an executive capable of making prompt decisions during crises. A single president could act decisively, and because his actions would be attributable to one individual rather than diffusing responsibility among many, accountability was clear. This idea is famously argued in Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 70, where he insists that “energy in the executive” is critical for good government.
2. Unified Leadership: A single president would serve as a clear, unifying national figurehead—a person who could represent the nation's interests both domestically and internationally. Unlike a council or committee, a president provided a focal point for leadership, ensuring that policy and national vision were coherent and consistent.
3. Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances: The creation of the presidency was part of a broader design to establish checks and balances among the three branches of government. While the president would have significant authority to enforce laws and direct government action, this power would nonetheless be balanced by legislative and judicial oversight, reducing the risk of tyranny.
4. Strengthening National Governance: Learning from the weakness of a decentralized government under the Articles of Confederation, the Founders wanted a president who could not only enforce federal laws but also serve as a decisive leader during emergencies, such as conflicts or economic crises. This role was essential for maintaining order, implementing policies, and negotiating with foreign nations.
Lol, what import/shitport dropshipping faggot business were you in that got you so Salty About Tariffs?
SUFFAH MEDIA MARKETEER! FUCKING SUFFAH!
This is not just about tariffs. Trump and his team are also happy to gut international cooperation, scientific research, cheap AIDS treatment and vaccines for babies, and a bunch of other actually good things for approximately no reason apart from owning the libs. Musk is happy to claim $200 B in savings and then deliver fifty bucks, before counting the $100 B in lawsuits the government will have to pay over this stuff. It's lame, unprincipled, dishonest, and incompetent.
I have to keep reminding myself that poor Democratic governance is part of the reason we got here and that I need to stay angry at the Democrats too. They are also culpable for their hubris and negligence. If you claim Democracy is at stake (which it actually is to whatever degree), then act like it.
But I digress. This administration is such a fucking dumpster fire. If you gave me the competent version of executive branch cost cutting, I could be into it. But they're giving us the dumbest possible version of everything and telling us it's 4D chess.
Well done this line, "the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology."
Of all the things I think or feel about what's going on, this one captures the core of it the best.
We can’t ignore the president’s wishes
> If Trump’s base starts abandoning him, it will be because of the tariffs.
> Any given dictator could always turn out to be a benevolent dictator; you can always glance behind you at the institutions controlled by your enemies and say “I like my chances”.
> Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy
I think your premise of an embarrassed far-right trump supporter is flawed. My idealism died. My politics are the emotions of anger, disgust and a devil-may-care euphoria.
I want the tradewar with china, I want the shockmarket to crash, I want blood and fire. I worry about trump being to weak, not him going to far. You must be projecting your desire for the old system to keep working on me, I dont know how to be any clearer. I want the irs to start failing to collect taxes, I want america to have secession movements, I want the bureaucracy to be crippled, I want the universitys to lose all funding and scramble to rejustify their position in society, I want america to be unable to start a middle est war.
The status quo I see venerated, I view as a cancer, I will cheer every piece cut out for the sake of the underlining host.
But why though. Is life simply not exciting enough for you?
Things airnt going well for me economically and I have fucking tried to fit into the broken system. If your to the left of a perfect score on the libertarian purity test you may want to talk about white males in fly-over-america material-conditions and have a plan.
If you share my economic pessimism, who do you blame and whats the plan to fix it? You just have to answer that question, or I simply dont care what you have to say, claims about the greatest economy in history when they printed money and stocks went up, when over quite poorly.
If you want to claim Im useless or deserve it for being an asshole or white or whatever. I dont care anymore, and will just be loud and proud.
If I was unhappy that my car leaked oil, my solution would not be to take a sledgehammer to every car in my neighborhood, because A: that would not remedy my oil leak, and B: that’s completely retarded.
B is a personal judgement of mine; the important part is A. Breaking things will only make whatever your situation is worse. If you don’t care then frankly, you should shut up while the adults are talking.
So, it’s been long enough that I think you either have no intention of responding to me or you’ve taken my advice about shutting the fuck up to heart and if that’s the case then you may feel free to disregard the following:
You may be “loud and proud”, but you also come off as “dumb and whiny”. Lots of teenaged emo vibes in your thicket of a reply there. Probably why things “aren’t going well economically” for you. Nobody wants to listen to that whiny bullshit, much less *employ* it. Man up and stop blaming other people for problems. Also, learn how to use punctuation, for fucks sake.
I have no idea WTF you were going on about with the libertarian purity nonsense. You write like an AI fed on a human centipede of endlessly recursive AI slop.
wow I fixed everything in my life thank you so much. 👍
Good to know I could help!
Not much point talking to people like this. They get off on pissing you off, it's literally all their politics is about, they admit as much. Treat them like you would any other narcissist begging for attention and grey rock them.
You said it well enough all the way back in 2013 ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ ):
> [I]n 1987 the dictator of Burma made all existing bank notes illegitimate so he could print new ones that were multiples of nine. Because, you see, he liked that number. As Wikipedia helpfully points out, “The many Burmese whose saved money in the old large denominations lost their life savings.” For every perfectly rational economic agent out there, there’s another guy who’s really into nines.
Trump is really into nines (tariffs).
I enjoyed the article and agreed with it to a degree. But this part seems like a huge problem for the whole thesis:
"For at least the past few decades, the bureaucratic institutional middle layer has been occupied mostly by liberals, adding a liberal spin to whatever policies it executes."
So here, we have a contingent historical factor, driven by the left, that has *obviously* been a major cause of right-wing populism arising in the first place. I think this empowers a very strong argument that it is actually the left that is in a real way responsible for Trumpism, even including the tariffs (and thus turns your argument back on its head).
All through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, real conservatives (not populists) were saying, "Stop it, liberals! This is a terrible idea! You're turning the courts and executive agencies into illegitimate engines of state power just because you like the outcomes that they contingently happen to enable at the moment. This is a corrupt disaster that can wash away our constitutional order." Liberals liked how things were going and refused to agree to a principled move away from this. Pressure and anger built over decades at what was *obviously* an anti-democratic usurpation for the interests of elite classes. And that is exactly how we ended up getting Trump.
The answer is not to take as your starting point the garbage system that gave us this (modern liberalism), nor the garbage system that it gave us (modern conservative populism). I don't know how we get back to a bipartisan institution-building republicanism, but if we don't, I don't think we get out of the cycle.