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."
In this context, "populism" refers specifically to anti-elite movements. You can be popular without being populist - most historical presidents in the US were.
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.
I agree that democracy tends to give you what voters vote for. That's not necessarily good.
Sortition might be an interesting alternative. Fill up a British or German style parliament with volunteers chosen at random, and have them make laws and select the executive. (Don't pick a single individual like a president via sortition: we want the law of large numbers to work in our favour.)
Elite Human Capital. Intended to denote highly productive people, with the connotation that they see themselves as the only ones pulling the average up, and they'd be better off if they weren't being dragged down by the rest of the riff raff.
“Elite Human Capital” - the idea that there should be experts, policy wonks, and meritorious bureaucrats forming a buffer layer of competence between the proles and the actual levers of power. (Whether that actually happens in practice…)
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.
Right now, Republicans in congress are pulling out all the stops to make Trump even more of a dictator (e.g. they're attempting to remove the ability of courts to hold people in contempt), and I don't see how that can change. That's the really scary part about all this.
> 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.
This Supreme Court has repeatedly said that the Constitution takes care not to entrust too much power in one individual. As it stands, Trump can declare tariffs of 1 trillion percent and effectively turn the US into an autocracy. This is clearly an abuse of power and goes further than what the IEEPA was intended for, although idk how bullish the courts will be with regards to asserting jurisdiction over the factual determinations that occur when a President declares an emergency or to the consequences thereof. And even if they do rule against Trump it will take months to years of deliberation, so another case where the courts will not save us.
>"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.
This argument goes back all the way to the 1700s. Edmund Burke supposedly said (or maybe even wrote) "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
Most people have a strong idea of what values they have, and even what outcomes they want, and an incredibly poor idea of what policy will get them there. Elected officials should be expected to say "I hear you say you want X, I'm fighting for X by doing Y, if you don't see the connection, you can trust me or you can replace me."
Yes, but the Speech to the Electors of Bristol was known to the Founders (as was Burke, personally, to some of them who had been in England negotiating the end to the Revolution), and that argument was explicitly rejected for the House (the zombified mess we've made of the Senate is a whole different kettle of fish):
"...we cannot doubt that a reduction of the period from seven to three years [for elections to the House], with the other necessary reforms, would so far extend the influence of the people over their representatives as to satisfy us that biennial elections, under the federal system, cannot possibly be dangerous to the requisite dependence of the House of Representatives on their constituents." (Federalist 52)
Dependence - literally the opposite of the exercise of "independent judgment."
Yes, and as you acknowledge, that dependence in the house was balanced out by long-terms for senators, who originally were not even directly elected. I'm not a fan of all of the ideas the founders had about democracy, but they could have made it a lot more direct than they did and they chose otherwise, and their judgement seems reasonable, if not unimpeachable.
Regardless, being "the most active and vocal" doesn't correspond to being right, OR to being in the majority, OR to even knowing WTF it is that you want.
And even then, its hard to argue Republican congressman doing literally nothing can possibly be what their constituents want, both using common sense, and judging by how much they get yelled at when they actually muster up the guts to be in the same room with their voters.
I'm not familiar with your post history, but I'm curious if you were so gung-ho about majoritarianism when it was say, Democrats trying to restrict gun ownership.
There is a distinction between opposing a policy on the object level (to say nothing of the question of the interpretation of the constitutional provision at issue) and acknowledging that representatives elected on a platform I disagree with have a mandate from their constituents.
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.
Populism isn't an ideology about how to attain power, it's about the convergence of institutional politics with public sentiment: a movement not only toward political presentation in layman's terms, but toward desacralizing political process. It brings political institutions closer to the kitchen table, and the kitchen table closer to the institutions. Whose kitchen tables? That's the distinction between left- and right-wing populism, between more inclusive or more exclusionary populist movements.
In this way populism sits opposed not to "unelectability" but to technocracy, which pulls politics away from the layman but in exchange honors institutional knowledge and expertise. So, technocrats can be highly electable if public trust in institutions is high, but at least a little populism is very helpful in appearing in touch with constituents. Populists can be unelectable if they appear completely uncredentialed for the job, but even bafoonish populists are electable when institutional trust is low.
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?
Well, also the legislature isn't performing its original function anymore. The House was supposed to be closest to the passions of the people, and directly responsive to their whims and local concerns. But barely anyone knows who their local representative is, and turnout in house-only races is abysmal. The House is a minor-league punditocracy now. The Senate was supposed to represent regional and state interests, in a reasoned debating chamber, but now is essentially just a senior version of the house - full of pundits who only ever posture for the cameras. Meanwhile the President was supposed to be something of a national avatar taking care of the minutiae of administration - well he's a national avatar alright, but attention around that office has swallowed up just about everything else. This wasn't how Madison drew it up.
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.
It would not be difficult to find some constitutional pretext on which to impeach trump, were one desired. Abducting US citizens, transporting them outside the country, and then failure to comply with court orders for reversal of same, just for a recent example.
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.
But if we had a parliamentary system, a handful of Republicans is all you'd need to join with the Democrats to get a majority for a vote of no confidence. In our system, you need 2/3 to impeach and convict, so it isn't enough.
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.
This argument over Parliamentism was argued 1775-1783 and decided in our favor. In fairness our request to participate in Parliament was denied. As it was until the last election by King Bureaucracy.
The question of Tariffs and the American system was settled 1861-1865. Or so we thought.
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?
i mean, were Lee Kuan Yew's radically outside of economic understanding? i understand that it wasnt fully in the mainstream, but my understanding is that its been in the mainstream for at least the last 20 years (i cant go further back, but the world bank had nothing bad to say about its past https://web.archive.org/web/20131126150907/https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/singapore/overview in 2013 (Which would be hard as it was rich for a long time by then)
in case im wrong? you belive it to be correct dispite, as far as i can tell, it being blatently not so (see the reasons in my reply to you?)
If i am wrong, and you can link to how the current set of tariffs are in fact the result of the function "The tarrif rate would cause the revenue taken in by the duty upon imported goods from the particular country to equal 50 percent of the trade deficit (goods plus services) with that country.", then i am clearly wrong?
As far as i know though, the function applied is currently 10% plus random other percentages on random other things. thats fine to find some way to justify, just, its obviously not this justification.
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
Then you need to explain your point better because you seemed to present Trump strategy as something sane, at worse suboptimal in the way he tried to influence allies.
My (and many others in this thread) point is that this is pure insanity, not a strategy: a trade war with China may be justified (although the official justification - trade imbalance - is bonkers), but doing it while simultaneously attacking allies using the same commercial weapons at lower intensity, and doing multiple other things (symbolic or with practical consequences) each of them enough to cause major diplomatic crisis is either insane, or both stupid and uninformed...
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.
The main difference is that in Trump's first term, his babysitters limited the damage. Then Trump spent years systematically eliminating anyone who isn't 100% sycophantic, leading to what we see now.
"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.
Trump’s “latest position” rotates through a number of different options, every few days. However, if your goal is to build an alliance against a common enemy, you don’t usually start by pissing off all your allies and destroying your credibility as a negotiating partner.
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.
Trump has also said that the goal was to raise revenue so we can cut taxes (his "external revenue service" slogan), which is just as contradictory - if we lower the trade deficit, then we're importing less stuff and that means less tariff revenue.
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.")
> "When Bill Clinton used his intellect, he was quite effective. When he allowed himself to be ruled by other organs, he undermined himself."
This is hilarious, because how much better off would we (or the entire world) be if we had a supposedly "regressive" Clinton or JFK at the helm today?
And yet, how utterly impossible would that be for the Left? Woke scolds have made it impossible for any Dem with even a *hint* of male privilege and sex drive to exist at the Presidential stage.
Instead, the only viable Dem candidates are female scolds or 90 year old mediocrities too senile to care about their dicks any more. It just drives home the point anew how there's zero place for actual men in the Dem coalition, either as actors or voters.
Sure, repeal the 22nd and let him run again - he’s certainly 100x better than anyone else they could come up with. I’m all about having an actual adult lead the country.
But need I remind you, he was basically done in 2012, second term secured, mission accomplished and no more thereafter? 2012 was pre-woke and pre-DEI - the last gasp of a golden era of competence and aspirations for all Americans.
Then we got a decade or so of literal witch hunts and thought policing and the centre dissolving entirely. Covid, crime and homelessness, DEI, etc.
People are bubbled and polarized more than ever, and it seems to be a steady state attractor, and now half the country wants to tear it all down for the lolz, and the other half is so mindkilled their only response to “let’s burn this mother down” is trying to force a woke scold or doddering half-corpse down everyone’s throat.
Instead of saying “yeah, there’s real problems, let’s solve them” with a plausible bipartisan candidate that doesn’t check a bunch of officially enshrined victimhood boxes it’s “obviously the thought policing wasn’t ENOUGH! Prepare for ten thousand years of witch hunts!!”
But if you want to lead the charge on repealing the 22nd, so we can get some adults in the room again, I’m 100% behind you.
Yeah, and I pointed out he was pre-woke and pre DEI, so before the self-owning policies that only allows Dems to nominate maximally polarizing candidates now.
Do you think the Dems would ever run the equivalent of Bill Clinton now, as an example?
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.
Also, careful technocratic weighing will likely tell you that tariffs are not the best mechanism for achieving your goal. Taxes can be an effective means of *discouraging* behavior. For example, taxes on cigarettes probably reduce smoking. If you want to *encourage* a behavior, the most efficient approach is almost certainly to be to subsidize the behavior you want.
For example, Biden decided that he wanted semiconductor chips to be manufactured in the United States, and got Congress to pass the CHIPS act, which provides subsidies. A tariff would be the wrong tool to accomplish this because it doesn’t directly encourage the desired behavior. A tariff on semiconductor chips would discourage the import of semiconductor chips into the United States. This would have the indirect effect of encouraging semiconductor chips to be manufactured in the United States, but only chips intended for the domestic market. It would not encourage building enough capacity that the United States could export chips to our allies. It would have the unintended side effect of discouraging the manufacture of products containing semiconductor chips in the United States, because it would be cheaper to manufacture those products in other countries where semiconductor chips cost less. There’s a reason that the CHIPS Act doesn’t impose tariffs: tariffs are the wrong tool for the job.
"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.
"Tired of winning" is a good way to describe the protectionists. Think America needs shock therapy to catch up with great powers like South Korea and Bangladesh.
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.
You’re thinking, probably, of I Won’t Back Down by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. I’m referencing No Surrender from Springsteen’s Born in the USA, with the lyrics,
Cause we made a promise, we swore we'd always remember
'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.
Only Klobuchar and Buttigeg dropped out right after South Carolina. Bloomberg and Warren stayed in a little bit longer, until after Super Tuesday when Biden and Sanders got most of the delegates between the two of them.
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.
A similar conspiracy theory you might find interesting: the guy at my local donut store gives me an extra donut every time I buy a dozen. Note that he does this for everyone, but that’s just to cover up the conspiracy between him and I. Feel free to retell, at will.
Paul - You're right, I stand corrected. Clyburn's endorsement didn't enable Biden to win South Carolina. Instead, it transformed what was looking like a single digit victory into a landslide. The polls in the week prior to the Feb 26 Clyburn endorsement had:
The primary results (and the change from the median polling) were:
Biden 49% (+16%)
Sanders 20% (-2%)
Steyer 11% (-5%)
Buttigieg 8% (0%)
Warren 7% (-1%)
Klobuchar 3% (-1%)
Gabbard 1% (-1%)
Other 1% (-10%)
Clyburn's endorsement was based on his own preferences, but it also relied on using leverage to get the Supreme Court commitment Steve Sailer mentions.
Come on, you're cherry-picking to exaggerate. The professionally-aggregated polling during the week in which most of the primary votes were cast [about 15 percent of them having been sent in absentee] had Biden at 40% (RealClearPolitics), 38% (FiveThirtyEight), or 36% (270ToWin). All of those represented a winning margin in the 15 to 18% range over the second-place finished (Sanders). A very solid primary-season win.
Following Clyburn's last-minute endorsement Biden actually got a bigger win in that primary. Of course that helped Biden as it would have any candidate. It wasn't nearly a big enough difference to justify the "Clyburn put Biden in the White House" cliche.
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.
And Israel has defined "using human shields" to mean "fighting in Gaza, where there are humans." And then they actually take Palestinian prisoners and make them walk in front of their tanks.
I garbled a detail (walk into tunnels or suspected booby-trapped buildings, not in front of tanks) but IDF soldiers even have a charming name for this: "Mosquito Protocol".
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.
You clearly do not understand the process of negotiation among serious adults. Both sides will ultimately make concessions, but you must begin by asking for much more than you are truly willing to accept. Egypt (which continues to purge from itself the Muslim Brotherhood, progenitor of Hamas) will ultimately accept the removal of Hamas in favor of Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority as sole local government, while disarmament will probably land somewhere in the middle. That Egypt's plan has been approved, albeit with conditions yet to be hammered out, is a wholesale rejection of Israel's plans to take over & depopulate 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.
It seemed to me that Hillary had the support of the party hierarchy tied up, and that this was sufficient for her to get the nomination despite not being a great candidate. But you're right that she had to win in the primaries. The party mostly seemed on her side (particularly when it was down to her vs Sanders, since Sanders is an insurgent as much as Trump was on the other side). Would a smoke-filled room have ended differently? (An analogue on the other side was the Dole nomination--he was a major power inside the party even though he was not a great candidate.)
The way the process played out with Harris didn't involve winning a primary, just kinda being selected by enough important people in the party that she became the candidate. That seems more clearly in smoke-filled-room territory to me. But to be fair, it's not entirely clear what else they could have done at that point--maybe have the selection made at the convention?
While the primaries are the official determinant, there's ample room to control the message delivered to the voters. Run enough press noting how one candidate is the clear frontrunner - possibly with some arguments about how crucial it is that the party field a strong candidate, and how damaging an internal conflict can be - and that candidate is handed to the primary as a fait accompli.
Not that it all hinges on that message. It's also possible to quietly approach rivals and make it clear in plausibly deniable terms that if they don't suspend their campaigns, all sorts of things could go wrong with the rest of their political careers.
And if that doesn't work, there's an additional mechanism in the form of superdelegates - a relatively small group of people whose votes are declared to count for much more than a regular party member's. Smaller group means fewer people you have to quietly persuade to vote for you, or a smaller group to quietly fill with people who previously promised to vote for you, either one.
The problem with Biden is that the smoke-filled rooms weren't powerful enough. The insiders knew Biden was a liability even back in 2023 and wanted to ditch him, but Biden stubbornly insisted on running anyway.
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.
In my considered opinion, democracy is often cast as "majority will + minority rights" because it implicitly assumes that virtually everyone agrees on what rights ought to exist, and will live long enough to see themselves in the minority, and want those rights protected on their behalf when that time comes.
I think that model can survive for a very long time. Centuries, even. But it survives that long because the philosophy underlying which rights should exist is itself long-lived *and* the nation sticks with that philosophy. It can even modify it slightly (especially if it ascribes to a stable philosophy of modification), but if it departs radically, that's when you tend to see "majority will + (several conflicting possible sets of minority rights, based on which factions are running around and how many pitchforks they have and how angry they are)" and the democratic model shows its failure mode.
If one wants a democracy to work, one has to build it on a durable philosophy, convince everyone to buy in, and then refuse the siren's call to depart from it for some brave new philosophy of the moment. Give in, and stuff starts sucking fast, in multiple directions.
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.
You're going to have to give me a link on this. As I understand it the bulk of the projected deficit comes from extending tax cuts that were already in place from Trump's first term.
1. There's some new stuff (ie the no tax on tips thing ends up being pretty expensive after all, as well as proposed increases to military spending for completely unworkable initiatives like the "golden dome")
2. It is entirely consistent for extending tax cuts to be much more expensive than instituting tax cuts. The most obvious reason is that infinity years of tax cuts cost way way more than 8 years of tax cuts, and indeed, that's the case here.
On the margins, even if the duration of the tax cuts were the same, the same tax cuts applied to a larger population (the population has grown) and a wealthier population (GDP per capita has grown) also lead to a higher deficit than when they were first introduced.
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.
That's a small part of it. A bigger part is that they invested heavily in human capital, speak English, and have a competent national govt willing to work with foreign capitalists with an eye for strategic partnerships.
A part for some vloggers and eccentric ski lovers with remote jobs, nobody actually *lives* and *produces goods and services* in Andorra. It is merely a legal fiction to dodge taxes, these guys make sure to spend just enough time around to not be considered tax residents in any other country and Andorra is happy to perpetuate the fiction that they "reside" thete. For companies ("legal persons"), it's even starker, the supposed HQ you find in Andorra is literally just a mailbox.
Compare with Ireland, where the companies domiciliated there have actual offices employing thousand of people, invest in training, and oft pay roundabout "taxes" by financing public goods like parks and libraries and scholarships.
Frankly the "Ireland is just a tax haven" is just mostly cope coming from countries that see their softwares engineers emigrating to Dublin and know, deep down, that something went wrong along the way at home. Like all copes that stick around, it has a nugget of truth, but it's still mostly cope.
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.
Thank you for posting that, for it is well-thought-out, and fairly clear. I just have a dispute that doesn't really have to do with the math, with which I cannot find fault.
Exports - Imports isn't as straight-forward as one might believe. If you export to, say, China, from the US, China pays for the goods in yuan, not dollars. Likewise, China buys things from the US in dollars, not yuan. One may exchange yuan for dollars, and vice versa, but that only makes the exchange indirect. So the part of the equation X-I is really X (yuan) - I (dollars), and exchange rates make this no longer simple.
Now, if China is exporting more than they import, they get a glut of dollars. This makes each dollar worth a little less than the previous dollar, which makes the exchange rate for yuan to dollars more favorable to yuan (devaluing the dollar). In so doing, they thus automatically give the US a raise in how much they get from exporting to China, for now they are still selling things for yuan, which is now worth more in dollars back home.
China may use their dollars to buy things in the US, which now seem more expensive relative to the same price in yuan in China.
The net result is that the trade "imbalance" self-corrects. If China continually runs a trade surplus, then items priced in yuan keep getting higher and higher priced.
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 was surprised to learn this, but actually, for weapons like the F 35, a lot of parts are manufactured in German factories. Pretty stupid if you ask me, but that's what the MIC has been up to.
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.
Yeah "trade deficit" just means that after people get cash (in your currency), they don't spend it all immediately to buy goods and services from you.
And yes, a small part of it is that they keep it as cash to trade between themselves ("reserve currency"). This however has a pretty natural saturation point, and can't be the reason for *sustained* trade deficits.
The actual driver here is that foreigners love to buy US *assets*. They love investing in the US economy bc it's a fast growing economy where neither the domestic nor any foreign govt is likely to arbitrarily expropriate assets any time soon. They love investing in Canada for the same reasons,
The protectionist platform is that somehow foreigners willing to invest in the US economy is some nefarious plan to disposses Americans, and that we should just scare them to the point they are willing to sell us stuff only with the intention of converting it into tangible goods to quickly bring home, as they do in Brazil, Vietnam and other trade surplus paradises. The Trump admin surely has been successful on that front, I might add.
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).
So, just to make it clear: you think that a Japanese investment fund buying Starbucks shares or bond is some nefarious activity that ought to be disicentivized, that is somehow logically or empirically related to the US invading Iraq and bankrolling Israel and KSA (what people *actually* meant when they said they opposed the US Empire), and that the fact we found a more efficient way of doing things by world-spanning specialization and economies of scale is a negative bc it reduces our "freedom" of "managing" the economy (weren't the other guys supposed to be the communists)?
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.
This only works for a strange definition of "empire". US territories are DC, a few Caribbean islands, and a few Pacific islands. NATO does not pay us tribute.
Purely monetarist explanations of trade patterns leave much to be desired frankly. Does US manufacturing suffers a bit from "Dutch disease" (where instread of exporting oil we are exporting some of the world's most reliable assets)? Maybe. But that can easily be cured by just more money printing frankly.
And it is unlikely to change the fact that the richest people in the world will simply buy more than the poorer foreigners, and thus any hope to run a sustained trade surplus (let alone a sustained trade surplus *with any given country*, which Trump clearly aspires to) only by smashing the reserve currency status is really chimerical.
Ultimately the US is an accidental hegemon: the reason people prefer to buy American assets rather than American goods or services have little to do with coercion and more to do with our legal system. Surely Trump is helping to change *that* fact, by making clear that the US govt can be as erratic, unpredictable and arbitrary as any other. I don't see how this is going to help the suffering Rust Belt towns, toh.
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.
I think we're in 'tabooing confusing words' territory here.
The phenomenon Scott is talking about is a singular leader who implements their personal whims without bending to feedback or preferences of the public or advisors, and acts directly through their own personal power structures instead of relying on a moderating bureaucracy to actually run things.
I would personally call that a 'strong-man leader' rather than a 'cult of personality', but if we don't have immediate intuitive agreement about what the terms mean then we can just ignore them.
I think the *phenomenon* Scott is describing is definitely more right-leaning, at least in the last half century in the US.
A strongman is supposed to denote someone who rules by strength, and that can either be military force or popular acclaim. "Do it my way, or this army or a mob of supporters will hurt you." The connotation is that the strongman has promised favors in return for that support, but it could be that supporters just really like the strongman.
A personality cult is strictly popular support, and the connotation there is that the people will think something is a good idea mostly just because their chosen personality says so.
So yes, these are confusing enough to be worth tabooing now and then.
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.
The other point is that tariffs only work if they're expected to be long-term, and crashing the economy will provoke an anti-tariff backlash. It's very hard to see tariffs lasting past 2029, even if Trump stops changing them every week and the courts never do anything.
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.
Given how he conducted his business ventures, I can see why he thinks paying the agreed-upon amount is for suckers and chumps who don't know the art of the deal.
Alas, on an aggregate level, you need to pay if you want the stuff, which the Americans very clearly want.
There is a version of his view that is part of the classical fallacy of treating a country like a business. Trump the business man also has a long history of thinking that paying for something, or paying in full is bad business. Youre supposed to trick the other side into doing it for free. Its not that trade is bad or gdp accounting identities are confusing him, its that there is an alternative out there where we get the stuff without paying. See ukraine mining deal. Not endorsing this plan.
To some, we are in fact getting the stuff effectively free, without making stuff in return, or paying for it on receipt. Instead we will be asked to pay at some point down the line.
Then why suspend most of the tariffs and explicitly invite other countries to come and um... negotiate? Do you think he's just wasting their time for lolz?
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.
A majority of Americans support onshoring factory work, 80%, while a much smaller number of people, 25%, say they would personally be better off working in a factory. The number of people 18-29 is a little higher at 36%. You're right to see some hypocrisy here.
On the other hand it also indicates that there are as many as 50 million working age Americans who would rather work in a factory than whatever they currently do. There are something like 12 million people in these types of jobs now. That would be enough to at at least greatly expand, and perhaps even 3x or 4x, the manpower in American manufacturing.
To me this tells a story almost opposite of what is normally implied, overwhelming public support and a massive number of people willing to do the work, if only the jobs existed.
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.
I see, when e.g. Trump talks about trade deficits it seems like he has in mind the goods trade deficit specifically, at least people seem to connect the tariffs to manufacturing. I guess I picked up a "manufacturing economy vs. service economy" narrative that is not what you are talking about..
And you aren't even just talking about financing the consumption of foreign goods with debt, either. Even people trading e.g. farmland for foreign goods is bad. So your idea here is that the farmland-for-goods trade has negative externalities that economists aren't taking into account?
What if the things we get in return for dollars were applied mostly toward wealth generation? For example, we bought nothing but power tools, reactor parts, microchips for factory robots, database support services, financial instruments that make business loans easier, etc.? Other nations get paper, but we got capital - things that we use to generate more goods and services.
In other words, is your argument here against all exchange of dollars for stuff? Or is it just against exchanging dollars for pure consumption (jewelry, movies, hot cars, pretty clothes, etc.)?
Fair question. I think it's theoretically possible to mortgage one's national assets in such a way that resulting growth allows, effectively, the repurchase of said assets. To abstract in the extreme, let's say that you can import a Star Trek replicator at an industrial scale, which can make anything out of anything instantly. Your productivity would increase so much that it would be worth giving up title to many national assets to acquire it.
But, and I think this is key to note, the mechanism of such productivity being "worth it" would not, I think, be via sustaining a continued permanent trade deficit - rather, it would accelerate the ability to reverse the trade deficit by increasing the amount and reducing the cost of your own production. So in other words, the increased productivity doesn't change the fact that a never-reversing and permanently unbalanced trade deficit is unsustainable. It simply alters the time horizon in which one considers "balance." For example, the U.S. ran a significant trade deficit in the mid-1800's (in the presence of significant tariffs, it should be noted). That resulted in a significant amount of foreign investment in U.S. infrastructure, e.g. railroads and factories, right as the industrial revolution was swinging into high gear. That FDI probably increased U.S. productivity, and did not ultimately beggar the U.S. (obviously). But the outcome was not funding even more trade deficits - rather it was a long-time U.S. trade surplus. That reversed in the 1970's and has continued in deficit ever since. The point is, if you're liquidating or borrowing against your national patrimony, it's not a good thing in and of itself - it's only good if you are confident you can generate sufficient future surplus to buy out the consequences of the FDI.
I would also argue that, Star Trek hypothetical notwithstanding, a very significant chunk of our current trade deficit does not remotely meet the productivity-enhancing definition.
EDIT: I think you understood this, but to be clear, my argument isn't against trade generally. When I'm talking about sending dollars abroad, I mean net not gross - unbalanced trade as reflected in the trade deficit. Trading equivalent amounts of stuff is not what I'm talking about - though of course there are failure modes for that as well. If you send every scrap of your food abroad to import Beanie Babies, you're going to have a rough time even if the ledger balances.
But the "future allocation of our resources" that trade partners claim by holding pieces of paper is just the deferred exchange on the stuff that they are NOT purchasing today, which is why there is a trade deficit in the first place.
Why is it bad that our kids might someday sell stuff to earn those pieces of paper back? Isn't that what all the trade deficit whiners are complaining about, that we aren't TODAY selling enough stuff to balance the exchange of pieces of paper?
Somehow you've reasoned yourself into a position where a trade partner claiming stuff today (and thus "balancing" trade) is good whereas deferring those claims to some point in the indeterminate future, in the meantime allowing us the use of and capital appreciation of the goods they are not claiming today, is somehow bad for us.
I dispute certain assumptions in this model anyway, in that a combination of gradual inflation, economic growth, and preserving Amerca's role at the apex of the globalization value chain means our trade partners want to hold significant reserves of our paper indefinitely anyway and given continued mostly non-crazy behavior on our part it would not be in their self-interest to liquidate their USD holdings. But even granting your model for trade partner's future behavior your reasoning's not internally coherent.
It's not incoherent. First of all, you're already conceding that the trade deficit isn't sustainable. You're assuming a larger time horizon, but your post concedes that it's a "deferred" exchange, not costless free stuff. That's already a different ground of argument than 98% of bad takes from economists who assert there's no problem with running trade deficits forever. What can't keep going, won't. Second, your model hinges on the assertion that current trade and future claims denominated in dollars are equivalent are equivalent. They're not, for two reasons: who chooses and who pays. If a country (collectively) trades current resources to import other resources in a balanced fashion, that country is choosing what goods they will produce and can spare, consistent with their existing resources and national values. If they run a persistent deficit, they are (a bit at a time) abandoning that choice and turning that over to other nations. And that control will be exercised not over the original consumers, but by the next generation (or older versions of this generation, to be fair). "Why is it bad that our kids might someday sell stuff to earn those pieces of paper back?" Because we don't control what will they will be obliged to make and sell. Balanced trade is fixed and certain and controlled by both trading partners. A persistent trade deficit is an undefined IOU for future production controlled by the IOU holder, that will likely be called in as claim upon the next generation. I'm reminded of Rumpelstiltskin, where the future queen trades her firstborn for the dwarf's help, thinking that she doesn't know what will happen in the future but wants assistance now. Or owing the Mafia a future unspecified favor in exchange for assistance.
(1) Read my whole comment, I explicitly /do/ endorse the normie economist view that some trade deficit is sustainable given reasonable national stewardship. The privilege of being the worlds reserve currency and the apex of the value chain means people want to hoard dollars. This is great for the source of dollars.
I engage with the assumption that it's not sustainable only to demonstrate the incoherence of this alarmism.
(2) All transactions require a wiling buyer and a willing seller, whether the occur now or in the future. Dollars are not a “mafia favor” they are a unit of exchange. Any exercise of that unit of exchange still needs a willing seller, and sometimes even that is insufficient - the US government Biden or Trump, should have approved the sale of US Steel and didn't, and it certainly isn't approving the sale of any actually meaningful strategic assets. In geopolitics papper ownership is the weakest form of ownership there is. Trump could snap his fingers tomorrow and execute the nationalization of tiktok that's already been laid out for him by existing legislative authority, which would actually be meaningful reciprocal reprisal against Chinese bad faith trade (IE our social media networks are blocked there so…) but that would actually be smart and cost him money so it hasn't happened yet.
(3) We are abstracting away a lot of actual complexity when we talk about nations as unitary economic actors in this way, or when you describe goods exports as a deliberate national “choice” being made by an conscious unitary agent and not what they are, distributed market responses to prevailing market prices and the existence of willing buyer/willing seller for a given good or service. So on this more accurate level of the abstraction, what would a mass redemption of the so called “mafia favor” you describe actually look like for the holder of USD? It'd be a mass exchange of paper USD (actually treasuries into USD and then into goods, but close enough) for goods/services from the US or elsewhere, devaluing the dollar. That sounds bad but /devaluing the dollar is exactly the OBJECT of tariff policy/!!! IE the whole point in its own terms is to make our money buy less overseas and our exports fetch more dollars, right? That is a devalued dollar. So tariff policy achieves immediately the outcome you think is the nightmare scenario.
Thinking about it in the right level of abstraction, value of dollar, also demonstrates why China aside literally everyone is invested in perpetuating this global system for everyone's mutual benefit. Even China itself benefits, they just don't like it for national chauvinistic reasons. Everyone wants the dollar to remain valuable precisely because it has been such a reliable store of value, which is why given reasonable national stewardship everyone is rooting for us and the system to continue and not for China to overturn it, /the entire world has skin in the game on our side/. China hates that we have this advantage which is why it's extra stupid that we might do to ourselves exactly the dedollarization they were hoping to achieve 10 years time.
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?
> If production is almost entirely automated, the government (or whatever ruling caste emerges)
...also isn't actually producing anything themselves, as humans, so by your own argument, why would more wealth be distributed to them? Baristas and bedpan-changers may seem like a low bar, but it's not hard to argue their overall value-added per hour is at least net positive, while patent trolls or absentee landlords are in the red once externalities are taken into account - and with cheap automated lawyers, no more procedural friction to prevent such accountability.
The basic structure of society began 10000 years ago, when powerful warriors decided it was easier to occupy a productive settlement, take a cut of its production, and defend it from other warlords. The limits on how they can treat their subjects are established by the willingness of those subjects to continue to produce under the rules and conditions established. Modern subjects in the West expect quite a lot, and will disrupt production with work stoppages or riots if the rulers act too unfairly. If they no longer require labor peace to extract wealth, they can simply grab anything that can be taken at the point of a gun. They do not have to extend the subjects procedural rights in court, or respect their property rights or patents, because they no longer need those subjects. Slaves do comparatively less productive work than freemen, and basically no creative work, but it all you need is menial servants while the AI creates everything of value then even slavery will suffice.
It's already been laid bare. We just keep delaying the reckoning by coming up with new things to make and buy. I feel like everyone engaged in the world of economics is already aware of this.
Not that long ago, political science and economics were basically one field, political economy. We should eventually go back to this, because the ultimate question of economics in a near-infinite productivity situation is going to be mostly about the tradeoff between legitimacy and resource management. How much conformity can be demanded before people run out of willingness to tolerate it? Why would they tolerate any of it when they know providing them with what they demand is a pushbutton affair on the microeconomic level? And how long can you go before we run into cultural zero-sum games that we can't solve by giving people more stuff?
America is a particularly harrowing case, because the mythos of this country is one of freedom, enabled by productivity. We have a hierarchy that's predicated on merit. The need to work to maintain material quality of life is the source of huge stresses but also validation, and I haven't seen a replacement narrative except some psychological naval-gazing that has people pursuing a pure authenticity that I don't think exists.
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.
Yes they are. All those people who are annoyed about relative status in this country will be much more annoyed to find that some people are working for what others are having given to them.
Unless they make the UBI lower than the basest wage, which is how you create a permanent underclass. Given how inflation and wages work, I see this as inevitable.
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.
The UBI would do more damage to the social fabric than any other policy.
What it would do to the economy depends on your point of view. GDP numbers are ultimately just tabulations of exchanges made, and that might rise, but it's not a participatory economy anymore.
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.
Consider my comment to be about the elected officials who appoint their preferred bureaucrats, then. I prefer them to appoint capable and civic-minded ones.
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.
1. I was talking about elected officials. Of course most people on one side will vote for their own candidate - I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. But FWIW Bush won with 50.7% of the vote and Trump won with 46.1% of the vote. Different times, population change, etc etc but - it seems like evidence that millions of people would vote for some Republican and not Trump.
2. But that is somewhat irrelevant to my point anyways. My point is the right *should* put forward candidates "that serves the long term and short term interests of the people". It is better for the world/country if they do so.
And we here in the comments section should hold them to that standard. I'd prefer to avoid the soft bigotry of "well the right is always going to select anti-meritocratic, destructive candidates, please save us democrats".
To the extent that we exhort the left to do some soul searching on how this has come to pass, let's also exhort the right to do some soul searching on how this has come to pass.
And yes, putting forth candidates that are good at governance doesn't mean you don't ALSO have to have charismatic candidates. Regardless of whether Desantis was one of the former, he seems not to have been the latter. Tough. Run better candidates.
3. I'm going to continue to of course advocate for policies I prefer, which means of course I will fight against candidates or bureaucrats who have a different view. My preference is often that they lose (not always! Sometimes they are right, like on housing regulation). But my side won't always win. When the other side wins, I would still like them to be competent and civic-minded. So I'm going to encourage them to run candidates who meet that bar, even if they do not meet my bar on preferred policies.
I agree the right should put forward better candidates. Scott is not writing from a rightward perspective, and most of the commenters aren't either. If I were posting on a right leaning board I'd probably be telling them the same things. You can't tell a group of Democrats that Republicans need to pick better candidates - of course they're going to agree, and like you shrug and say they have no power over that conversation. When speaking to Democrats I'm going to tell them they should improve their own house. Biden and Harris were both bad candidates, if in different ways, and Hillary was likely worse (talk about uncharismatic!).
"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.
"And I think we generally handled it well - very little policy was based on cutting edge nutritional science or social psychology of the 2000s."
The naivety in this sentence is astounding. Where do you think all the progressive prosecutors elected in 2020 got their ideas? Or all the DEI commisars?
The collapse of trust in authority and institutions is by no means an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. This is a rationalist blog so maybe it doesn't follow to a lot of people here that rejecting religion, bloodline family, and big business in the 60's was the first step towards rejecting the scientific community, Weberian bureaucracy/the PMC, and whatever parts of the progress narrative they don't like.
But we're talking about an attitude here. Both sides protest now.
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. Whereas 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.
I agree and am always surprised that this topic seems relatively underdiscussed (at least in my assesment). The economic costs of barring more qualified persons from certain jobs, fields of work, or educational institutions seem potentially gargantuan to me, and it is a policy that touches people relatively directly. I don't see it mentioned a lot in rationalist circles, so perhaps I'm missing something and am overestimating the costs
I think you're overestimating the costs and the actual policy effects (your use of the word "barring", for instance, implies a surety I've not experienced irl). I've been involved with hiring for our team in the past near-decade. Despite the company paying lip service to DEI ideals, the real effect is minimal. Nepotism, on the other hand, has absolutely had more drastic/problematic effect. From what I see in the corporate world this is true pretty much all around. The same thing with paying lip service to any other ideals.
This is likely a different matter than in academia, where I can more easily believe academic institutions don't have to do the economically prudent thing. But regarding the fields of work/certain jobs part, at least, I think you're under the impression things are worse than they actually are.
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edit: Going off on a spiel... full disclosure, and the opposite of some made-up DEI nonsense, this discussion reminds me - I do actually know women of a certain age face more scrutiny/bias, due to the possibility of becoming pregnant and needing maternity leave, which is more typical for women than men at the same stage of the career. It is a genuine disadvantage faced by women in their later 20s-30s, not something invented for woke purposes. This is also known to women, who are thus less likely to jump ship and look for better-paying opportunities, which is unfortunate because that time period is also when you want to get the biggest pay jumps and can handle a bit of instability in your career. It's all logically understandable on everyone's part but it winds up creating, yes, systemic disadvantage due to biological reality. The best case studies to amend that I've seen involved equalizing maternity/paternity leave and legally forcing each partner to take time (otherwise what tends to happen with a shared pool is women take more or are perceived to be likely to take more anyway). Obviously, just making companies "hire more women" will do nothing to combat it, because it *is* financially unsound, especially for smaller companies. This is one scenario where I could have imagined DEI initiatives to 'help', by pushing for legally mandated equal maternity/paternity leave, but of course we didn't get that. Aside from this, I'm a supporter of anonymizing resumes to the extent of hiding people's names for the first go-round to combat initial biases.
Those are things that I feel are reasonable 'DEI' initiatives without a real downside, so if that's the kind of thing you have in mind as problematic, I don't think we have the same outlook.
Otherwise, I have never felt any pressure to hire a less qualified more diverse candidate over a more qualified less diverse candidate. There may be some degree of pressure to not throw away a diverse candidate's resume outright, but never to hire them if they've proven worse. In my opinion, doing so is a disservice to them anyway, because people will be fully aware and judgmental. The vitriol posed towards 'DEI hires' is fairly well-known.
Thank you for your detailed response! I suppose my criticism is more applicable to college admission then, where significantly different SAT scores can be observed along racial lines in the admitted (and rejected) candidates, even after the supreme courts ruling against this. I'm not sure how large the economic cost of that is though. I'm assuming it might be negligible in general, but higher in cases like medical school (where a similar phenomenon can be observed with regard to MCAT scores), since they are a mandatory licensure requirement in order to work as a doctor, and non admitted candidates thus are barred from this profession, which I would posit might have an impact on patient outcomes.
(I also want to add that I hope I am not unduly biased for this discussion, but that I did not attend college in the US, which I suppose minimizes bias)
Forced paternity leave may make things slightly more fair, but it also makes things worse overall. There's an inefficiency associated with having to find a replacement for the parent taking leave (and potentially with the replacement then getting laid off when the parent returns from the leave). Having fathers take leave essentially doubles the cost, which may directly fall on the employers, but will be spread out across society in one way or another, especially to young (prospective) parents. It may very well make things more "fair" by making young men slightly worse off, without making young women any better off. All the while the unfairness may matter relatively little to the many couples who live together and share their finances anyway.
It also overrides the parents' preferences about how to share their responsibilities, who plausibly more often than not both prefer that the mom stays at home with young children and the dad works in a formal job, partly for biological reasons (breastfeeding) and partly as a matter of preferences.
If we want to minimize the unfairness caused by biology, IMO the least bad way is to try to minimize companies' incentive to discriminate against young women based merely on the speculation that they'll take maternity leave by e.g. repealing any laws that force employers to let them return to their position after the leave or to pay part of the maternity leave (Idk if these exist in America), and instead compensate mothers for the earnings loss with a tax-funded subsidy. (Or, rather, the parent nominated by the couple if they are together, or the custodial parent if they are separated, but that will usually be the mother anyway.) As a libertarian I'm not a fan of taxes, but they're still less inefficient than implicit taxes like forcing companies to treat mothers better than they would based on their interests, or the measure you proposed.
But also, I'm not sure how much discrimination there actually is against young women based on their sex itself (on the expectation that they'll take maternity leave). IIRC I've seen statistics that in young, unmarried, childless women actually outearn young men in many places, they only start to earn less after they actually have children.
Those are good points all, and I generally agree with your suggestion. Regarding your last point, I've seen it in action in my own company; managers are more loathe to take on later-20s early-30s married women who don't have kids precisely because they expect them to have kids soon. I realize this comes down to a "trust me bro" but, well, it's not written policy because it's illegal, and I'm not going to give more details because again... see above. However, if you look into the stats (specifically separating by age and marital status) you can notice the differences. There are also studies that have found "those who were married and had older children were the most likely to be called back, while married but childless women were the least likely to be called back. A gap of 14 percentage points separated the two groups."
This does translate into taking on more young, unmarried, childless women, or older, married women with grown kids, because they're considered a lower 'risk' while still padding one's stats. But speaking as someone who personally thinks society will be better off if more women are eager to enter into marriage and have kids in general, I don't think we should really be encouraging women to remain childless and unattached as long as possible by what's essentially a perverse incentive. I also don't think we should be having state-raised kids, but if you look at the e.g. GDR's stats on married, child-bearing women in the workforce (or the other way around - how many working women were still happily having kids, because it was made easy), it's pretty extraordinary. This also ties into the birth rate flatlining that I'm sure everyone's tired of hearing about.
I'm a bit surprised that married vs. unmarried matters, given how a big fraction of children are born outside of marriage nowadays, and in many more cases the couple only marries shortly before the child arrives. Though I guess if a young woman *is* married, it's indeed especially likely that she'll have children soon. Also, how does the employer even know if the applicant is married? (Maiden name having to be specified perhaps?)
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.
They're welcome to say that, and even to believe it.
The point here isn't to shame them into changing their political affiliation.
The point is for them to publicly accept the consequences of their vote, so that all other voters can be aware of those consequences and make informed decisions for themselves.
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.
Well, yes -- Denmark did have an incipient populist insurgency, but the mainstream parties managed to head it off by co-opting the populists' main policy, after which the populist movement ran out of steam. Hence we can conclude that the voters didn't support populism as an ideology or governing style so much as they supported a particular set of policies -- immigration restrictions and monoculturalism -- which happened to be championed by the populists.
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.
1. Elite policy preferences differ from those of the great unwashed because the elite tend to be smarter and they understand things better.
2. Elite policy preferences differ from those of the great unwashed because of self-interest
Both of these are true to some extent, and it's terribly difficult to disentangle the two, even when you are an elite. Maybe it _is_ totally reasonable and best overall that a guy making $10 million a year pays 14% tax and a guy making $200K a year pays 40%. But if you find yourself saying too often that "geez, it turns out that the policy that's best overall just happens to be the policy that's particularly good for me and my friends" then maybe some skepticism is called for.
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.
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."
In this context, "populism" refers specifically to anti-elite movements. You can be popular without being populist - most historical presidents in the US were.
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.
At least the left-wing populists tend to resign after their sex scandals.
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.
What's EHC?
I agree that democracy tends to give you what voters vote for. That's not necessarily good.
Sortition might be an interesting alternative. Fill up a British or German style parliament with volunteers chosen at random, and have them make laws and select the executive. (Don't pick a single individual like a president via sortition: we want the law of large numbers to work in our favour.)
Elite Human Capital. Intended to denote highly productive people, with the connotation that they see themselves as the only ones pulling the average up, and they'd be better off if they weren't being dragged down by the rest of the riff raff.
“Elite Human Capital” - the idea that there should be experts, policy wonks, and meritorious bureaucrats forming a buffer layer of competence between the proles and the actual levers of power. (Whether that actually happens in practice…)
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"
lol
Reverting back to the original meaning, where it was "rule by the mob" and not considered a good system of governance?
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
Right now, Republicans in congress are pulling out all the stops to make Trump even more of a dictator (e.g. they're attempting to remove the ability of courts to hold people in contempt), and I don't see how that can change. That's the really scary part about all this.
> 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.
This Supreme Court has repeatedly said that the Constitution takes care not to entrust too much power in one individual. As it stands, Trump can declare tariffs of 1 trillion percent and effectively turn the US into an autocracy. This is clearly an abuse of power and goes further than what the IEEPA was intended for, although idk how bullish the courts will be with regards to asserting jurisdiction over the factual determinations that occur when a President declares an emergency or to the consequences thereof. And even if they do rule against Trump it will take months to years of deliberation, so another case where the courts will not save us.
>"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.
This argument goes back all the way to the 1700s. Edmund Burke supposedly said (or maybe even wrote) "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
Most people have a strong idea of what values they have, and even what outcomes they want, and an incredibly poor idea of what policy will get them there. Elected officials should be expected to say "I hear you say you want X, I'm fighting for X by doing Y, if you don't see the connection, you can trust me or you can replace me."
Still sound odd?
Yes, but the Speech to the Electors of Bristol was known to the Founders (as was Burke, personally, to some of them who had been in England negotiating the end to the Revolution), and that argument was explicitly rejected for the House (the zombified mess we've made of the Senate is a whole different kettle of fish):
"...we cannot doubt that a reduction of the period from seven to three years [for elections to the House], with the other necessary reforms, would so far extend the influence of the people over their representatives as to satisfy us that biennial elections, under the federal system, cannot possibly be dangerous to the requisite dependence of the House of Representatives on their constituents." (Federalist 52)
Dependence - literally the opposite of the exercise of "independent judgment."
Yes, and as you acknowledge, that dependence in the house was balanced out by long-terms for senators, who originally were not even directly elected. I'm not a fan of all of the ideas the founders had about democracy, but they could have made it a lot more direct than they did and they chose otherwise, and their judgement seems reasonable, if not unimpeachable.
Regardless, being "the most active and vocal" doesn't correspond to being right, OR to being in the majority, OR to even knowing WTF it is that you want.
And even then, its hard to argue Republican congressman doing literally nothing can possibly be what their constituents want, both using common sense, and judging by how much they get yelled at when they actually muster up the guts to be in the same room with their voters.
I'm not familiar with your post history, but I'm curious if you were so gung-ho about majoritarianism when it was say, Democrats trying to restrict gun ownership.
There is a distinction between opposing a policy on the object level (to say nothing of the question of the interpretation of the constitutional provision at issue) and acknowledging that representatives elected on a platform I disagree with have a mandate from their constituents.
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
There are plenty of examples of left-wing populism as well, e.g. Venezuela.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/kakistocracy-as-a-natural-result
Populism isn't an ideology about how to attain power, it's about the convergence of institutional politics with public sentiment: a movement not only toward political presentation in layman's terms, but toward desacralizing political process. It brings political institutions closer to the kitchen table, and the kitchen table closer to the institutions. Whose kitchen tables? That's the distinction between left- and right-wing populism, between more inclusive or more exclusionary populist movements.
In this way populism sits opposed not to "unelectability" but to technocracy, which pulls politics away from the layman but in exchange honors institutional knowledge and expertise. So, technocrats can be highly electable if public trust in institutions is high, but at least a little populism is very helpful in appearing in touch with constituents. Populists can be unelectable if they appear completely uncredentialed for the job, but even bafoonish populists are electable when institutional trust is low.
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?
Well, also the legislature isn't performing its original function anymore. The House was supposed to be closest to the passions of the people, and directly responsive to their whims and local concerns. But barely anyone knows who their local representative is, and turnout in house-only races is abysmal. The House is a minor-league punditocracy now. The Senate was supposed to represent regional and state interests, in a reasoned debating chamber, but now is essentially just a senior version of the house - full of pundits who only ever posture for the cameras. Meanwhile the President was supposed to be something of a national avatar taking care of the minutiae of administration - well he's a national avatar alright, but attention around that office has swallowed up just about everything else. This wasn't how Madison drew it up.
Problem is we stopped expanding the House to stay proportional with the population.
"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.
Our election was actually ‘alternative vote’ last time but they changed it. Not sure why.
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.
A bit like Cromwell, so not entirely unimaginable.
And Lincoln among other great achievements did achieve The American System- his point all along.
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.
It would not be difficult to find some constitutional pretext on which to impeach trump, were one desired. Abducting US citizens, transporting them outside the country, and then failure to comply with court orders for reversal of same, just for a recent example.
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.
Yes! congress needs to take back it's power. We can have 'crazy' from either political side.
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.
I think you could get a handful of Republicans to vote to replace Trump, but the majority is still firmly behind him. It's really scary.
But if we had a parliamentary system, a handful of Republicans is all you'd need to join with the Democrats to get a majority for a vote of no confidence. In our system, you need 2/3 to impeach and convict, so it isn't enough.
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
This argument over Parliamentism was argued 1775-1783 and decided in our favor. In fairness our request to participate in Parliament was denied. As it was until the last election by King Bureaucracy.
The question of Tariffs and the American system was settled 1861-1865. Or so we thought.
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?
i mean, were Lee Kuan Yew's radically outside of economic understanding? i understand that it wasnt fully in the mainstream, but my understanding is that its been in the mainstream for at least the last 20 years (i cant go further back, but the world bank had nothing bad to say about its past https://web.archive.org/web/20131126150907/https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/singapore/overview in 2013 (Which would be hard as it was rich for a long time by then)
and the western economists who were top advisors werent anyone particuarly heterodox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Winsemius
this is only minor quibbleing though
If you already know the math involved, why are you asking me?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-populist-right-must-own-tariffs/comment/113401992
in case im wrong? you belive it to be correct dispite, as far as i can tell, it being blatently not so (see the reasons in my reply to you?)
If i am wrong, and you can link to how the current set of tariffs are in fact the result of the function "The tarrif rate would cause the revenue taken in by the duty upon imported goods from the particular country to equal 50 percent of the trade deficit (goods plus services) with that country.", then i am clearly wrong?
As far as i know though, the function applied is currently 10% plus random other percentages on random other things. thats fine to find some way to justify, just, its obviously not this justification.
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.
Are you actually disagreeing with me?
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
Again, I don't think you especially need to explain this to me.
Then you need to explain your point better because you seemed to present Trump strategy as something sane, at worse suboptimal in the way he tried to influence allies.
My (and many others in this thread) point is that this is pure insanity, not a strategy: a trade war with China may be justified (although the official justification - trade imbalance - is bonkers), but doing it while simultaneously attacking allies using the same commercial weapons at lower intensity, and doing multiple other things (symbolic or with practical consequences) each of them enough to cause major diplomatic crisis is either insane, or both stupid and uninformed...
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 would argue Trump's deficit spending during his first term was a major driver of inflation. Still is, in fact.
The main difference is that in Trump's first term, his babysitters limited the damage. Then Trump spent years systematically eliminating anyone who isn't 100% sycophantic, leading to what we see now.
"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.
Trump’s “latest position” rotates through a number of different options, every few days. However, if your goal is to build an alliance against a common enemy, you don’t usually start by pissing off all your allies and destroying your credibility as a negotiating partner.
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.
Trump has also said that the goal was to raise revenue so we can cut taxes (his "external revenue service" slogan), which is just as contradictory - if we lower the trade deficit, then we're importing less stuff and that means less tariff revenue.
Well, he is in for a rude awakening if he thinks tariff revenue would cover the defecit.
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.")
> "When Bill Clinton used his intellect, he was quite effective. When he allowed himself to be ruled by other organs, he undermined himself."
This is hilarious, because how much better off would we (or the entire world) be if we had a supposedly "regressive" Clinton or JFK at the helm today?
And yet, how utterly impossible would that be for the Left? Woke scolds have made it impossible for any Dem with even a *hint* of male privilege and sex drive to exist at the Presidential stage.
Instead, the only viable Dem candidates are female scolds or 90 year old mediocrities too senile to care about their dicks any more. It just drives home the point anew how there's zero place for actual men in the Dem coalition, either as actors or voters.
Obama?
Sure, repeal the 22nd and let him run again - he’s certainly 100x better than anyone else they could come up with. I’m all about having an actual adult lead the country.
But need I remind you, he was basically done in 2012, second term secured, mission accomplished and no more thereafter? 2012 was pre-woke and pre-DEI - the last gasp of a golden era of competence and aspirations for all Americans.
Then we got a decade or so of literal witch hunts and thought policing and the centre dissolving entirely. Covid, crime and homelessness, DEI, etc.
People are bubbled and polarized more than ever, and it seems to be a steady state attractor, and now half the country wants to tear it all down for the lolz, and the other half is so mindkilled their only response to “let’s burn this mother down” is trying to force a woke scold or doddering half-corpse down everyone’s throat.
Instead of saying “yeah, there’s real problems, let’s solve them” with a plausible bipartisan candidate that doesn’t check a bunch of officially enshrined victimhood boxes it’s “obviously the thought policing wasn’t ENOUGH! Prepare for ten thousand years of witch hunts!!”
But if you want to lead the charge on repealing the 22nd, so we can get some adults in the room again, I’m 100% behind you.
I'm not saying Obama should literally run again, I'm responding to your last sentence.
Yeah, and I pointed out he was pre-woke and pre DEI, so before the self-owning policies that only allows Dems to nominate maximally polarizing candidates now.
Do you think the Dems would ever run the equivalent of Bill Clinton now, as an example?
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.
Also, careful technocratic weighing will likely tell you that tariffs are not the best mechanism for achieving your goal. Taxes can be an effective means of *discouraging* behavior. For example, taxes on cigarettes probably reduce smoking. If you want to *encourage* a behavior, the most efficient approach is almost certainly to be to subsidize the behavior you want.
For example, Biden decided that he wanted semiconductor chips to be manufactured in the United States, and got Congress to pass the CHIPS act, which provides subsidies. A tariff would be the wrong tool to accomplish this because it doesn’t directly encourage the desired behavior. A tariff on semiconductor chips would discourage the import of semiconductor chips into the United States. This would have the indirect effect of encouraging semiconductor chips to be manufactured in the United States, but only chips intended for the domestic market. It would not encourage building enough capacity that the United States could export chips to our allies. It would have the unintended side effect of discouraging the manufacture of products containing semiconductor chips in the United States, because it would be cheaper to manufacture those products in other countries where semiconductor chips cost less. There’s a reason that the CHIPS Act doesn’t impose tariffs: tariffs are the wrong tool for the job.
"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?
Why?
Too much winning (low prices).
"Tired of winning" is a good way to describe the protectionists. Think America needs shock therapy to catch up with great powers like South Korea and Bangladesh.
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.
You’re thinking, probably, of I Won’t Back Down by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. I’m referencing No Surrender from Springsteen’s Born in the USA, with the lyrics,
Cause we made a promise, we swore we'd always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
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.
Only Klobuchar and Buttigeg dropped out right after South Carolina. Bloomberg and Warren stayed in a little bit longer, until after Super Tuesday when Biden and Sanders got most of the delegates between the two of them.
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.
A similar conspiracy theory you might find interesting: the guy at my local donut store gives me an extra donut every time I buy a dozen. Note that he does this for everyone, but that’s just to cover up the conspiracy between him and I. Feel free to retell, at will.
Paul - You're right, I stand corrected. Clyburn's endorsement didn't enable Biden to win South Carolina. Instead, it transformed what was looking like a single digit victory into a landslide. The polls in the week prior to the Feb 26 Clyburn endorsement had:
Biden 27-36%
Sanders 13-24%
Steyer 7-20%
Buttigieg 6-11%
Warren 8-12%
Klobuchar 2-5%
Gabbard 1-6%
Undecided/other 4-17%
(Source: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/democratic-primary/2020/south-carolina)
The primary results (and the change from the median polling) were:
Biden 49% (+16%)
Sanders 20% (-2%)
Steyer 11% (-5%)
Buttigieg 8% (0%)
Warren 7% (-1%)
Klobuchar 3% (-1%)
Gabbard 1% (-1%)
Other 1% (-10%)
Clyburn's endorsement was based on his own preferences, but it also relied on using leverage to get the Supreme Court commitment Steve Sailer mentions.
(Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/inside-jim-clyburn-s-biden-election-endorsement-how-biden-almost-ncna1255414)
The landslide was enough to drive three other candidates out of the race.
Come on, you're cherry-picking to exaggerate. The professionally-aggregated polling during the week in which most of the primary votes were cast [about 15 percent of them having been sent in absentee] had Biden at 40% (RealClearPolitics), 38% (FiveThirtyEight), or 36% (270ToWin). All of those represented a winning margin in the 15 to 18% range over the second-place finished (Sanders). A very solid primary-season win.
Following Clyburn's last-minute endorsement Biden actually got a bigger win in that primary. Of course that helped Biden as it would have any candidate. It wasn't nearly a big enough difference to justify the "Clyburn put Biden in the White House" cliche.
Thanks!
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.
Except that the prime minister is subject to the authority of the cabinet too.
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.
Biden also pressured Harris very strongly not to criticize him. Biden did more than anything to sabotage the 2024 campaign.
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.
And Israel has defined "using human shields" to mean "fighting in Gaza, where there are humans." And then they actually take Palestinian prisoners and make them walk in front of their tanks.
I’d like to see some evidence for this.
I garbled a detail (walk into tunnels or suspected booby-trapped buildings, not in front of tanks) but IDF soldiers even have a charming name for this: "Mosquito Protocol".
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_e5b69661-3234-4cd7-a904-20faacf37463
Apparently IDF acknowledges that there is reason to believe this may be happening, and is investigating. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/middleeast/israel-gaza-human-shields-investigation-intl
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.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/03/17/trump-approves-egypts-gaza-reconstruction-plan-under-two-conditions/
Thank you!
That article says "on two conditions": Hamas's removal from Gaza and the disarmament of the Strip.
Egypt's plan does not fulfil those.
You clearly do not understand the process of negotiation among serious adults. Both sides will ultimately make concessions, but you must begin by asking for much more than you are truly willing to accept. Egypt (which continues to purge from itself the Muslim Brotherhood, progenitor of Hamas) will ultimately accept the removal of Hamas in favor of Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority as sole local government, while disarmament will probably land somewhere in the middle. That Egypt's plan has been approved, albeit with conditions yet to be hammered out, is a wholesale rejection of Israel's plans to take over & depopulate Gaza.
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.
It seemed to me that Hillary had the support of the party hierarchy tied up, and that this was sufficient for her to get the nomination despite not being a great candidate. But you're right that she had to win in the primaries. The party mostly seemed on her side (particularly when it was down to her vs Sanders, since Sanders is an insurgent as much as Trump was on the other side). Would a smoke-filled room have ended differently? (An analogue on the other side was the Dole nomination--he was a major power inside the party even though he was not a great candidate.)
The way the process played out with Harris didn't involve winning a primary, just kinda being selected by enough important people in the party that she became the candidate. That seems more clearly in smoke-filled-room territory to me. But to be fair, it's not entirely clear what else they could have done at that point--maybe have the selection made at the convention?
While the primaries are the official determinant, there's ample room to control the message delivered to the voters. Run enough press noting how one candidate is the clear frontrunner - possibly with some arguments about how crucial it is that the party field a strong candidate, and how damaging an internal conflict can be - and that candidate is handed to the primary as a fait accompli.
Not that it all hinges on that message. It's also possible to quietly approach rivals and make it clear in plausibly deniable terms that if they don't suspend their campaigns, all sorts of things could go wrong with the rest of their political careers.
And if that doesn't work, there's an additional mechanism in the form of superdelegates - a relatively small group of people whose votes are declared to count for much more than a regular party member's. Smaller group means fewer people you have to quietly persuade to vote for you, or a smaller group to quietly fill with people who previously promised to vote for you, either one.
The problem with Biden is that the smoke-filled rooms weren't powerful enough. The insiders knew Biden was a liability even back in 2023 and wanted to ditch him, but Biden stubbornly insisted on running anyway.
Oh god Israel "war crimes" angle. Biden was in an unwinnable position due to Netanyahu being an ass.
Your example being the literal thing the party stopped him from doing kind of negates your point...
In what sense was that a terrible decision? The median voter was and remains pro-Israel.
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.
In my considered opinion, democracy is often cast as "majority will + minority rights" because it implicitly assumes that virtually everyone agrees on what rights ought to exist, and will live long enough to see themselves in the minority, and want those rights protected on their behalf when that time comes.
I think that model can survive for a very long time. Centuries, even. But it survives that long because the philosophy underlying which rights should exist is itself long-lived *and* the nation sticks with that philosophy. It can even modify it slightly (especially if it ascribes to a stable philosophy of modification), but if it departs radically, that's when you tend to see "majority will + (several conflicting possible sets of minority rights, based on which factions are running around and how many pitchforks they have and how angry they are)" and the democratic model shows its failure mode.
If one wants a democracy to work, one has to build it on a durable philosophy, convince everyone to buy in, and then refuse the siren's call to depart from it for some brave new philosophy of the moment. Give in, and stuff starts sucking fast, in multiple directions.
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.
You're going to have to give me a link on this. As I understand it the bulk of the projected deficit comes from extending tax cuts that were already in place from Trump's first term.
https://thehill.com/homenews/5226077-republican-tax-cut-proposals-debt/
A couple things
1. There's some new stuff (ie the no tax on tips thing ends up being pretty expensive after all, as well as proposed increases to military spending for completely unworkable initiatives like the "golden dome")
2. It is entirely consistent for extending tax cuts to be much more expensive than instituting tax cuts. The most obvious reason is that infinity years of tax cuts cost way way more than 8 years of tax cuts, and indeed, that's the case here.
On the margins, even if the duration of the tax cuts were the same, the same tax cuts applied to a larger population (the population has grown) and a wealthier population (GDP per capita has grown) also lead to a higher deficit than when they were first introduced.
Here's your link
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tax-cuts-2025-budget-reconciliation/
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.
That's a small part of it. A bigger part is that they invested heavily in human capital, speak English, and have a competent national govt willing to work with foreign capitalists with an eye for strategic partnerships.
A part for some vloggers and eccentric ski lovers with remote jobs, nobody actually *lives* and *produces goods and services* in Andorra. It is merely a legal fiction to dodge taxes, these guys make sure to spend just enough time around to not be considered tax residents in any other country and Andorra is happy to perpetuate the fiction that they "reside" thete. For companies ("legal persons"), it's even starker, the supposed HQ you find in Andorra is literally just a mailbox.
Compare with Ireland, where the companies domiciliated there have actual offices employing thousand of people, invest in training, and oft pay roundabout "taxes" by financing public goods like parks and libraries and scholarships.
Frankly the "Ireland is just a tax haven" is just mostly cope coming from countries that see their softwares engineers emigrating to Dublin and know, deep down, that something went wrong along the way at home. Like all copes that stick around, it has a nugget of truth, but it's still mostly cope.
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...
From whence cometh the water?
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.
Thank you for posting that, for it is well-thought-out, and fairly clear. I just have a dispute that doesn't really have to do with the math, with which I cannot find fault.
Exports - Imports isn't as straight-forward as one might believe. If you export to, say, China, from the US, China pays for the goods in yuan, not dollars. Likewise, China buys things from the US in dollars, not yuan. One may exchange yuan for dollars, and vice versa, but that only makes the exchange indirect. So the part of the equation X-I is really X (yuan) - I (dollars), and exchange rates make this no longer simple.
Now, if China is exporting more than they import, they get a glut of dollars. This makes each dollar worth a little less than the previous dollar, which makes the exchange rate for yuan to dollars more favorable to yuan (devaluing the dollar). In so doing, they thus automatically give the US a raise in how much they get from exporting to China, for now they are still selling things for yuan, which is now worth more in dollars back home.
China may use their dollars to buy things in the US, which now seem more expensive relative to the same price in yuan in China.
The net result is that the trade "imbalance" self-corrects. If China continually runs a trade surplus, then items priced in yuan keep getting higher and higher priced.
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.
Inflation.
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.
I was surprised to learn this, but actually, for weapons like the F 35, a lot of parts are manufactured in German factories. Pretty stupid if you ask me, but that's what the MIC has been up to.
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.
Yeah "trade deficit" just means that after people get cash (in your currency), they don't spend it all immediately to buy goods and services from you.
And yes, a small part of it is that they keep it as cash to trade between themselves ("reserve currency"). This however has a pretty natural saturation point, and can't be the reason for *sustained* trade deficits.
The actual driver here is that foreigners love to buy US *assets*. They love investing in the US economy bc it's a fast growing economy where neither the domestic nor any foreign govt is likely to arbitrarily expropriate assets any time soon. They love investing in Canada for the same reasons,
The protectionist platform is that somehow foreigners willing to invest in the US economy is some nefarious plan to disposses Americans, and that we should just scare them to the point they are willing to sell us stuff only with the intention of converting it into tangible goods to quickly bring home, as they do in Brazil, Vietnam and other trade surplus paradises. The Trump admin surely has been successful on that front, I might add.
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.
So, just to make it clear: you think that a Japanese investment fund buying Starbucks shares or bond is some nefarious activity that ought to be disicentivized, that is somehow logically or empirically related to the US invading Iraq and bankrolling Israel and KSA (what people *actually* meant when they said they opposed the US Empire), and that the fact we found a more efficient way of doing things by world-spanning specialization and economies of scale is a negative bc it reduces our "freedom" of "managing" the economy (weren't the other guys supposed to be the communists)?
(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
This only works for a strange definition of "empire". US territories are DC, a few Caribbean islands, and a few Pacific islands. NATO does not pay us tribute.
We have 500+ military bases and men fighting on the ground in a dozen countries right now.
Purely monetarist explanations of trade patterns leave much to be desired frankly. Does US manufacturing suffers a bit from "Dutch disease" (where instread of exporting oil we are exporting some of the world's most reliable assets)? Maybe. But that can easily be cured by just more money printing frankly.
And it is unlikely to change the fact that the richest people in the world will simply buy more than the poorer foreigners, and thus any hope to run a sustained trade surplus (let alone a sustained trade surplus *with any given country*, which Trump clearly aspires to) only by smashing the reserve currency status is really chimerical.
Ultimately the US is an accidental hegemon: the reason people prefer to buy American assets rather than American goods or services have little to do with coercion and more to do with our legal system. Surely Trump is helping to change *that* fact, by making clear that the US govt can be as erratic, unpredictable and arbitrary as any other. I don't see how this is going to help the suffering Rust Belt towns, toh.
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 agree that likability matters at the margins.
I'm just saying that "cult of personality" isn't a particularly good model.
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.
I think we're in 'tabooing confusing words' territory here.
The phenomenon Scott is talking about is a singular leader who implements their personal whims without bending to feedback or preferences of the public or advisors, and acts directly through their own personal power structures instead of relying on a moderating bureaucracy to actually run things.
I would personally call that a 'strong-man leader' rather than a 'cult of personality', but if we don't have immediate intuitive agreement about what the terms mean then we can just ignore them.
I think the *phenomenon* Scott is describing is definitely more right-leaning, at least in the last half century in the US.
A strongman is supposed to denote someone who rules by strength, and that can either be military force or popular acclaim. "Do it my way, or this army or a mob of supporters will hurt you." The connotation is that the strongman has promised favors in return for that support, but it could be that supporters just really like the strongman.
A personality cult is strictly popular support, and the connotation there is that the people will think something is a good idea mostly just because their chosen personality says so.
So yes, these are confusing enough to be worth tabooing now and then.
> "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.
The other point is that tariffs only work if they're expected to be long-term, and crashing the economy will provoke an anti-tariff backlash. It's very hard to see tariffs lasting past 2029, even if Trump stops changing them every week and the courts never do anything.
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.
Given how he conducted his business ventures, I can see why he thinks paying the agreed-upon amount is for suckers and chumps who don't know the art of the deal.
Alas, on an aggregate level, you need to pay if you want the stuff, which the Americans very clearly want.
There is a version of his view that is part of the classical fallacy of treating a country like a business. Trump the business man also has a long history of thinking that paying for something, or paying in full is bad business. Youre supposed to trick the other side into doing it for free. Its not that trade is bad or gdp accounting identities are confusing him, its that there is an alternative out there where we get the stuff without paying. See ukraine mining deal. Not endorsing this plan.
To some, we are in fact getting the stuff effectively free, without making stuff in return, or paying for it on receipt. Instead we will be asked to pay at some point down the line.
Then why suspend most of the tariffs and explicitly invite other countries to come and um... negotiate? Do you think he's just wasting their time for lolz?
Trump was dragged kicking and screaming into partially pausing the tariffs. That is not something he wanted to do.
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.
A majority of Americans support onshoring factory work, 80%, while a much smaller number of people, 25%, say they would personally be better off working in a factory. The number of people 18-29 is a little higher at 36%. You're right to see some hypocrisy here.
On the other hand it also indicates that there are as many as 50 million working age Americans who would rather work in a factory than whatever they currently do. There are something like 12 million people in these types of jobs now. That would be enough to at at least greatly expand, and perhaps even 3x or 4x, the manpower in American manufacturing.
To me this tells a story almost opposite of what is normally implied, overwhelming public support and a massive number of people willing to do the work, if only the jobs existed.
The poll for those curious:
https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-employment-greatfor-other-people
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.
I see, when e.g. Trump talks about trade deficits it seems like he has in mind the goods trade deficit specifically, at least people seem to connect the tariffs to manufacturing. I guess I picked up a "manufacturing economy vs. service economy" narrative that is not what you are talking about..
And you aren't even just talking about financing the consumption of foreign goods with debt, either. Even people trading e.g. farmland for foreign goods is bad. So your idea here is that the farmland-for-goods trade has negative externalities that economists aren't taking into account?
Thank you!
For making this comment section less alienating.
What if the things we get in return for dollars were applied mostly toward wealth generation? For example, we bought nothing but power tools, reactor parts, microchips for factory robots, database support services, financial instruments that make business loans easier, etc.? Other nations get paper, but we got capital - things that we use to generate more goods and services.
In other words, is your argument here against all exchange of dollars for stuff? Or is it just against exchanging dollars for pure consumption (jewelry, movies, hot cars, pretty clothes, etc.)?
Fair question. I think it's theoretically possible to mortgage one's national assets in such a way that resulting growth allows, effectively, the repurchase of said assets. To abstract in the extreme, let's say that you can import a Star Trek replicator at an industrial scale, which can make anything out of anything instantly. Your productivity would increase so much that it would be worth giving up title to many national assets to acquire it.
But, and I think this is key to note, the mechanism of such productivity being "worth it" would not, I think, be via sustaining a continued permanent trade deficit - rather, it would accelerate the ability to reverse the trade deficit by increasing the amount and reducing the cost of your own production. So in other words, the increased productivity doesn't change the fact that a never-reversing and permanently unbalanced trade deficit is unsustainable. It simply alters the time horizon in which one considers "balance." For example, the U.S. ran a significant trade deficit in the mid-1800's (in the presence of significant tariffs, it should be noted). That resulted in a significant amount of foreign investment in U.S. infrastructure, e.g. railroads and factories, right as the industrial revolution was swinging into high gear. That FDI probably increased U.S. productivity, and did not ultimately beggar the U.S. (obviously). But the outcome was not funding even more trade deficits - rather it was a long-time U.S. trade surplus. That reversed in the 1970's and has continued in deficit ever since. The point is, if you're liquidating or borrowing against your national patrimony, it's not a good thing in and of itself - it's only good if you are confident you can generate sufficient future surplus to buy out the consequences of the FDI.
I would also argue that, Star Trek hypothetical notwithstanding, a very significant chunk of our current trade deficit does not remotely meet the productivity-enhancing definition.
EDIT: I think you understood this, but to be clear, my argument isn't against trade generally. When I'm talking about sending dollars abroad, I mean net not gross - unbalanced trade as reflected in the trade deficit. Trading equivalent amounts of stuff is not what I'm talking about - though of course there are failure modes for that as well. If you send every scrap of your food abroad to import Beanie Babies, you're going to have a rough time even if the ledger balances.
But the "future allocation of our resources" that trade partners claim by holding pieces of paper is just the deferred exchange on the stuff that they are NOT purchasing today, which is why there is a trade deficit in the first place.
Why is it bad that our kids might someday sell stuff to earn those pieces of paper back? Isn't that what all the trade deficit whiners are complaining about, that we aren't TODAY selling enough stuff to balance the exchange of pieces of paper?
Somehow you've reasoned yourself into a position where a trade partner claiming stuff today (and thus "balancing" trade) is good whereas deferring those claims to some point in the indeterminate future, in the meantime allowing us the use of and capital appreciation of the goods they are not claiming today, is somehow bad for us.
I dispute certain assumptions in this model anyway, in that a combination of gradual inflation, economic growth, and preserving Amerca's role at the apex of the globalization value chain means our trade partners want to hold significant reserves of our paper indefinitely anyway and given continued mostly non-crazy behavior on our part it would not be in their self-interest to liquidate their USD holdings. But even granting your model for trade partner's future behavior your reasoning's not internally coherent.
It's not incoherent. First of all, you're already conceding that the trade deficit isn't sustainable. You're assuming a larger time horizon, but your post concedes that it's a "deferred" exchange, not costless free stuff. That's already a different ground of argument than 98% of bad takes from economists who assert there's no problem with running trade deficits forever. What can't keep going, won't. Second, your model hinges on the assertion that current trade and future claims denominated in dollars are equivalent are equivalent. They're not, for two reasons: who chooses and who pays. If a country (collectively) trades current resources to import other resources in a balanced fashion, that country is choosing what goods they will produce and can spare, consistent with their existing resources and national values. If they run a persistent deficit, they are (a bit at a time) abandoning that choice and turning that over to other nations. And that control will be exercised not over the original consumers, but by the next generation (or older versions of this generation, to be fair). "Why is it bad that our kids might someday sell stuff to earn those pieces of paper back?" Because we don't control what will they will be obliged to make and sell. Balanced trade is fixed and certain and controlled by both trading partners. A persistent trade deficit is an undefined IOU for future production controlled by the IOU holder, that will likely be called in as claim upon the next generation. I'm reminded of Rumpelstiltskin, where the future queen trades her firstborn for the dwarf's help, thinking that she doesn't know what will happen in the future but wants assistance now. Or owing the Mafia a future unspecified favor in exchange for assistance.
(1) Read my whole comment, I explicitly /do/ endorse the normie economist view that some trade deficit is sustainable given reasonable national stewardship. The privilege of being the worlds reserve currency and the apex of the value chain means people want to hoard dollars. This is great for the source of dollars.
I engage with the assumption that it's not sustainable only to demonstrate the incoherence of this alarmism.
(2) All transactions require a wiling buyer and a willing seller, whether the occur now or in the future. Dollars are not a “mafia favor” they are a unit of exchange. Any exercise of that unit of exchange still needs a willing seller, and sometimes even that is insufficient - the US government Biden or Trump, should have approved the sale of US Steel and didn't, and it certainly isn't approving the sale of any actually meaningful strategic assets. In geopolitics papper ownership is the weakest form of ownership there is. Trump could snap his fingers tomorrow and execute the nationalization of tiktok that's already been laid out for him by existing legislative authority, which would actually be meaningful reciprocal reprisal against Chinese bad faith trade (IE our social media networks are blocked there so…) but that would actually be smart and cost him money so it hasn't happened yet.
(3) We are abstracting away a lot of actual complexity when we talk about nations as unitary economic actors in this way, or when you describe goods exports as a deliberate national “choice” being made by an conscious unitary agent and not what they are, distributed market responses to prevailing market prices and the existence of willing buyer/willing seller for a given good or service. So on this more accurate level of the abstraction, what would a mass redemption of the so called “mafia favor” you describe actually look like for the holder of USD? It'd be a mass exchange of paper USD (actually treasuries into USD and then into goods, but close enough) for goods/services from the US or elsewhere, devaluing the dollar. That sounds bad but /devaluing the dollar is exactly the OBJECT of tariff policy/!!! IE the whole point in its own terms is to make our money buy less overseas and our exports fetch more dollars, right? That is a devalued dollar. So tariff policy achieves immediately the outcome you think is the nightmare scenario.
Thinking about it in the right level of abstraction, value of dollar, also demonstrates why China aside literally everyone is invested in perpetuating this global system for everyone's mutual benefit. Even China itself benefits, they just don't like it for national chauvinistic reasons. Everyone wants the dollar to remain valuable precisely because it has been such a reliable store of value, which is why given reasonable national stewardship everyone is rooting for us and the system to continue and not for China to overturn it, /the entire world has skin in the game on our side/. China hates that we have this advantage which is why it's extra stupid that we might do to ourselves exactly the dedollarization they were hoping to achieve 10 years time.
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?
> If production is almost entirely automated, the government (or whatever ruling caste emerges)
...also isn't actually producing anything themselves, as humans, so by your own argument, why would more wealth be distributed to them? Baristas and bedpan-changers may seem like a low bar, but it's not hard to argue their overall value-added per hour is at least net positive, while patent trolls or absentee landlords are in the red once externalities are taken into account - and with cheap automated lawyers, no more procedural friction to prevent such accountability.
The basic structure of society began 10000 years ago, when powerful warriors decided it was easier to occupy a productive settlement, take a cut of its production, and defend it from other warlords. The limits on how they can treat their subjects are established by the willingness of those subjects to continue to produce under the rules and conditions established. Modern subjects in the West expect quite a lot, and will disrupt production with work stoppages or riots if the rulers act too unfairly. If they no longer require labor peace to extract wealth, they can simply grab anything that can be taken at the point of a gun. They do not have to extend the subjects procedural rights in court, or respect their property rights or patents, because they no longer need those subjects. Slaves do comparatively less productive work than freemen, and basically no creative work, but it all you need is menial servants while the AI creates everything of value then even slavery will suffice.
It's already been laid bare. We just keep delaying the reckoning by coming up with new things to make and buy. I feel like everyone engaged in the world of economics is already aware of this.
Not that long ago, political science and economics were basically one field, political economy. We should eventually go back to this, because the ultimate question of economics in a near-infinite productivity situation is going to be mostly about the tradeoff between legitimacy and resource management. How much conformity can be demanded before people run out of willingness to tolerate it? Why would they tolerate any of it when they know providing them with what they demand is a pushbutton affair on the microeconomic level? And how long can you go before we run into cultural zero-sum games that we can't solve by giving people more stuff?
America is a particularly harrowing case, because the mythos of this country is one of freedom, enabled by productivity. We have a hierarchy that's predicated on merit. The need to work to maintain material quality of life is the source of huge stresses but also validation, and I haven't seen a replacement narrative except some psychological naval-gazing that has people pursuing a pure authenticity that I don't think exists.
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.
Yeah...but I think they actually believe it!
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.
Yes they are. All those people who are annoyed about relative status in this country will be much more annoyed to find that some people are working for what others are having given to them.
Unless they make the UBI lower than the basest wage, which is how you create a permanent underclass. Given how inflation and wages work, I see this as inevitable.
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.
> then we should probably just vote for the UBI
We could just do that *without* destroying the economy and ripping apart the social fabric first, maybe?
The UBI would do more damage to the social fabric than any other policy.
What it would do to the economy depends on your point of view. GDP numbers are ultimately just tabulations of exchanges made, and that might rise, but it's not a participatory economy anymore.
It's just not going to work though is it?
The odds are low. It's amazing how I can hear mirth coming through a typed sentence.
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.
Dull economics 101 guys had a chance to run against Trump in the primary; this suggests to me that Americans really did want 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.
Consider my comment to be about the elected officials who appoint their preferred bureaucrats, then. I prefer them to appoint capable and civic-minded ones.
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.
1. I was talking about elected officials. Of course most people on one side will vote for their own candidate - I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. But FWIW Bush won with 50.7% of the vote and Trump won with 46.1% of the vote. Different times, population change, etc etc but - it seems like evidence that millions of people would vote for some Republican and not Trump.
2. But that is somewhat irrelevant to my point anyways. My point is the right *should* put forward candidates "that serves the long term and short term interests of the people". It is better for the world/country if they do so.
And we here in the comments section should hold them to that standard. I'd prefer to avoid the soft bigotry of "well the right is always going to select anti-meritocratic, destructive candidates, please save us democrats".
To the extent that we exhort the left to do some soul searching on how this has come to pass, let's also exhort the right to do some soul searching on how this has come to pass.
And yes, putting forth candidates that are good at governance doesn't mean you don't ALSO have to have charismatic candidates. Regardless of whether Desantis was one of the former, he seems not to have been the latter. Tough. Run better candidates.
3. I'm going to continue to of course advocate for policies I prefer, which means of course I will fight against candidates or bureaucrats who have a different view. My preference is often that they lose (not always! Sometimes they are right, like on housing regulation). But my side won't always win. When the other side wins, I would still like them to be competent and civic-minded. So I'm going to encourage them to run candidates who meet that bar, even if they do not meet my bar on preferred policies.
I agree the right should put forward better candidates. Scott is not writing from a rightward perspective, and most of the commenters aren't either. If I were posting on a right leaning board I'd probably be telling them the same things. You can't tell a group of Democrats that Republicans need to pick better candidates - of course they're going to agree, and like you shrug and say they have no power over that conversation. When speaking to Democrats I'm going to tell them they should improve their own house. Biden and Harris were both bad candidates, if in different ways, and Hillary was likely worse (talk about uncharismatic!).
"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.
"And I think we generally handled it well - very little policy was based on cutting edge nutritional science or social psychology of the 2000s."
The naivety in this sentence is astounding. Where do you think all the progressive prosecutors elected in 2020 got their ideas? Or all the DEI commisars?
The collapse of trust in authority and institutions is by no means an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. This is a rationalist blog so maybe it doesn't follow to a lot of people here that rejecting religion, bloodline family, and big business in the 60's was the first step towards rejecting the scientific community, Weberian bureaucracy/the PMC, and whatever parts of the progress narrative they don't like.
But we're talking about an attitude here. Both sides protest now.
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.
Indeed.
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.
I'm not sure 'interests groups' and 'advisor and bureaucrats' are meaningfully the same thing here, though.
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.
During his nation's darkest hour, one man gave the people the courage to speak the truth...
For one thing, Trump has a habit of reversing his policies in the span of days or hours.
Google 'Slate Star The Phatic And The Anti-Inductive'
This made me feel an intense nostalgia for Scott's old writing.
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. Whereas 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.
I agree and am always surprised that this topic seems relatively underdiscussed (at least in my assesment). The economic costs of barring more qualified persons from certain jobs, fields of work, or educational institutions seem potentially gargantuan to me, and it is a policy that touches people relatively directly. I don't see it mentioned a lot in rationalist circles, so perhaps I'm missing something and am overestimating the costs
I think you're overestimating the costs and the actual policy effects (your use of the word "barring", for instance, implies a surety I've not experienced irl). I've been involved with hiring for our team in the past near-decade. Despite the company paying lip service to DEI ideals, the real effect is minimal. Nepotism, on the other hand, has absolutely had more drastic/problematic effect. From what I see in the corporate world this is true pretty much all around. The same thing with paying lip service to any other ideals.
This is likely a different matter than in academia, where I can more easily believe academic institutions don't have to do the economically prudent thing. But regarding the fields of work/certain jobs part, at least, I think you're under the impression things are worse than they actually are.
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edit: Going off on a spiel... full disclosure, and the opposite of some made-up DEI nonsense, this discussion reminds me - I do actually know women of a certain age face more scrutiny/bias, due to the possibility of becoming pregnant and needing maternity leave, which is more typical for women than men at the same stage of the career. It is a genuine disadvantage faced by women in their later 20s-30s, not something invented for woke purposes. This is also known to women, who are thus less likely to jump ship and look for better-paying opportunities, which is unfortunate because that time period is also when you want to get the biggest pay jumps and can handle a bit of instability in your career. It's all logically understandable on everyone's part but it winds up creating, yes, systemic disadvantage due to biological reality. The best case studies to amend that I've seen involved equalizing maternity/paternity leave and legally forcing each partner to take time (otherwise what tends to happen with a shared pool is women take more or are perceived to be likely to take more anyway). Obviously, just making companies "hire more women" will do nothing to combat it, because it *is* financially unsound, especially for smaller companies. This is one scenario where I could have imagined DEI initiatives to 'help', by pushing for legally mandated equal maternity/paternity leave, but of course we didn't get that. Aside from this, I'm a supporter of anonymizing resumes to the extent of hiding people's names for the first go-round to combat initial biases.
Those are things that I feel are reasonable 'DEI' initiatives without a real downside, so if that's the kind of thing you have in mind as problematic, I don't think we have the same outlook.
Otherwise, I have never felt any pressure to hire a less qualified more diverse candidate over a more qualified less diverse candidate. There may be some degree of pressure to not throw away a diverse candidate's resume outright, but never to hire them if they've proven worse. In my opinion, doing so is a disservice to them anyway, because people will be fully aware and judgmental. The vitriol posed towards 'DEI hires' is fairly well-known.
Thank you for your detailed response! I suppose my criticism is more applicable to college admission then, where significantly different SAT scores can be observed along racial lines in the admitted (and rejected) candidates, even after the supreme courts ruling against this. I'm not sure how large the economic cost of that is though. I'm assuming it might be negligible in general, but higher in cases like medical school (where a similar phenomenon can be observed with regard to MCAT scores), since they are a mandatory licensure requirement in order to work as a doctor, and non admitted candidates thus are barred from this profession, which I would posit might have an impact on patient outcomes.
(I also want to add that I hope I am not unduly biased for this discussion, but that I did not attend college in the US, which I suppose minimizes bias)
Forced paternity leave may make things slightly more fair, but it also makes things worse overall. There's an inefficiency associated with having to find a replacement for the parent taking leave (and potentially with the replacement then getting laid off when the parent returns from the leave). Having fathers take leave essentially doubles the cost, which may directly fall on the employers, but will be spread out across society in one way or another, especially to young (prospective) parents. It may very well make things more "fair" by making young men slightly worse off, without making young women any better off. All the while the unfairness may matter relatively little to the many couples who live together and share their finances anyway.
It also overrides the parents' preferences about how to share their responsibilities, who plausibly more often than not both prefer that the mom stays at home with young children and the dad works in a formal job, partly for biological reasons (breastfeeding) and partly as a matter of preferences.
If we want to minimize the unfairness caused by biology, IMO the least bad way is to try to minimize companies' incentive to discriminate against young women based merely on the speculation that they'll take maternity leave by e.g. repealing any laws that force employers to let them return to their position after the leave or to pay part of the maternity leave (Idk if these exist in America), and instead compensate mothers for the earnings loss with a tax-funded subsidy. (Or, rather, the parent nominated by the couple if they are together, or the custodial parent if they are separated, but that will usually be the mother anyway.) As a libertarian I'm not a fan of taxes, but they're still less inefficient than implicit taxes like forcing companies to treat mothers better than they would based on their interests, or the measure you proposed.
But also, I'm not sure how much discrimination there actually is against young women based on their sex itself (on the expectation that they'll take maternity leave). IIRC I've seen statistics that in young, unmarried, childless women actually outearn young men in many places, they only start to earn less after they actually have children.
Those are good points all, and I generally agree with your suggestion. Regarding your last point, I've seen it in action in my own company; managers are more loathe to take on later-20s early-30s married women who don't have kids precisely because they expect them to have kids soon. I realize this comes down to a "trust me bro" but, well, it's not written policy because it's illegal, and I'm not going to give more details because again... see above. However, if you look into the stats (specifically separating by age and marital status) you can notice the differences. There are also studies that have found "those who were married and had older children were the most likely to be called back, while married but childless women were the least likely to be called back. A gap of 14 percentage points separated the two groups."
This does translate into taking on more young, unmarried, childless women, or older, married women with grown kids, because they're considered a lower 'risk' while still padding one's stats. But speaking as someone who personally thinks society will be better off if more women are eager to enter into marriage and have kids in general, I don't think we should really be encouraging women to remain childless and unattached as long as possible by what's essentially a perverse incentive. I also don't think we should be having state-raised kids, but if you look at the e.g. GDR's stats on married, child-bearing women in the workforce (or the other way around - how many working women were still happily having kids, because it was made easy), it's pretty extraordinary. This also ties into the birth rate flatlining that I'm sure everyone's tired of hearing about.
I can believe that it happens at some companies.
I'm a bit surprised that married vs. unmarried matters, given how a big fraction of children are born outside of marriage nowadays, and in many more cases the couple only marries shortly before the child arrives. Though I guess if a young woman *is* married, it's indeed especially likely that she'll have children soon. Also, how does the employer even know if the applicant is married? (Maiden name having to be specified perhaps?)
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.
It IS Maslow's hierarchy. Pronouns are in the "Esteem" tier.
They're welcome to say that, and even to believe it.
The point here isn't to shame them into changing their political affiliation.
The point is for them to publicly accept the consequences of their vote, so that all other voters can be aware of those consequences and make informed decisions for themselves.
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.
Any *individual* opponent can, but flipping even 1% of them on the margins would swing enough elections to take them out of power.
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 expect it to take something like 2 months to reflect in the data.
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.
Well, yes -- Denmark did have an incipient populist insurgency, but the mainstream parties managed to head it off by co-opting the populists' main policy, after which the populist movement ran out of steam. Hence we can conclude that the voters didn't support populism as an ideology or governing style so much as they supported a particular set of policies -- immigration restrictions and monoculturalism -- which happened to be championed by the populists.
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.
Yeah look I think there's two possibilities:
1. Elite policy preferences differ from those of the great unwashed because the elite tend to be smarter and they understand things better.
2. Elite policy preferences differ from those of the great unwashed because of self-interest
Both of these are true to some extent, and it's terribly difficult to disentangle the two, even when you are an elite. Maybe it _is_ totally reasonable and best overall that a guy making $10 million a year pays 14% tax and a guy making $200K a year pays 40%. But if you find yourself saying too often that "geez, it turns out that the policy that's best overall just happens to be the policy that's particularly good for me and my friends" then maybe some skepticism is called for.
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.