With collapsing stock markets, retirement portfolios, and consumer confidence, there is an all-too-human tendency to focus on the economic effects of tariffs by their critics: they are a tax on consumption, they will raise inflation, reduce efficiency, and reduce take-home income, etc. This is familiar.
But this mistakes the full significance of a tariff-centric public policy. First and foremost, tariffs are an exercise in political agency. In Trump’s administration they are an assertion of political control by the executive branch. And, in fact, political decisionism is (see here; here; and here) a core commitment of the so-called ‘unitary executive theory,’ which I prefer to call (with a nod (here) to Benjamin Constant) ‘Bonapartism.’ According to Bonapartism the will of the American people generates a presidential mandate to take charge. If you were to have a certain conspiratorial sensibility this is a control over ‘Globalists’ or the ‘Woke;’ a certain progressive-democratic sensibility this is the exercise of control over ‘the economy.’ For Bonapartists it’s control over the ‘deep state,’ which turn out to be code for ordinary ‘civil servants and scientists with at-will employment, sanctity of contracts be damned.’
From my own, more (skeptical) liberal perspective tariffs are an expression of mistrust against individuals’ judgments; they limit and even deny us our ability to shape our lives with our meaningful associates as we see fit. And tariffs do so, in part, by changing the pattern of costs on us, and, in part, by altering the political landscape in favor of the well-connected few. Of course, in practice, tariffs are always hugely regressive by raising costs on consumer products. This is, in fact, a familiar effect of mercantilism and has been a rallying cry for liberals since Adam Smith and the Corn league. Tariffs are also regressive as tax instruments displacing the income tax.
That is, some of the most insidious and dangerous effects of tariffs are evidently political in character. They create monopoly profits for the connected few, who can, thereby, entrench themselves against competitors, regulators, and consumers. It is well known that once a tariff is entrenched it is incredibly difficult to remove. They create permanent temptations to bribe the executive and those with access to him. Watch for stories about import-quotas, tariff holidays, and ad hoc tariff exemptions to appear in the press and subsequent policy.
Tariffs generate incentives for smugglers and in order to catch them we end up with additional policing and militarizing of the border and the economy on behalf of those who profit from selling the government equipment and services and those who desire a scared workforce. Industries protected behind tariff walls cheer on customs/police raids. For, as Jacob T. Levy predicted, the subsequent effect is terror and the collapse of due process against purported criminals, smugglers, refugees, and people who hold the wrong opinions and the unapproved gender. This is a far more likely outcome than the re-industrialization of America.
A certain kind of ‘class-based progressive’ and a certain kind of ‘moderate’ urges us to understand the rise of Trump as a predictable and justifiable backlash (Liam Kofi Bright has a good piece on this). And the implication is always an abandonment of the unpopular vulnerable (at least ‘temporarily’). Once these need no defending, we’re told, then the true victory (with purportedly homogeneous steelworkers, soccer mums, etc.) is possible.
But this diagnosis gets it backwards. Mercantilism is never just about the balance of trade. It’s always and everywhere an attempt to direct state violence against those who wish to shape their own lives unguided by the superior wisdom of the nation, the people, or race. Policing the border means control over romance, marriage, friendship, and gender, that is our most meaningful choices; it is an attempt to control who plays with who, who prays with who, and who learns from who. Free trade and free meaningful control over one’s life are the same side of the coin.
Cheap products and high purchasing power leave room for emancipatory projects. Tariffs are not just taxes on consumers, they are also simultaneously hidden subsidies to the favored few whose life choices are privileged and recognized by the executive power.+ Anyone who has reflected on contemporary Singapore and China knows that ‘liberalism-a-la-carte’ is genuinely possible. But it doesn’t mean there is no internal political logic to mercantile-Bonapartism; there is, and it is always zero-sum.
Among certain commentators it is conventional wisdom that the Trump Administration is increasing uncertainty by acting inexplicably on a whim (see here, for example, Daniel W. Drezner) or pursuing economic incoherence (see here, for example, Neville Morley). [HT Chris Brooke.] And while I am happy to admit that the process that leads to any of the Trump administration’s decisions seems haphazard at best, I do see in it, a reasonably coherent worldview that combines Bonapartism with Mercantilism.
Political and economic uncertainty is generally a self-reinforcing process. To undo it more and more actions by the executive are demanded by a scared public manipulated by profit-seeking adventurers. It’s entirely predictable we’ll see the rise of a system of selective subsidies and cartels as Trump Tariffs are entrenched.
The commentariat is suddenly full of knowing nods to William McKinley and his tariffs. President Trump himself is known to refer to him. And, yet, there is a temptation to treat tariffs as evidence of isolationism. McKinley was no isolationist.* McKinley’s was the American imperialist presidency annexing Hawaii, and after the war with Spain annexing Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and American Samoa as well as control of Cuba. That President Trump admires President McKinley and envisions annexation of Canada, Greenland, Panama, and even Gaza fits the worldview. To put it in wider context: tariffs are a feature of manifest destiny.
Now, the party of peace and prosperity is mortally threatened by the Trump Tariffs, which will accelerate the re-alignment of alliances at home and abroad. In a zero-sum world, ruled by fear, declining expectations, and uncertainty induced mistrust, it pays, alas, to use the flag as a cover for one’s greed.** If the Tariffs stick, we should expect the revival of opportunistic and accidental wars on behalf of aggrieved oligarchs with media interests.
The main effect, thus, of Trump tariffs is to make politics more important.** And as awareness grows of what is at stake, we can expect the public to welcome courageous politicians as focal points in rallying hostility toward the closing society.
- This post appeared in somewhat modified fashion at Digressions & Impressions (here).
+In practice, they also become explicit subsidies in order to buy off some of the losers of a tariff policy.
*It’s beyond my competence to speak about McKinley’s attitude toward the rise of and entrenchment Jim Crow, but I very much doubt he was a strong opponent of it.
**This is why I admire ‘Hands Off’ as slogan. It conveys accurately that this is a battle over freedom, over who gets ownership over one’s body and one’s agency; it’s a battle over the character of the federal government; it’s a battle against manifest grifters who loot the public purse.
{ 76 comments }
MisterMr 04.07.25 at 11:12 am
My two cents: [disclaimer: not an actual economist]
The problem of tariffs comes from not understanding, or not wanting to understand, the cause of the USA trade deficit.
All developed capitalist countries (including China) have the problem of excess expected ex ante savings, aka underconsumption, aka overproduction, so most countries stimulates their economy by the government going into debt or lowering interest rates etc.; the USA is doing this since the end of WW2 but, because of its size, it is doing more than the others.
In time, it lead to a situation where the USA has good employment levels, good wages relative to the rest of the world and also to other rich countries like Germany.
From google:
The average salary in the U.S. is $66,622
In 2023, the average gross annual salary in Germany for full-time employees was around €52,000 (57000$)
(Germany is the most industrialized country in the EU, the fact that the USA average wage is higher than in the most industrialized EU state is important, because in reality there isn’t a big technological difference between USA and the EU as a whole).
It is also a situation where profits are high in the USA, because the increase in debt makes it possible to have profit + wages > total productivity.
However, this also means that the USA, in time, became a net importer, because comparatively rich USA citiziens have more reasons to buy from the outside world than comparatively poorer outsider have to buy from the USA.
However, this situation is unstable and overall the difference of income between the USA and the rest of the world became lesser, expecially with the rise of China (but european countries and japan did the same, if less spectacularly, decades earlier).
Also, the logic of capitalism requires that wealth has to continuously grow, so the USA is forced to increase this keynesian stymulus (by cutting taxes on the rich or lowering interest rates) more and more, that lead to an obvious casino economy.
There is no simple solution to this, at least I see no one; some “solutions” like taxing more and pumping out more in services (to decrease inequality and thus decrease the excess in expected savings) are a solution from my point of view and from the point of view of many lefties, but not from the point of view of righties and then the USA would have the problem of big corporations relocating outside.
Therefore, since there is no “acceptable” solution, the right just blames foreigners and puts on tariffs that are ideally supposed to hurt the foreigners, but will also hurt many locals, and my understanding is that Trump is not going to decrease the government deficit but to cut taxes on the wealthy a bit more, so it is actually more of the same right wing keynesianism (Reaganomix?) that might create a bit of growth short term but will exacerbate the problem long term.
The apparent irrationality of this comes from the fact that there isn’t really a solution, or the solutions that exist are unacceptable (such as much lower profits), so the party that wins wins by making a bugaboo claim and bugaboo economic policy: there is irrationality but this irrationality has a cause.
SamChevre 04.07.25 at 12:57 pm
Mercantilism is never just about the balance of trade. It’s always and everywhere an attempt to direct state violence against those who wish to shape their own lives unguided by the superior wisdom of the nation
I am not sure this is a useful claim: it would so far as I can tell be equally true if “mercantilism” was replaced with “speed limits”, “legally binding disclosure rules”, or “anti-discrimination laws”.
J, not that one 04.07.25 at 1:58 pm
I think the incoherence isn’t just at the top, and this is obviously the big issue here. We have things like QAnon because people who know very little about the world are focusing intense rationality on things they don’t understand. Better education is probably the obvious solution, both so ordinary people have a good understanding of how government works (rather than fantasies about how one person actually has a complex plan and everything is predetermined), and so people won’t push naive deductive past the point where it should be used. Once the right is at the point where something like QAnon makes sense to them, they’re not going to be willing to raise any kind of objection to anything the “emperor” does.
And any group that might splinter off, because of differences of opinion or interpretation, instead rationalizes the difference as being somehow illusory and doubles down on defense of the regime.
How we get there from here is obviously another question. I don’t see the solution myself.
wkw 04.07.25 at 4:57 pm
Excellent post, Eric, I’m sharing widely. I tried to sound some similar notes at my place (link below, apologies for promotion but I’ve got nothing to sell other than solidarity), and my next post will be about the blatant extra-legality of these actions, which wantonly violate both domestic and international law. Hoping to get that up today (before turning to my actual bread and butter: fragmentation of global networks).
McKinley was known as the “Napolean of Protectionism,” a fact I didn’t see you mention but which certainly reinforces the utility of your framing.
Link: https://bespokehumancontent.substack.com/p/its-not-about-economics-its-about
nastywoman 04.07.25 at 4:59 pm
In 1999 PAUL KRUGMAN wrote the following:
‘Well, here’s my theory: The real divide between currently successful economies, like the U.S., and currently troubled ones, like Germany, is not political but philosophical; it’s not Karl Marx vs. Adam Smith, it’s Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative vs. William James’ pragmatism. What the Germans really want is a clear set of principles: rules that specify the nature of truth, the basis of morality, when shops will be open, and what a Deutsche mark is worth. Americans, by contrast, are philosophically and personally sloppy: They go with whatever seems more or less to work. If people want to go shopping at 11 P.M., that’s okay; if a dollar is sometimes worth 80 yen, sometimes 150, that’s also okay.
Now, the American way doesn’t always work better. Even today, Detroit can’t or won’t make luxury cars to German standards; Amtrak can’t or won’t provide the precision scheduling that Germans take for granted. America remains remarkably bad at exporting; the sheer quality of some German products, the virtuosity of German engineering, have allowed the country to remain a powerful exporter despite having the world’s highest labor costs. And Germany did a better job of resisting the inflationary pressures of the ’70s and ’80s than we did.
But the world has changed in a way that seems to favor flexibility over discipline. With technology and markets in flux, not everything worth doing is worth doing well; in an environment where deflation is more of a threat than inflation, an obsession with sound money can be a recipe for permanent recession.
And so Germany is in trouble–and with it, the whole project of a more unified Europe. For Germany is supposed to be the economic engine of the new Europe; if it is a drag instead, perhaps the whole train in the wrong direction goes, not so?
Now somebody here might ask: Now what does that have to do with Trumps tariffs? while the answer actually is very simple – as Trump said: ‘German car firms should become American’
And that’s all…
Eric Schliesser 04.07.25 at 8:02 pm
WKW, thank you for the kind words, and the link to your piece which indeed anticipates my essay. Yes, ‘Napoleon of Protectionism’ is a good one, and I hope to use it some time!
Alex SL 04.07.25 at 10:22 pm
As SamChevre wrote. The claim here is that if my nation has a tariff to protect its agricultural sector, I cannot marry the person I love. That is difficult to take seriously. While I agree that conservatism is about creating a world in which only the wealthy enjoy freedoms, it is not necessary or helpful to drag Napoleon into this or to go Road to Serfdom on the basic concept of regulating trade. I live in a country with a public health system and have yet to wake up in the gulag that Hayek claimed many decades ago such arrangements would inevitably lead to. The same will be true in this case.
engels 04.07.25 at 10:55 pm
That Krugman quote is really something.
joejoejoe 04.07.25 at 11:27 pm
silly silly silly. Even Tommy Boy got it right (and we’ve been dealing with free trade for several decades).
If I have a hunk of metal, and I want to turn it into a hammer, I can send it to a hammer factory in Pittsburgh.
Or, I can ship it to China, send it to a hammer factory there, and ship it back.
Under free trade, whichever is cheaper, wins.
Chinese workers are cheaper (so much cheaper, its still cheaper to send that metal to China and back!). So they win.
So the hammer factory in Pittsburg loses.
That’s why we don’t make anything in this country any more.
And that’s why small towns, and flyover country, are devastated. Its cheaper to make hammers in China.
Tariffs are good for those folks. Tariffs are bad for the upper class: those that profit from shipping things to back and forth to China.
But tell us more about the hidden impact of tariffs on the chattering classes. “Cheap products and high purchasing power leave room for emancipatory projects”-for those that can afford them. Perhaps you can work on your emancipatory project in the Caribbean while on vacation?
joe
nastywoman 04.08.25 at 4:07 am
@’Under free trade, whichever is cheaper, wins’.
OR –
whatever is better!
Matt 04.08.25 at 5:23 am
Tariffs are good for those folks. Tariffs are bad for the upper class: those that profit from shipping things to back and forth to China.
Somewhere, even in this over-simplified equation, you need to find a place for people who want to buy a hammer (or whatever) too.
J-D 04.08.25 at 6:21 am
Not when those folks want to buy hammers, they’re not.
If you want to put people in your own small town out of a job because they can’t compete with the Pittsburgh factories, you can; or if you want to destroy your own small town by uprooting everybody who lives there and forcing them to move to Pittsburgh to work in the factories there, you can.
Gareth Wilson 04.08.25 at 8:45 am
“And that’s why small towns, and flyover country are devastated.”
That’s “flyover country” in the United States, right? So white people only ever moved there to make money. Why is it surprising that they’d move back out, when there’s no money?
Ray Vinmad 04.08.25 at 11:13 am
“That’s why we don’t make anything in this country any more.
And that’s why small towns, and flyover country, are devastated. Its cheaper to make hammers in China.
Tariffs are good for those folks. Tariffs are bad for the upper class: those that profit from shipping things to back and forth to China.”
How are tariffs ‘good for them’?
Are you assuming they don’t have a job? So a) the tariffs will cause a factory to be built b) they will be employed in that factory c) they will have higher wages in that factory than they have now
Why assume a-c? I’m trying to understand how there is much more wealth than there was when the US was manufacturing more, and much more in the way of corporate profit.
The rich are richer than ever. But the person working at the non-existent hammer factory cannot have good wages under any other conditions–and they are guaranteed good wages under those conditions?
It’s amusing you imagined a working class person who needs a working class job but the factory they work in is non-existent. You are imagining a person getting cheated of something they don’t have.
Matt 04.08.25 at 11:58 am
Relevant commentary from some of New Zealand’s most important thinkers here: https://youtu.be/TLEK0UZH4cs?si=-coHdBKK2WwnnVrR&t=85
J, not that one 04.08.25 at 1:54 pm
It’s true that Trump seems to admire McKinley for his imperial expansion of the US as much as for his tariffs. However, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to try to understand him as rational or coherent. He’s doing all kinds of things that cancel each other out — and cancel their stated rationales out also. He claims we’ll end foreign imports but also that we’ll get so much money from tariffs that we’ll be able to eliminate domestic taxes. This is just randomly throwing everything in the air and seeing where it comes down. There’s a similar tendency among liberals to reduce his libertarian tendencies to social Darwinism as was common in McKinley’s time: so they’d say we don’t need social programs because that will encourage the weak to reproduce and keep “natural selection” from operating. But this is way more thought-through than what the Republicans are doing right now. Their ideology is essentially “I’m going to act on my principles and I’m going to believe it will all work out the way I want, and I’ll end up on top, but at least in the near- to middle-term, well, sh** happens and it’s in God’s hands (but also God doesn’t mind if I make sure I come out on top by illicit means in the meantime because I really am better than others and if they don’t recognize my worth they’re evil).” Maybe the poor will die, or maybe a miracle will happen, who knows? They don’t consider it to be their business.
Inattention to inequality and the unaddressed downsides of globalization have led us to this but maybe it’s not the time to pretend it’s still 1998. Today, in 2025, we’re seeing what happens when enough people become convinced that white Midwesterners got the worst end of the deal and that everyone on the coasts is rich no matter where they cane from or what they do for a living.
J, not that one 04.08.25 at 2:45 pm
It occurred to me that what’s missing from the discussion of “emancipation” and “private projects” might be something like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which explains that before a person can pursue intellectual pursuits, their physical needs must be fulfilled, and also their social needs for “belonging” and so on (which can’t be fulfilled until the physical, economic needs are fulfilled first, and so on). Emancipation is the last rung on the ladder and is only possible or advisable, on this theory, after all the others have been fulfilled.
If we start with the idea that intellectual pursuits and emancipation are the primary thing we’re interested in, then, either we have an idea what we think about the people who aren’t interested in what we’re interested in, or we don’t. Again, it was very, very easy to make this about “middle class white Midwesterners with traditional values” and only complain about their being apparently left out of society (some of which is real and some of which seems to me to be basic teen alienation about going to university far away that has been ideologized).
TF79 04.08.25 at 3:24 pm
“Tariffs are good for those folks.”
Of course, the home builder who goes to buy this twice-as-expensive hammer can no longer afford a saw, so the saw factory in Indianapolis closes. So we’ve saved the Pittsburgh hammer job at the expense of the Indianapolis saw job, and instead of having a hammer and a saw, the home builder just has a hammer.
steven t johnson 04.08.25 at 3:48 pm
” And, in fact, political decisionism is (see here; here; and here) a core commitment of the so-called ‘unitary executive theory,’ which I prefer to call (with a nod (here) to Benjamin Constant) ‘Bonapartism.’ According to Bonapartism the will of the American people generates a presidential mandate to take charge.”
There is an awful lot going on here. As I understand it, Constant supported 18 Brumaire and his qualified opposition to Napoleon came later (reversed during the Hundred Days?) and he was a deputy in the Bourbon restoration. He died in 1830, before Louis Napoleon was elected president. Thus, the segue from, or identification with, Constant’s Bonapartism to American elections is rather abrupt. Mercantilism as a thing rather than a label from adversaries is itself open to interpretation. The rejection of any concept of classes as role in social production, in favor of a universal (transhistorical?) category of consumers versus others suffers I think from a vagueness as to who the others are.
joejoejoe@9 in addition to other problems pointed out in other comments forgets in my opinion that manufacturing jobs are not necessarily good jobs, it’s union jobs that generally are better. And no one in the Trump administration is pro-labor.
somebody who remembers what people who know him say 04.08.25 at 3:50 pm
joe3 does not imagine that they have good wages. in fact, in his deepest imagination they have awful wages and are treated with vicious violence if they attempt to unionize. but he imagines that they’re smarty pants scientists who studied plants and animals, and teachers who told him to do his homework; women who wouldn’t give him their number at starbucks, who had just a little too much fun in a tiktok that he saw one time, someone who enjoyed a movie with a black person in it, someone who didn’t get furiously angry when a trans person was waiting for the bus, someone who had a video game opinion he wanted to punish them for. this is industrial policy as punishment – the total elimination of all wealth and happiness in the united states, including his own, is necessary to punish the woke losers for not respecting him. that is exactly what he will carry out, remorselessly, hatefully, until there is none left. he imagines then that finally he will at least be satisfied, respected, loved.
Scott P. 04.08.25 at 4:29 pm
Amtrak can’t or won’t provide the precision scheduling that Germans take for granted.
Oh, how things have changed in 25 years…
LFC 04.08.25 at 8:22 pm
The OP writes: “Free trade and free meaningful control over one’s life are the same side of the coin.” That was indeed how some 18th-cent. and 19th-cent. classical liberals viewed things, and the OP is right to point out, e.g., that tariffs -> more smuggling -> more militarization of the border.
That said, indiscriminate, ‘blanket’ tariffs can be opposed on economic grounds alone: they make no sense. If the goal is to rejuvenate or support U.S. manufacturing (something that the Biden-era CHIPs Act helps to do, btw, assuming it survives), then v. selective, carefully targeted tariffs might play a role (it’s probably debatable); in any event they would make considerably more sense than Trump’s idiotic, economically illiterate blunderbuss approach that is poised to create a real disaster.
engels 04.08.25 at 9:14 pm
I thought two nations with a McDonalds could never have a trade war with each other.
Michael Cain 04.08.25 at 11:19 pm
…Amtrak can’t or won’t provide the precision scheduling that Germans take for granted.
Amtrak owns very little of the trackage they use, none outside of the DC-to-Boston corridor. Everywhere else, their schedules are at the mercy of the freight rail companies. Worth noting that in the western half of the US, almost all of the right-of-way owned by those freight companies was originally a gift of public lands. A gift the freight companies have been allowed to retain through bankruptcy after bankruptcy.
engels 04.09.25 at 12:20 am
You can disagree with Joe’s views but you have to acknowledge: these are the people now controlling the world economy.
wckz 04.09.25 at 5:50 am
What joejoejoe 9 said, to the letter.
As for China-made crap being (allegedly) cheaper (allegedly, because price is hardly ever based on cost), if I may quote what I heard recently:
“Okay, we had $10 mittens, now they’re $5 mittens and they come from China. We’ve saved $5. Oh no, we didn’t actually, now they’re actually $12 mittens because included in the cost of them is they only last a month, so they fill up our landfills.
[…]
There’s no job for making them. So, you know, there’s no security for the families. There’s, you’re losing your homes to corporate buyers like BlackRock because if you can’t afford them, BlackRock still can. And if you still want one, you’re bidding against them. So did those cheap mittens come out to a $5 savings, or do they really now cost $30 in total cost? It would be my, I would submit that they may not cost 30, but they cost a lot. And they cost a lot in morale, they cost a lot in life expectancy, they cost a lot in environmental problems, frankly. And they cost a lot in the demoralization that comes of crappy stuff at Target falling apart on the way home from Target.”
abdessamed gtumsila 04.09.25 at 8:07 am
Thanks Eric.
Sharp, dense, urgent warning against tariffs and executive overreach.
nastywoman 04.09.25 at 10:57 am
@’You can disagree with Joe’s views but you have to acknowledge: these are the people now controlling the world economy’.
Nobody is currently ‘controlling’ the world economy anymore – it’s total absolutely chaos –
-(as all the guys who once controlled the world economy will tell you)
And why – of all people – Americans are so eager to self-destruct?!
AnthonyB 04.09.25 at 12:47 pm
Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is probably his best appointment and is actually pro-labor.
bekabot 04.09.25 at 12:54 pm
“You are imagining a person getting cheated of something they don’t have.”
Exactly my position with regard to the TERFs. They’re being cheated (they think) of the cultural representation they don’t have by means of (putative) transwomen who can perform gender better than they can (quite possible) and their idea is that once the transwomen have been removed their own native femininity will bloom. And will be valued — for some reason, never mind why. And will secure them a place in society when it never did that before.
Xenophobes think of foreigners the same way; the progression of notions is very similar. First, I’m being cheated of something I don’t have — I don’t have my grandfather’s factory job, the factory he worked at no longer exists, and most of the infrastructure which supported it is gone. Second, somebody’s to blame — in this case, the foreigners did it. Those damn Haitians can turn out widgets better and faster than I can (again, quite possible) and this is all their fault. Third, there’s a solution, even if it’s drastic: deport all the foreigners and everything will go back to ‘normal’ and life will be good again. The one salient difference is that women never have had much cultural presence, whereas America at one point did have a lot of factories.
Trump’s tariffs are a product of the same state of mind, dialed up well past 11. (The wishfulness implicit in it is dialed up past 11 too.) First, there’s a problem, and the problem is presented as an imbalance in trade. The real problem, though, is that trade is the imbalance — we’re human and mortal and dependent on other people, even when/even though we would much rather not be. Second, there’s a villain — the villain is government, a thing which proves that we’re not immune to the vagaries of time and chance and that we have to huddle together with other people for protection (such an indignity). Third, there’s a way (and a draconian way) of fixing the problem (and the draconianism is part of the fix) — which is simply to cancel the problem, in other words, to end trade. This solution carries with it the extra added benefit of (quite possibly) having the capacity to cancel government as well. Once the symptoms are gone, the disease will be cured, native excellence will flourish once all the impediments to it have been erased — and things will go back to ‘normal’, whatever ‘normal’ is. (Though it’s going to be hard to measure that once all the rulers have been smashed.)
Tm 04.09.25 at 12:59 pm
engels: “You can disagree with Joe’s views but you have to acknowledge: these are the people now controlling the world economy.”
Trump’s fascist regime built on incompetence, ignorance and malice can do a lot of damage to the world economy, but it certainly doesn’t “control” it, not only because they are way too incompetent for that, and not only because an economy is way too complex to be “controlled” by anybody, but most of all because other countries have agency too.
engels 04.09.25 at 7:41 pm
“Only effete virtue-signaling metropolitans want to buy hammers” is somewhere out there in a quadrant of the space of reasons I hadn’t known existed until now.
Dr. Hilarius 04.10.25 at 5:09 am
Assuming that people in flyover country want to work in factories of any kind is dubious. Nebraska still has meatpacking plants but the workers are predominately non-white and foreign (Latino, Somali, Cambodian). Local whites don’t want those jobs at current wages and probably not at any feasible wages.
Why would hammer factories be any different? It’s easy to complain about jobs being taken by immigrants or being outsourced to China when there’s no credible threat of being forced to take those jobs. There’s a lot of nostalgia for a glorious past that never existed.
Tm 04.10.25 at 8:01 am
My comment from yesterday got lost?
Anyway the idea that anybody, let alone Trump and his stupid and incompetent regime “controls the world economy” (engels) is absurd, not least because other countries have agency too.
Tm 04.10.25 at 8:07 am
engels 31: How about “tariffs are manly”, what quadrant is that on? We shouldn’t really be surprised I guess. Fascism = extreme violence to compensate for insecure masculinity.
Trader Joe 04.10.25 at 10:42 am
The mistake that is constantly being made about tariffs is to believe that they are an economic tool when in fact they are a power-exchange tool. Trump believes he has the upper hand and in a clear plurality of cases he does (China and the EU certainly, Canada and Australia not so much, for example).
When you tell your kid he can’t go out until he does his homework, that’s a tariff as much as if you said ‘if you want to go out give me $20’. Behavior, barriers and money are all fungible in tariffs.
The excess of focus on whether the number is 5%, 10%, 25%, 105% is missing the point. The purpose of the exercise it to extract “something” in exchange for allowing “something else.” We’re on page 50 of a 400 page book. Its impossible to hand out grades until we at least get to the second half of the story.
I agree with much of what the OP says, but also think that joejoe@9 and wckz@26 have valid points. We’ve gotten to a point where all we have to trade is services and in the long-run, that’s not enough to come to the table with. Setting rules that cause the trade door in, say Vietnam to be as open as they are here will eventually result in actual trade. Right now, that isn’t even possible because the door is closed and we make little that they want even if it wasn’t.
SamChevre 04.10.25 at 12:30 pm
Local whites don’t want those jobs at current wages
That is exactly the point.
When immigration was under democratic control, and outsourcing to low-wage countries was not a major threat to manufacturing workers, those jobs paid a lot more. (One median employee in meatpacking earned somewhere around median family income in the early 1970’s – the equivalent of $40-$50 an hour today.)
Tm 04.10.25 at 1:26 pm
Do we still pretend to believe that Trump has any sort of plan or strategy?
“Maybe the important thing to understand about Trump’s policy framework is that he doesn’t have one. He wants tariffs and thinks they’ll reindustrialize America, and might turn to currency policies when they don’t. But his views about currency are contradictory: he wants a weaker currency but threatens anyone considering moving away from the dollar. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that he wants both a smaller trade deficit and increased capital inflows, because arithmetic has a well-known globalist bias.
The idea that Trump’s international economic policy reflects sophisticated thinking about the international role of the dollar is, as Adam Tooze says, sanewashing.”
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-balance-of-payments-primer-part-b66
LFC 04.10.25 at 1:32 pm
Trader Joe @35
The U.S. has existing bilateral free trade agreements w many countries, and in the case of Vietnam for ex. there is only a 1 percent tariff on U.S. exports (i.e. what they import from the U.S.). [source for that figure: PBS NewsHour]
Trump continually asserts that other countries are engaging in “unfair” trade but never cites specifics. He never mentions what the actual tariff rates are. He never mentions that the WTO dispute process exists to deal w cases of dumping and other actual unfair trade practices. Instead he seems to think that if the U.S. buys more from country X than it sells to X there must be something unfair going on. That belief is nonsense, it is complete economic illiteracy.
The question is whether “resetting” global trade in the Trump way will serve the goal of reviving/strengthening U.S. manufacturing. Esp given the way he’s going about it, it seems unlikely. Simply asserting over and over that other countries have been “ripping off” the U.S. for decades without providing any specifics or any evidence is demagoguery. It’s not enough to have some intern or some staff member hunt around for evidence and post it on a website or bury it in congressional testimony. A President has to make a case himself, has to present the evidence to the country and treat the electorate as adults, not as three-year-olds whose favorite toys are being monopolized by an “unfair” playmate. Trump believes that simply because he says something it is true. He seems to have the mental capacity of a ten-year-old coupled w an authoritarian’s certainty that his claims are self-validating. “So-and-so is a bad person.” “We must unleash coal.” “Everyone is ripping us off.” The unsupported statements are a feature of his rule along w the stacks of in many cases unconstitutional executive orders he’s signing.
bruce wilder 04.10.25 at 11:35 pm
oh, my
the media are near peak inanity and political discourse is polluted and confused by bumper sticker arguments that focus group well but are otherwise irrelevant and, taken altogether, incoherent in the extreme.
I think money, debt and the dollar’s reserve currency status have something to do with Trump’s tariff shock and especially the urgency with which it is being pressed.
If your economic argument does not admit into history financialization and the problem of the twin deficits — basically that the U.S. for decades has been exporting paper debt to finance its hegemonic role as consumer-market-of-first-resort for countries practicing export-driven industrial development — then I’d say you are stupider than Trump (and Trump seems pretty stupid). The liberal faith that some unseen hand is letting the “better hammer” win a war of virtuous competition is touching in its innocent naïveté but it is impossible to take seriously.
China, in case you missed the last three dozen episodes of our on-going drama, collaborated with American banks and financial institutions and American multinationals and American commercial distributors to transfer industrial development and capacity to China. The relative value of currencies and price levels were managed in ways that enabled profitable investment in China and very profitable disinvestment in the U.S. I will not offer a personal moral judgment on the “fairness” or equity of those processes. It is enough for my argument here to remind all that they happened; China became workshop to the world while the capabilities and integrity of American business diminished.
The immediate issues for the Trump Administration, I suspect, revolve around sustaining the system of dollar dominance while collapsing the twin deficits. I do not think any one — even among elite economists — have a clear idea of how to manage the end of U.S. federal deficit financing or the end of chronic trade deficits. (Figuring out that the two are directly related is left as an exercise for the Reader. Consult an MMT guru at your own peril.)
J-D 04.10.25 at 11:40 pm
In my lifetime I have heard a lot of people say a lot of different things. Some of them turned out to be true; some of them turned out not to be true.
J-D 04.10.25 at 11:41 pm
Isn’t ‘Donald Trump’s best appointment’ like ‘world’s wettest desert’?
somebody who remembers when college was free in a lot of the country 04.11.25 at 1:00 am
dr. hilarius is correct but the answer to the question is, of course, that work in these factories is anticipated to be a brutal punishment meted out against effete knowledge workers and america’s ethnic minorities once, shorn of DEI, the pure meritocracy of supergenius white men again catapult them above their low-iq inferiors to godlike wealth, status, respect, and the love of women who right now don’t want to give them their number even though they were REALLY NICE to them at the grocery store. there is no way to understand the theory of how this will work except by remembering that the people who want this hate black people so much that there are days they can’t get out of bed without watching a racist video game player scream slurs into a webcam. samchevre pretends “oh actually those were good jobs and two generations weren’t spent frantically fleeing them because having your child’s arms mangled in a chicken killing machine is not a dream most people have for their kids”.
Scott P. 04.11.25 at 5:06 am
“Okay, we had $10 mittens, now they’re $5 mittens and they come from China. We’ve saved $5. Oh no, we didn’t actually, now they’re actually $12 mittens because included in the cost of them is they only last a month, so they fill up our landfills.
Can we get past this stereotype? In 2025 this has the same sour taste as 1980s jokes about Japanese crap. The Japanese climbed the quality ladder and China has done the same. There is some schlock, as there is everywhere, but you can easily find Chinese items about as good as anything manufactured in the West.
Speranta Dumitru 04.11.25 at 10:16 am
True, but during the 16th-19th centuries, mercantilists had encouraged immigration and tried to discourage emigration. They advocated naturalisation and favorable laws for foreigners in order to attract immigrants. The opposite of our times.
J-D 04.11.25 at 10:38 am
The one thing is ‘as much’ a tariff as the other in that neither one is a tariff.
No, they aren’t.
I suppose this analysis has the merit of being as clear and coherent as whatever is going on inside the mind (or coming out of the mouth) of Donald Trump.
Why anybody would want to hand out grades I don’t know.
No, you have not.
The trade door?
The trade door?
What?
J-D 04.11.25 at 10:41 am
What? When do you suppose that was? Immigration has never been under democratic control.
Trader Joe 04.11.25 at 11:33 am
@38
I agree the administration is light on details of these ‘non-tariff’ barriers, but I’m aware of numerous examples. To wit:
I know of a decent size company (I’ll not name them for reasons that will become clear) that makes a product that farmers mix with their seed that conditions soil and helps improve crop yield (not really a fertilizer, but like that). Its approved in the US and Canada, most of South America and is in the process of approval in the EU.
When the company took the product to Asia naturally they were asked for a list of what ingredients were in it. Completely normal and this was provided. Most countries took more than a year in providing a response – long, but not unheard of. Several objected to certain ingredients because they didn’t know them and had never tested them, so they rejected. In many cases that was the end of the road. No further response, no use certificate, no path forward. A hard barrier.
In others, that began a process of “Well how can we get it tested” That too lasted many months and required numerous meetings – in person, lots of data, at great travel expense. In one particular case this ultimately yielded the name of a person who was in charge of what gets tested. Long story short, they wanted a substantial – lets generously call it an inducement – to consider doing testing, with of course no promise of outcome (no doubt further inducements would be needed). The company actually considered it but ultimately decided not to pursue the matter despite the time and money already invested.
This was for a product that is already in-use in most of North and South America.
I appreciate its just anecdotal, but I have few doubts that these sort of barriers, both soft and hard barriers, exist across a spectrum of products and while I don’t necessarily see the current tariff initiative as killing all the weeds in the system, its a step in the right direction.
Free trade is rarely free and tariffs are just a number – Vietnam’s 1% (you cited) being a case in point. A 14:1 export/ import ratio doesn’t happen by accident.
wckz 04.11.25 at 1:11 pm
“The question is whether “resetting” global trade in the Trump way will serve the goal of reviving/strengthening U.S. manufacturing. Esp given the way he’s going about it, it seems unlikely.”
Give him a chance. For a lot of people, his supporters, this feels like the last chance. If it looks like he got a chance and failed, they will turn away from him. But if it looks like he’s being sabotaged every step of the way, I don’t think they will. And that might turn messy.
wkw 04.11.25 at 2:41 pm
LFC, I’m working on some up-to-date network analysis of this to slow it more clearly, but the US doesn’t have many existing PTAs relative to Europe, China, and many other entities around the world. Prior to 45 the US preferred to work through the multilateral Bretton Woods institutions (i.e., the GATT/WTO framework) rather than do bilateral deals. Obviously NAFTA is an exception, and an exception that could’ve “grown out” into TPP and TTIP (which were structured similarly to NAFTA, TPP in particular).
But TPP and TTIP didn’t happen, and the US has been inactive in this space for a long time now. The ROW didn’t stop when the US did, however. That meant that as the WTO system was abandoned (by the US, chiefly), others built alternative infrastructure while the US did not. This has been going on for 25 years, the US is very peripheral in the PTA network, and most of its access is indirect (e.g., via Mexico, which is deeply interconnected… in related news, Mexico isn’t even blinking when 47 blusters in their direction). For example, EU-Mercosur recently agreed a trade deal after 20 years of negotiating. It will surely be ratified. This gives EU preferential access to South American primary commodities and LatAm access to leading-edge industrial goods, which reduces dependency relationships involving the US.
And Mercosur has an existing trade agreement with Mexico, which is one of the most PTA-connected countries in the world. Thus, the EU has access to Mexico’s value chain via Mercosur.
Which means that 47 isn’t attacking countries, he’s attacking networks of countries, seemingly without realizing it. His strategy is to isolate, but you can’t isolate countries that are deeply embedded.
By viewing everything bilaterally he thinks he has the biggest market and thus the most instrumental leverage; but viewed structurally he doesn’t.
steven t johnson 04.11.25 at 5:17 pm
Believe Tooze’s latest (Chartbook #370 if I remember correctly) indirectly apologizes for using the term sanewashing. He decided that apparently Trump is decoupling US and PRC economies in preparation for war, economic or otherwise. Thus withdrawing so-called reciprocal tariffs on other nations is more or less rational. For my part I believe this is an insane project, on a par with Napoleon invading Russia or imperial Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, however seemingly rational in the short term it may seem to be.
Matt 04.11.25 at 10:37 pm
during the 16th-19th centuries, mercantilists had encouraged immigration
That’s partly true for some of the time, but by the time in question in the post (the McKinley administration, and the “guilded age” more generally) anti-Chinese immigration laws had been passed in the US, Canada, and what would become Australia, and other restrictions had existed for some time. And, of course, much of the call for migrants was closely connected with colonial movements, so it’s not completely clear it should be seen as a model or attractive thing for us.
J-D 04.12.25 at 2:49 am
This is a response to an argument which has not been made. Nobody here has suggested that there are no non-tariff barriers to trade. There are many regulations which function as non-tariff barriers to trade. For some of them, there are no good reasons; for others, there are good reasons. If somebody wants to take the position that there should be no non-tariff barriers to trade, they’re going to have make a case for it; that hasn’t been done yet.
J-D 04.12.25 at 3:03 am
A chance to do what? A chance to screw things up more than he already has and to hurt people more than he already has? Why?
In my life, I’ve had experience of telling me how something feels to them: sometimes their feelings have been soundly based and reasonable guides to action and sometimes very much not. Some people ‘feel like’ he should be ‘given a chance’ to go ahead? So what? What if they and their feelings are hopelessly wrong? ‘Please let me have just one more chance to bet on my favourite number because I feel like it’s going to be lucky this time’?
I ‘feel like’ practically everything Donald Trump has done as President and practically everything he’s going to do is terrible, and so do other people. Why don’t our feelings count?
Were you paying attention in January 2021? Things have already turned messy. If his supporters want to believe that he’s being sabotaged, they will do so, and what anybody else is actually doing will have no effect on that. He incited insurrection with the whole world observing, and what difference did that make to his supporters?
nastywoman 04.12.25 at 8:14 am
‘You can’t make money anymore with manufacturing’ – said Jack while sitting in Paul’s office on a beautiful spring day in 1998.
‘Mmh’ said Paul –
How about we give up manufacturing altogether and let just the ‘Slave States’ produce the stuff we need – suggested Jessica.
‘The what’ asked Paul indignantly.
Well – all these countries like Germany or Japan or China?
‘Aha’ said Paul –
‘Great Idea’ said Jack –
And Paul smiled and mumbled more to himself: And if it bankrupts them I write about: Why Germany kan’t kompete?
‘Genius’ said John – and we turn America into a total Service Economy with all the great paying and sophisticated ‘sinking’ jobs.
‘Full Genius’ laughed Jessica and added – ‘and I get my Italian passport too and hang mainly in Verona’ –
‘Two households both alike in dignity’ didn’t Kant write – concluded Charlie who hadn’t said a single word the whole time and made a note for Warren…
engels 04.12.25 at 8:51 am
PeteW 04.12.25 at 9:31 am
I don’t know what TraderJoe trades but his understanding of non-tariff barriers seems fairly … bespoke.
Far more typical than the example he gives – which seems to be blatant corruption rather than an actual non-tariff barrier – would be, for example, the difference between mains electrical plugs in the UK and Continental Europe.
Plugs in the UK have three prongs. Plugs in Europe have two. There would be no point in a company launching a massive manufacturing and marketing exercise to sell UK plugs into the EU because, well, they don’t fit the sockets.*
That’s a non-tariff barrier. How are Trump’s tariff hikes are going to pull up THAT weed?
Except in Ireland, for obvious historical reasons.
Speranta Dumitru 04.12.25 at 9:33 am
The interest for attracting foreigners is not linked to colonialism but to the mercantilists’ idea that the population is a source of strength and wealth for a country/sovereign.
For instance, Bodin (1575) gives the example of the tax-exempt Swiss in France or the situation of foreigners in Florence, of whom the Florentines were so jealous that they asked the Duke to recognise them as foreigners. To attract foreigners, he recommends privileges for them (better laws compared to those for the natives).
Conversely, colonisation (later) raised the question of the loss of population from the metropoles to the colonies, and there are philosophers/economist who argue that it is better to let people go free (but the default position was that emigration should be discouraged).
Matt 04.12.25 at 11:07 am
The interest for attracting foreigners is not linked to colonialism but to the mercantilists’ idea that the population is a source of strength and wealth for a country/sovereign.
It is true that, sometimes (but not always) in this period, some countries falsely believed that population size was itself desirable and a source of power, but what moral we’re supposed to draw from this isn’t, I’ll admit, completely clear to me.
but the default position was that emigration should be discouraged)
This was obviously not the position of countries try to establish colonies, again, seen as a source of power, but once again, it’s not clear what it tells us now. It’s of some modest historical interest, but I don’t see that it’s of any normative interest at all, other than to remind us that in different times and in different places, different policies were followed, sometimes wisely and sometimes not, sometimes for good ends, and sometimes not.
LFC 04.12.25 at 2:36 pm
bruce wilder @40
I didn’t mean to suggest — and if you had read my comment w a minimum of interpretive charity you wd probably have realized this — that this is a case of a “better hammer” triumphing in “virtuous competition.” Container shipping enabled or accelerated the “offshoring” of relatively high-wage jobs to places w lower labor costs (in countries w export-led strategies as you say) and “financialization” was tied in w this (in ways that I’m prob not competent to explain clearly but you perhaps can). I don’t think this obviates the pt about Trump’s rhetoric.
wkw @50
I guess my impressions about PTAs are out-of-date.
@ Trader Joe – interesting story, can’t comment further rt now.
wckz 04.13.25 at 7:14 am
“A chance to screw things up more than he already has ”
You have got to be kidding. Look around you. The economy (political economy, especially) is in the toilet, unsustainable. So are the dominant media. Political discourse is a joke, with any inconvenient commentary censored, disappeared. Widespread cynicism, naturally. The “legitimate” elite seeks the solution in a global war. If anything, DOGE and the tariffs shakeups are too mild. Give him a fucking chance.
bekabot 04.13.25 at 1:29 pm
“Give him a fucking chance.”
No. He has never given us a chance and he never will. He has taken up arms against his own country. He has taken up arms against his own people. He has defiled the Capitol building, the home base of Congress, which the Constitution places at the heart of the American government. (He did that years ago, and you would not accept the warning.) He has destroyed decades’-worth of accumulated wealth in a few bare weeks. He shows no signs of stopping. This country is now so demoralized that we interpret his implied promise to implement the same program of ruination as he always planned to, only at a slower rate, as a light at the end of the tunnel. That is what he has brought us to. There is no potential for change in him: he is motivated only by vindictiveness and an instinct to wreck. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to him.
Why in the name of God Almighty would I give him a chance? Why would I give him the chance to do more, and worse, and dunk my country further down into the cesspool of failure and shame in which he wishes to immerse it? Why would I want to be complicit, even to the smallest degree, in the mass imposition of rottenness at every level over which he presides? For what purpose and to what end? How could I possibly benefit, and not only that — how could you benefit? He holds his followers in no less contempt that he holds everyone else.
For God’s sake, tell me that — I dare you. (If you can.)
Lee A. Arnold 04.13.25 at 2:21 pm
It looks like what Trump has done, is to give the world to China. The rest of the world will start trading more with each other and avoid the United States. Trump’s premises are that the U.S. is indispensable and can throw its weight around, because 1) the U.S. is the biggest consumer market and 2) the U.S. dollar + Treasury bond market are a safe haven for world investors (“we are the world’s banker,” boasted Trump). But #1 will soon be wrong (Europe is nearly as big a market, and China could be gargantuan if President Xi adjusts his policies) and #2 is challenged by the current fall in Treasuries and the dollar. If the rest of the world develops a stable coin linked to Europe-China stock market futures or trade futures (or somesuch), the dollar will be burnt toast. Already, old U.S. allies no longer expect it to honor its defense agreements, so the lure of U.S. military power is falling too. The U.S. will be left to hollow out, bereft of the advanced education and scientific achievement that kept it near the forefront of the world, while the Trump Administration curtails funding. The rest of the world will start trading with each other and avoid the U.S. except for cruel jokes. Even Wall St. won’t stick around. All of this is Trump’s doing, and it looks like it is irreversible.
The way to deal with its woes would have been for the U.S. to incrementally and quietly target its manufacturing and defense needs with careful policy (much as the Biden Administration was doing, only without the bureaucratic bottlenecks). But we are WAY past that, now.
There is NOT going to be a lot of new manufacturing jobs! Manufacturing jobs have been disappearing worldwide. They are even disappearing in China. Why doesn’t MAGA know this? Every new factory will be automated with robots and AI, or else it cannot be economically competitive. Robots work 24/7, they don’t get sick, they don’t take vacations. The U.S. factories will be owned by the same free-market elites who brought you globalization, and who make you pay too much for healthcare, and make you bail out their financial crashes.
About the only upside I see is that in the future, not very long from now, AI & robots are going to level the playing field worldwide by democratizing creative discovery and performing most of the labor. At that point everybody will be able to do just about everything. Then the overriding concerns will be ownership of land and raw materials, but AI is already transforming materials science and there may be plentiful substitutes for lots of different things. But we are not there yet.
nastywoman 04.13.25 at 2:50 pm
‘If anything, DOGE and the tariffs shakeups are too mild. Give him a fucking chance’.
You have got to be kidding. Look around you. Trump put the economy (political economy, especially) completely into the toilet, unsustainable. So are the dominant Right Wing media. Political has not only become a joke, with any hateful commentary dominating and never disappeared. Widespread cynicism, naturally – or as a commenter at the NYT wrote today:-
I turn 70 later this year.
One of my first memories was on 11/22/63.
I lived through the year 1968.
I experienced the election of 2000.
I was about 25 miles from Ground Zero on 9-11-2001.
I’ve seen much sadness and strife.
I’ve never been so full of despair as I am today.
J-D 04.13.25 at 9:53 pm
No. I am not kidding.
It is an indicator of poor judgement not to grasp that there is no reason for me to be kidding.
somebody who remembers the deportation of a guy who was just standing around not doing anything to an el salvadoran torture prison 04.14.25 at 12:12 am
“Stop crying! Why won’t you give him a chance?” screams the modest, reasonable centrist at the trans person kneeling over the corpse of their dead friend. “If you hadn’t ducked, he wouldn’t have even hit your friend! Now wait for him to reload and stand still this time! He deserves his chance doesn’t he?”
Alan White 04.14.25 at 5:11 am
What bekabot and nastywoman said. Anyone who thinks Trump is anything other than a stupider version of Hitler needs to be on meds.
Just me 04.14.25 at 3:51 pm
Tariffs by Trump et al are the stick of a Bully demanding … all they can get.
Any deal made with this bully will be broken.
Trump’s framing of tariffs as seeking fairness and redress is deceptive.
The Trump Base’s emotional engine of resentment – fairness is comparable to the faith systems of cargo cults and other millenarian movements.
bruce wilder 04.14.25 at 4:19 pm
LFC @ 60
I am sorry for having accidentally given offense. My comment was aimed squarely at criticizing the OP’s liberal fairy tale, which depends heavily on disappearing the role of global dollar financialization, which enabled China to pursue an industrial development strategy of export-driven growth and American industrial disinvestment.
As for rhetoric — Trump’s and other people’s — I do not think the political rhetoric necessary to motivate (or retard) policy change normally has much relation to a realistic analysis of the economic dynamics. So, for example, pounding the war drums and accusing the Chinese of “exchange-rate manipulation” may be inevitable political rhetoric, it doesn’t reflect an “objective” and balanced economic analysis.
My own view is that financialization around the dollar as global reserve currency created the American billionaire class and political dominance by billionaires is a huge political problem for the U.S., which is caught up in a self-destructive spiral of elite betrayal of national interests that has been on-going for 25 years.
Economically, the financial system built around the dollar is crumbling as the remnant foundations of U. S. economic power crumble. The 60-year cycle of disinvestment did not start with Trump, not even close. I look at the economic analysis of people like Steven Miran (in the Trump Administration) and Michael Pettis (author of Trade Wars are Class Wars and The Volatility Machine among other insightful work) and I think panic is setting in over the endgame for the global almighty dollar among the powers that be.
It is with that understanding that I feel great hostility to the narrative put forth by the OP, which went to great lengths, in my view, to disappear the economic and financial history that ties together American industrial disinvestment and the rapid rise of China.
Popular misunderstanding and ignorance of economics has always been a major factor driving politics in pathological directions, imho, and now, with Trump’s tariff shock, does not appear to me to be an exception. All the ignorance won’t be Trump’s. Not even close.
a. y. mous 04.15.25 at 6:19 am
Re: “Give him a chance!”
No. Not giving him a chance to chop the world into pieces. But, this shit has already happened, right? Why does this seem so boringly repetitive? I quote from right here on CT, a decade ago, where it was quoted, from about a century ago.
“But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the old English compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an improvement merely because it is complete. They call it utopian and revolutionary that anyone should really have his own way, or anything be really done, and done with. Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.” – https://crookedtimber.org/2011/01/01/chesterton-on-adaptive-preference-formation-and-the-perils-of-moderation/
nastywoman 04.15.25 at 9:16 am
and ultimately this (by Ed) HAS to be said:
There’s a growing suspicion that an entire class of Americans is being targeted for political, cultural, and perhaps economic extinction as part of Trump’s vengeance tour, as Franklin Foer discussed in The Atlantic:
The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age.
‘It’s no secret, of course, that there’s a long and terrible tradition in right-wing authoritarian politics of intense hostility to allegedly self-serving and disloyal “elites” that have to be demolished so that a given nation, race, or culture can thrive. In early 20th-century Europe, financial, academic, professional, and bureaucratic elements — which were thought to be disproportionately Jewish and “cosmopolitan” — were treated as the incorrigible enemy of truly productive capitalists, workers, and peasants alike. Thus they had to be crushed by any available means, legal or extralegal. And as Foer observes, there’s a less lethal but still distinctive U.S. conservative tradition of animosity toward the so-called PMC, often described as creating a government-dependent underclass in an unholy alliance of parasites feeding off the work of productive and patriotic Americans. That sort of thinking has gone viral in Trump 2.0:
Thehaymarketbomber 04.15.25 at 4:03 pm
Excellent discussion of the likely effects of Trump’s policies, and we are already seeing some of the results you predict. As a (sort of) admirer of the Man of Destiny, I would object to your label of these policies as “Bonapartism.” My understanding is that it was Bonaparte who pretty much invented the Deep State, the modern bureaucratic government manned by professional technocrats. I would argue that what Trump is doing more resembles France under Louis XVI, but “Louiseizism” is a bit awkward I suppose..
Fake Dave 04.16.25 at 12:09 am
This OP left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, but it didn’t seem worth engaging. Fortunately, I don’t have to as David Sirota has been gagging on the same kind of free trade absolutism coming from “progressives” lately and has some choice words in The Guardian today:
There’s other good stuff there — like pointing out how many of the same liberals were fine with Biden’s tarriffs. It’s not perfect by any means — I am not willing to hear any more appologizing for the failure to “sell” Bidenomics and, at this point, can only take so much of the warmed over Sandersisms Sirota is known for, but he has a valid point. A lot of people seem to be pretending there is no middle ground on tariffs and they can never be part of a sensible trade policy, but history says otherwise and a return to Clinton-era neoliberalism would be a tragedy for Democrats and working people. Given these comments appear divided between nostalgists pining for Pennsylvania hammer factories and scolds insisting no one wants those jobs anyway, his warning about who such polarization actually serves is worth considering.
bekabot 04.17.25 at 2:26 pm
“many of the same liberals were fine with Biden’s tariffs”
I’m one of them. I was fine with Biden’s tariffs. I was fine with them for three reasons:
I recognize tariffs as a tool in the buildup and maintenance of a manufacturing base, though they’re only one tool and though they have to be wielded with great care. They can’t do the job on their own.
Biden did more to bring back manufacturing than any other American President in my lifetime, which speaks to the parlousness of the overall situation, since I’m almost 63.
When Biden levied tariffs he did so with some intention of doing something other than wrecking the country. Trump is transparently into tariffs only for the sake of the damage they can cause, and they can cause a lot. That’s why he likes them.
Finally…tariffs are like any other policy or tool — they’re morally neutral, neither good nor bad. It’s what you do with them that’s the issue. Think of a hammer — you can use it to pound in a nail on the one hand or to destroy a neighbor’s property on the other. The hammer isn’t good in the first case and bad in the second — whether it’s hurtful or helpful depends on what you use it for.
People used to understand this kind of thing but the simplistic commercial morality which has taken over everywhere casts virtue as a talent for avoiding the bad things while picking the good things. (Don’t disappoint your family by buying the wrong laundry soap, etc. — smart-shopper ethics.) One of the results is that stupid taboos proliferate — when people notice that they can’t err as safely as they used to be able to, that the stakes are high and that they’re going to be held personally responsible for anything that goes wrong in their lives, all you have to do is show that fill-in-the-blank can sometimes lead to a bad outcome to get them to shun fill-in-the-blank forever, mostly because no other alternative occurs to them. They have to keep away from anything which might plausibly hurt them, because no one will come to their aid.
Miriam Ronzoni 04.25.25 at 11:47 am
Hi Eric, I am really sorry for coming so late to this, but have you encountered the work of the early career scholar Anton Jäger? He is trying to develop the idea that the current far right has more in common with Bonapartism than with fascism or right-wing populism (see for instance this interview, but there is more: https://www.e-ir.info/2023/01/19/interview-anton-jager/#google_vignette)
steven t johnson 04.25.25 at 3:38 pm
Miriam Ronzoni@75 Perhaps it’s needless to say, but of course I am entirely unfamiliar with the man’s work. Thus, it’s not even clear to me how this is substantively different from the OP, with its invocation of Constant and presidential mandates? Because it’s not mercantilism in the OP’s sense, where mercantilism is a malicious conspiracy against freedom, because reasons?
Not sure by the way what right-wing populism is, except that in American history, it was a band of politicians who upheld Jim Crow even as they supposedly pursued economic reforms like regulation of railroads, soft money, anti-trust, cheap credit, farm subsidies. But Jim Crow meant among other things, lynching. (It seems to me that the perspective is that some mythical we would all be small businessmen or farmers, all Chiefs and no Indians, if there was only fair trade.) It seems to me that right-wing populism is a root of fascism. Ignoring this seems misleading.
Bonaparte himself used universal suffrage to make himself Emperor and France the Second Empire. He fought Austria in Italy, Russia in Crimea, went adventuring in Mexico and conquering in Indochina, and lost a war with Prussia. Bonapartism had everything to do with imperialism, no? But after Napoleon, the advance of world economy along with the ruthless march of empires, divided up the world, turning imperialism into a zero-sum game so to speak. Hence WWI, hence the disorders of fascism in nations defeated, either totally or in their own aspirations for empire. Looking to Bonapartism as such for the model neglects this sea-change in world, I think.
Thehaymarketbomber@72 This is bewildering. The notion that government itself is the deep state, implies a picture of the world as a kind of flea market/farmers’ market/bazaar where independent vendors do their thing. The state however is essential even to those. If it’s an indoor flea market, the state is basically the roof and the power for the lights and the water and sewage lines for vendors etc. It’s the title to the land where the farmers’ put out their produce. It’s the guards who keep bandits from hijacking goods in the night, or simply bursting in to steal at gunpoint. It’s the weights and measures and trademarks and logos and most of all the currency used in every exchange.
The problem of how to ensure that the very visible, not at all “deep” state, actually carries out the will of the majority—-a controversial position denied, even by anarchists who don’t believe the majority can overrule a single person—hinges on questions of property. That means class, in the material sense. The genius of bourgeois democracy is that it arranges for suffrage and elections and so on but such issues are not even on the agenda.
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