Caveat lector: Discursive throat-clearing ahead; center lane temporarily closed.
Raspberry Patch readers will be interested to know, perhaps, that the raspberry canes here at Antebedlam, in beautiful Wheaton, Maryland, have sprouted out in all their early glory. Having spread beyond their bespoken grow-zone in recent years, I was able to dig out two-dozen rooted canes from the wrong side of our white picket fence to give to our youngest son for planting at his still-new Takoma Park home. He’s also got a lemon balm plug from us, with plenty of other perennial herb plugs—oregano, thyme, rosemary, sweet mint, chives—to come.
As luck would have it, youngest son and middle daughter, families in tow, have both decamped to houses not far from each other in Takoma Park and, remarkably, both properties feature the fringe benefit of having derelict chicken coups on them. I don’t mean that the chickens are derelict, I mean that the abandoned coups have suffered neglect summing to acute deferred maintenance. (What, anyway, is a derelict chicken, and how would we distinguish one from a normal “pet with benefits”?) Youngest son is first to get his coup back up to snuff, so we just the other day gave him four of our twelve chickens to populate it. This is progress, a real “Liberation Day,” for some chickens anyway.
* * *
So with mention of “Liberation Day,” let us now segue from throat-clearing to brass tacks.
Ordinarily not a whole lot would happen in just ten days to affect synthetic analyses like those TRP posts recently gone before this one. These are not ordinary days, however, as the quotidian behavior of the Trump 2.0 White House continues to resemble a dozen or two ping pong balls shot from a cannon into a squash court. Stuff is careening around every which way; you can’t tell where the balls will go next, let alone where they will come to rest.
So we were going to inflict all these tariffs, as discussed in our April 4 post, starting on Wednesday—even on some hapless penguins on Heard and McDonald Islands; now, China excepted, we and everyone else get a 90-day reprieve. But 90 days is longer than the Administration has existed so far, and by then, July 8, Lord knows what the situation will be. Donald Trump certainly doesn’t know, that’s for certain. Trying to follow the Trump 2.0 Administration’s “move fast and break things”-style of mayhem production is like trying to take a fine photo of a cute toddler who just refuses to sit still. Everything inclines to blur.
So amid the murk how to tell what or who warned Trump off the tariffs, aside from market behavior resembling a cascade of trillions of disappearing dollars he could see with his own eyes? As of Wednesday evening, no one knew in this process-bereft Administration, of which more anon. I doubted it was Peter Navarro or Howard Lutnick. Maybe Scott Bessent; but my best guess was Kevin Hassett, the head of the National Economic Council. Hassett has a Penn economics Ph.D. and studied under Alan Aurbach. One may agree or not with their views on economic policy issues, but they are serious men who know what a Hecksher-Ohlin graph looks like and how trade, bonds, and currencies like to dance with one another.
But that was just a guess until the New York Times at its best laid out the narrative yesterday morning in “From ‘Be Cool’ to ‘Getting Yippy’: Inside Trump’s Reversal on Tariffs.” As the author quartet of Tyler Pager, Magie Haberman, Ana Swanson, and Jonathan Swan revealed, what looked like a process cluster-fuck from the outside was in fact a process cluster-fuck on the inside, too. But I guessed right: Bessent and Hassett did the deed. Except that in the muddy sty of Donald Trump’s reflected hubris not even competent people can escape the filth. Hassett’s lame attempt to put a coherent face on the President’s miasma of misunderstanding has turned him overnight into a spin whore—a sad sight to see. Stephen Miller’s praise for the President’s supposed tactical four-dimensional chess genius was even more ridiculous: He looked like a man rapt with delight at the brilliant beauty of the evening flames without hinting that they were coming from his own house rapidly burning to the ground.
The days leading up to April 3 “Liberation Day” and proceeding until Trump pushed the pause button on April 9 may well go down in history as the Ten Days that will live in Infamy, except unlike the case of December 7, 1941, this time we have attacked ourselves, or at least invited it. For while Trump and Company were screwing the domestic and global economic pooches the Chinese, whose leaders are not stupid, ignorant, and insane, and who have a decision process that is smooth, practiced, and professional from judgment to implementation to monitoring, were not sitting on their duffs wondering aimlessly what to do. They (and doubtless some others) were dumping large chunks of their huge accumulated stash of U.S. Treasury notes. This, affirms the NYT article, is what really got Trump’s attention, not so much the stock market dive. That dumping caused bond interest rates to soar, because we need others’ money to pay bondholders cashing in their notes—but that only worsens the debt burden. It is as though the Treasury ends up shorting itself seriatim, and this of course brings huge unwelcome pressure against the dollar. It is also very much unfun for U.S. banks and corporations who are forever triaging and rolling over their own debts.
It’s not clear when it dawned on Trump that the bond market dislocation was not a result of random bad market weather, but reflected a studied and pointed Chinese reaction to his challenge. But when he finally remembered the long-hanging Chinese Sword of Damocles in the form of its bond holdings, he probably realized—or Dr. Hassett explained to him—that at least for several months looking forward the Chinese would hold escalation dominance in any trade war he decided to start. The ten days between the beginning of April and Wednesday early afternoon have resembled, in process terms, a soccer game between a team of 8-year olds all running after the ball, heedless of their assigned positions on the field or even the direction of their own goal—the ball being Trump’s bouncing, rolling brain—and Manchester United. Guess who’s going to score first, and second, and third……?
The NYT article quoted Trump as boasting as recently as Tuesday afternoon, “I know what I’m doing.” That deserves a ranking right up there along with “the cheque is in the mail,” “you won’t get pregnant,” and “I won’t __ in your mouth.” Given Trump’s bottomless but completely misplaced self-confidence, we are left with an interior Administration scene that less resembles the sort-of-proverbial one-eyed leading the blinded and more the Pied Piped of Hamlin inadvertently drowning the villagers instead of the rats.
Left unasked and so unanswered in all this is the question: Is there such a thing as presidential-assisted economic suicide? Because until Wednesday at about 1:15 pm that’s what we were seeing play out before us in terms of economic policy. Even still the shockwaves of our erratic behavior is driving confidence and investment away from us and toward China, as well as other climes. Trump has already bailed out the Russians; is he now set on doing the same for the economically foundering, doldrum-dwelling Chinese?
* * *
The tariff-go-round business is not the only volte face of note in the past few days. In mid-February, so subjectively eons ago already, President Trump said: “There’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on [the] military. There’s no reason for . . . spending $400 billion—China is going to be at $400 billion. I’m going to say we can settle this, we can spend this on other things.” Soon thereafter, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth memoed the Service chiefs to cut their budget requests, and to expect and plan for 8 percent per year cuts for each of the next four years. But then on Monday, after referring vaguely to “bad stuff” happening “out there,” Trump said: “We’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military. $1 trillion, and nobody’s seen anything like it.”
Of course, Trump meant “approving a budget request,” not “approving a budget,” which only Congress can do between its separate authorization and appropriations functions. Withal, under current circumstances, with Congress persuasively imitating the metabolism of a drunk sleeping off a bender, one can perhaps excuse the President for presuming congressional approval of whatever he wants.
Trump doesn’t recognize even the possibility of his erring on the defense portfolio, no matter what he decides. Fool that he is, he has a foolproof method for success, illustrated by the fact that he still thinks he “saved the military” during his first term. What Trump actually did, pushed by Congress at the time, was to sanction DoD budget increases of 3 percent in the first two years, but approve flat budgets in the next two. The sum of it was to boost the readiness accounts a smidgen, but otherwise…..nothing. You see the same delusional narcissistic signs in the language just quoted: He’s “proud to say” and “no one’s ever seen anything like it”—just like those huge Inauguration crowds that never were, and so on and on ad nauseam.
The man is a hubristic fabulist “like no one has ever seen,” that’s the truth of the matter, and no one has put it better than John Bolton did on April 7 amid the Ten Days of Infamy:
Trump listens primarily to himself, not to others. He creates his own world, this time an imaginary trade world, and then lives in it. Trump isn’t lying so much as he is ruling a parallel universe, like a boy’s tree house, where numbers mean what he says they mean. He doesn’t react well when the real world’s numbers don’t match: after all, who’s in charge here?[1]
The real question here, of course, is why the presidential brain caroms? Why the bounce from $400 billion to $1 trillion, and why the critical-necessary-very-important tariffs because we need to reverse the deterioration of manufacturing in the United States to, oh, let’s negotiate tariffs away, to, well, I dunno, …., after 90 days we’ll revisit, OK? The markets evidently thought this stumbling-around-dizzy display meant that, yes, just as we thought and hoped all along, the whole thing was just a bargaining ploy and the President doesn’t really intend to tank the global economy and destroy the status of the U.S. dollar. Right: People with a lot of money to venture can still be very stupid, herd-like creatures who see what they want to see whether it’s really there or not. Maybe that’s what Keynes’s “animal spirits” really means?
On the other hand, some think the sudden go-and-stop tariff routine signaled an insider-trading scheme from which Trump and his cronies made tens of millions of dollars overnight. Maybe: Sometimes I think that Trump positively needs to do something illegal at least once every 48 hours or he’ll begin clacking his teeth like a dog on Adderall. But I am skeptical.
As to the DoD budget boomerang, well, here too it would be nice to know who got to Trump between mid-February and Monday of this week, to go from a determination to cut and cut and cut and cut over four fiscal years to a decision to massively increase instead. No NYT article yet tells us how that happened. These are no small peanuts we’re talking about: The delta between $400 billion and $1 trillion for FY 2026 is a decent shitload of money: $600 billion is a bit more than 77 percent of the entire FY2025 DoD budget.
Now how does anyone at the Pentagon plan anything when budget numbers are continually passed before a funhouse mirror? And now that Hegseth has foolishly destroyed the Office of Net Assessment, where my late friend Andy Marshall presided for a great many years, how will anyone henceforth plan intelligently anyway in that huge and fissiparously busy building?
As we have already limned, and as my friend Drew Thompson, a former DoD Desk Officer for China, has spelled out brilliantly, the early Trump 2.0 Administration is a patchwork of personalities and policy preferences that rarely harmonize, at least not yet.[2] When it comes to China/Asia-Pacific, Thompson describes three discernible schools of thought vying for prominence.
First we have the Administration’s anarcho-libertarian types who are essentially anti-nationalist, anti-statist, anti-militarist, anti-alliances, and very anti-U.S.-provision-of-global-common-security goods….which, like a bunch of naturally selfish teenagers who have yet to figure out how win-win relationships work, they denigratingly call “being the world’s policemen” because they are too ignorant of history to know any better. MAGA sub-elites who subscribe to this view, whom I call MAGArons (short for MAGA morons) nod vigorously when Fox News’s deputy assistant shamans tell them, as they have done daily for years, that this is why everyone, all the foreigners, are “laughing at us” for letting scammers free-ride and take advantage because we’re too stupid and nice and believe a lot of what the Vice-President recently referred to as “moralistic garbage.” They do not want us to defend Taiwan. They think it unwise for any reason to fight a war in China’s granted “sphere of influence” in the desired amoral balance-of-power world. They probably cannot imagine what DoD would even do with a $1 trillion budget. They are probably surprised and perplexed by the President’s volte face. They probably thought they had fixed this back in February.
Second are the China-hawk Asianists who would defend Taiwan (but not necessarily because it is a democracy), and support U.S. Asian allies on geopolitical grounds. Some of these folks, like Bridge Colby, have been waiting years to take over from Democratic China hawks like Kurt Campbell and, at long last, do this right. They are doubtless salivating over what the USG can do with a $1 trillion defense budget. Some of them may know how this shift happened, but even those who don’t are not wont to look a gift horse in the mouth. Bring on the bucks, and by all means let us in on planning the best ways to spend them.
Third are the moneymen types who see the China challenge as mainly economic and technological, not geopolitical. These folks have been in a minority position, and many are distributed in the IC and in offices other than DoD. They would probably, most of them, have different ideas than the China-hawk Asianists about how best to spend $1 trillion. But with Tulsi Gabbard as DNI, and with Trump firing fine people like General Timothy Haugh from his job as NSA and Cyber Command chief, along with several other more or less competent NSC detailees, because Laura Loonytoons, channeling Torquemada, told him to, they seemed unlikely to have an influential champion “in the room” (see below)—until the tariff debacle unexpectedly raised the profile of their brief.
The same kind of breakdown as regards China and the Asia-Pacific also applies to Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, and so on. Each region and functional policy area, such as trade, has its own semi-random mix of claimants on policy focus and direction. But all are the same in that all these basic decisions presume the sound functioning of the Interagency because beyond DoD these kinds of macro-policy judgments per force also involve State, Treasury, Commerce, and other offices as well, as specific issue areas may require.
* * *
This is not an incidental remark, as the title given to this essay hopefully has suggested. In a complex policymaking setup with so many moving parts process often presupposes both the direction and nature of decisions, and the potential coherence of their implementation. Those who become process experts from experience and native common managerial sense have often become indispensable to Presidents and Departmental Secretaries. A prime example is Robert M. Kimmit, whose government career spanned the period from 1976 to 2021.
A lawyer by training, Kimmit served in the military, at the NSC, in the State and Treasury Departments, and more. He held some senior positions as his career proceeded, but his forte all along was knowing how the all the pieces of a massively complex government apparatus fit together, and how to make them work together when that was possible. It isn’t always possible, which was and remains something also worth knowing for, as is infamously the case in New England, there are times when you really just can’t get there from here.
So to the rub: What happens when an Administration is manned by top officials virtually none of whom have any prior experience of that process, and who, initially at least, don’t really even understand what lacking that experience means? It’s a variation of the Dunning-Kruger effect we have here before us: These people are so ignorant of effective process that they don’t even realize how ignorant they are. At least not yet.
So consider: President Trump as master governmental manager? Despite his first-term experience he still has almost no idea how the Executive Branch, let alone the whole government, actually works. For purposes of policy development, implementation, and monitoring, he couldn’t manage his way out of the back of a 7-Eleven. That’s not the only reason his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, called Trump a “fucking moron,” but it was one of them.
Vice-President Vance? A one-term junior Senator with modest, low-ranking military experience, and with zero prior Executive Branch experience.
What about Mike Waltz, the NSA, the director of the place whose core function is managing the foreign/national-security policy process? He served with honor in the military—as an Army Special Forces Colonel—and in the Bush 43 Administration as a defense policy director in the Pentagon and as counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. So he had some Executive Branch experience before becoming a three-term congressman from Florida. Yet Waltz is the one who decided to use the Signal app to base high-level communications in the Administration. And look what he has to work with outside the White House.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio? No prior Executive Branch experience. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau? A lawyer who was a political appointee Ambassador to Mexico in Trump’s first term; otherwise no Executive Branch experience. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth? None. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent? None. DNI Tulsi Gabbard? Military service, yes, but Executive Branch or any prior IC experience? Absolutely none. CIA Director John Ratcliffe? He served as DNI after Dan Coats in 2020-21 for less than eight months, otherwise nothing. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s mostly witless diplomatic envoy? Less than zero, and he has showed it especially in trying to deal with the Russians. We could go on for quite a ways as we descend the Schedule C list, but only those in need of tedium therapy would enjoy it since the answer is pretty much the same again and again and again: none.
With a hubristic and encyclopedically ignorant President like Donald Trump supposedly running the show, a man who somehow manages to revolve around only himself—of course that must be dizzying—and with a 40-year old Vice-President like Vance who has no idea how the upper echelons of the U.S. Government work, and with a 51-year old NSA like Waltz who is no Bob Kimmit, what we have, so far at least, is a semi-randomized non-process for policymaking that is not only capable of producing wild swings of policy body language—as the tariffs and DoD budget cases illustrate—but is also capable of ignoring things that need to be done even while perseverating on marginalia, like expunging Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service website, that just doesn’t matter notwithstanding anyone’s view of the issue.
My friend and mentor, the late Harvey Sicherman, used to refer to what he called the monkey-in-the-machine-room phenomenon. What he meant was that on any given hoary policy issue, domestic as well as foreign, the U.S. government is sufficiently institutionalized that intelligent, educated, and experienced people carry on day by day implementing and monitoring given policy domains, and by so doing gain a fifth sense, so to speak, of the nuances and possibilities in a given area. The drawback of professional government management is that it is generally not capable of boldness or rapid adjustment to the unexpected. That is what leadership is for. The benefit of it resides in its allergy to the impetuous and its understanding that it is much harder to build something fine and functional than it is to wreck it. So when a President who is elected mainly to deal with domestic challenges, say, or an ambitious Cabinet Secretary perhaps, decides on a given morning for whatever reason that he or she knows better than the phalanx of professionals minding the shop, and reaches down into the shadowy box of foreign policy reality and then says or does something that floods or ignites a fire in the machine room, all hell is liable to break loose.
This has happened repeatedly over the years in a diverse array of times and places: think annexation of the Philippines, Iran-Contra, the Iraq War, regime change in Libya….hey, make your own damned list. It wants to give me a déjà vécu headache “having to pay to not go through all these things twice,” as some folksinger once said.
It happens in part because the kind of personality who is well suited to keep the institutional memory of a given policy area to hand, who is capable of deep expertise, and who knows, Kimmit-like, how to move the Interagency mountain to do what is necessary if not also what is constructive, is not the kind of personality who typically ends up “in the room” where key decisions are made. A lot of in-the-room people are used to being the smartest person in a given room, and they are often used to making quick flash-on-it decisions upon which their confidence far exceeds what reality eventually will bear. Sometimes yes, there is benign overlap—Henry Kissinger comes to mind, and I would aver Brent Scowcroft and Harold Brown among some others, as well. But more often there is not.
Now, keeping all that in mind, what will likely happen in a situation like the one we see today where senior officials disdain civil service and foreign service professionals, and where there is not one or two potential machine-room monkeys but a baker’s dozen of them, all of whom think they know better what to do and how to do it than those who’ve been working in the policy trenches for decades? If I may be so bold, at least two generic phenomena may be expected to singe our souls in due course, and of course we’ve already got burn marks to heal from the tariffs episode.
First, the more or less usual natural link between policy formulation and implementation will barely exist, or exist not at all. Policymaking is not like a votive act in a church. Sometimes, yes, the mere saying of it is the doing of it, like the destruction of NATO back in February at the hands of Hegseth, Vance, and Trump. But votive foreign policy pronouncements only work when the point is to burn down the shithouse. To install plumbing you need practiced connectivity between naked volition and concerted, clothed action officers. In other words, decision-makers need other people who understand what senior officials want to do, who are willing to put shoulder to wheel with morale at least two inches above the floorboards, and who actually know how to do it. Combinations like that will perhaps not come so easily in this Administration, with this President.
Second, a processless decision non-system will be prone, as we have already seen this week, to sudden reversals, shortcuts that lead nowhere, detours that never end, and promises rarely if ever kept. That produces bad blood and fraught personalized workarounds within a decision elite, unpredictability and non-committal behavior outside of it in lower government echelons and beyond. If the intentions of an Administration are evil or stupid, this kind of incoherence may work as a form of damage limitation. If nothing much major can get done then bad and stupid major things won’t get done either. But unpredictability is recursively unpredictable: frustrated rogue extrusions from a constipated or diarrheic decision system can be dangerous and irresponsible, particularly so when a malignant narcissist has the last word and as C-in-C can give orders—now with no JAGs to determine what may or ma not be illegal orders—that can be expansively dangerous.
Why even allude to such a dark scenario? Because one plausible interpretation of the first few months of the second Trump Administration paints a very dark, Rieffian deathworks picture of what it is actually about.[3]
Perhaps it is not just about abolishing wokeness and DEI, not just about elevating anti-pluralism and several forms of bigotry on a faux-nostalgic pedestal, and certainly not about making the Federal government more efficient. It is, argues Timothy Burke, a howl of irrational, purpose-free anti-humiliation nihilism. Elaborating the theme of a “shithole country” turned inward, Burke concludes, his choice of words suitably kinetic:
Telling the people with authority in Washington right now that they’re destroying something valuable, that they’re harming even their own prospects for sustainable corruption, doesn’t inhibit them at all. They know that. It’s the point! . . . . [T]hey’re setting out to make life unstable, poorer, and radioactively erupting with untruth. They do this with no master plan of a better world on the other side. They are going to level everything as an object lesson to us all. The plan here is the same plan that an angry toddler has when they start throwing all their toys out the window. It is about vast and unmotivated anger that has no goal besides itself.
This is not a revolution, it is a negation. It is a colossal expulsion of the entire contents of a body politic. This is not just a bowel movement expelling what the body no longer needs, it is an evacuation of everything that has kept the body alive up to this point. They are digging a shithole so deep that there will be literally no way to climb back out again. They want us all to be down there in the dark as a punishment for the temerity of having been who we have been.[4]
Burke may be closer to truth than any conventional political analysis can be these days. He is describing, whether he realizes it or not, not just an inside-the-inner-sanctum explosion of Ortega y Gassett’s “reason of unreason,” but also a collective act of megalothymia led by the head pathological archetype of them all: Donald Trump.
What Burke may also not see is a place possibly even darker than his “down there in the dark.” Consider that a malignant narcissist like Trump could reason as he enters the portal of his own mortality that if he cannot live forever, no one will get to live longer than he does. If he is President when this thought occurs, he might be capable of an act of spite so enormous as to almost defy imagination. Not to make a facetious argument but only a comparative hypothetical one, but if Adolph Hitler had had to hand in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1944 a “football” connected to launch codes for say, oh, 3,748 nuclear warheads, who is sure he wouldn’t have used it?
This fear may be overwrought, true. Some argue that just as the entire Trump phenomenon comes down to the mimicry of a reality-TV show, so the entire MAGA movement is little more than a virtual affinity group. “For a very few people, the first Trump term was a live-action role-playing game; for everyone else, it was a YouTube channel,” wrote Noah Smith. And now?
The MAGA movement, you see, is an internet thing. It’s. . . a bunch of deracinated, atomized individuals, thinly connected across vast distances by the notional bonds of ideology and identity. There is nothing in it of family, community, or rootedness to a place. It’s a digital consumption good. It’s a subreddit. It is a fandom.[5]
Well maybe so; but then again maybe not. In any event, someone—someone not in government right now, perhaps—should be monitoring the behavior of those 1,600 J6 felons who were set loose on January 21, 2025.
* * *
The recent torrential outpouring of analysis about tariffs and related economic policy matters has forced me finally to boil down some notions that have been flirting with me like a satyr in my peripheral mind-vision for many months, even years. Now I have found a way, amid the great mass of rocking, rolling, raving, and occasional seriously thoughtful analyses I’ve encountered lately, to condense the essence into a single beefy sentence. Here it is: We, the United States, can remain “out there” in the world of global “free trade” and, whatever its limits and inequities may be, wax objectively richer from it, but also be inherently less equal internally given the Net Effect’s pro-gigantism misanthropies that are sustained and aided by that globalist arrangement; or we can be “in here” focused on our own manufactures and domestic markets and be objectively less rich but more equal, and also live more deliberately at human-scale if we play our cards wisely and morally.
As I see it, our choice is at base pretty stark; the tradeoffs are real and any split-the-difference wiggling room to both have and eat cake is modest. Being the kind of crunchy romantic quality-over-quantity person I am, I lean to the latter choice. That basic direction, it seems to me, is more conducive to long-term social comity and stability than our present orientation extrapolated out into the dimly lit future. If as many suspect the next several years, even decades, of continuing rapid technological change will stress social bonds in every technologically advanced society, we would be wise to give ourselves the best chance to withstand the headwinds of that stressing.
So I am not opposed to what seems, sometimes at least, the basic view of the Trump 2.0 Administration on this point. I have commented favorable already in his space on a remark made by the Treasury Secretary early last month to the Economics Club of New York, and I’ll here repeat the remark:
Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream. The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security. For too long, the designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this.
Nor do I disparage the implications for organized labor, which not for no reason has all but abandoned the Democrats and flocked to the MAGA banner this past November 5. More manufacturing within the United States, if it is accompanied by a fair deal for organized trade labor, would promise over time to reduce inequality and calm status competitions compared to the current track the American economy is on.
That said, sledgehammer style, slap-your-face tariffs will not of themselves bring back old-tech manufacturing to the United States or help to stimulate new high-tech forms. And to the extent they might do so even to a limited degree, it will take years to achieve that.
That being the case, it makes sense to plan a transition that is both viable and sustainable. That, in my view, will require cultural changes, which do not happen overnight, as well as economic policy adjustments. It will, for example, require a cultural renaissance of craft and taste. Not only will many more Americans need to better understand and willingly accept that paying more for many items so that American workers can earn a living wage, as befits the dignity of labor, is the right thing to do, but they will also need to learn that quality craft matters more, and is worth more to the spirit of maker and buyer alike, than mountains of mass-produced plastic junk.
Enhanced social solidarity in America and a more elevated vision of quality of life can, and actually must, go hand in hand. A nation with a lot of wealthy people is not the same as a social order conducive to human flourishing, as my friend Brink Lindsay has been at pains to point out now for years.[6]
Can American consumers up their game? Can they climb out of the material-festishist sewer into which so many have fallen? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that a nation of mindless hoarders is an ugly thing based on an ugly distortion of what a genuinely good life can be.
The historically fluent may recognize here some resemblance in more than a few casual ways between my view and of the old Whig Party’s “American System.” Obviously, what Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were dealing with before the Industrial Revolution really hit its stride in a still expanding American domain fits awkwardly in today's circumstances. Our circumstances today are different, too, from those of William McKinley's time—McKinley being apparently Trump’s favorite but wildly misunderstood President. As noted in TRP’s April 4 post, McKinley’s 44-years-later updating of the Whig “American System” required massive immigration in order to build an industrial manufacturing proletariat. And yes, when you get right down to it, that Whig invention was indeed McKinley’s starting point, as well it would have been since post-Civil War Republicans were on most broad points a continuation of the Northern Whigs after both Clay and Webster died in 1852.
Yes, circumstances today differ significantly from those of the second half of the 19th century. But that does not mean we cannot devise ways, which probably would include a new but carefully crafted tariff regime, to change what is in my view an unsustainable status quo. We are at about 7.5% of the labor force in manufacturing now, linked to a savings rate of only about 0.6%—compared to about 30% and 20% forty and some years ago. That, in my view, is a formula for future economic and social decline.
When Michigan Governor Gretchen Witmer said recently that she agreed with the Trump Administration that America needs to make more things here at home, she was excoriated by many of her fellow Democrats for bending too far toward the MAGA madness. Maybe what she said or how she said it lacked political astuteness, but she was nevertheless right, and it is no sin a priori to speak one’s mind. Heaven knows more politicians should be encouraged to do so, instead of studying polls and stapling their tongues to them. Maybe Witmer’s critics should have assessed her views more carefully before criticizing her tactics—as if they, most of them, have been resounding political successes lately.
The new American System must be about making not just any things, but about making beautiful and useful things, about spirit-infused manufacturing in other words; we as a nation cannot go on being in thrall to stuck-up meritocratic symbol manipulators forever and expect to maintain the level of affluence we have enjoyed for now a number of generations. If we want to build a better America for future generations, we’ll need to shift not all the way, but some distance, from a Bretton Woods/GATT/WTO evolved mindset to a New-Whig American System mindset, even knowing that it will probably take an entire generation to accomplish a better balance between the homespun and the traded. The postwar formula did good work, for America and for the world, but nothing lasts forever; as Isaiah Berlin taught, collisions happen, things change, and we must change with them or sink into obsolescence. Anyway, we need time for the cultural maturation mooted above to take place. Yes, I do have an idea or two for how to make that happen…..don’t touch that dial.[7]
The Trump 2.0 Administration’s roadmap—insofar as that map is legible—to what might be thought a new American System is too thin, too vague, too untextured, too impatient, too angry, and above all too dismissive of the necessary social solidarity that is part of the reason for traveling such a road in the first place. Truth to tell, Trump doesn’t give a downed double-cheeseburger fart about the working class Joes and Janes he professes to care about. A real and sustainable transition requires a process—yes, a process assiduously marrying government and civil society—carefully devised and patiently pursued for the rest of this decade and well into the next. The Trump 2.0 Administration’s approach, though aimed in vaguely the right general direction, is a road to perdition: wrong map, wrong vehicle, and very much the wrong driver.
[1] Bolton, “I worked for Donald Trump. This is the key to understanding him,” Telegraph, April 7, 2025.
[2] Drew Thompson, “Is the Pivot to Asia Finally Happening?” RSIS Commentary, March 18, 2025.
[3] The reference here, as long-time TRP readers know from the Age of Spectacle manuscript, is to Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (University of Virginia Press, 2006).
[4] Burke, “The News: A Shithole Recipe,” Eight by Seven (Substack), February 22, 2025.
[5] Smith, “This thing will fail,” Noahpinion, March 9, 2025. Martin Gurri took a similarly blasé attitude based on a similar analysis in his The Revolt of the Public (Stripe Press, 2018). One wonders if he still thinks that stifled male thymos-craving is a mere thing.
[6] Lindsay’s book, The Permanent Problem, is forthcoming soon from Oxford University Press.
[7] For one hint, take a look at my “A New Pioneer Act,” National Affairs (Winter 2017).