Here We Go...
Trump's Tariffs Terrify Thousands and Thousands, or, welp!
This afternoon, Trump announced his long-promised tariffs in a televised event held at the White House rose garden. Until the last couple of weeks, The Tariffs were an abstraction bouncing around the collective MAGA hivemind, floated by Trump and his moron leeches as well as extremely online crypto maniacs who have given themselves brain poisoning watching their corner of the market behave erratically since 2020. Trump, ever the showman, had been hyping up the announcement like a WWE match or Big Fight on pay-per-view—advertising a "Liberation Day”—which of course sounds all well and good if you’re stupid. As with everything this administration does, you’d drive yourself insane trying to memorize the actual numbers they propose which might be talked down tomorrow morning after the market opens, or tripled if Trump sees someone on Fox expressing doubt about the plan. So in lieu of details, which you can find elsewhere, I want to talk about what I think might be happening here at the level of ideology and political legitimacy.
If you are reading this blog, you know that Americans in general have very little idea about how the economy works; this is due in part to the norms of our education system and the dominant ideology of consumer capitalism that wants first and foremost to inject a business ontology with defined roles onto individuals as if they are in a theatrical production called The Economy. As the current iteration of the GOP continues to entrench itself through our political institutions, many commentators have noted the extent to which stupidity reverberates in every corner of their coalition. RFK, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is two steps away from hawking colloidal silver as a cancer treatment. We spent all of last week freaking out because it turns out the guys actually in charge of doing Army stuff plan it all on their personal phones using a texting app. And voters, analysts like to remind us, only seem to care about the price of eggs without understanding the reasons why and how the numbers on the grocery store price tag go up or down at any given moment.
But it seems to me that underneath the terrified response to the tariffs is not so much that the White House lacks knowledge but rather that we have an imbalance between our analysis of the right that places too much focus on “Evil or Stupid?” I’ve long been of the opinion that balancing this scale is not a zero sum game, that one can be Stupidly Evil; but I do think, as Nathan Tankus noted on Bluesky, that we discount the extent to which everything that pretty much anyone in power is doing at the moment (let alone the GOP) is entirely seat-of-the-pants, on the fly stuff. That’s because what’s really happening right now is a legitimacy crisis: capitalism in its neoliberal form long exhausted itself as a productive project for producing value with a general buy-in from both workers and owners. This happened in the 1960s and 1970s (albeit with stronger alternative ideological systems vying for ascendancy), and it’s happening again.
I do tend to follow Althusser in viewing ideology as a transhistorical and necessary component to the stability of any society—that ideology has no history, that there are only ideologies. What is happening right now is the first real serious appearance of a post-neoliberal project out of the discursive realm and into the Real. It has been brewing since the mid-2010s and has been intensifying in more violent articulations with the right’s use of the bipartisan state of exception to deport at will. But capital has, for the most part, been in the driver’s seat as a collectively networked entity. I think what we are seeing now is less some general sense of stupidity and more the attempt to thingify what had heretofore been merely ideas into the concrete.
As I wrote back in November following Trump’s second victory,
Some Marxists and the Anti-Imperialist Umbrella have a tendency to let their analysis slip into these simple abstractions. Oh they want you to do this. Capital wants this, or Empire does that, while the idealized countervailing forces range from Putin to Assad or just a local co-op serving fair trade coffee. But have any of them ever read what The Wall Street Journal says about Elon Musk? The WSJ fucking hates Elon Musk! They ran hard with the stuff about his ties to Putin and reported exclusively on his shaky finances before the election. Capital may be “mutely compelled” to accumulate but did we all forget that capitalists are in competition with other capitalists?!?!!?!?! Elon Musk and Trump have both made Reddit or Truth Social-brained overtures to the Ron Paul style idea of getting rid of the Federal Reserve altogether. Do you think that Jeff Bezos—who invited Fed Chair Jerome Powell to a party in 2020 with Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—wants the dollar to be pegged to crypto?
I’m not in the game of making predictions and I certainly don’t have the adequate financial expertise to even make educated guesses as to how this or that wing of capital will respond. What I do know is that within capital itself, what some tend to call neoliberalism in the form of Hayekian economic policy still tends to run the show. It’s a bitter irony that this project, so built off an insight that no single actor can access enough knowledge about an economic system on their own, that it is the network of buyers and sellers and all the other hands in the pile that together aggregate into the “knowledge” itself which can only be measured, is now caught unawares as the dumbest president in the history of the country says fuck you I’m the boss.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how what I’m starting to call Stable Capital responds to this event. Maybe they will shake some sense into the White House after the market tanks tomorrow, or maybe they’ll roll up their sleeves and get to work figuring out how to navigate a new reality as an opportunity to creatively destroy competitors. Maybe this was the first shot in what will move from a trade war to a real war. I am not the person to be reading for advice on any of that, but I do know enough to say that there is a contradiction unfolding: everyone is “stupid” in the face of these tariffs because nobody thought they would actually do it. But they just did.
On the one hand, it seems clear that Silicon Valley capital has been trying to nudge up to Trump here in the early days of his administration, perhaps knowing full well the man runs on nothing other than narcissistic ressentiment. Maybe Stable Capital will follow suit and use the tariffs to negotiate certain conditions with the White House in exchange for political donations, ensuring a streamlined power structure in the kind of coup the liberals have been warning about. Or maybe not! So without trying to guess who which CEO is secretly going Joker mode behind the scenes or what market will try and take advantage of the situation, I think it’s fair enough to say that today was a capital-H Historical Event in the historical trajectory of political and economic ideology and its articulation within the political institutions in the United States. Everyone is calling this stupid because of what it’s going to do to Any Existing Business let alone your average consumer (literally anywhere in the world), but perhaps that Evil/Stupid scale isn’t so helpful in this case. With these tariffs now real, the right is beginning to push towards, if not a coherently articulated new political philosophy, simply something else. So forget the evil/stupid thing. History is open!
For evidence of this, one could point to the fact that Trump was going to announce these tariffs before the market closed, but they decided to delay them until afterwards. This tells me there’s either a little less stupidity going on here or that there are active contradictions within the White House itself. Here’s another fascinating contradiction: for the past few decades, America’s dominant bipartisan political economic ideology has been to protect and manage the accumulated capital that petty booj homeowners have. These guys are the ones who buy cars and refinance their mortgages to refinish their bathrooms; both parties chase these voters as Real Americans because they vote for their interests and have their interests addressed as the only real political action that can ever happen in this country. Well all these people, chief amongst them Gen Xers and Boomers heading to retirement, newly retired, or nearing the end of their lives living off their stocks, are about to have everything go up in smoke. Do you understand how different this is than even 2008? That was a contradiction that emerged out of a hairbrained scheme for capital to juice the economy and get more and more people into the homeowning business so it could keep the cycle of accumulation going. This is a declaration that there’s a new boss in town, and you might even be able to say it’s the first policy either political party has devised in at least my lifetime aimed towards not only my generation but future generations to come. This is a step towards a new economic contract, one that has a terrifying and completely idiotic vision of the world order. Of course it’s disastrous, but is it really stupid?
Moving forward, I think we need to take seriously the idea that the old rules no longer apply and that what we are actually seeing is a fight over emergent forms of political ideology in the concrete. Part of the reason the Bernie movement failed when it did is because liberalism still had enough legitimacy through the existing political and electoral institutions that prop up our government. That is increasingly no longer the case, and I think we need to act accordingly.
Sixteen years ago, during the peak moments of the financial crisis, finance ghoul Rick Santelli famously freaked out on CNBC from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange after hearing about Obama’s plan to bail out Fannie and Freddie, demanding a new Tea Party in response. We all know what happened after this. Today we stand in the wreckage of this rant, living in a world it helped usher into being. But people today are just as freaked out as they were then, probably even more, and even if they voted for Trump, they didn’t want this to happen. How will the left respond? I think we should take a little time to gloat myself, just because I spend too much time online, but I also think we should get to work and figure out how to mobilize the confusion and fear that is currently radiating out from the black hole at the core of the economy before new dogmas start to crystallize from the right wing media apparatus and Dumb Guy podcasts.
Mark Fisher once famously misquoted Jameson about the whole imagining an alternative to capitalism thing, and while it wasn’t exactly what he meant, I think it came to stand in his wider body of work as a desire just for something else to happen. Something else may have just happened. What are we gonna do about it?