Yves here. albrt below discusses how to test whether Trump and Vance are in the process of implementing a political realignment, or whether his pro-working class talk will amount to empty promises. albrt focuses on concrete material benefits as the measurement standard and discusses whether particular Trump initiatives, such as immigration, are likely to deliver.
By albrt. Originally published at his website
I said back in November there are reasons to believe that Trump might represent the end stage of a historic political realignment. That post did not attempt to define the nature or the likely course of the realignment, which leads to today’s hypothesis and counter-hypothesis: Trump and Vance could either consolidate power by improving the alignment of the Republican party with the working class, or they could further entrench the current model of a DC uniparty that works for the oligarchs, with two superficially warring factions carrying on a phony fight to the death over issues the oligarchs don’t care about. As usual, it has taken me a long time to write the post.
The original impetus came from this lovely chart that was posted on Xitter right after the election. I can’t vouch for the method or the sources, but the chart gives a very nice sense of twirling toward freedom, or circling the drain, or whatever it is the United States is doing as a country.
Since November, even the dumber organs of the mainstream media have recognized that the Republicans and the Democrats have started down the road of swapping core constituencies. The Democrats have more of the over-educated and the wealthy than they did 20 years ago, while the Republicans have more of the working class. Here’s another version of the realignment argument. At least one persuasive commentator, Musa al-Gharbi attributes this to the takeover of the Democratic party by the professional managerial class (PMC), who (to oversimplify) are not actually very good at managing things in the real world because they prefer to deal with abstractions. Al-Gharbi refers to the PMC as “symbolic capitalists.” His thesis would seem to tie in with the themes of this blog pretty well.1
Scope
The first assumption this post makes is that a long-term realignment is in play. The second assumption is that the realignment has not yet been fully accomplished. The third assumption is that it should be possible for a non-expert (like me) to look at how the Trump-Vance administration implements its policies and tell whether they are serious about delivering concrete material benefits for working class citizens in order to consolidate the realignment. I’m going to try to identify some benchmarks in different policy areas that can be used to evaluate what happens over the next few years. Along the way I will inevitably express disgust with both factions of the legacy uniparty in the United States, but/and the point of the post is not to express support for Trump-Vance or any other U.S. politician.
So my test hypothesis is that Trump and Vance might make relatively rational decisions on a multi-year time frame with the goal of delivering real benefits to working people. The bar for achieving this is set very low—if the Trump-Vance administration does a barely competent job of delivering material benefits for the working class, that would be better than what the two factions of the legacy uniparty have done for the past 30 years, including what Trump did during his first term.
Note that I’m talking about material benefits such as higher wages, better housing, price stability, or health care (as distinguished from “access” to health care through a corrupt intermediary a.k.a. insurance company). For purposes of this post it is important to distinguish material benefits (which the oligarchs want working people to have very little of) from culture war conflict and entertaining stunts that give supporters a dopamine rush (which we get plenty of precisely because the oligarchs do not care about these issues).
The test hypothesis seems at least somewhat plausible to me because Trump and Vance might be unusually motivated to create a scenario where Vance can win the 2028 election. Among other things, Trump probably does not want to retire with the threat of another round of prosecutions hanging over his head. I’m calling it the Trump-Vance administration because I think showcasing Vance will be an important goal (in contrast to what the Biden administration did with Harris). If that does not happen, it will be the first indication that my test hypothesis is false.
The null hypothesis I’m testing against is that Trump and Vance will continue the legacy uniparty scam in which both factions have basically the same macro-policies cloaked in divisive culture-war language, psyops, and stunts. Trump is well-suited by personality and by experience for the stunt politics of the recent past so the sensible thing would be to expect more of the same. If Trump and Vance continue with that approach then the Democrats will be in a better position to make a comeback in 2026 and 2028. Instead of Trump-Vance consolidating a realignment, the swing voters will keep swinging back and forth meaninglessly and we’ll continue following our current trajectory on every issue that matters to the oligarchs.
To put it another way, to hold the swingy members of the working class on the Republican side, Trump and Vance need to take actions that help the working class have a viable path to prosperity. If material conditions don’t get better for that elusive segment of the working class that shifts its allegiance in each election based on personal economics rather than media narrative, then nothing will really change. We’ll be looking at more 50-50 elections determined by stunts versus Taylor Swift endorsements rather than a fundamental realignment.
As a final note on scope, this post only considers domestic policy benchmarks. U.S. foreign policy is insanely chaotic right now, especially in Eurasia and north Africa, but it seems unlikely to get much better or worse under Trump-Vance, and will probably be hard to distinguish from the delusional, pro-genocide approach practiced by the Biden administration. A nuclear war could start at any time, but I haven’t thought of a rubric for evaluating that yet.
Immigration
Immigration was one of Trump’s biggest hot buttons on the campaign trail, and is also one of the areas where it will be easiest to tell if Trump and Vance are serious. I think the immigration issue works particularly well as a litmus test, and Trump and his followers have been making a big deal out of it since the election.
I accept as self-evidently true that reducing the number of undocumented non-citizens who are able to work in the United States would help the employment prospects of working class citizens. The economists who claim that immigration helps to increase GDP are not necessarily wrong. The problem is that all the gains go to the oligarchs and the cadre of sub-oligarchs and PMC oligarch-servicers who benefit from cheap labor. If nothing else, reducing the number of undocumented non-citizens who are able to work in the United States would require employers to pay somewhat more to get American citizens to mow lawns, pick crops, or work in chicken processing plants. Americans still might not want those jobs very much, but higher pay would give them a somewhat more viable fallback option when they can’t find work in their chosen trades (which happens to a lot of working class people nowadays).
The obvious way to reduce the number of undocumented non-citizens working in the U.S. is from the employer side, through administrative measures such as requiring employers to use E-Verify for real and cracking down on duplicate use of social security numbers. Trump actually did this for a little while late in his first term. If this type of enforcement is not expanded, then Trump is not serious about stopping employment of undocumented immigrants.
Trump did not campaign much on administrative measures involving employers, and instead promised massive deportations. Forcibly deporting enough people to make a difference would be extremely difficult. I have some experience dealing with the immigration service, and bureaucratic gridlock is one of the only things holding the entire edifice together. Unless Trump can get his bare majority in the House to approve a big budget increase to hire a deportation force on the scale of the TSA, mass deportations are simply not going to happen. A handful of highly visible PR raids would entertain hardcore Trump supporters in the short-term, and could reduce incoming numbers by scaring immigrants, but would not lead to a noticeable structural change in the economy for the disillusioned members of the working class who the parties will be trying to persuade in 2026 and 2028.
Lately Trump has shifted from talking about deportations to talking about ending birthright citizenship. Ending birthright citizenship is a red herring at best. It is unlikely to succeed, and unlikely to make any immediate difference in the labor market if it did succeed. There is no process in American law for revoking the citizenship of people born in the United States. Even if Trump were somehow successful in eliminating birthright citizenship, it would only apply to babies born after the change. Fussing about birthright citizenship is a stunt – it may make Trump’s hard core supporters happy, but it will not create any tangible benefits for the working class in the time frame we are talking about.
In the past few weeks Trump has dismayed some of his supporters by talking about expanding legal opportunities to work in the United States such as H-1B visas. This is the opposite of what he should to do consolidate a working class based. H-1B visas are for “specialty workers” to fill jobs when employers claim there are shortages, so H-1B immigrants compete more with the PMC than with wage workers. Still, using H-1B workers to proletarianize the PMC does not help Trump-Vance earn the loyalty of the working class in the long run because it means that the children of the working class have less chance at upward mobility. Telling working class kids to learn to code becomes an even crueler joke if you’re going to import masses of people to take those jobs at lower pay for an 80 hour work week.
Peter Turchin has said that in order to restore stability in the U.S, we need to “bring the relative wage up to the equilibrium level (thus shutting down elite overproduction) and keep it there.” End Times at 202. “Equilibrium level” means working class wages and conditions need to improve enough that a somewhat larger percentage of working class people decide it is OK to be working class, so they don’t need to go to college and try to become PMC. But some of the youngsters still want to move up. Importing a bunch of people to take existing PMC slots makes it much harder to achieve a stable equilibrium. You’re basically clogging up the pressure relief valve for the already dysfunctional class system, and giving elite aspirants more reasons to identify with working class immigration grievances.
As with many other issues addressed in this post, the number of desperate people trying to immigrate could be significantly reduced if the United States adopted a less bloodthirsty and piratical foreign policy, and stopped robbing, bombing, and destabilizing other countries. Unfortunately there is no prospect of that happening, which is why I said I would not try to address foreign policy.
In short, there are two tells with immigration. If Trump and Vance want to benefit citizen wage laborers, they need to require all employers to start using E-Verify or something similar, with real social security numbers. In order to benefit citizens who aspire to the next steps up the economic ladder, Trump and Vance need to reduce H-1B visas, not expand them. I don’t think either of these indicators can easily be fudged. If Trump and Vance limit immigrant work opportunities in this way, then I think the effects will be visible, and may even lead to significant inflation, particularly in food and construction. I don’t think there is a way to avoid the risk of inflation if you’re trying to induce a broad increase in wages at the lower end of the scale.
If Trump and Vance don’t do these things, then I think it is fair to say they are not serious about consolidating a working class realignment.
And just to emphasize it once again, I am not saying this is my preferred policy outcome. The United States is a profligate and unethical nation on a path to collapse, and I have accepted that my preferred policy outcomes are not at all plausible in my lifetime. All I am saying is that this is what I think Trump and Vance would do if they were serious about consolidating a working class base in a multi-year time frame, given the promises they made and the coalition they established during the campaign, and given a realistic assessment of the economic background.
Tariffs and Re-Shoring Manufacturing
For about 40 years, both factions of the oligarch-controlled uniparty have been in favor of free trade and outsourcing American industrial jobs to places where people work cheap. The Americans who previously held those jobs obviously wanted the jobs to stay here. Working class people lost that battle, and the United States has been largely deindustrialized as a result. This is not only causing economic distress for working people in flyover country, it has reached the point where the United States can’t manufacture things considered vital for national defense and other priorities.
Economists argued that free trade would increase America’s GDP, but they forgot to mention that the oligarchs would not only skim off all the gains from trade for themselves, they would steal even more by driving down the standard of living for working class Americans. Economists also forgot to mention the part about needing to import practically everything at a time when the uniparty wants to start wars with all the major exporters. Protectionism has a bad name, but things have gotten so far out of balance that some type of industrial policy is clearly needed.
A few weeks ago the big story was that Trump was going to restart American manufacturing by imposing massive tariffs. That story has now disappeared from the headlines in favor of immigration scare stories and whatever else Trump tweeted in the past 24 hours. Tariffs and industrial policy are difficult to do well. Imposing tariffs on goods that the United States has very little capacity to produce for itself will lead to short-term inflation and shortages followed by demand destruction rather than plentiful jobs.
Success on this issue will be harder to judge than immigration, because it requires evaluating whether Trump is appointing serious people and whether the solutions they come up with are working. Those evaluations can easily fall prey to partisan biases and ad hominen attacks. One thing to look for is whether Trump can stop picking fights over tough-guy sanctions and move toward tariffs or other measures that actually give a boost to viable American businesses. That is hard to do because the main presidential tariff authority is based on national security, but the task at hand is to figure out how to do it.
The other thing to look for is whether re-shored businesses (if any) actually start offering jobs Americans would take. It’s not just wages—we need to see more private sector working-class jobs that offer benefits, or else we need to see socialistic benefits to replace employment-based benefits. Either one would make working class life more acceptable to many people, helping to create Turchin’s equilibrium and consolidate the potential political realignment. If re-shoring occurs but it only produces jobs nobody would want (except perhaps an undocumented immigrant) then tariffs will not help Trump and Vance consolidate a working class Republican base.
Drill Baby Drill
In the latter part of the campaign, Trump repeatedly said that one of his highest priorities would be a “drill baby drill” energy policy. On its face this does not make a great deal of sense, at least not as it relates to gas prices. “Drill baby drill” is an inherently boom-bust policy that would most likely lead to big swings in fuel prices over a multi-year time frame.
I was in Ohio when I started working on this post, and gas was as low as $2.39 a gallon. That is as low as it’s been for a while, so Trump does not get to start from an easy benchmark. Gas has gone up a little since then, but it will be very difficult for Trump to keep gas prices at current levels for four years, much less lower them, and there is little reason to believe that U.S. shale operations are interested in developing overcapacity to reduce the prices they receive. Meanwhile, Trump’s early focus on recruiting Iran hawks for his foreign policy team suggests that world oil prices could go up drastically rather than coming down.
If Trump were serious about boosting the economy through domestic energy production, he would develop a long-term plan to stabilize American energy prices using shale production at a target price to help decouple the U.S. from the wild swings of the world oil market. If you want to encourage business confidence, you need to allow businesses to plan for longer term investment. This is especially true in capital intensive industrial sectors. Trump probably won’t be able to use Biden’s method of depleting the strategic oil reserve because Biden is leaving it pretty depleted, and anyway that isn’t a long-term plan.
Coming up with a plan to use domestic supply to stabilize energy prices for the next ten years or so would do far more to encourage domestic industrial investment than encouraging a boom-bust cycle. That doesn’t sound very Trump-like, but it’s something to look for to see whether Trump and Vance are serious about consolidating power for 2028 and beyond. Alternatively, if Trump and Vance would quit bombing the middle east and provoking wars and color revolutions near Russia then worldwide oil markets would probably stabilize quite a bit, but as I said earlier, that probably isn’t going to happen.
Like the tariff issue, this one is hard to judge because it requires Trump and Vance to do something difficult and complicated. Nevertheless, if they start to shift the energy rhetoric toward stability rather than driving prices down, that would be a sign they are serious. Within two years I think it should be possible to evaluate the Trump-Vance energy policy by whether thay adopt some kind of mechanism to decouple domestic oil and gas production from a boom-bust price cycle, and by whether prices actually remain relatively stable.
Firing Federal Workers
Trump and his boy-wonder DOGE sidekicks Elon and Vivek have made a lot of idiotic statements about cutting the federal budget by firing huge numbers of people. My most constructive suggestion is to start with the National Endowment for Democracy. That’s the CIA sponsored organization that funds anti-democratic “color revolutions” in countries all over the world and was substantially responsible for starting the Ukraine war. If Trump and Vance actually succeeded in eliminating the National Endowment for Democracy, I would consider becoming a late-stage MAGA convert myself. Not because of the modest direct cost savings, but because it would reduce U.S. war-mongering and support for terrorism abroad. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is what will happen.
Instead, the DOGE rhetoric lends itself to stunts that will not bring any net benefit to the working class. Many federal programs are distributed around the country, especially the ones that deliver federal benefits. Cutting those jobs will disproportionately hurt employment and government services in low-tax red states that don’t have much in the way of state-level programs to pick up the slack. Elon and Vivek can undoubtedly find a few offices full of DC wokesters to sacrifice, but that’s just another stunt. It won’t have a big impact on the budget, much less an impact on material conditions for the working class.
Based on summary numbers at federalpay.org, most federal employees (around 3 million) are associated with the Department of Defense, which Trump fans are stereotypically supposed to support. The next two biggest departments are the departments of veterans’ affairs (over 400,000) and Homeland Security (over 200,000). Again, big cuts to these departments are not likely to play well with Trump fans, and the number of Homeland Security employees will need to go up, not down, if Trump is serious about deporting large numbers of people.
The Department of Education, a favorite target of Republicans even before Trump, only has a little over 4,000 employees. The department has a $45 billion budget, but most of that is pass-throughs to local schools to pay for things like special education. Anything that intereferes with those pass-throughs will not ultimately play well in rural areas that have no funds for such luxuries other than federal dollars.
It is also important to remember that a $100,000 a year job in Washington DC might not be considered all that great, but it looks pretty darn good in Wichita. At the end of the day, the biggest thing the working class cares about is the availability of living wage jobs. Cutting many of the best-paid and most secure jobs throughout the country does not provide an immediate net benefit to the working class, it mostly just provides cover for giving more tax-cuts to the rich. As we know very well by now, those tax cuts do not trickle down in ways that provide stable job opportunities for the working class.
It may be theoretically possible to improve the economy by making the federal government more efficient, but it is fiendishly difficult to do in practice. I don’t see how this promise is likely to produce any material benefit for the working class in a four-year time frame. The most likely positive tell here could be if the Trump-Vance administration appears to ghost this promise and do very little. Highly visible stunts with chainsaws are more consistent with the null hypothesis that Trump and Vance intend to continue the kayfabe of the existing uniparty scam.
Legalizing Marijuana
This is an easy one. Trump toyed with this issue during the campaign, but did not commit. If Trump and Vance are really serious about doing something for the working class, they need to not only legalize marijuana at the federal level, they also need to erase past prosecutions and allow those convicted to rejoin polite society and qualify for decent jobs. There is probably no other step on this list that could boost the short-term economic viability of the working class of all races more cost-effectively than an aggressive marijuana legalization policy. I don’t think this will happen, but if it does then it counts as a serious material benefit for the working class, not just a stunt.
Promoting Alternatives to the College Path
This is an issue that Trump did not campaign on at all as far as I could see, but Trump often points to academia as an example of everything that his followers believe is wrong with America. Telling young people that college is the only path to economic prosperity basically reinforces the power of the PMC, which is the real base of the Democratic party today and is Trump’s main enemy.
Trump hasn’t made any promises about this and I don’t think anybody has any particularized expectations, so the field is wide open. Pushing trade schools (assuming you can find some that aren’t scams) would help, and would also help fill the open jobs if undocumented immigrants in the construction industry disappear from the labor market, or if re-shoring of industry starts to happen on any scale. Increasing the size of the military (or developing an immigration enforcement army) is a possibility, but that takes a big budget, and only works if more people want to join. Making a play to co-opt unions might help, but only if the oligarchs will allow it.
In the long run, even if Trump and Vance consolidate their gains among working class voters, they have a serious problem with exercising power so long as the PMC retains a stranglehold on post-secondary education. Going to college is widely believed to be the only path to prosperity in this country, and college graduates are hired to manage all of our major institutions. If the Trump-Vance administration figures out a way to break the iron grip of college on our culture and our economy, then a substantially bigger realignment is possible.
What About the Democrats?
Frankly, the Democrats are irrelevant to the question of whether Trump and Vance will consolidate a working class realignment in the next four years. Anybody who was paying attention figured out long ago that Democrats “represent” the American working class in about the same way a slave auctioneer represents slaves, and the Democrats have sold their working class constituencies down the river for thirty years without pause.
The Biden senility scandal has driven home just how useless and dishonest the Democrats are, and they are not going to be able to pick themselves up off the mat in the next couple of years without help from the Republicans. Even among the PMC, the core constituency of the Democrats for the past two decades, it has become impossible to conceal the foul smell emanating from the Democratic corpse. Former Democrats among the PMC are increasingly labeling themselves “centrists” or some similar poppycock, rather than risk continuing their affiliation with the Democrats.
The credibility of the Democratic party is completely shot at every level, and Democrats are not in control of whether it can ever be regained. The only way the Democrats have a chance in 2026 and 2028 is if Trump and Vance blow it. That could certainly happen, but it won’t be the result of anything the Democrats do between now and then. Instead, the Democrats will probably carry on with their most important role of blocking and tackling for the oligarchs by using dirty tricks and litigation to prevent any viable third party from emerging. That will leave the field completely open for Trump and Vance. We’ll see what happens as a result.
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Thanks, albrt, for this excellent post. What I especially appreciate is that you lay out strategy and tactics and how Trump and Vance can be assessed.
First, the strategy for Trump and Vance is secure realignment of the major parties, to be assured by continued Republican dominance in the Congress. As part of this strategy, Trump, being in his last term, has to assure that Vance is seen as presidential timber. Republicans, being more hierarchical than Democrats, will see Vance as the most viable presidential candidate in 2028 — but this presumption of being the heir apparent has to be borne out in fact.
The tactics you list and how to assess whether or not Trump & Vance succeed form a good rubric.
The irony of the heading “Alternates to College” is that, for many years, unions have provided training. My father, a unionist, was also an instructor at the training school of his printers’ union. Will Trump and Vance recognize that one of the roles of trade unions is to uphold the standards of workers and their work? (This is where one may also test the influence of ElonVivek, neither of whom seems to have much respect for the dignity of labor.)
I note this: ‘Musa al-Gharbi attributes this to the takeover of the Democratic party by the professional managerial class (PMC), who (to oversimplify) are not actually very good at managing things in the real world because they prefer to deal with abstractions. Al-Gharbi refers to the PMC as “symbolic capitalists.”’
What’s even worse is that the U S of A is experiencing a whole class of lawyers, academics, and commentators dealing in abstractions even though Americans have always been bad at abstraction. “Serious” commentators will trot out Rawls — and that’s about it for the U.S. philosophical tradition, unless someone happens to recall William James or Peirce. The Venerable Tocqueville is invoked — and he doesn’t seem to have thought that Americans deal well with ideas.
Consequently, one sees loads of “theory” these days — the art museum with a didactic label three feet long. The endless appeals to economic, gender, and queer theory — all of them held together by spit, Elmer’s Glue, and duck tape. The absurdity of Law & Economics at law schools. And now this bad faith has produced discontent. Che sorpresa.
I think “alternatives to college” is a bit of a misnomer. Where I live a number of community colleges have programs in various trades. “Alternatives to academics” is maybe better.
Yes. “Community Colleges,” generally two year training institutions are common here in the North American Deep South. Some of them are the descendants of the old “Negro Colleges.” Said colleges were a real example of parallel institutions at work. Something similar can be done, the templates still exist.
How well stocked are these colleges with equipment, etc relevant to what they are instructing/teaching, so that the students can hit the ground running when they graduate.
Visiting a HIGH-SCHOOL in the perifery of Paris some years ago with an in-law teaching there electro-mechanical stuff, I was utterly impressed by the build up in all sorts of equipment that car mechanics could use, that electricians wiring apartment buildings would use, all new or with better technologies available and able to maintaing all kinds of standards.
I have not seen such level of equipments at uni here. A trades’ college might have, but that one costs more to pursue for two years than 4 years of undergraduate.
I agree union apprenticeships and technical colleges (the non-scam ones) are part of the solution, but right now most of my friends in flyover country (even the Trump supporters) would be pretty disappointed if their kids went that route. And there is a pretty solid history of tech schools cranking out graduates just as the economy has a glut of entry level people for a particular skill. Work needs to be done to make this path a more viable and acceptable alternative.
It occurred to me today that the traditional university education may be doomed anyway – the idea that teaching kids to think is the core of the curriculum simply can’t hold up if the kids are able to have AI bots do all the thinking. The potential scale of that disruption boggles my mind. Possibly the subject of a future post, but needs much more thought.
“the idea that teaching kids to think is the core of the curriculum simply can’t hold up if the kids are able to have AI bots do all the thinking.”
Redefine “thinking” enough and, yeah, no limit to what someone can convince others of…others that no one bothers to teach.
Thanks for this article. I think it provides a useful framework to evaluate these varmints. On immigration, mandating E-verify might have been easier had the Supreme Court not struck down the Chevron doctrine. I can see that becoming harder now, as a law may need to be passed, rather than having the BLS or IRS simply issue a rule. We also know that the Chamber of Commerce will fight mandated E-verify tooth and nail, and they control a lot of Congress. Either way, if they don’t even try, we’ll know what their true colors are.
I predict that DOGE will turn out to be toothless.
I share your generally gloomy outlook for the Democrats. One possible rescue for them though could be the economy finally taking a trip to see the bottom of the ocean. I keep watching long term bond yields rise and can’t help but think something wicked this way comes.
The Democrats could change course if the weren’t so tied into the PTB in the intel and “news” (i.e., propaganda organs) community. The DP is so deeply ensconced into the oligarchy that it’s hard to see how they divorce themselves from it. This is why foreign policy is much more important than domestic policy since that is what keeps the Imperial Capitol from being the Capitol of the United States of America. The amount of resources the Empire require can be better invested in infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word. If that doesn’t work then all the issues described in the article are largely irrelevant.
The song The Man’s too Strong comes to mind, along with Biden’s promise to the oligarchs “that nothing will fundamentally change” as characterizing the obstacles to socio-economic progress presented by the deeply entrenched powers that be. It’s difficult to imagine their dislodgement proceeding smoothly and without some period of chaotic disruption, a state most people rightly fear. For the moment it looks like it will be stunts and kayfabe all the way down and realignment toward or away from either major party will have only marginal effects insofar as the more equitable distribution of material benefits are concerned.
So the big question at hand is that now, with Trump possessing all the power the presidency conveys, makes Trump tick? Not being a billionaire I don’t have a lot of insight into this. But a seat of the pants impression would be ego, obiviously, is a biggie and also grievance. Trump wants to be loved and that means that flatterers and outsized contributors may have a lot of influence. The Adelson widow will doubtless get consideration for her views on the ME and he unaccountably likes our Lindsey–probably because of the flattery.
Whereas my Nikki is out in the cold for defying him and deservedly so. Hope she has some hobbies to occupy her spare time.
And here’s suggesting there’s at least a chance that Trump will be more sympatico with small business and the non union working class. Quite probably he shares the views of his own class on unions which by their nature challenge managerial power and therefore those all important egos. It’s not just about money.
What he won’t be though is Biden and that perhaps is the main point. The true sociopaths have been with us for the past four years.
Ah-men to this – “My most constructive suggestion is to start with the National Endowment for Democracy. That’s the CIA sponsored organization that funds anti-democratic “color revolutions” in countries all over the world and was substantially responsible for starting the Ukraine war. If Trump and Vance actually succeeded in eliminating the National Endowment for Democracy, I would consider becoming a late-stage MAGA convert myself.” I will add (and could entirely wrong on this because I don’t follow news as closely as I’d like) IMO Trump will not bring abt alignment due the fact he rarely if ever talks about improving the working clas via concrete material benefits, meaning all the categories covered there is not much talk from Trump Team that the goal is related to improving the working class. In contrast, see Bernie Sanders.
I agree that the GOP/MAGA will not improve conditions for the working class. However, they do offer scapegoats. Since the Dems are also not doing anything to provide concrete material benefits to the non-rich classes, offering scapegoats becomes attractive in the same way that a mote of something is better than nothing.
If Trump can deliver on scapegoats while the Dems continue to stay in their lane it might be good enough for the realignment to gel.
Eliminating NED would be an important sign that the US is moving away from imperialism–in that case, since NED is the point of the arrow to “fight” the opponents of US imperialism then the whole project would have to be rolled back. In my view, imperialism must be ended as a long-term project. It is official US foreign policy to control through conquest the entire globe–a highly seductive program that has intoxicated the neocon movement that currently dominates US FP. This is unlikely because the CIA always holds the whip hand. Always. Reform must start, if it is to happen, with the partnership of imperialism, MSM, and Hollywood with the CIA/MI6/Mossad and those people will stop at nothing to get their way.
CIA was entrusted from the beginning with ensuring the free flow of (American) capital around the world. As such, Wall Street will fight toot and nail to keep NED well funded. And CIA will have all the blackmailing material needed to make sure that happens.
Excellent post–a clear-eyed and realistic assessment of the domestic issues bedeviling the country. The takeaway is there is no reason for optimism, and given our bloodthirsty foreign policy, we are now in a race between instant Armageddon via nuclear war, or slower paced chaos and destruction that planetary heating will bring. There seem no realistic alternatives.
Indeed, a race, run by criminal minds that can think only in bringing famine to entire population, genocide, sabotage, and assassinations. The Israeli method seems to become the mainstay of US foreign policy. It won’t work on Russia and China, they have subs too…
The Russian merchant ship and the plane crush in Kazakhstan seem to be no accidents.
“The economists who claim that immigration helps to increase GDP are not necessarily wrong. The problem is that all the gains go to the oligarchs and the cadre of sub-oligarchs and PMC oligarch-servicers who benefit from cheap labor.”
Aye. It’s true. Newly-arrived immigrants who work do contribute to GDP, as they help provide goods and services that people use. But it’s also true that newly-arrived immigrants consume some portion of GDP, as they use goods and services that our economy provides. They buy food and clothing and shelter. They use medical care. They buy cars and gasoline and drive on roads. They use educational services. They use electricity and water and telecom services. They buy pretty much all the same things that ordinary US citizens buy.
So the question isn’t whether or not immigrants contribute to GDP, it’s if they contribute more than they consume. And a related question is this: Will the increased demand on the economy causing shortages anywhere? I did a quick-and-dirty analysis of the housing market a couple of weeks back (at https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/zeitgeist-watch-wall-street-journal-readers-criticize-article-defending-illegal-immigration-because-employers.html#comment-4148137), and I’m firmly convinced that the massive immigration of recent years has contributed to our housing crisis. I wonder if there are additional shortages elsewhere.
GDP is precisely the wrong determiner of prosperity. If I hold up a liquor store and get caught and imprisoned I am providing a bigger boost to GDP, particularly if I shoot someone and get shot myself. GDP is complete bullshit as a guiding statistic to anything–but modern economists love statistics and numbers which is what makes the entire profession much weaker than it could be if it had been more grounded by focusing on the political economy.
Thank you albrt, this is a useful list of markers. One difficulty here is our informational signal to noise ratio is awful. Will it be possible to accurately monitor this list? Another difficulty will be the Trump admin’s ability to navigate the extra-governmental power structure without compromising away any real gains for both the working class and beneficial gdp. Imagine a meeting between team Trump and whoever is the Purdue family bagman now. Bagman, “if we kick the undocumented off the packing plant floor, it’s going to be prison labor and high school kids.” This crystal ball is going to be a tough read.
Convict Slavery is still Constitutional. The only way to change that would be to strike the following words: “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” from the Thirteenth Ammendment, which reads:
” Thirteenth Amendment
Section 1
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
As long as those pro-Convict-Slavery fourteen words remain in that ammendment, the “labor gap” caused by mass deportation will be met with millions of Convict Slaves, whose numbers will be maintained by as much artificial concocted legislation as may be needed to keep convicting millions of people and turning them into Convict Slaves.
The way to close that loophole would be to pass and ratify a revision to the Thirteenth Ammendment removing, deleting and erasing those fourteen words which make Convict Slavery legal and constitutional.
I really appreciate the analysis as it provides a useful framework to evaluate the actual performance. And I agree, from at least a “vibes” perspective it does feel like Trump is more serious about building up Vance as a potential successor than the Biden administration (aka whoever was actually in charge there) building up Harris.
One minor quibble regarding the immigration portion, though. As an “IT greybeard”, my experience with H1Bs (which are non-immigrant visa, BTW) is that their impact on the rest of the US workforce is disproportionately on the older, more experienced and thus more expensive parts of the workforce. The lack of entry level positions that is (especially currently) affecting recent graduates has different reasons – mostly outsourcing and an unwillingness to train new employees that seems to be prevalent in large parts of this industry. I’m not sure that the immigration and/or temporary work visa situation in IT is that visible to someone with a working class background unless they know people in the industry already.
And of course we know that in general, older people tend to vote more often than younger people, and I theorize that those who vote and are potentially affected by types of shenanigans currently going on might have less propensity to vote for the PMC party. Especially if Trump/Vance manages to deliver some of their promises towards working people.
Thanks for this IT perspective. The path for entry level as you describe it still looks pretty bad, especially if the “unwillingness to train” is based in part on knowing that the next step up the ladder can be filled with H1Bs.
One thing is for sure, this issue is blowing up the MAGA Xittersphere today.
DoD failing audits is low hanging fruit.
USAF stopped signing receiving papers for F-35s until the software version stated in the contract was integrated.
Save current outlays by making the seller deliver the contracted work.
This approach to service contracts would look like “refuse to pay for activity reports,” only pay for measured performance on schedule. Too much of DoD spending is services for operations and support a lot not performance based.
Then cut the empire.
DoD is 50+% discretionary outlays.
Trump supporters sometime talk America First defense, which is let Europe fight for the chimera of sacred Kievan territory, and leave Taiwan to the One China policy…. In spite of the Navy lobby!
“The DP is so deeply ensconced into the oligarchy that it’s hard to see how they [Democrats] divorce themselves from it. This is why foreign policy …”
But isn’t the very same oligarchy very much in control of RP? MAGA/Tea Party is allowed to make noise, and even some action in spheres that oligarchy does not care about: gun control, abortion, changing sex etc.
Already with immigration we can see a divergence between PTB and working people. Tools to exclude people without work permits from all formal jobs exist, and how many millions of maids and handymen can make a living? But the economy, and thus the business, is addicted to cheap and mobile illegals. Hate campaigns will not change that.
About foreign policy, Overton window is a bit wider within RP than in DP, but the bipartisan consensus is still strong and kicking.
its to late now, the damage has not only been done, but its institutionalized now. this is a correct statement,
“the Democrats have sold their working class constituencies down the river for thirty years without pause.”
it actually started out with carter, but he was lame compared to bill clinton, who made sure over turning what he did, is almost impossible.
he left us with banks and nukes, that’s about it.
so down the path of the roman and ottoman empire’s we go.
If America ” is” the Roman and/or Ottoman empire of today, then going down their path means the breakup of the US into smaller countries, kingdoms, somaliform no-man’s-lands, Free Cities, Chinese colonies and protectorates,etc.
Perhaps some of the surviving Indian Nations might re-arise and reclaim some of their Legally-Already-Their’s land and power.
I think an eventual breakup is baked into the cake at this point. Joel Garreau explained this inevitability in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_America.
The RoW will be better off for it.
I once read Garreau, but I don’t remember whether he had anything to write about Indian Nations possibly re-arising or not.
“firing huge numbers of people. My most constructive suggestion is to start with the National Endowment for Democracy. That’s the CIA sponsored organization that …”
For that matter, why not shrink the entire intelligence apparatus by a large factors, which gobbles fat billions to “assure that Saddam has WMD” or “content of Hunter Biden’s laptop has all hallmarks of Russian disinformation” when it is not busy fomenting civil war or political processes abroad AND at home. Then shrink military mission and expenditures (e.g. American base was booted out of Niger with no observable detriment to American security). Healthcare is actually a larger item, but with no equally fast solutions that can be conceived.
Why not? Because the intel community can shoot their enemies–they are the gunsels of the Deep State apparatus, i.e., the National Security State, MSM, entertainment, and so on. They are not going to give up their little scams and rackets peacefully because of “democracy” or rule-of-law. These are, at the top, gangsters.
Which is one reason why Citizen Gun Rights are so important, and why the PMC DemLibs will keep working so hard to achieve “Gun Control” against the Citizenry.
Of course, “intel community” has a ton of ways to defend their own, like NED, without using weapons inside US — except for few suspicious deaths.
An astonishingly good post. Triple kudos. In particular, your coverage of forced population growth (a.k.a. immigration) was remarkably rational and devoid of the usual rubbish about ‘scapegoating immigrants.’ And yes, on immigration we shall be easily able to tell if Trump and Vance are going to stab the working class in the back, or not. We shall know before too long.
albrt and Yves, thank you for this enlightened approach to a very complicated subject. Especially thank you for the humanizing manner in which people are designated.
I made a couple of comments above–without dealing with foreign policy first and downsizing the Imperial project to rule the entire planet I don’t see the changes outlined above as possible except in symbolic ways–but that’s what Americans crave, i.e., symbolism and fantasy.
Having said that, I believe that cutting down the size and scope of the federal government is very important. Having worked in the federal gov’t I can assure you that the problem of systemic corruption is of paramount importance. Since Congress is ruled by bribes and threats how can positive change come to any branch of government? It can’t and won’t.
If Trump can put teeth into his rule and be a kind of dictator, he has a chance at beginning the long road of returning the US to Constitutional rule and bring a few more smiles on the faces of all of us. We are currently living in a post-Constitutional country so dramatic steps must be taken much like Roosevelt took. At minimum Roosevelt improved the mood of the country and improved the culture as a whole so that is responded as well as it did to WWii.
TrumpenVance could increase material benefits to the working class today while decreasing material benefits to the working class tomorrow by privatizing and/or abolishing Medicare and Social Security . . . if President Musk calls for it.
Would that consolidate working class support today for the Republican Party or would the working class noticing that their Medicare and Social Security has been abolished for tomorrow cause the working class to fail to consolidate around the Republican Party? Or would the working class say, in the deathless words of Scarlett O’hara . . . ” I’ll worry about that tomorrow.” . . . ?
And if TrumpenVance coupled abolishing the NED with abolishing Social Security and Medicare, would anyone still convert to MAGA just for the abolition of NED alone all by itself?
Let me preface by stating I don’t think locking people up for weed is a good thing, unlike giggling Kamala did. However I take serious exception to albrt’s claim that legalization of cannabis brings a cornucopia of working class wonder:
First, there is a practical limit on how many shops and grow houses are necessary to supply demand. Employment is not high and the taxes or trickle down benefits are not huge. It is legal in NY state and if it is moving the economic dial you need a magnifying glass to see it.
Second, what is legally sold ain’t cheap. The grow-your-own or friendly dealer cut into this supposed economic benefit. Growing doesn’t provide meaningful economic stimulus .
Lastly, I do not see how an even more intoxicated working class can possibly be a positive thing. Smoking weed is not conducive to serious working class skilled jobs. Nor is it conducive for unionization or political activism, which is hard work. While not as bad as alcohol and driving, it is a serious public safety issue for driving or operating equipment. Speaking from historical experience in my railroad days, it makes people lazy and apathetic. Great for listening to music alone or with a few friends. And eating.
What you miss is the problem working class people face because of drug testing. Cannabis in one way or another is largely available but drug testing keeps people away from employment and keeps them in fear of the authorities. Of course, the authorities want nothing more than subjects who are fearful whatever the cause. I think drug testing for truy harmful drugs in certain occupations has a role but not cannabis. I agree, btw, of now allowing people on the job to take cannabis to the extent it dulls them–which is not the case for many of us. Sativa actually sharpens my senses if taken in low doses.
I am not a particular fan of the new cannabis economy. My concern is for all the people of the last several generations who are way underemployed because they have criminal records due to cannabis prohibition, as well as the folks Chris mentioned who are underemployed because they are afraid of drug tests. Just about everybody I know who lives near where they grew up has an old friend or family member in this category.
The developments you say to watch for are legitimate, but I’m not sure Trump and Vance have that much power to decide whether to pursue them. They are basically front men, performers for the audience, sales reps for their backers. (Like, does anyone think Biden and Harris have been deciders rather than actors given lines to spout by the people really in charge?) So the questions about the remaking of the Republican party should be addressed at whether the big backers of the party and its candidates are changing, and, if so, what the priorities of the new backers are. I don’t have a good grasp of this, but obviously there was a time when the Kochs and the Mellon Scaifes and people of that generation were funding much of the Republican apparatus. Who is doing that now?
The working class has been promised a lot of things over the past half century but actually has had precious few delivered to them. So a realignment based on promises is likely to be short term, which is why I agree with your argument that we have to look at concrete actions to provide some material benefit–but benefits that don’t evaporate because other concrete actions are undermining it.
It’s hard to imagine what’s going to happen that won’t be massively affected by foreign policy decisions and their consequences. Hopefully the insane talk about a nuclear war being winnable gets shut down. But can Trump really force BRICS back into total dependency on the US dollar like he’s threatening? Sometimes I think the only way to avoid a total US collapse is for us to have a smaller collapse from getting our noses bloodied on the international stage to the point that we have to retrench and take on a more realistic attitude toward the rest of the world, rather than thinking we can dictate terms to everybody by rattling our swords at them. But are the flag-waving Republicans up for handling that?
A real realignment would involve a different party replacing the Democrats, who at this point are mostly a media figment with zero credibility outside their echo chambers. But, again, somebody with money would have to pony up for that, unless we get really creative with GoFundMe.
Well, didn’t the Bernie candidacy inspire and attract and keep a couple-million $27/month small donor citizens? What if they were to get themselves back together and fund a party-movement of their own invention and construction? How far would it get over time, as long as they could prevent any metastatic malignant clintonoma cells and/or Yersiniobama pestis political plague germs from infecting it?
Agree with albrt’s point of Dem irrelevancy to a working class realignment. obama’s wrecking ball of Black homeownership thru subprime began a voter detachment which the aging/dying off of latino gatekeepers also brought about within the Brown community. Unfortunately trump allows and even feeds off the open racism within the republican party, which frightens off/angers Black/Brown voters who might otherwise (like people of all races) vote for a candidate whose platform might appear to improve the quality of their own lives. If he had the self control of even a mccain during his “obama is not a muslim” moment he could have stopped that. I would say vance has that quality, a measure of discipline.
Two probably over-abstrsct comments:
1) Is there a political realignment coming? Well, one of the necessary conditions has been in place for decades: there are masses of people alienated from the incumbent political institutions who would be happy to support some kind of hope for change. But the other condition, a configuration of political actors and instotutions necessary to bring about the change not only hasn’t been formed, but all attempts at its formation has been actively sabotaged by the insiders. This means that “a change from within,” defined broadly to include all changes through the conventional politics are increasingly difficult. Without reconfiguration of political institutions and actors, building a durable new coalition that encompasses those left out of the current order yet still brings about the changes through “conventional” means is increasingly improbable. I worry that this portends for a real revolution. While obvious ingredients are not visible, one should remember that Count Berchtold did get to see Mr. Bronstein from Cafe Central lead the revolution in Russia.
Second, and related to the lack of possibilities for new political coalitions, is that this is a pre-condition for successful re-industrialization. You need to build a broad political coalition that can get buy-in from pretty much every socio-economic-political faction–all of which will need to be fairly well organized to enable thrm to bargain and give consent, with the government in the middle of it all, acting as the intermediary. Or, in other words, some kind of corporatist political organization (which, I think, gets a worse rap than it deserves) is necessary for successful industrial policy. I have trouble seeing this kind of politics emerge in United States, especially in its current form where politics runs on too much zero-summism and short term thinking.
The implication from these, I worry, is that we will keep drifting and slipping. Lord Macartney’s description of the Chinese Empire around 1800, “an old crazy man of war,” seems increasingly applicable to United States 2 centuries later.
Excellent and thoughtful post. Thanks for it.
Want to stop immigration?
Make it impossible for immigrants to do remittances back to their home country, and you would stop a good many of them from coming here.
I assume you are referring to illegal immigration?
Ah…you have to think this through. Tons of families throughout Latin America are supported by someone in the US sending home money. It’s not unusual for communities with a well-developed immigration/migration support network to receive half their income this way, versus from local crops and manufacturing.
Hence, those remittances are a source of community development, since one person successfully implanted to the north tends to draw/support other members of the home community to share in their success, even if its menial. So you have a point there, but those new arrivals will in turn send even more remittences back, all for the benefit of the local community with a increasingly rich multiplier effect (what was once spent on food will increasing be spent on other things, such as home improvements, and eventually on larger business development contributing to the health of the local economy more broadly. Each time a dollar passes to other set of hands it generates the heat for additional economic development, which eventually can become self-sustaining.
In this sense, encouraging remittances is a lot like USAID when properly focused, helping to develop the economy there so people aren’t driven here by their hunger. There will always be ambitious young’uns who want to come the to the US due to h ambition and too much TV, but if they can stay reasonably comfortable while staying put, that’s what the vast majority will do. It works this way around the world.
Ah…you have to think this through. Tons of families throughout Latin America are supported by someone in the US sending home money. It’s not unusual for communities with a well-developed immigration/migration support network to receive as much as half their income this way, versus from local crops and manufacturing.
Hence, those remittances serve as a source of community development, since one person successfully implanted to the north tends to draw/support other members of the home community to share in their success, even if its menial. So you do have a point there, but those new arrivals in their turn send even more remittences back, all for the benefit of the local community with an increasingly rich multiplier effect (what was once spent on food will increasingly be spent on other things, such as home improvements, and eventually on larger business development contributing to the health of the local economy more broadly. Each time a dollar passes to other set of hands locally it generates the heat for additional economic development, which eventually it can become self-sustaining.
In this sense, encouraging remittances is a lot like USAID when properly focused, helping to develop the economy there so people aren’t driven here by their hunger. As a kinder and gentler face of modern neocolonialism, this is much to be a much preferred way for the US to manage the world. There will always be ambitious young’uns who still want to come the to the US due to ambition and too much TV, but if they can stay reasonably comfortable while staying put, that’s what most will do. It works this way around the world.
In my community, Apalachicola—once the “Oyster Capitol of the World”—Mexicans come up to work as oyster shuckers for the oyster processors. They do so with a visa for specialized labor, HIB?, although just about everyone in town except for me could work as an oyster shucker. As well, there is a large Guatemalan community, all with some kind of visa or green card, who do a number of shit jobs from masonry to dishwashing.
About deindustrialization, Michael Hudson often points out how America’s cost of living is now so high that American labor can barely afford to work at even ‘living wages’, while the education system is so hollowed out that Americans would have a hard time acquiring industrial skills. Contrast with China where medium wages are effectively increased by social services from low cost housing to healthcare and transportation, to education.
There is nothing that Trump/Vance can do about American deficiencies short of declaring a socialist revolution!
Yeah, that is a bit of a conundrum. I don’t know how you “undo” forty years of neoliberalism by doing more of it so it will be interesting to see how this evolves.
” America has stood up!” How do you say that in Mandarin?
A good approximation of how the duopoly game of US politics is played by the plutocracy. A little twist might be that Trump will not see out a full term (for whatever cause) and JD Vance will become POTUS. Vance will then pardon Trump of all Federal offences and Thiel gets his POTUS sooner rather than later.
Should the Dems gain some control they will just run their show as ongoing protection/cover/defence for the GOP and the duopoly, which has always been their station in modern US politics.
It’s end stage Empire as the US mass mindset goes fortress America.
The national security state will still be pulling the strings through Thiel-Vance and the libertarian tech bro tie-ins to same. Stuff in this world of politics doesn’t happen by accident but by design. Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football game will continue. Looking forward to the Trump-Elon bust up.
Being in government and having control of the state are not the same. Watch the military closely.
I think it is likely Trump will abdicate in favor of Vance, but probably not until late in his term after he has a chance to get very comfortable with Vance.
My gut tells me Trump will side with the billionaires and dual party system but I think Vance has some serious growing up issues which may make him more favorable to choosing the working class benefit approach.
If Trump and Vance actually did help the WC they could build a 50 year coalition. I still think Trumps best play is to suddenly go for medicare for all. This would win him.not only the WC but lots of Democrats. Why would he do this and betray the Health complex? Impose socialism? Because in the end Trump wants to be hailed as one of the greatest American figures ever and if he like FDR betrayed his class and went with Medicare for All, staged ovet a few years with a public option, and linked it with the MAHA movement, and if he at the same time called for all congress critters to never trade stocks, he would be answering all this public rage triggered by the Luigi event and at the same time giving the WC the biggest tangible benefit ever, medical assurance, freedom from being trapped in a job, flexibility. As I said Trump would be revered nationwide.
I worked in NYC 1984 – 1990 and back then Trump was a liberal and on the hustle and just as he is now, all about him.
I think absent some dramatic move like medicare for all or increasing taxes on the rich the only conclusion you can make is that Trump and Vance will changr nothing and the rage will continue as will the paralyzed government. If however Trump like FDR surprised with real steps toward working people, he and then Vance would build a MAGA party and political machine that would last for decades….
I’ve been saying for a while that we are more likely to get universal healthcare from the Republicans by accident than to get it from the Democrats on purpose. The odds of either seem quite low right now, but things will probably keep getting more chaotic, so who knows?
If the Republicans are smart, they’d be the ones to set up the real welfare state by design: that was how Bismarck broke the 19th C German liberals for good, after all. But I don’t think anyone in today’s US (or, in most places arpund the world) that’s capable of thinking about forging (or breaking) coalitions for decades.
He could say, ” do you want MAHA? Or KASFO?” And if necessary he could explain that KASFO stands for Keep America Sick For Ever. Or . . . Keep America Sick FOrever . . . if you to make the acronym fit exactly.
The current policy is KASFO.
The New Zealand government made an attempt right after Covid at reducing our reliance on migrant workers, by limiting the supply of visas issued once the country opened back up. It was largely a failure.
It turns out that the labor market for migrant work is not nearly as fungible as people would like to think. Pay is only one of the considerations. Migrant workers accept a lot of things as routine that permanent local workers would normally not even consider. They move long distances for work, often leaving their families to do so, and live in remote areas in temporary accommodation that’s often of poor quality. They accept seasonal contracts lacking most of the guarantees that you’d normally get for permanent work, often with limited protections for things like loss of hours due to weather.
Even businesses that were willing to pay more for local staff typically weren’t willing to reevaluate their work practices and redesign their business and employment terms in a way that would convince locals to pack up and move their families. Most of them lacked any sort of recruitment infrastructure for local workers, so they didn’t even know why they weren’t getting applications. There was no union or industry body to broker conversations, negotiate terms, and provide a flow of workers, and no way to build one overnight. In the absence of information, most opted for blame-focused explanations, saying that locals were lazy and didn’t want to work hard. Even for the ones that did attract new workers, most of the work in question was never truly ‘unskilled’. Many of the migrants had been doing it for years, and had become very efficient at it – so the new workers cost more and were less efficient, at least in the near term, with the associated business consequences.
The result was heavily constrained supply, higher prices, produce rotting in the fields/orchards/etc., and a wave of businesses getting into financial trouble, including bankruptcies. Faced with the reality that replacing the migrant worker pool would take time, effort, investment and communication, and that most migrant reliant industries would be devastated in the near term, the government backtracked and ended up mostly restoring the old system – after which there was, of course, no further incentive to change.
In the US I think it will be even harder because most of the workers are illegal and there’s less of a good faith presumption on the part of businesses (viz., most know very well they’re cheating the system and will use every dirty trick in the book to keep doing it).
Thanks for all the kind words, and even the critical ones. Sorry I didn’t get to participate in the comments earlier – busy day at work.
Just an idea. Let’s have a general strike in say four, or six, months from now, and see who’ll support the strikers. That might give an answer.
I think that probably depends on who is believed to have started the general strike and who is the target. If it’s the Teamsters or the dockworkers striking against Temu or Cosco, Trump-Vance might support it. If it’s people with PhD’s striking against Trump-Vance, Trump-Vance will probably be against it.
If it’s a Mangione-inspired general uprising demanding national health care or something like that, I definitely would not rule out the possibility that Trump-Vance might run up to the front of the line and try to call it a parade.
One thing I’d been noticing is that Team Trump has been very quiet (at least as far as I can tell) about the whole Mangione stuff, while the Dems are breaking themselves apart over this. I would venture that Trump sees this as both a major risk and opportunity–what the Chinese call 危機 (combination of characters for “danger” and “opportunity,” usually translated as “crisis”). Trump generally has a good read on the American public, especially his supporters and enemies, and there’s a lot that he can do there–esp if Dems mess up, which I think they are certain to do (eg throwing terrorism charges at Mangione).
I am staggered by how historically ignorant all discussions about tariffs have been so far, Yes, “Protectionism has a bad name.” We need to stop and ask why. But to answer would require some knowledge of how economics developed as a profession under the sponsorship of American and British ruling elites aka oligarchs. The simple historical fact is that protectionism was a key component of the policy mix that led USA and other countries outside the British empire to industrialize, including most recently South Korea. Thus, at this time, South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang offers a critique of free trade that is light years ahead of any other work I know of. (See Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, Bloomsbury; 2008.)
Greatly hampering the discussion is that USA’s history of protectionism and industrialization has been obscured and hidden by over a century of myths and lies. If you don’t know who Henry C. Carey was, then you are a victim of those myths and lies and simply don’t have the historical facts at hand (and in mind) to make any rational and effective judgement regarding tariffs and protectionism. Carey was the leading USA economist of the mid-19th century, and the world’s leading proponent of protectionism. And the proof is certainly in the pudding: the success of Carey’s ideas are amply proven by USA’s rise to global industrial leadership by the end of that century.
Internal improvements
Tariffs and protectionism are only one of five critical policies needed for economic success. Historians generally agree that there also must be a program what was known Carey’s time as “internal improvements.” This is major infrastructure programs, almost always undertaken by the national government directly, or with massive support and promotion by the national government. Examples are the building of roads, bridges and canals. The standard reference is Carter Goodrich’s Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-1890, which was published in 1960, just before it became almost impossible to write approvingly of government “interference” in the economy.
National banking
This one is not as clearcut as Internal improvements, because of the self-serving myths created by Wall Street and the big banks over the past century. And, because Alexander Hamilton’s plan of national finance was eclipsed by Andrew Jackson’s “War on the bank” (Bank of the United States) which created three decades of wildcat banking and a financial system so weak that the national government almost lost the Civil War in the first year. Lincoln and the Republicans only pulled the nation out of danger when they discarded entirely Jackson’s nonsystem and restored some Hamiltonian national purpose to banking and finance.
So, it’s not so much a system of national banking, as it is putting in place the regulations and guard rails needed to squeeze out much of the speculation and useless trading, and ensure that banking and finance are confined to channels that will help the rest of the national economy. A key example here: if tariffs are imposed, you have to make sure people that want to rebuild domestic production capacity have access to ample and easy credit.
To do this today, the big banks have to be broken up, private equity pretty much eliminated, futures trading once again restricted to actual users of the commodities, interest rates largely brought back under regulation, and short term stock trading repressed heavily. Obviously, none of this is likely to happen, so it’s a certainty that just imposing tariffs is never going to succeed at doing anything but raising prices.
Doctrine of high wages
This is one critical component of 19th century industrialization overlooked by historians and economists, and when they do notice it, they spin it as “plentiful land and scarce labor.”
But there really was a time when there was a strong cultural and normative bias in favor of paying workers well, and widely sharing the prosperity of the national economy. This is a key component of the political economy of civic republicanism. An excellent book on this is James L. Huston’s
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (LSU Press, 1998).
A positive requirement to do good
Also generally overlooked by historians and economists, and, again, a key component of the political economy of civic republicanism. Any decent biography of Benjamin Franklin will reflect this. “‘Serving God is doing good to man, but praying is thought an easier service and therefore more generally chosen,” Franklin wrote. A good book on USA’s early cultural and social imperative is David Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs (University of Chicago Press, 1979). See especially the material on the administration of John Quincy Adams.
Or just read the last third or quarter if Adams’ First Annual Message to Congress (December 6, 1825):
Anthony, thank you very much for a superb and informative comment.
It is easy to assert that history is important in everything but less easy to provide an example of why that is true.
Obviously you must have read a lot of Michael Hudson’s work. While reading your comment I was reminded of so many of the things I have learnt reading him. I wonder if your Korean economist was inspired by him too?
Something else that I was struck by while reading: the importance to the ruling class of the cooption of the intellectuals. The mass memory of the history of US economics and development has been almost extinguished, limiting severely the imaginative possibilities of future solutions.
Thanks again.
Some of the comments above are on the money in regards to the overwhelming importance/power of the institutional apparatus which guides American foreign policy and which, in my opinion, is the key determinant in any chance for significant domestic reform.
Stated most starkly, just because American domestic life is getting worse does not necessarily mean that American power internationally is not getting stronger.
When every key domestic institution (media, culture, music, churches, nonprofit charities, Hollywood, organized crime, White House, NIH, CDC, HHS, DHS, FBI, NSF, tech, universities, foundations, journalism, domestic corporations, finance, etc.) are now being used as instruments of statecraft–it is our Empire Managers who are in control both domestically and internationally.
“To put it another way, to hold the swingy members of the working class on the Republican side, Trump and Vance need to take actions that help the working class have a viable path to prosperity.”
I don’t think that this is (necessarily) true. I’d be more with Steve Bannon in saying that Trump could consolidate a large R majority if the new Trump admin followed through (that is highly unlikely). But Trump has also validated the white working class culturally, and is pressing for a restoration of the aristocracy of the working class that helped cement, and may now re-cement, the shaky foundations of our national project.
I think that there’s a good possibility that Trump can paper over–even ignore–enough of his failures, highlight enough of those scant measures of betterment that his admin does supply, to make people feel that the political process sees them. That resentment of the middle and upper class, of liberals and intellectuals, isn’t going away any time soon. I’m not relinquishing mine, which–despite a PhD and decently off life (even now)–is grounded in the plight of working class relatives and my own youthful adventures as janitor, cook, oil right roughneck, and ditch digger.
What swung a winning portion of the electorate to Trump, IMO, were those critical rebates at the height of Covid. They made it clear to many that he was willing to get behind people financially during troubled times in a way that Republicans hadn’t since Nixon. It’s zero skin off of the government’s nose, and his insistence on raising the debt ceiling suggests he’s not oblivious to the fact that some mildly redistributive gesture will need to accompany his largesse toward the ruling class. Make it popular to join the armed forces, internal militias (DeSantis is honing the model), militarized police forces and expanded prisons . . the idea that we need some form of New Deal for the working poor–which Bannon is arguing for–for the Rs to win national elections going forward, may not be the case.
Yes, these clowns ARE prisoners of their own rhetoric, do believe that a rising economic tide will lift poor people’s boats–do believe that some people need to be poor; some disruption looks inevitable. But we underestimate, often, the degree of misery that people will put up with.