By Noah Rothman
Monday, April 07, 2025
Call it “the fierce urgency of now.” Among those who
“know what time it is,” whose narcissism imbues them with confidence that “we
are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” incrementalism is a dirty word. That’s
particularly true of modernity’s discontents. Cloistered in impenetrable
bubbles populated by like minds, the radicals engage in a game of rhetorical
one-upmanship until they convince themselves that the whole contemporary
artifice must go. That outlook led so many on the political left to endorse a
program that its critics have aptly branded a “degrowth” agenda.
What else could you call it? To hear environmental
activists tell it — at least, when they’re comfortable enough to reveal their
true motives and preferred outcomes — the modern world, with its comforts and
abundant necessities, is a suffocating contrivance. Plentiful food is
contributing to disastrous overpopulation. The on-demand availability of power
is overheating the planet. Novel consumer goods and their commercialization
have made us soft and weak. “So much neon and noise, plastic and profligacy,”
the New Yorker’s E. Tammy Kim wrote contemptuously of the copious miracles
that have delivered mankind from the Hobbesian existence that defined the human
experience until roughly 300 years ago.
It was assumed that the Trump administration and
Republicans, generally, stood athwart this perverse masochism masquerading as
altruism. But the inescapable logic of Trump’s preferred tariff regime and the
global trade war it has inaugurated has led the president’s backers to embrace
the defective logic of the degrowth movement.
As Trump himself insisted, there is no market reaction
apocalyptic enough to divert him from his chosen course. Indeed, it’s “stupid”
to imagine that the president would alter his deep ideological convictions
based on minor externalities like the implosion of the global economy.
“Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he
warned.
Sure, it’s a bitter pill, but compelling consumers to
absorb price increases and struggle amid the reduced economic activity that
will follow Trump’s tariff regime is good for you. Indeed, many in and around
Trump’s orbit have — either out of conviction or desperation — borrowed the
rhetoric of the degrowthers.
“You can lose money,” declared the gadfly and popular
MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson. “You can lose points in your portfolio. It
costs you absolutely nothing. You won’t miss them when you’re dead.” In much
the same way that environmentalist Luddites insist that your sacrifices will
beget a better world, eliding the many steps along the way from privation to
prosperity, you’re called upon to suffer for a greater good that is never
properly defined.
Whatever his reach, Johnson’s outlook is not anathema
inside the Trump administration. “I’m not happy with what’s going on in the
market today,” Treasury Secretary Scott
Bessent said during an ill-conceived interview with Tucker Carlson. “But
the distribution of equities across households — the top 10 percent of
Americans own 88 percent of equities, 88 percent of the stock market. The next
40 percent owns 12 percent of the stock market. The bottom 50 has debt; they have
credit card bills, they rent their homes, they have auto loans, and we’ve got
to give them some relief.”
This is an unreconstructed version of the faulty economic
rationales to which Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are partial. It presupposes that investment income and the
economic growth it generates come at the expense of low-income Americans.
Moreover, Bessent seems to have reached the conclusion that engineering worse
but marginally more equal outcomes is the only way to remedy this intolerable
disequilibrium. After all, as the secretary said previously, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence
of the American dream.” In other words, paying less to get more, freeing up
income for productive purposes other than funneling it into the insatiable maw
of the U.S. Treasury, is a gateway to vice: sloth, ingratitude, and the weak
constitutions that typify the atomized modern man. Take your medicine.
“The army of millions and millions of human beings
screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come
to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard
Lutnick forecast in an appearance on CBS News over the weekend. “Great
Americans — the tradecraft of America — is going to fix them, is going to work
on them.”
According to Trump, we may have to endure two more years of this before menial manufacturing
of the sort Lutnick describes is reshored to Trump’s satisfaction. Meanwhile,
back in our shared reality, only China outpaces America’s global manufacturing output — production that has been on the rise in recent years. And if the goal is to restore
the status quo ante that comparative advantage undid, Trump’s trade
policies are the enemy of that objective. At least, according to the
manufacturers who are vocally terrified about the trade war’s effect on their bottom lines, to say nothing of
their ability to employ the forgotten masses.
The faint Bolshevist notes that consumers of this sort of
rhetoric may detect become far more pronounced when surveying the pro-tariff
arguments of the MAGA faithful.
Free Press contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon dispensed with the burden of proof when
she insisted that the global economy to which we were all accustomed last week
was a plague on mankind. Something drastic had to be done. “And yet when
somebody has the courage to show up and say to Wall Street, screw you, I am
waging class warfare on behalf of the American working class,” she shouted
during a recent cable news appearance. “And you elites in Wall Street, you do
what you need to do because I’m not going to stop fighting for the American
working class.”
“We must reorder the American economy to work for the
masses of working-class citizens,” declared one-time Donald Trump and JD Vance
campaign operative Steve
Cortes. In some ways, he added, the economy Donald Trump inherited was
“actually even worse than the Great Depression” because the rich are “getting
wealthier and wealthier while the working-class masses suffered.”
Cortes concludes with a note of caution to free traders.
Populism “is ascendant,” he notes. “The question is, do you want populism of
the left,” he asks, “or do you want populism of the right?” That is not the
question. Rather, what inquiring minds really want to know is, what’s the
difference?
It took the Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers in the
West decades to abandon Marxism-Leninism’s unrealizable promise of material
abundance. Only then, when the belief that socialism would usher in a new stage
of human progress was finally abandoned, did central planning advocates retreat
to the notion that collectivism was morally superior. What that argument lacked
in empiricism it made up for in being the last safe rhetorical harbor.
It took MAGA just days to arrive at the same place. With some
exceptions, the MAGA right has not undergone a sudden conversion to
degrowtherism. They’re merely groping for a rationale that renders Trump’s
tariffs comprehensible to skeptics of this faith-based initiative. Their
progression was predictable because it’s the same path the left follows. First,
they raise prices. Then, they shriek at the producers who respond to increased
prices. Ultimately, they settle on the notion that deprivation and hardship are
good for your soul. In the end, the argument resorts to coercion. You will
have less, and there’s nothing you can or should do about it.
That argument tends to be the final word in the
authoritarian systems necessary to maintain an intolerable level of distress.
We’ll see soon enough if civically active Americans are likewise intimidated.
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