Trumpism and "direct economics"

Quinn Slobodian gets the appeal of Trump's economics - but misses its weakness.

Quinn Slobodian, writing for the Financial Times, makes a curious argument about Trump’s economy:

Similar to plebiscites and referendums, direct economics seeks to do an end run around experts and incumbents and communicate straight to individual citizens and voters. It tries to demystify what have long been naturalised processes captured in stock market indices, interest rates and even fiat currency, to expose these as mere tools of the elites in further oppressing the true people.

Ironically, this is very close to what we would ordinarily just call “democratic socialism.” Particularly in the Marxist tradition, an extraordinary amount of socialist polemic revolves around insisting that capitalism isn’t a natural system — that it is the product of choices made by humans. Democratic socialism builds on that premise by insisting that these choices should be democratized as much as possible.

In a world where so much inequality and injustice seems natural or imposed from the top down, the idea that people can take control of their own economy has an obvious appeal! Insofar as Trump’s economics seem to hold out that promise it is not hard to understand why people find that enticing, particularly those who the economy has hit the hardest. You can see that happening, for example, in a crucial passage of Parnes and Allen’s Fight:

One state campaign aide said of Black men who leaned toward Trump… “Every single one of them said one word and fucking one word only: stimmy.” The aide tried to argue that Biden had also sent stimulus checks. “They’d say, ‘No, he didn’t. I got one with Trump’s name on it.’”

People didn’t just like those checks — they liked Trump for it because it felt like he was taking control and intervening directly on their behalf. But Slobodian continues:

The arbitrariness of [Trump’s] tariff announcements is taken as a demerit by many. Yet arguably, from the point of view of direct economics, it is this very arbitrariness that is their strength.

Here, I think, is where this analysis goes off the rails. People like that Trump is taking command of the economy, and insofar as they like the tariffs at all this is probably why. But that is a different thing from saying that people like the “arbitrariness” of the tariffs. That just seems patently untrue. The people who are defending these tariffs clearly think that they are following sound economic reasoning. They may be mistaken in that, but this does not mean that they therefore agree that Trump’s “direct economics” are arbitrary and that this is why they like them.

I stress this point simply because there seems to be an effort afoot to associate state intervention into the market with arbitrary or bad reasoning. You can see this in liberal efforts not only to assert free markets as the ideal alternative to Trump’s tariffs, but to vilify in-principle defenses of tariffs as mealy-mouthed compromise. And in Slobodian’s article, we see this in the conflation of state intervention and arbitrariness under the concept “direct economics”.

The real problem with Trump’s tariffs is three-fold. First, they are — as everyone has pointed out — comically ill-designed even as tariffs go. They seem at this point far more likely to decimate the American economy than to bring back industry. Second, contrary to what Quinn suggests, they do not actually represent the replacement of elites with democratic control. The tariffs have been wildly unpopular from the beginning, and are only in place precisely because plutocrats bought control of state power and are using it to enact their own idiosyncratic, kooky agenda. Third and most importantly, the tariffs are a bad idea because even if they succeeded, all they would do is redistribute international wealth in a blatantly inegalitarian way that privileges US national interests.

None of these problems necessarily follow from “direct economics”. You can have a democratic socialist state that makes bad decisions of course, but you can also have one that makes much smarter and much more moral decisions than Trump is making now.