A Hundred-Year Moment of Decision

Substack is where the health is. It’s doing the thing that’s supposed to happen. Alex Berenson is a critic of the Trump administration’s tariffs, calling them “a massive mistake” that will “never work,” while Jordan Schachtel views the Trump tariff maneuver much more favorably, arguing from the reasonable starting point that Trump “is a dealmaker and a pragmatist, not an ideologue.” Eugyppius points to a positive development, noting that Europe is responding to Trump “with unusual sanity” and a proposal to entirely eliminate some tariffs between the European and American economies. Bad Cattitude unambiguously hates tariffs, and argues that “punching yourself in the face because your opponent punches himself in the face seems an unwise tactic.”

See that? Viewpoint diversity. People hashing it out. Calmly.

My view is Schachtel’s view: Trump is trying to drive other countries to the table to lower tariffs across the board, mutually, and the current movement toward high tariffs is tactical and temporary. The point is ultimately more and freer trade, not a world where high tariffs form permanent protectionist barricades. We buy your stuff, you buy our stuff.

Berenson’s examination of the underlying cultural argument is tremendously important, and I disagree with him:

We have a huge number of deaths of despair in this country: drug overdoses, alcoholism, suicides, homicides. Car crashes too. The United States has always had more preventable deaths than other rich countries, but now the gap has worsened dramatically even though our wealth has grown compared to theirs.

The populist right believes those two problems are closely connected, that bringing back high-wage manufacturing jobs will end the overdose epidemic and heal the United States more broadly.

I’m not so sure. I think the main problem with our drug problem is, well, drugs.

My view is that American strength was the product of a producer society, and American weakness is the product of a consumer society. We were healthier when we made things, when we endured hardship in the interest of making things, and when we had a sizable middle class that lived on the work of production. The powerful naval fleet that announced the arrival of American power on the world stage was the product of American shipyards, which are in marked decline. Making things: being healthy and strong.

If Trump’s maneuver works as advertised, it seems to me that it changes the trajectory of the country and its culture. We’re making hundred-year decisions: choosing a different future, including the future that our country will have after we’re dead and gone.

Trump’s effort to restore some degree of additional productivity to the American economy, to move toward producing more things, is unlikely to transform the country because one elected official says so. The needed transformation will be most effective if it’s bottom-up, not top-down. But Trump is creating a space for other people to join the work, and signaling the possibility of the transformation. I’m enthused by it, and prepared to endure near-term hardship to secure a future that will benefit our grandchildren. It’s just fine to argue about that, but there’s a logic and an intent behind his political course. The headlines are mostly about Trump’s insane, bizarre, totally destructive and irrational trade war:

I think those headlines choose to miss a bunch of obvious points about what Trump means to do, whether or not you agree with him. Argue against what he’s doing, if you want, but argue against what he’s actually doing.

Finally, I’ve been reminded this week of John Michael Greer’s essay arguing for the presence of four competing classes in American society:

It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income? Broadly speaking—there are exceptions, which I’ll get to in a moment—it’s from one of four sources: returns on investment, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.

The angry responses to Trump’s tariff maneuver this week, and to the market reaction, aren’t coming from all of those classes. You can figure out those divisions yourself, because they’re pretty clear. And I think that patience will pay off, here, as the view of these negotiation-driving tariffs will be much different a year from now than it is today.

You’re seeing a panicked narrative, and the pandemic is echoing. The people who sold you forced masking and mandatory vaccines, and the institutions that pushed fear five years ago, are back to selling their manipulative narrative product. I think there’s a place for calm, here, and for optimism about the future, and that’s the choice I’m going to make.