Category: Democracy

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A return to Nature.

Thomas Hobbes wrote his seminal work Leviathan in 1651. In it he describes the world system as it was then as being in “a state of nature,” something that some have interpreted as anarchy. However, anarchy has order and purpose. It is not chaos. In fact, if we think of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market” we get something similar to what anarchy is in practice: the aggregate of individual acts of self-interest can lead to the optimisation of value and outcomes at the collective level. Anarchy clears; chaos does not.

For Hobbes, the state of nature was chaos. Absent a “Sovereign” (i.e. a government) that could impose order on global and domestic societies, humans were destined to lead lives the were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.“ This has translated into notions of “might makes right,” “survival of the fittest,” “to the victor goes the spoils” and other axioms of so-called power politics. The most elaborate of these, international relations realism, is a school of thought that is based on the belief that because the international system has no superseding Sovereign in the form of world government with comprehensive enforcement powers, and because there are no universally shared values and mores throughout the globe community that ideologically bind cultures, groups and individuals, global society exists as a state of nature where, even if there are attempts to manage the relationships between States (and other actors) via rules, norms, institutions and the like, the bottom line is that States (and other actors) have interests, not friends.

Interests are pursued in a context of power differentials. Alliances are temporary and based on the convergence of mutual interests. Values are not universal and so are inconsequential. International exchange is transactional, not altruistic. Actors with greater resources at their disposal (human, natural, intellectual) prevail over those that have less. In case of resource parity between States or other actors, balances of power become systems regulators, but these are fluid and contingent, not permanent. Geography matters in that regard, which is why geopolitics (the relationship of power to geography) is the core of international relations.

It is worth remembering this when evaluating contemporary international relations. It has been well established by now that the liberal international order of the post WW2 era has largely been dismantled in the context of increasing multipolarity in inter-State relations and the rise of the Global South within the emerging order. As I have written before, the long transition and systemic realignment in international affairs has led to norm erosion, rules violations, multinational institutional and international organizational decay or irrelevance and the rise of conflict (be it in trade, diplomacy or armed force) as the new systems regulator.

These developments have accentuated over the last decade and now have a catalyst for a full move into a new global moment–but not into a multipolar or multiplex constellation arrangement in which rising and established powers move between multilateral blocs depending on the issues involved. Instead, the move appears to be one towards a modern Hobbesian state of nature, with the precipitant being the MAGA administration of Donald Trump and its foreign policy approach.

We must be clear that it is not Trump who is the architect of this move. As mentioned in pervious posts, he is an empty vessel consumed by his own self-worth. That makes him a useful tool of far smarter people than he, people who work in the shadow of relative anonymity and who cut their teeth in rightwing think tanks and policy centres. In their view the liberal internationalist order placed too many constraints on the exercise of US power while at the same time requiring the US to over-extend itself as the “world’s policeman” and international aid donor . Bound by international conventions on the one hand and besieged by foreign rent-seekers and adversaries on the other, the US was increasingly bent under the weight of overlapped demands in which existential national interests were subsumed to a plethora of frivolous diversions (such as human rights and democracy promotion).

For these strategists, the solution to the dilemma was not to be found in any new multipolar (or even technopolar) constellation but in a dismantling of the entire edifice of international order, something that was based on an architecture of rules, institutions and norms nearly 500 years in the making. Many have mentioned Trump’s apparent mercantilist inclinations and his admiration for former US president William McKinley’s tariff policies in the late 1890s. Although that may be true, the Trump/MAGA agenda is far broader in scope than trade. In fact, the US had its greatest period of (neo-imperial) expansion during McKinley’s tenure as president (1897-1901), winning the Spanish-American War and annexing Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the Philippines, so Trump’s admiration for him may well be based on notions of territorial expansionism as well.

Whatever Trump’s views of McKinley, the basic idea under-riding his foreign policy team’s approach is that in a world where the exercise of power is the ultimate arbiter of a State’s international status, the US remains the greatest Power of them all. It does not matter if the PRC or Russia challenge the US or if other emerging powers join the competition. Without the hobbling effect of its liberal obligations the US can and will dominate them all. This involves trade but also the exercise of raw (neo) imperialist ambitions in places like Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada. It involves sidelining the UN, NATO, EU and other international organisations where the US had to share equal votes with lesser powers who flaunted the respect and tribute that should naturally be given in recognition of the US’s superior power base.

There appears to be a belief in this approach that the US can be a new hegemon–but not Sovereign–in a unipolar world, even more so than during the post-USSR-pre 9/11 interregnum. In a new state of nature it can sit at the core of the international system, orbited by constellations of lesser Great Powers like the PRC, Russia, the EU, perhaps India, who in turn would be circled by lesser powers of various stripes. The US will not seek to police the world or waste time and resources on well-meaning but ultimately futile soft power exercises like those involving foreign aid and humanitarian assistance. Its power projection will be sharp on all dimensions, be it trade, diplomacy or in military-security affairs. It will use leverage, intimidation and varying degrees of coercion as well as persuasion (and perhaps even bribery) as diplomatic tools. It will engage the world primarily in bilateral fashion, eschewing multilateralism for others to pursue according to their own interests and power capabilities. That may suit them, but for the US multilateralism is just another obsolescent vestige of the liberal internationalist past.

A possible (and partial) explanation for the change in the US foreign policy approach may be the learning effect in the US of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza. Trump and his advisors may have learned that impunity has its own rewards, that no country or group of countries other than the US (if it has the will) can effectively confront a state determined to pursue its interests regardless of international law, the laws of war or institutional censorship (say, by the UN or International Criminal Court), or any other type of countervailing power. The Russians and Israelis have gotten away with their behaviour because, all rhetoric and hand-wringing aside, there is no actor or group of actors who have the will or capability to stop them. For Trump strategists, these lesser powers are pursuing their interests regardless of diplomatic niceties and international conventions, and they are prevailing precisely because of that. Other than providing military assistance to Ukraine, no one has lifted a serious finger against the Russians other than the Ukrainians themselves, and even fewer have seriously moved to confront Israel’s now evident ethnic cleansing campaign in part because the US has backed Israel unequivocally. The exercise of power in each case occurred in a norm enforcement vacuum in spite of the plethora of agencies and institutions designed to prevent such egregious violations of international standards.

Put another way: if Israel and Russia can get away with their disproportionate and indiscriminate aggression, imagine what the US can do.

If we go on to include the PRC’s successful aggressive military “diplomacy” in East/SE Asia, the use of targeted assassinations, hacking, disinformation and covert direct influence campaigns overseas by various States and assorted other unpunished violations of international conventions, then it is entirely plausible that Trump’s foreign policy brain trust sees the moment as ripe for finally breaking the shackles of liberal internationalism. Also recall that many in Trump’s inner circle subscribe to chaos or disruption theory, in which a norms-breaking “disruptor” like Trump seizes the opportunities presented by the breakdown of the status quo ante.

Before the US could hollow out liberal internationalism abroad and replace it with a modern international state of nature it had to crush liberalism at home. Using Executive Orders as a bludgeon and with a complaint Republican-dominated Congress and Republican-adjacent federal courts. the Trump administration has openly exercised increasingly authoritarian control powers with the intention of subjugating US civil society to its will. Be it in its deportation policies, rollbacks of civil rights protections, attacks on higher education, diminishing of federal government capacity and services (except in the security field), venomous scapegoating of opponents and vulnerable groups, the Trump/MAGA domestic agenda not only seeks to turn the US into a illiberal or “hard” democracy (what Spanish language scholars call a “democradura” as a play on words mixing the terms democracia and dura (hard)). It also serves notice that the US under Trump/MAGA is willing to do whatever is necessary to re-impose its supremacy in world affairs, even if it means hurting its own in order to prove the point. By its actions at home Trump’s administration demonstrates capability, intent and steadfast resolve as it establishes a reputation for ruthless pursuit of its policy agenda. Foreign interlocutors will have to take note of this and adjust accordingly. Hence, for Trump’s advisors, authoritarianism at home is the first step towards undisputed supremacy abroad.

The Trump embrace of international state of nature differs from Hobbes because it does not see the need for a superseding global governance network but instead believes that the US can dominate the world without the encumbrances of power-sharing with lesser players. In this view hegemony means domination, no more or less. It implies no attempt at playing the role of a Sovereign imposing order on a disorderly and recalcitrant community of Nation-States and non-State actors that do not share common values, much less interests.

This is the core of the current US foreign policy approach. It is not about reorganising the international order within the extant frameworks as given. It is about removing those frameworks entirely and replacing them with an America First, go it alone agenda where the US, by virtue of its unrivalled power differential relative to all other States and global actors, can maximise its self-interest in largely unconstrained fashion. Some vestiges of the old international order may remain, but they will be marginalised and crippled the longer the US project is in force.

What does not seem to be happening in Trump’s foreign policy circle are three things. First, recognition that other States and international actors may band together against the US move to unipolarity in a new state of nature and that for all its talk the US may not be able to impose unipolar dominance over them. Second, understanding that States like the PRC, Russia and other Great Powers and communities (like the EU) may resist the US move and challenge it before it can consolidate the new international status quo. Third, foreseeing that the technology titans who today are influential in the Trump administration may decide to transfer there loyalties elsewhere, especially if Trump’s ego starts becoming a hindrance to their (economic and digital) power bases. The fusion of private technology control and US State power may not be as compatible over time as presently appears to be the case, something that may not occur with States such as the PRC, India or Japan that have different corporate cultures and political structures. As the current investment in the Middle Eastern oligarchies shows, the fusion of State and private techno power may be easier to accomplish in those contexts rather than the US.

In any event, whether it be a short-term interlude or a longue durée feature of international life, a modern state of nature is now our new global reality.

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A culture of cruelty.

In February I wrote a post about “the politics of cruelty” in which I highlighted the mean-spirited commonalities of recently elected rightwing governments in the US, NZ, Italy and other democracies. In this post I shall expand on them with reference to some of the authoritarian features that I researched and wrote about when I was a young academic.

In the 1980s and early 1990s when I wrote about Argentine and South American authoritarianism, I borrowed the phrase “cultura del miedo” (culture of fear) from Juan Corradi, Guillermo O’Donnell, Norberto Lechner and others to characterise the social anomaly that exists in a country ruled by a state terror regime like the “Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional” in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. In those circumstances individual psycho-pathologies are often rooted in the pervasive feelings of dread, vulnerability and hopelessness brought about by the regime’s use of death squads, disappearances and other violent authoritarian measures to enforce public compliance with their edicts. That pervasive sense of fear extends to collective life, something that was and is a deliberate objective of authoritarians because it produces a sense of survivalist alienation and social atomisation in the body politic, thereby disrupting basic horizontal bonds between and within groups in civil society (you can see one of my essays that uses this concept here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111080).

In recent years and especially since Trump’s re-election in the US, Javier Milei’s election in Argentina and the election of the right wing “chaos coalition” in NZ, I see an extension of this concept in what I will call the culture of cruelty. A culture of cruelty is one in which social groups and organisations, including governments, engage in particularly cruel behaviour in order to punish, humiliate and revel in the plight of others, particularly political opponents and scapegoated social out-groups. We only need to think of Trump’s deportation policies and the behaviour of his immigration Gestapo, ICE, to see the culture of cruelty at work. We can see it is the DOGE chainsaw approach to public sector employment and federal regulations. We can see it at MAGA rallies. It is personalised in the behaviour of Trump advisors like Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt and Tom Homan, who show utter contempt for the suffering their policies have caused and in fact appear to relish being able to rub in the fact that they can act with apparent impunity due to the weakness of the courts and congressional or partisan complicity. 

In fact, the “culture of impunity” is another characteristic of authoritarianism that I and others wrote about three decades go, and it goes hand-in-hand with the culture of fear because it is the feeling of impunity that leads dictatorships to use wanton repression as an instrument of subjugation of the popular will. In other words, the culture of regime impunity leads to the imposition of a culture of fear in society. That is what is at work, to various degrees, under Trump, Milei, the evil clown circus currently ruling NZ (especially in the ACT and NZ First parties) and in other former liberal democracies today.

This culture is mean-spirited and malicious. In many instances it is fuelled by hatred of “others,” be they immigrants, indigenous people, people of colour or different faiths, those who are sexually “deviant” from “traditional” norms (i.e. non-binary) and others who do not conform to a given set of social mores or expectations or are simply easy scapegoats given public attitudes. It is facilitated by the increased vulgarisation of social discourse and erosion of societal norms regarding behaviour and civic exchange, now megaphoned and accentuated by social media. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and uses cruelty as a punishment, as an intimidation tactic and as a dark reminder of what is possible when one is targeted for any number of perceived transgressions

Cruelty can be physical, mental, emotional, social or any combination of them because its impact is not confined to just one dimension or aspect of human existence. It is “unusual” in that its objective is to cause disproportionate anxiety, anguish, stress and suffering to targeted people and groups beyond whatever duress might (or might not) be warranted under the circumstances. The term “scarred for life” is an accurate depiction of the broader long-term effects that cruelty can have on the human subject. And when it comes to public policy or social exchange among groups, that is exactly what perpetrators hope to achieve via its use: it psychologically traumatises people and groups in the moment as well as their individual and collective memories, something that renders asunder the social fabric into which they were previously woven.

As is the case with torture (which is inherently cruel), social and political cruelty works. Not so much as an instrument to induce cooperation from those otherwise disposed not to give it, but as a disincentive, revenge or retribution tool against them.

I could write more about the subject but this is not the place to do so. However, I hope that the notion is clear. We are now in an era where the culture and politics of cruelty have become integral features of democratic politics in at least some Western societies (I will leave aside for the moment the fear that exists in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes like those in Russia, China or Nicaragua). And if the cultures of impunity that have led to the imposition of these growing cultures of cruelty and fear in Western societies continues unchecked, then another social pathology will follow–the reaping or harvesting of fear (“cosecha del miedo,” in O’Donnell’s words) in the form of a legacy of damaged people and institutions resultant from the practice.

Should that happen, then democracy as a social construct and a method of governance will never be the same.

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Uncertainty, Hierarchy and the Dilemma of Democracy.

If nothing else, we have learned that the economic and geopolitical turmoil caused by the Trump tariff see-saw raises a fundamental issue of the human condition that extends beyond trade wars and “the markets.” That issue is uncertainty and its centrality to individual and collective life. It extends further into how human societies are organised, which in turn raises the question as to how political life is constructed. There are some interesting dilemmas involved as are their methods of resolution.

What we fear most in life is uncertainty. Thinks of it along the lines of that old Donald Rumsfeld syllogism. There are the “known knowns:” What we know about we can adjust to and even take advantage of, either via coping or avoidance strategies. There are the “known unknowns:” What we know that we do not know (say, we know that an earthquake or flood will occur but not when it will occur) allows us to develop avoidance or ameliorative strategies via insurance or hedging schemes. Then there are the “unknown unknowns:” things that are real but about which we do not know to the point that we have no coping mechanism for them because they cannot be foreseen or anticipated. This makes us uncertain about how to proceed.

In short, what we know we can prepare for, what we do not know we can prepare for, but what we are uncertain about leaves us in decision-making limbo. In Gramcian terms, certainty allows us agency, or what he called virtu. Uncertainty leaves our destinies to fate, or in his words, fortuna. A basic human objective is to control fate through agency, and that requires some measure of certainty in our lives.

A personal anecdote illustrates my point. At one time in my life I was an avid open-water swimmer and managed to pass on some of that interest to my then teenaged daughter, a versatile athlete in her own right. We swam together in lakes, rivers and oceans whose waters were known to us. We knew currents, water temperatures, the fauna in each, and when and when not go into them. If we knew that there were alligators or sharks about, or large ships or drunken wastrels riding jet skis, we avoided swimming. If we knew that there were no hostile critters or dangerous currents, boaters and other hazards, we swam. But one time, when she got a bit older and was visiting me, I invited her to swim in a bay near my house, one that she had not swum in before. When we got to the beach she hesitated and demurred. That was not like her as she had always been keen to swim. I asked her what the problem was and she said that she did not know what was in the water but knew that sharks were common to that area. She could not be certain, in spite of my assurances, that there were no sharks where we were going to swim, and was therefore reluctant to go in.

I tried to reassure that at that time of day (midday), what sharks might have been there retreated to deeper waters further off-shore, and we could stay within 20 meters of the sand at all times. That did not assuage her. She kept on saying that if she could be certain about what was and was not in the water at that time, she could make a better decision. But since I could not guarantee 100 percent that there would be no sharks at that time, she preferred not to go in. Since she had already demonstrated courage in various ways at younger age, I accepted her reluctance and we found a pool instead. (Truth be told, a few years later a young woman was bitten by a bull shark at that exact beach while swimming at night).

The point is that it was not what she knew or did not know that bothered her. It was the uncertainty that filled the gap between what she knew and did not know that made her pause.

That is exactly why uncertainty is what the markets fear most. Businesses develop strategies based upon what they know and what they attempt to know. But something like Trump throws all forecasts and plans into disarray. The same goes for political risk and diplomacy. In fact, intelligence collection and analysis is, like polling and other predictive instruments, designed to reduce uncertainties and impose a degree of predictability–certainty, by another measure–to the subject in question. Humans spend a major part of their lives, both personally and collectively, trying to overcome uncertainties of a macro- and micro- sort.

Human social organisations reflect this fear of uncertainty in their composition. Almost all social organisations are organised hierarchically. Businesses, sports teams, churches, schools, social clubs, volunteer agencies, interest groups, armed services and law enforcement, other public services, and most of all, the traditional family, are organised vertically rather than horizontally. Some may be more authoritarian than egalitarian in their hierarchies and leadership selection criteria, but all are organised in ways that place decision-making authority at the top, from which directives are passed down. A major reason for that is to promote efficiency in decision-making in order to reduce uncertainties, if not impose some degree of certainty, in the organisational decision-making process as well as its outcomes.

Although many reforms, challenges and modifications of organisational hierarchies in human society have been made, the core of collective life is a hierarchical one. It is hierarchical because that has traditionally been seen as the most effective way of coping with uncertainty in and around social organisations.

That is where a major contradiction emerges. Although most social organisations are hierarchical in organization in an attempt to reduce uncertainty, democracy is not. In fact, authoritarianism–dictatorship by another word–would seem to be the most “natural” or “organic” type of human political society because it aligns neatly with most all other forms of social organization. In fact, not all types of authoritarianism are personalist and some even have methods of collective leadership selection contained within them (think of the CCP in China or the House of Saud). Even non-human primates, while dominated by so-called Alpha Males, rely on the support of females and younger males to ward off challengers to their rule. However, in every instance the politics of the group are hierarchical and authoritarian even if some subordinate input into leadership decision-making is allowed.

In contrast, in democracies uncertainty has been placed at the centre of the leadership selection process. That what we fear most is the linchpin of the electoral process. No matter how much polling, gerry-pandering, vote-rigging, candidate-blocking or other frameworks are introduced in an effort to lend certainty to voting outcomes, at its core elections are about institutionalised uncertainty. But they also have institutional constraints. At pre-set intervals, elections are held and leaderships are openly contested under a veil of voter secrecy. At the moment one votes the outcome is not known. That happens after the voting deadline passes. So elections, while uncertain in any specific instance, are also temporally delimited by institutional frameworks and processes. They may happen at 2, 3, 4 or 6 year intervals or even as special events under certain conditions, but the bottom line is that they occur at regular intervals regardless of the outcomes of previous contests.

There are plenty of caveats and modifications to this general principle, but the principle stands. Democracy is a political system based on institutionalised uncertainty when it comes to leadership selection. The motives for this contradiction of basic human social organization is to keep candidates and parties honest and accountable. Democracy is a system where losers agree to lose in exchange for being allowed to compete again in the future at pre-determined intervals and winners accept that their rule will be challenged at those intervals. This electoral “bargain” (election winners and losers accept outcomes in exchange for being allowed to challenge or defend at given time intervals) lends some certainty to the system itself (rather than the fortunes of those competing within it). Thus the dilemma of democracy as a system based on institutionalised uncertainty is resolved by imposing chronological certainty on the timing of elections.

Obviously enough, this core feature of democracy–the uncertainty inherent in free and open competitive elections–has been seriously undermined by authoritarian-minded politicians like Donald Trump, Viktor Urban and Recap Erdogan,. But their usurpations do not dissolve the fundamental truth that true democracy is founded on electoral uncertainty.

There is another feature of democracy that helps support the idiosyncrasy that is electoral uncertainty. Elections can be considered to be the “procedural” level of democracy because they involve the procedures and processes of leadership selection, but they are underpinned by “substantive” democracy in the form of institutional guarantees of civil rights, due process under the law, government accountability (both horizontal and vertical) and transparency, equality of voice and collective action, provision of minimum health and welfare standards, etc. With regard to civil society, norms and values are promoted that encourage horizontal solidarity, that is, the notion that people are equal as persons and should be treated the way any individual would want to be. Notions of fairness and access to opportunity apply here.

These are the institutional, societal and economic dimensions in which certainty is promoted under the procedural umbrella. Differences in how institutional, societal and economic democracy are pursued are what make the difference between liberal, social, Christian, illiberal and socialist democracies. Uncertainty may rule leadership selection, but limited ranges of institutional certainty when it comes to individual and collective behaviour and rights are offered to the body politic in general.

Because of the guarantees and processes available to the public at the substantive democratic level, people offer what is known as “contingent mass consent” to the democratic form of rule. In exchange for delegating the authority to make public policy decision-making positions to election winners, voters expect that certain material, social and cultural conditions are met. For example, voters expect economic and physical security, affordable access to health care, education and social services, equal rights under the law, and more. In addition, consent is not given once, forever, but is contingent on the delivery of substantive guarantees and expectations being met. Again, the reality is all too often different, but that is how democratic decline or backsliding is measured.

As can now be seen in the US.

In the US the root cause of democratic backsliding may lie at the level of contingent mass consent, not just the authoritarian behaviour of the current president and his minions. In recent decades many people have seen their prospects diminish while the material fortunes of politicians and “one percenters” flourish. Advances in technology, if not the ultimate cause of many of the major social dislocations of the contemporary moment, are certainly compounding them. Alienation and hopelessness have risen in several socio-economic and ethnographic demographics that are further confounded by increases in international mass migration and a the perceived restructuring of traditional value systems in ways that they do not understand. Their sense of uncertainty has grown along with all of the other pathologies now present in modern democratic life, and none of the substantive guarantees offered below the electoral mantle appear to be ameliorating that uncertainty. If fact, for some elections just seem to make things worse. This is not exclusive to the US, although it acts as a weathervane indicator of the syndrome.

Withdrawal of mass contingent consent is also where the move towards authoritarianism may be coming from. Authoritarians guarantee certainty. The certainty of repression, of elite bias, of blaming some “others” for the national malaise. They assure the public that they know what they are doing, that it is in the collective interests that they rule, that they will brook no opposition to their national projects (like “Make America Great Again”), and that they will restore traditional values and lead the people to their rightful and “proper” places in society. They assure the electorate that they are certain of that.

In democratic polities where material and social uncertainty abound in at least some sectors of society, mass contingent consent is withdrawn and the authoritarian option is explored because, for those doing the withdrawing, democracy does not seem to work. The 77 million people who voted for Trump in 2024 may have done so for many reasons, but a main one appears to be profound unhappiness with the political and economic status quo bequeathed by the Biden administration. It is ironic that the US economy was, by most macroeconomic indicators, doing very well on Election Day last November, but that was not enough for those 77 million people. For them voting for Trump represented a way to withdraw mass contingent consent from the US democratic regime as it stood (i.e. The “Swamp” or Beltway “politics as usual”) until such a time as their prospects improved and expectations are met.

Instead, their purported saviour has turned out to be chaos agent who has orchestrated not just a global market meltdown but also has propagated mass uncertainty to levels unseen since the Financial Crisis of the late 2000s and perhaps even the Great Depression. The insidious aspect of this is not confined to the chaos itself and the uncertainty that comes with it, but extends to Trump’s solution set, which is to increasingly use authoritarian devices as a means to combat the uncertainties he himself is magnifying.

This is an important distinction. It is not Trump’s authoritarianism per se that has caused the decline of US democracy, at least at the institutional level. Instead, it is the withdrawal of mass contingent consent to the US democratic system by the voting majority that made it possible for him to steer the country in an increasingly authoritarian direction. But he has two conditions that he must meet if his rule (as outlined in the infamous Project 2025 policy paper) is to succeed. He must diminish uncertainty with his authoritarian practices; and he must satisfy material and social expectations in order to secure and reproduce mass contingent consent to his project.

As things stand neither of those two conditions appear close to being met, so the next round of institutionalised uncertainty in the form of the 2026 midterm Congressional (and state and local) elections will be a true test of the dilemmas confronting US democracy.

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The Comparative Notebook on Trump’s Tariffs.

The ever brilliant Kate Nicholls has kindly agreed to allow me to re-publish her substack offering some under-examined backdrop to Trump’s tariff madness. The essay is not meant to be a full scholarly article but instead an insight into the thinking (if that is the correct word) behind the current moment of trade madness. However unpleasant, there is a method to it, and there is a twist to how it may be applied today.

The link is here. It is well worth the read.

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The Green’s Identity Bubble Problem.

The scurrilous attacks on Benjamin Doyle, a list Green MP, over his supposed inappropriate behaviour towards children has dominated headlines and social media this past week, led by frothing Rightwing agitators clutching their pearls and fanning the flames of moral panic over pedophiles and and perverts. Winston Peter decided that it would be good to amplify the defamatory claims from his perch as Deputy Prime Minister and Party Leader, relying on rhetorical questions (where is the media?) and innuendo to megaphone the venomous narrative while avoiding legal liability for defamation. The pile-on is despicable.

Besides the obvious partisan basis for the attacks on Doyle and the Green Party co-leaders for defending (in somewhat pedantic and condescending terms) their colleague, the Rightwinger’s alarm about what I will call “the kiss”–a chaste lip-to-lip “smooch” between father and very young son–betrays deep-seated heterosexual repression that is Barry Crump-ish in nature. It avoids the fact that in many cultures men kiss their children on the lips well into pubescence and that men and boys hug and kiss each other and even hold hands in public. I grew up in Argentina, and if one looks at how the World Cup champions celebrate their victories you will see a lot of male kissing and father-child lip-kissing going on and no-one thinks to impute untoward sexual intent to any of it. Not all countries are populated by repressed, insecure, heterosexual misogynistic transphobes.

The attacks on Doyle also could well be linked to the ongoing smears levelled against Golriz Ghahraman, the former Green MP who was convicted for shoplifting after an intense months-long public vilification campaign carried out in and echoed by the media and led by notorious Dirty Politics-adjacent actors. It turns out that Ghahraman’s brief detention in a supermarket earlier this year in what was initially described as another shop-lifing attempt was in fact an orchestrated set-up by malicious security guards with dubious connections to the police and social media personalities. The whole thing was a beat up, as are the Doyle accusations, done in part by the same crowd of Rightwing “usual suspects.” Truth be told, the guys–always guys–who disparage her the most seem to be the type of guys that she is not interested in, especially middle aged to elderly Pakeha male public figures. In summary: they hate her because she will never have them (and who knows how many have tried? Someone should ask Sean Plunkett or David Seymour about that because they carry on about her like spurned suitors).

That having been said, the Greens do have a big problem, and it is not just the non-conformist (some would say “weird” or “odd”) lifestyles of some of their members. It is not about their Morris dancing or their lifestyles per se, but about who they select and the way in which they get into parliament. As my former colleague here at KP Lew and other have written on social media in the past few days, the Greens problem is one of candidate vetting, not candidate lifestyles. In fact, I mentioned this concern previously ( a decade or so ago!) when Haley Holt of television fame was placed on the candidate list in a top ten spot. She did not get elected or make list selection due to the Green Party vote that year, but in retrospect she looks positively middle-of-the-road when compared to some of her recent successors!

As I see it, the Greens spend too much time living in an alternative identity bubble, trying to tick as many rainbow and alternative lifestyle boxes as is possible (Doyle claims to be a “pansexual,” something that can lead to many interpretations and in the case of the Right-wingers, the worst possible ones. He confirmed their worst thoughts by using language with sexual undertones in his private social media posts that included the photos of his son). I have heard that they wanted to add polyamory to their electoral platforms, which even Barry Crump may have found a bit rich if he was not in charge of the action. These are not the types of candidate and policy that appeal to the voting majority, and even under MMP that matters for coalition-building purposes.

To be clear: being “odd,” “weird” or “alternative” is not a crime and should not be treated as such (as happened with Doyle). But having those traits can prove detrimental to the Party’s overall fortunes, especially when opponents seize on them to hype their “deviancy” and other supposed criminal behaviour. In the words of the late French sociologist Robert Michels (in a book titled Political Parties), the first duty of an organization is to protect itself.

After all, being transgressive is not always a virtue in politics, especially in an era where culture wars about alternative lifestyles and non-conformity to “traditional” social norms is a cornerstone of Rightwing political agendas. In such an ideological climate, perhaps it is better to put other (non-identity based) policy concerns before identity (and here I respect the Greens stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which from a social justice standpoint is well within their purview even it opens them to charges of anti-Semitism either directly or via association while other parties equivocate and quibble about NZ’s position).

The Greens seem to have moved from being an environmental party with a social-democratic policy agenda under Jeanette Fitzsimmons, Sue Bradford, Keith Locke and Ron Donald to keffiyeh-wearing alternative social justice urbanite identitarians who, from an outside-the-beltway perspective such as mine, occasionally hug a tree, stop a logging truck or swim around like dolphins in sheltered coves before re-assembling at the nearest barista shop for mocha latte soy milk cappuccino-fueled social policy strategy sessions with other black-clad or tie-dyed and multi-pierced plural pronoun individuals who think very highly of themselves and stay up way too late at night, to the point that their countenances are as parlous as their personalities.

I am joking of course, and one hopes that the woke can take a joke on this one. Because this piss-take is not equivalent to the hate-speech supporting sociopaths in the Free Speech Union. The joke is not about letting harm be done to the multiple varieties of identitarians; it is about goofing on their self-absorbed lack of serious purpose and self-awareness, and why this does not make for good candidate and policy selection.

I do so in order to make a point. The Greens were episodically effective when they were watermelons–red on the inside and green on the outside. They were fairly effective as “teals”–blue on the inside and green on the outside. But other than people like Chloe Swarbrick, who is in fact a smart and effective politician, and perhaps Steve Abel as an environmental purist, the Green Party has become a hodgepodge of virtue signalling identitarian grievance and defence. It is increasingly not relatable to anything other than those in their identity bubbles and while individuals like Swarbrick may be able to carry the party on her election coattails, they appear to be enmeshed in a self-inflicted political death spiral due to the character of their caucus. Think of the MPs that the Greens have lost in recent years outside of the electoral cycle and who they have been replaced with. Think of the dramas associated with these departures and the behaviour of some of those still sitting on their benches. With some exceptions, they come across as unserious people pursuing unpopular agendas. No wonder they are seen as easy pickings for bullying political hyenas like Peters and Shane Jones.

Contrast that with Te Pati Maori (TPM). Whatever you want to say about them, TPM clearly know how to vet and select people who conform to their unified policy agenda. Their agenda may seem like a lot of symbolic politics without substance and with some buffoonery thrown in, and there may be some dodgy connections between them and people like John Tamihere and his Waipareira Trust (sort of along the lines of ACT and the tobacco lobby or NZ1st and the fishing and mining lobbies) but two things stand out in contrast to the Greens: 1) the TPM “bubble” is activist and united at its ethnic and ideological core (including a class line), not an disparate assortment of identitarians representing different socially marginalised groups; 2) party discipline is strong. The feet follow the head and the head knows what the feet are doing in the long march ahead.

It will be interesting to see how the Greens do in the next elections. I have a feeling that the gains that they have made in recent years will be reversed even if a Labour-led coalition is elected. I am also curious to see how TPM does, because it seems to be targeting Labour’s left and Maori flanks with its more militant and confrontational appeals. For the moment, however, and again repudiating the reprehensible attacks on Doyle, Ghahraman, Tamatha Paul and Ricardo Mendez-March (the latter for for being foreign-born), the main problem for the Green Party is that it is self-inflicted because of a lack of proper candidate selection criteria and process as well as candidate education as to what is expected of them (including their use of social media and other aspects of their personal behaviour) and how they will be treated by their opponents and media.

Benjamin Doyle haș gone to ground under an apparent barrage of death threats and has suspended the social media account that led to them. But such after-the-fact actions do not remedy what was an avoidable controversy in the first place. All that was needed was some good sense, a modicum of decorum, and a candidate selection process that is based not so much on ticking off identity boxes as it is about electing and/or listing serious people with a common policy agenda that transcends post-modern identity politics while retaining a common social justice focus that is centred in and on environmental politics with a (waged) class orientation.

After all, as the saying goes, politics is the art of the possible. What the Greens have been doing as of late is quite the opposite.

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A Return to a US Gilded Age?

I have been trying to figure out the logic of Trump’s tariff policies and apparent desire for a global trade war. Although he does not appear to comprehend that tariffs are a tax on consumers in the country doing the tariffing, I can (sort of) understand that he may think that this is a good way to protect US manufacturing and employment. But because the evidence that tariffs wind up hurting domestic consumers and do not necessarily bring back manufacturing, farming or employment in those or other sectors, I found myself somewhat mystified as to why Trump is determined to push them through.

I realise that he is using them as a form of leverage to obtain concessions in non-trade areas like illicit drug interdiction and immigration. But he seems to want to go further than forcing neighbouring countries to tighten their border controls in exchange of a lifting of tariffs or reduction in the amount of them (both in terms of reducing tariff costs–say from 25 percent to 10 percent–as well as the range of goods subject to tariffs). He truly does appear think that tariffs are good for the US, all evidence to the contrary.

Because of his intellectual limitations (remember my empty vessel argument of a couple of weeks ago), I then thought about his economic advisors and how they may see the issue. Here is where I think I have found the answer to Trump’s obsession with tariffs. It has to do with the so-called Gilded Age.

Readers may recall Trump speaking of president William McKinley and the “Gilded Age” when the US was prosperous, expanding and turning into the global superpower that it eventually became. He even restored the name “Mount McKinley” to the mountain in Alaska known as Denali by indigenous people and has otherwise extolled the virtues of the 25th US president even though McKinley was assassinated while in office in 1901 (Vice President Teddy Roosevelt succeeded him). As it turns out at least one person (an anarchist) was not happy with his policies. Yet it seems that Trump seeks to return to a new US Gilded Age in light of what he and his advisors see as the failure of capitalist globalisation.

Needless to say, there have been global trade systems since ancient times. Notions of Riccardian and competitive advantage were eventually developed around them to explain and justify the commonweal benefits of global trade. This accelerated with the technology-driven globalisation of production, consumption and exchange that emerged as of the 1990s and grew exponentially in the following two and a half decades. While all economic boats would be lifted by this rising tide, the argument went, the expansion in trade was expected to benefit the US the most because it was the core of the global capitalist system, including finance, advanced manufacturing, information and high-tech services, logistics and even value-added primary good extraction.

For its adherents, the post-Bretton Woods moment was the US’s oyster and free trade under standardised monetary exchange conditions was considered to be so universally positive that theories (known as “neo-modernization” theories after the original 1950s variants) were advanced that posited that joining global systems of trade would lead to rising middle classes and eventually democracies in poorer authoritarian countries that adopted the export-import logic and other development models such as the so-called “Washington Consensus.” The Consensus (by industrialised nation’s finance ministers of the time) married neoliberal domestic economic theories based on the primacy of finance capital in determining a country’s investment opportunities in a macroeconomic environment characterised by the reduction of the State’s role as both manager and direct producer of national goods and services, on the one hand, with an abject faith in the invisible hand dynamics at play when national markets were opened up to unfettered foreign competition.

As it turns out, things did not go as planned. Rather than benefit the most as the core of the globalised system of trade, the US saw significant declines in domestic manufacturing, mining and other extractive enterprises as well as a number of value-added business sectors (textiles, shoes, ship-building) when US firms migrated abroad in pursuit of cheaper labour and supply chain inputs. Even service sectors saw business move abroad–think of off-shore call and computer service centres–something that in the aggregate saw the economic decline of the so-called Industrial Age-originated “Rust Belt,” growth of increasingly precarious labor markets and the rise of a host of social pathologies associated with that decline (the book Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance sums them up pretty well even if it is a fictionalised account of his own life story pre-politics).

Put bluntly, instead of being at the top of the globalized pile, when it came to many US domestic businesses, profits were prioritised over patriotism, they moved their businesses abroad and the benefits of globalisation went to them (in terms of re-patriated profits), not their former employees and the communities that depended on their livelihoods. When it comes to free trade and open markets, businesses acted as capitalists first, and that made them globalists rather than nationalists.

The bottom line is that while the US remains the core of the global economy, the location of where globalisation impacted negatively the most within the US and the perception of its general decline as a result is a strong component of the economic nationalist discourse that propels the modern US Right. From Pat Buchanan to Rand Paul to Steve Bannon, US economic nationalists see US decline as rooted in two main things: 1) the migration of industries away from the Heartland to foreign countries which do not adhere to the overly restrictive environmental, labor, welfare and taxation standards of the US; and 2) the “woke” cultural transitions associated with granting equal rights to everyone regardless of merit while opening admission to immigrants from foreign cultures that are inherently anti-Western in orientation and yet upon which the US was increasingly dependent for both skilled and unskilled labor.

This is where economic nationalists on Trump’s staff like Peter Navarro come in. It is he and his colleagues that put the thought of the McKinley Gilded Age into Trump’s otherwise adderal-addled head. For them, a global trade war suits the US because as the biggest economic bully on the block, others will fold their cards before it has to. The belief is that although there will be short-term pain in the US domestic economy, eventually foreign countries and businesses will, for their own political as well as economic reasons, bend a knee and comply with US demands on trade and non-trade issues. Some manufacturing and other businesses may return to the US but even if they just adjust their bilateral export pricing and other trade measures in line with US demands, the view is that the US will eventually win and ultimately prosper because the advantages it has when it comes to complex economies of scale.

We need to underscore that many trade globalisation supporters did not see the US as necessarily benefitting more than others under the modern trade framework. Instead, they saw all nations receiving some benefit in excess of what they would accrue if they did not join the network, and within that “limited gains” perspective the US would still do well even if it lost uncompetitive businesses to foreign markets that held comparative and competitive advantages like lower wages and costs and proximity of raw materials, rising educational standards etc. They believed that the US would simply specialise in higher-end production and services that used advanced technologies and value-added capital goods while continuing to domestically supply most consumer non-durables like food staples and the like.

This is different than what the economic nationalists envisioned, and whereas the globalist economic vision is an integral part of the liberal internationalist perspective and institutional order codified in the likes of the IMF, WTO and World Bank, economic nationalists see the entire combine as inimical to US economic supremacy and hence an existential macroeconomic threat that increased US economic dependency on the whims of others such as the PRC and EU. Where globalists see trade interdependence and mutual benefit, economic nationalists see trade dependency and economic vulnerability The latter is the dominant rationale in the White House at the moment.

With Navarro and other economic nationalists back in the West Wing and the liberal international order in disarray for more than just economic reasons, the in-house consensus is that the time is ripe to push for another Gilded Age on the back of a tariff-based national economic restructuring. Coupled with a new version of gunboat diplomacy and carrying a foreign policy Big Stick, Trump is offered as the champion of and vehicle for that metamorphosis.

The trouble is that US capitalism today is not the capitalism of a century ago, nor is the nature of its connections to a globalized capitalist world with multiple centres of economic gravity. Think of the Middle East, the Arab oil oligarchies and their sovereign hedge funds. Think of the reach of the PRC’s Belt and Road initiative. Think of the rise of the Global South and emergence of the BRICS as an economic bloc. All of this suggests that while Trump may see himself as McKinley bringing in a new US Gilded Age, he is just a real-time protagonist in his economic advisor’s pipe dreams. What may have worked at the turn of the 20th century in terms of tariffs benefiting the US is unlikely to work in the early 21st century, at least not in the measure envisioned. So even if some countries cave to US demands on a host of issues, the chances of the US “winning” a truly global trade war seem long at best, and even if the US “wins” the economic contest, the political costs of subjecting the US electorate to consumer price hikes and supply chain disruption through the 2026 Congressional midterm elections and 2028 presidential vote may spell serious trouble for Trump, MAGA and the GOP regardless of who may or may not succeed him. The political fallout of the tariff moves, in other words, may yield negative dividends even if it is “successful” because the short-term economic pain that Musk and Trump talk about as necessary may not be tolerable for many voters, including those in Red States.

If that is the case, all the tariff-led economic gilding project may just turn into political rust.

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School meals as human capital investment.

Although I do not usually write about NZ politics, I do follow them. I find that with the exception of a few commentators, coverage of domestic issues tends to be dominated by a fixation on personalities, scandals, “gotcha” questioning, “he said, she said” accusations, nitpicking about the daily minutia of pretty trivial matters and clickbait hysteria about usually inconsequential issues (such as the recent freedom of navigation/power projection exercise conducted by a small Chinese flotilla/task force that in no way presented a serious threat to NZ interests). The world is blowing up before our eyes and NZ media fixates on parliamentary bullying, politician’s name-calling, assorted partisan spin attempts and even the rhyming word salad vitriol spewing from one bloated onanist’s mouth. Rarely is there a reflection on the why of some policy controversies that extend beyond the immediacies of the moment. Worse yet, what starts out in corporate media coverage then gets siloed and echo-chambered down into social media cesspools where hatred and contempt for “others” is the most salient distinguishing feature of discourse.

As a short response, here I would like to very briefly do a reflection on the why of school meals.

Here is why: The most precious resource that a country has is its human capital. The creativity/productivity of its people are the true measure of its strength. Investment in human capital involves short- and long-term direct and indirect costs in human capital development, one of which is schooling. Since it is proven that well-fed kids do better academically and are more socially adjusted than hungry or poorly fed kids, school meals have long been considered to be an integral part of the indirect investment in (future) human capital. If for whatever reason parents cannot provide nutritious school meals for their kids to take to school (there are many, most not due to parental negligence), most societies accept the need to provide them in the school system using taxpayer-provided funding. This is not just a trait of democratic educational systems, Authoritarians well understand the concept of human capital development so are often just as prone to providing nutritious school means (often with propaganda associating the regime with school meal-provision programs).

For example, Argentina (where I was raised asa child), Brazil and Chile (where I researched and worked as an adult) all provide school meals at no or small cost to caregivers. This happened during periods of democratic rule as well as dictatorship, with the exception that the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile selectively closed entire schools and health clinics in working class neighbourhoods in order to weaken what it considered to be sources of class resistance to its murderous neoliberalism (from which NZ took many lessons, including its Labor Law reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the legacies of which remain to this day). Similarly, some of the biggest protests against the chainsaw cost-cutting approach adopted by ACT Party favourite Javier Milei in Argentina involves cutting back on school meals, something that because of its extensive history in Argentina is considered to be a birthright, especially amongst the working classes. Along with other socio-economic indicators like the over-all poverty rate (now nearly 60 percent of the population), child malnutrition has surged in the (again, poor and low income) areas where school meals are the most needed and yet where meal cutbacks have been zealously applied.

That may be by design, like in the Pincohet regime’s approach in its day. Milei’s sociopathy simply sees the lower income strata as vermin that should be eliminated, not nurtured. Parsing David Seymour’s rhetoric on his school meal program and leaving aside the dubious circumstances in which the contract for his program was let, one gets the impression that he shares Milei’s Social Darwinistic worldview. We can only hope that he does not share Milei’s view that “blue eyed people” are “aesthetically superior” to dark-eyed folk (true story: Milei actually said this in a country where the majority of the country do not have blue eyes). But then again, Seymour’s attacks on the Treaty and adjacent attacks on Maori “privileges” seem to be cut from the same cloth as Milei’s.

That having been duly noted, the bottom line is that in most countries and certainly in the developed world, current tax dollars are used to invest in pursuit of future human capital returns. It complements immigration policy in that regard, as immigration provides short-term human capital inflows that over time can be transferred into inter-generation human capital development through education and the infrastructures that go with it (like school meals). In fact, dividends on this investment come in the form of productive adults upon whom less public money is spent on welfare, health and crime mitigation services, and who in fact pay more in taxes than those who wind up as dependents of those public services. Surely the trade-off is worth it.

It is therefore mistaken and short-sighted to claim that it is not the NZ school system’s responsibility to provide student meals. Those meals are a collective good that serve both the present and future commonweal. As such, they should be nutritionally sufficient to help a young person’s development, not just a cost that must be kept low. Scrimping on meal costs and arguing about parental responsibility at the expense of boosting NZ’s future human capital is folly.

But that is where NZ is today.

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Empty vessel and strategic disruptor?

I have been trying to make sense out of the shifts in US foreign policy under Trump 2.0. I understand his admiration for authoritarians and supination to Putin (which I believe is because Putin has dirt on him), and I also understand the much vaunted “transactional” nature of his view of foreign relations. Moreover, it is clear that he is a racist (remember his comments about “s***hole countries”), so he has a dim view of soft power projection into the underdeveloped world and the benefits of global engagement. His neo-isolationism is apparent, although it doe not fit well with his delusional designs on Canada, Greenland, Gaza and the Panama Canal Zone (I am of the opinion that his medications have been changed in order to make him speak in a more moderate monotone even if his message remains as deranged as always) . In any case even if I can reconcile all of this, the open move to side with Russia in its conflict with Ukraine and his attacks on erstwhile European allies are perplexing on the face of it. But perhaps there is a method to his madness, so let me try to unpack things. Let’s be clear: this may be a stretch but it is within the realm of the possible given what has happened so far.

First, let start with some background. Trump is an empty intellectual vessel. He has no foundational morals or guiding principles other than making money and garnering power. That makes him non-ideological as well as transactional in his worldview. Remember that at its core ideology is a coherent set of value principles that organise reality over time and specify the relationship between the imaginary (what could happen) and the real (what is happening). That is important because as a non-ideological empty intellectual vessel Trump is susceptible to whatever advice and suggestions appeal to him in the moment. Scapegoat immigrants? Sure. Demonize transgender people? Why not? Rename geographic locations? Sounds good. Embrace Christian nationalism? Halleluja! Champion guns, state’s rights and NASCAR? Dang right! And so forth. There is nothing too petty or trite that he will not stoop to when it comes to patriotic symbolism if it advances his interests under the pretext of making the US great “again.” The ghost whisperers who surround him know this and play upon his vainglorious ignorance.

But there is a serious side to his intellectual influences. They come in the form of disruption or chaos theory, on the one hand, and neo-reactionaryism on the other.

Chaos or disruption theory posits that stagnated status quo’s can only be “broken” by chaos or a disruptive force. That force may come in the form of “disruptors” who take advantage of chaos to impose a new order of things. The origins of this ideological belief in chaos or disruption theory come from many sources but include Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberalism, who justified his support for the 1973 Chilean coup and a number of other pro-market dictatorial interventions as the only means of breaking the hold of welfare statism on national economies. The depth of the crisis determined the extent of the disruption, be they coups in Latin America, Southern Europe and East/Southeast Asia or socially dislocating macroeconomic reform done under emergency in places like NZ and England. A political disruption was necessary in any event in order to break the extant economic model via chaotic reform.

Chaos and disruption theory see the moment of crisis as a circuit breaker, a means to end cycles of social decay and vicious circles of bureaucratic parasitism and clientelistic rent-seeking. Under proper guidance by “disruptors” as change agents, societies can re-emerge from the ashes of the old order better and stronger than before.

Reports have circulated for years that Trump embraces his own form of chaos theory in which he pits his underlings against each other in order to shake out the ideas that best suit him. Although he seems to have toned things down when compared to his first presidency and what may have worked for him in the private sector may not work in the public sector (as his first presidency appears to have proven), it is possible that his advisors believe that he will welcome the “disruptor” role where he makes order out of chaos. This may be psychological manipulation by his advisors but if so it seems to be working.

That s where the second ideological strand poured into Trump’s empty vessel comes into play. Neo-reactionism holds that democracy no longer is fit for purpose. The main reason is that political equality 1) allows stupid people a vote equal to that of smart people, which in turn leads to 2) inefficient and self-destructive economic and social outcomes because elected officials and the bureaucracies that they oversee will always seek to accomodate the interests of the stupid majority over those of the enlightened few. Because of this, the ranks of the non-productive beneficiary classes grows while the entrepreneurial class shrinks, in what is seen as a form of reverse social Darwinism with a twist. Adding to the mix “progressive” policies like refugee and other migrant admissions from low IQ societies and providing social services that individuals otherwise would have to provide for themselves further dilutes the gene pool and perpetuates a cycle of dependency in the ever-expanding mass of dumb rent-seeking parasites.

The solution lies in creating an elected oligarchy that makes popular appeals and promises but which rules in a beneficent authoritarian manner, as in, for example, Singapore. It is they who know what is best for the polity and it is they who define what is in the public interest and public good. Elections are seen simply in instrumental terms, as a means of securing and maintaining power that also serve as legitimating devices for their rule.

It does not matter if this view of society and governance is a grotesque caricature of what is really happening in the US. It is what the technology entrepreneurs known as “tech bros” imagine and therefore believe it to be. Led by Elon Musk, it is the ideology of this sub-strata of wealth-horders that has gotten inside of Trump’s head. As we currently see playing out, via DOGE they are now in the first phase of implementing their vision of how the federal government should look and act.

Against that backdrop, the question then turns to US foreign policy and the dramatic shifts in it. Again, this may be a stretch but what could be happening is that the US is embarking on a foreign policy disruption and reset of its own that is designed to realign the international system that followed the Cold War. It could be that Trump (or, more precisely, his foreign policy advisors) are looking down the road and envision a new world system that, transaction by transaction and incremental reneging on the rules of the old international “liberal” order, replaces the emerging and somewhat chaotic multipolar/polyarchic/multiplex networks of the last 20 years. They are not interested in re-hashing the causes of US decline and the rise of the Global South or the ways in which international relations are no longer an exclusively State-centric and -dominated affair. They are not interested in the international liberal order. They want to re-assert US primacy after a period of challenge.

For that to happen it appears that Trump 2.0 has taken inspiration from the Cold War and is attempting to re-invent a tri-polar international system, The idea is to re-align with Russia because of shared Western traditional values and pull it away from China’s growing sphere of influence. The Russian hinge will be what balances the US-PRC relationship, giving Russia a sense of restored prestige and the US a better sense of security vis a vis the PRC.

Here again, Trump and his advisors are deeply racist in their views (think Stephen Miller) and have an abiding fear and loathing of the Chinese. The US has made clear that it wants to turn away from Europe and the Middle East and concentrate strategic attention on curtailing Chinese power expansion in Asia and elsewhere. The PRC is already mentioned–and has been for a while–as the US’s main “peer competitor,” and US war planning is heavily focused on gaming contingency scenarios versus the PRC. Trump’s attempt at territorial expansion into Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone and even (however farcical) Canada is designed to create a US lebensraum equivalent to the notion of Russian buffer states in which its interests are undisputed and inviolate (which is what Russia claims about Ukraine).

A rapprochement with Russia could tip the geopolitical scales in US favour by moving Moscow away from China’s embrace while forcing Europeans to accept new Russian-drawn buffer border boundaries and stop their security dependency and corresponding rent-seeking from the US. The US can then focus on its Asian partnerships and military planning versus the PRC, and Russia is restored, thanks to US recognition, to the community of nations (where it already enjoys support in the Global South, especially in Africa) whether the Europeans like it or not (some do, most don`t).

That is where the rubber hits the road. The move will involve sacrificing Ukraine in some form or another, be that a land-for-peace swap or some other type of security guarantees. No matter what, Ukraine will come out the lesser for its troubles and Russia will be rewarded for its aggression. But that is no longer the point because the bigger picture is what is more important in Trump’s eyes, especially if he can secure rare mineral concession rights in both Ukraine and Russia (as has been discussed lately, something that demonstrates the power of US coercive diplomacy versus Ukraine and the power of Russian persuasive diplomacy versus the US). The stagnation of the Ruso-Ukrainian war invites the application of disruption theory to the conflict, even if there will be significant collateral damage to Ukraine and US-European relations as a result.

This gambit also rests on the assumption that Russia is an honest actor and will in fact prefer to normalize relations with the US while distancing itself from the PRC (since it would be part of any negotiations to betray Ukraine unless Trump is completely owned by Putin). That may be a mistaken belief, which would make all the claims about Trump’s ability to play “three dimensional chess” a bit of a pipe dream. It also discounts the PRC reaction, which also would be a mistake.

The bottom line is that precisely because Trump is an empty intellectual and ideological vessel he is more susceptible than other presidents to the suggestions of his advisors, especially when they appeal to his narcissism and bigotry. Chaos or disruption theory-derived policy recommendations are a good way of doing so, especially when coupled with the suggestion that he is the only “King” (remember last week’s White House-generated Time Magazine cover) capable of imposing a new order both at home and abroad. If that advice is coupled with suggestions that the pivot towards Russia could earn him the Nobel Peace Prize (something that he has repeatedly said that he thinks that he deserves), then the neoreactionary ideological project will have started to bear fruit in terms of US foreign relations.

Judging from what is going on in terms of changes to US domestic policy under Trump 2.0, the strategic shift in foreign policy appears to be just one side of the disruptor’s coin. But is that a coin secured in hand by a long-term strategic plan or one that is simply being tossed to see how it lands?

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A presidential crypto pump-and-dump.

This may be rhetorical but here the question goes: did any of you invest in the $Libra memecoin endorsed and backed by Argentine president and darling of the global Right Javier Milei (who admitted to being paid a fee for his promotion of the token)? You know, the one that soared above $4 billion in worth after his Friday night announcement and then collapsed entirely within 24 hours after the original memecoin sponsors (3-4 in number on a cryptocurrency web site) cashed in their stake, leaving dozens of investors with unsecured million dollar losses in what was basically a crypto Ponzi scheme? Hmm.

When confronted Milei said that investment is about risk and people should have gauged the level of risk exposure that they could sustain. He would not say what his fee was or whether he was part of the original memecoin sponsor group (others in the know suggest that he was). He disavowed any responsibility for pumping up investor interest on Fridaay night via social media (you can imagine whose platform was used) before the token was dumped by the sponsors, in what is known in the crypto world as a rug-pull.

In his defence some have pointed to the fact that memecoins are like figurines or troll dolls: they have no intrinsic value and are purchased just for fun. But Milei pushed $Libra as a genuine investment, one that could presumably help small and medium sized Argentine businesses by allowing them to raise funds at low investment costs (the buy-in of $Libra started at USD$.1.00). Less than 12 hours later he deleted his original post on social media.

The fact that the sitting Argentine president was promoting a crypto currency of any sort–or any other financial asset or scheme–seems dodgy at the very least. That he was promoting a rug-pull pump-and-dump as a legitimate investment opportunity is Trump-level criminally audacious.

But maybe that was the play all along? Phrased differently and to pervert an honorable saying, the NZ Special Air Services (SAS) have as a motto “he who dares, wins.” Perhaps Trump, Musk and Miley have their own version of that. Does it not occur to anyone that the moral character of all of these people playing on the public trust is the same–that they are a kinship of immoral miscreant sociopaths? In NZ, is not David Seymour not the same?

Milei îs now being investigated for financial crimes and is facing the possibility of impeachment (juicio politico) over the scheme. But this is Argentina we are talking about so it is anyone’s guess how justice will be served.

When he said that he was going to take a chainsaw to public finances and remove “the caste” from politics perhaps he meant something a bit different than cleaning up the public sector under conditions of austerity. Maybe he just meant that the nature of official mendacity and corruption, and the beneficiaries of it, would simply change with him in office, not that it would go away entirely. I tend to believe, having been raised and socialized in that country, that the latter is the case.

You can read up on the scam details here.

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The limits of over-reach.

Here is a scenario, but first a broad brush-painted historical parallel.

Hitler and the Nazis could well have accomplished everything that they wanted to do within German borders, including exterminating Jews, so long as they confined their ambitious to Germany itself. After all, the world pretty much sat and watched as the Nazi pogroms unfolded in the late 1930s. But Hitler never intended to confine himself to Germany and decided to attack his neighbours simultaneously, on multiple fronts East, West, North and South. This came against the advice of his generals, who believed that his imperialistic war-mongering should happen sequentially and that Germany should not fight the USSR until it had conquered Europe first, replenished with pillaged resources, and then reorganised its forces for the move East. They also advised that Germany should also avoid tangling with the US, which had pro-Nazi sympathisers in high places (like Charles Lindbergh) and was leaning towards neutrality in spite of FDR’s support for the UK.

Hitler ignored the advice and attacked in every direction, got bogged down in the Soviet winter, drew in the US in by attacking US shipping ferrying supplies to the UK, and wound up stretching his forces in North Africa, the entire Eastern front into Ukraine and the North Mediterranean states, the Scandinavian Peninsula and the UK itself. In other words, he bit off too much in one chew and wound up paying the price for his over-reach.

Hitler did what he did because he could, thanks in part to the 1933 Enabling Law that superseded all other German laws and allowed him carte blanche to pursue his delusions. That proved to be his undoing because his ambition was not matched by his strategic acumen and resources when confronted by an armed alliance of adversaries.

A version of this may be what is unfolding in the US. Using the cover of broad Executive Powers, Musk, Trump and their minions are throwing everything at the kitchen wall in order to see what sticks. They are breaking domestic and international norms and conventions pursuant to the neo-reactionary “disruptor” and “chaos” theories propelling the US techno-authoritarian Right. They want to dismantle the US federal State, including the systems of checks and balances embodied in the three branches of government, subordinating all policy to the dictates of an uber-powerful Executive Branch. In this view the Legislature and Judiciary serve as rubber stamp legitimating devices for Executive rule. Many of those in the Musk-lead DOGE teams are subscribers to this ideology.

At the same time the new oligarchs want to re-make the International order as well as interfere in the domestic politics of other liberal democracies. Musk openly campaigns for the German far-Right AfD in this year’s elections, he and Trump both celebrate neo-fascists like Viktor Urban in Hungry and Javier Milei in Argentina, Trump utters delusional desires to “make” Canada the 51st State, forcibly regain control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, turn Gaza into a breach resort complex and eliminate international institutions like the World Trade Organization and even NATO if it does not do what he says. He imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court, slaps sanctions on South Africa for land take-overs and because it took a case of genocide against Israel in the ICC, doubles down on his support for Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians and is poised to sell-out Ukraine by using the threat of an aid cut-off to force the Ukrainians to cede sovereignty to Russia over all of their territory east of the Donbas River (and Crimea). He even unilaterally renames the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a teenaged display of symbolic posturing that ignores the fact that renaming the Gulf has no standing in international law and “America” is a term that refers to the North, Central and South land masses of the Western Hemisphere–i.e., it is not exclusive to or propriety of the United States.

Trump wants to dismantle the globalised system of trade by using tariffs as a weapon as well as leverage, “punishing” nations for non-trade as well as trade issues because of their perceived dependence on the US market. This is evident in the tariffs (briefly) imposed on Canada, Mexico and Colombia over issues of immigration and re-patriation of US deportees.

In other words, Trump 2.0 is about redoing the world order in his preferred image, doing everything more or less at once. It as if Trump, Musk and their Project 2025 foot soldiers believe in a reinterpreted version of “shock and awe:” the audacity and speed of the multipronged attack on everything will cause opponents to be paralyzed by the move and therefore will be unable to resist it. That includes extending cultural wars by taking over the Kennedy Center for the Arts (a global institution) because he does not like the type of “culture” (read: African American) that is presented there and he wants to replace the Center’s repertoire with more “appropriate” (read: Anglo-Saxon) offerings. The assault on the liberal institutional order (at home and abroad), in other words, is holistic and universal in nature.

Trump’s advisors are even talking about ignoring court orders barring some of their actions, setting up a constitutional crisis scenario that they believe they will win in the current Supreme Court.

I am sure that Musk/Trump can get away with a fair few of these disruptions, but am not certain that they can get away with all of them. They may have more success on the domestic rather than the international front given the power dynamics in each arena. In any event they do not seem to have thought much about the ripple effect responses to their moves, specifically the blowback that might ensue.

This is where the Nazi analogy applies. It could be that Musk and Trump have also bitten more than they can chew. They may have Project 2025 as their road map, but even maps do not always get the weather right, or accurately predict the mood of locals encountered along the way to wherever one proposes to go. That could well be–and it is my hope that it is–the cause of their undoing. Overreach, egos, hubris and the unexpected detours around and obstacles presented by foreign and domestic actors just might upset their best laid plans.

That brings up another possibility. Trump’s remarks in recent weeks are descending into senescence and caducity. His dotage is on daily public display. Only his medications have changed. He is more subdued than during the campaign but no less mad. He leaves the ranting and raving to Musk, who only truly listens to the fairies in his ear.

But it is possible that there are ghost whisperers in Trump’s ear as well (Stephen Miller, perhaps), who deliberately plant preposterous ideas in his feeble head and egg him on to pursue them. In the measure that he does so and begins to approach the red-line of obvious derangement, then perhaps the stage is being set from within by Musk and other oligarchs for a 25th Amendment move to unseat him in favour of JD Vance, a far more dangerous member of the techbro puppet masters’ cabal. Remember that most of Trump’s cabinet are billionaires and millionaires and only Cabinet can invoke the 25th Amendment.

Vance has incentive to support this play because Trump (foolishly, IMO) has publicly stated that he does not see Vance as his successor and may even run for a third term. That is not want the techbro overlords wanted to hear, so they may have to move against Trump sooner rather than later if they want to impose their oligarchical vision on the US and world. An impeachment would be futile given Congress’s make-up and Trump’s two-time wins over his Congressional opponents. A third try is a non-starter and would take too long anyway. Short of death (that has been suggested) the 25th Amendment is the only way to remove him.

It at that point that I hope that things will start to unravel for them. It is hard to say what the MAGA-dominated Congress will do if laws are flouted on a wholesale basis and constituents begin to complain about the negative impact of DOGE cost-cutting on federal programs. But one thing is certain, chaos begets chaos (because chaos is not synonymous with techbro libertarians’ dreams of anarchy) and disruption for disruption’s sake may not result in an improved socio-economic and political order. Those are some of the “unknown unknowns” that the neo-con Donald Rumsfeld used to talk about.

In other words, vamos a ver–we shall see.