The Downward Turn

Oh my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: whatever falls should be given a push, too! Everything of today - it is falling, it is decaying; who would want to preserve it? But I - I want to give it a push, too! Do you know the relish of rolling sttones into preciptious depths? - These people of today; just see how they roll into my depths! I am a prologue to better players, oh my brothers! An example! Follow my example! And anyone you do not teach to fly, teach him - to fall faster! — Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

In 2016, the American intellectuals were writing off Donald Trump, it was obvious to them Hillary would win. I was in my senior year of high school during the spring primaries, and for one of my social science classes I wrote a paper arguing why I thought Trump would win. I went to a rural Midwestern town, and the excitement was growing around Trump.

A few months later, before the election, Slavoj Zizek said in an interview he would vote for Trump over Hillary (if he was an American). The reason? It would be a wake up call to the Republicans and Democrats. They would have to go back to the basics and rethink their approach to politics. Zizek is no Trump fan, rather, he was engaging in what Nietzsche called active nihilism. As opposed to passive or weary nihilism, which Nietzsche associates with the Buddhist and Christian stance to recede from the happenings of the world, active nihilism encourages the end of the system so that something new can be born.

Eight years later, Zizek is right. First as tragedy, then as farce however. When Hillary lost, it was time to expand the tent. The 2016 election spanned Sanders to Manchin, but the 2024 election spanned Sanders to most of the traditional, Reagan or Bush Republicans. In other words, it became those who thought the system worth preserving versus those who want something new.

Trump had the most dominant win of a Republican in a long time, with an almost entirely rightward shift towards Trump in 2024 even after his presidency that was, in talk, Trump, but when it came to policy, was mostly traditional GOP policies. Now, many of the intellectuals who lean Democratic are conducting a post-mortem on what happened.

It is easy to think that it was the candidates, the economy, culture war issues, etc. Some, across the spectrum, are reading the divide as those who want to keep the system together versus those who don't. Reform or revolution.

According to Wolfgang Streeck, the neoliberal competitive advantage and global free trade solution is what made it such that China was able to convert economic power into political leverage, threatening the Western neoliberal hegemony. In other words, the neoliberal solution was self-defeating. It was temporarily managed by the central banks and institutions like the Fed using levers like quantitative easing or interest rates. The political parties then were free to debate "policy" and not engage in "politics". It was a perpetual battle over how much taxes to raise or lower to stimulate growth. One party thought less was better, another more.

For Streeck, there are only two ways out of the antinomies of global financial capitalism of the last three neoliberal decades. One way is up, by letting the "free market" govern the world, although that seems increasingly not viable. Whether its chips in Taiwan, shipping routes in the Red Sea, or underwater internet cables in Scandanavia, the free market left to its own devices is not conducive to capital investment.

The other route is downward. Downward being, control over capital should be relativized to the state. There are those who, like many WSJ-types, think that we just need to do more of their flavor of neoliberalism. But there are those, the Compact Mag types, who are, at least in discourse, leading us through the downward turn. These types of folks take seriously things about getting rid of the Fed's autonomy, adding tariffs, etc.

There are those who will make fun of or critique these positions, but to the Compact Mag type of person's credit, at least it seems to me, that is where reality is going. With China, and mostly China backed by Russia, the neoliberal fantasy of a free global trading world (coincendtally backed by the US military, traded using the dollar) has burst. The US State is pragmatic, and since Trump, even Biden has kept in his tariffs. Biden pursued "industrial policy" to secure areas of "national interest". Covid, Ukraine, and the potential war with China have changed the calculus on supply chains, trade, and manufacturing partnerships. What seemed cheap on the whole to have factories across the world that can produce cheaper, becomes a huge risk.

Too much of a risk. Tariffs will be more surgical, despite Trump's language around them, to remake global trade to be more controlled and secure for the US. The US has no enemies on our borders or near our borders, so we can imagine that trade with regional partners becomes more important.

The WSJ types are betting that this mercantilism is temporary. However, there are those that see this time as an opportunity to reshape politics towards giving control back to the people, for better or for worse. The expertocracy, marketocracy, technocracy faced too much backlash. Americans, and seemingly Europe, would rather be poor and free than rich and serving an opaque system ruled by elites.

Even if none of this was done anti-democratically, and the elites had good intentions in setting up institutions that could navigate the world's largest economies through globalization and the digital age, the lag in bringing the common citizen along hurt the regime.

Politics is in a weird space, where the left is not really the left, and the right is not really the right. Democracy as meta-political value is not seen as a left wing value, nor a right wing value. Politics feels more like a fight over the adminstrative and executive state. Especially given that Congress barely legislates.