In the second century before Christ, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the Roman tribune of the plebs, proposed a reactionary program of legal and economic reform to address the republic’s pressing problems, particularly the dispossession of small landowners by the planter class, which had sapped the army of its traditional recruiting base and given birth to a large, unstable, propertyless urban underclass. The planter class saw these reforms as an unacceptable attack on their own interests and, after an escalating series of legal showdowns between Gracchus and his fellow aristocrats, eventually whipped up a mob and killed him.
When Eli Lake compared Donald Trump to Gracchus in 2022, he was addressing Trump’s violation of longstanding norms of behavior and the Democrats’ self-destructive reaction to it. Trump’s second term invites a new comparison, this time to the actual content of his policies. The markets have decided that these are radical and a matter of life-or-death, going into a frenzy after the announcement of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs; the markets’ spokesmen, including the hyperventilating Bill Ackman, have made the numbers’ message explicit. The tariffs are a frontal assault on the money power—so frontal that Trump pulled back, lest the entire thing go kaput. Meanwhile, the usual chorus of conservative naysayers has been wringing hands, clutching pearls, etc. about this attack on an economic configuration that has, to hear them say it, been just dandy.
A basic question of our time is whether the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama economic order is basically good or has in some deeply fundamental way gone wrong. Trump’s billionaire allies of convenience, who in large part made their fortunes under that economic order and have until recently been the happy cronies of its authors, are unsurprisingly fine with business as usual. A large portion of the public, however, disagrees. (And if between a third and a half of your voting population believes that something is fundamentally wrong, isn’t that itself a basic problem with the system?) They see that there are real disadvantages to being a mere consuming superpower; they know that there is a reason that China has consistently sacrificed financial and consumer interests to maintain and expand its industrial base. To quote a seminal text:
The same can be said for Trumpian trade policies and anti-globalization instincts. Who cares if productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow? Nearly all the gains of the last 20 years have accrued to the junta anyway. It would, at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice—only to ensure that it and eight of the other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to the same four industries and 200 families.
Will this work? Ask a pessimist, get a pessimistic answer. So don’t ask. Ask instead: is it worth trying? Is it better than the alternative? If you can’t say, forthrightly, “yes,” you are either part of the junta, a fool, or a conservative intellectual.
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To be sure, I’m not keen on the execution. The messaging has been quite bad, sometimes literally incoherent; a longer phase-in period would, by my lights, have helped the cause. (Although not too long—midterms aren’t far off, and the White House is hardly a sure bet in 2028.) But the basic question—do you think we should do something or not?—remains the same. Nobody has ever tried to reverse deindustrialization; perhaps it can’t be done. But if you buy the “Flight 93” argument quoted above, well, grab the sporks and tiny cans of ginger ale! Grab the little red and white packages of weird cookies! It might fail, but trying is better than not trying. If it all seems improvised and desperado-like, well, that’s because it is.
What’s the alternative? In my ideal world, we’d have a carefully measured program of industrial subsidies, a rejiggered international monetary system, and a set of tariff protections. (Actually, in my ideal world, we’d have managed the relative decline of American economic supremacy in a somewhat wiser, more far-seeing fashion.) But the facts on the ground are that the fisc is a mess; the GOP’s majority in Congress is razor-thin, not in step with the president on economic issues, and likely to be blown out in the midterms; and the leverage to bring about a new monetary accord is limited and could take years of negotiation. That leaves us with tariffs, which are in the president’s hands basically by a quirk of New Deal-era legislation. Are you going to try to use the means available to you, those tiny cans of ginger ale and the weird cylindrical pieces of ice, or are you going to settle in for another comfortable year of decline?
Like Gracchus, Trump’s radical economic platform has fundamentally conservative political aims. Like Gracchus’ aristocratic enemies, the money-men are apoplectic. Like Gracchus’ reforms, there are particular shortcomings or things to be desired. But what is the real, viable alternative? Isn’t it better to try something?
