How would you persuade your October 2024-self (using October 2024-available information, not literal time travel) of this outcome? At the time your perspective was that Trump belonged in jail, but that given that he was the nominee, the risk to capitalism from the Democrats required his winning.
Trump was running on tariffs and mercantilism (literally, see below for example) for a DECADE and Hanania somehow convinced himself Kamala Harris of all people was a threat to capitalism. This despite Biden and Powell managing the best soft landing post-covid of any country on Earth. Truly a remarkable mind
This was mostly a result of government staying out of the way. The Biden-Harris interventions — student-loan forgiveness, a firehouse of relief payments, DEI doubling down, a promise of price controls for the next term — were often bad.
Not nearly this bad, tho'. And we still have DJT's price controls to look forward to!
Yeah, that's the point. What super-high IQ decides that "a little bad" that is like a small tax on an engine of prosperity is somehow worse than wrecking the engine of prosperity?
All of the comments above miss the point : tariffs are not the issue, then or now. Nothing about the history of tariffs negative effect on a country’s economy suggest it to be a threat to democratic, constitutional rule of law - and this is the threat that Trump represents. Yes, they will likely do serious harm to our economy, but the harm is reversible. What is not reversible is Trump’s need to feel he is THE MAN, that no one can oppose him with impunity. The point of this article is that tariffs are one of the means of concentrating power in the executive - for the sake of Trump’s self-aggrandizement. The other means are DOGE, which challenges Congress control of government funds, and the imprisonment and deportation of immigrants without due process, which challenges the judiciary enforcement of laws. Hanania clearly misjudged, like many other not-crazy Trump supporters at the time, the toxic need for self-aggrandizing power that Trump represents, and judged the parties on the basis of policies and not by what the character of the candidates said about the nature authoritarian nature of the political parties involved. The fundamental reason to oppose the tariffs is that they are being used as part of a program to expand the power of the executive branch above the other branches of government with the aim of allowing Trump to act without regard to our laws and Constitution. This is the threat to our country.
>Overall, the goal seems to be to recreate the conditions of the 1930s, a global trade war and an aggressive nationalism where the strong prey upon the weak.
Probably nothing he could say other than that he should take his own fears/theory of MAGA intellectual and moral bankruptcy more seriously. This is what he’s said recently. Most people who were not Democrats didn’t take these tariff threats seriously.
Almost nobody thought it would get this bad. If you were so confident Trump would be so terrible, you should have shorted the market and you'd be rich right now!
it's pretty funny that your original reason for supporting Trump was because economic freedom matters more than protecting democracy. Trump has arguably proven himself more dangerous to economic freedom than he is to democracy!
Trump was running on tariffs and mercantilism (literally, see below for example) for a DECADE and Hanania somehow convinced himself Kamala Harris of all people was a threat to capitalism. This despite Biden and Powell managing the best soft landing post-covid of any country on Earth. Truly a remarkable mind (copying and pasting from another comment I made)
People like to say this but they forget he replaced NAFTA with…NAFTA. It was a totally reasonable view that he was content with leaving thing the way they are but putting his nominal imprint on them.
What I find worrying is Venezuela. There, another leader with a cult of personality wrecked the country, but he managed to hand over the dictatorship to someone else, the shenanigans didn't end with his death.
As a Democrat, I'm really angry at my party for getting so wrapped up in bizarre culture-war issues that it can't win an election even in such a consequential environment. I hope they can regain sanity soon.
Dems were wrecked by COVID causing supply-chain inflation all over the world, not because of culture war stuff. You should be madder at there being too many idiots in the US (and the rest of the world).
Inferring causality is always difficult, especially in politics. I agree that the Covid-related economic damage harmed Democrats in the 2022 election, but I think that fringe cultural attitudes have caused the Democrats more harm. Trump's most effective campaign ad was the one saying "...she's for them/they. I'm for YOU!"
I've noticed this; the President will say something objectively stupid. Like that tariffing the sh*t out of Pinguin Island is really important to protect our domestic industry of Pinguin photos. If you point out this is stupid to the point of comedy, the MAGA response is always short, emotional outbursts about the Left and pleas for Faith.
The point IS to constantly say ignorant, blatantly dumb things. That way you filter out the independent thinkers.
As this post very briefly notes, Trump's views on tariffs--whether they are wildly misguided or not--go back forty years, way before he went into politics. So there is clearly much more to his policy approach than just a personal power grab.
"if you imagine Trump as someone who wants to maximize his own personal power and the number of people paying him deference, then massive tariffs do not seem like a bad way to go about achieving his goals."
Yes, they do. If they cause conflict abroad and poverty at home (which is what opponents say) then this will dramatically and immediately reduce Trump's power. His recent power derives from his popularity among GOP and working class voters and a ruined economy would certainly affect that. American politicians still depend (to some extent) for popularity and political support for power.
If the tariffs don't cause conflict abroad and poverty at home... then perhaps they were a good policy choice.
I think it's important to emphasize that you have no idea what Trump's motivations are, and you have no idea what the short- and long-term effects of tariffs will be. Too many people are avoiding stating that caveat in this discussion.
There is no need for us to pretend ignorance. The short-term and long-term effects of tariffs are obvious: everything will get more expensive, and there will be a recession. You are trapped in the cult and denying the basic evidence of your eyes, but I will at least try to reduce your power in the future by pointing out you can make $5 from $2 on Kalshi if you are correct: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxrecssnber/recession
While I agree with much of what you've said here in regard to Trump's faults, I'm surprised that you ended your piece with a call for the Democrats to regain the White House in 2028?
Wasn't your opinion just a few months ago that the Democrats are so anti-industry and anti-markets that Trumpian corruption is the lesser evil by comparison? How will giving the White House back to the Dems in 2028 not lead to a continuation of the antibusiness policies that have deindustrialized the United States over the last fifty years?
For my part I am going to try the best I can to get either JD Vance or Rand Paul nominated in 2028. Both of these men seem to understand what's going on re the economy better than either Trump or the Warrenite progressives. Yes, they've had to put their light under a bushel, so to speak, to survive politically during the Trump years. But going all the way to the Dems and supporting the party that's been consistently anti-economic-freedom for our entire lifetimes seems like a much worse option by comparison.
(Back in August of last year I wrote a post entitled "Why it Doesn't Matter if Tim Walz is a Moderate Democrat." https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/why-it-doesnt-matter-if-tim-walz. My argument was that even a Democratic president who personally has some pro-business views will in practice empower the worst members of the Dem coalition in the bureaucracy, judiciary, etc. to keep strangling American business and infrastructure. If Mr. Hanania ends up voting Dem in 2028, he will just be reinstalling the kind of government that he was dreading a few months ago.)
I think it's obvious, when you consider his entire public life from Hillbilly Elegy onward, that he has much more nuanced and rational economic views than Donald Trump does. The fact that he has spent the last few months channeling Trump instead of doing his own thinking is disappointing, but if in 2028 I have to choose between Vance and Elizabeth Warren (or any other Dem) then it will still be the easiest decision in the world.
Elizabeth Warren would make for a harder choice, but Josh Shapiro, Jared Polis, or John Fetterman would not. The way Vance jumped on Zelensky lowers him to nearly Trump-like stature in my view.
Do you think that there will be any difference between Warren-appointed judges and Shapiro-appointed judges in how hostile they are to new infrastructure, or how accommodating they are to unions? I don't.
The United States at present has the second-slowest mine development of any country in the S&P 500's list (only Zambia is worse.) Despite spending billions of dollars on various high-speed rail projects for well over a decade, we have laid 0 miles of track. Look at any other industry that involves lots of environmental reviews, and you'll see the same story - vetocracy and decades of private litigation make it practically impossible to do business profitably in the US... meanwhile not only China but also liberal democracies with less insane environmental laws, like Canada, Australia, and Japan, are surging ahead of us.
And all of this is happening with about an even mix of Republican and Democratic appointees to the judiciary and civil service! Tilting the balance more to the Dems (which will happen whether or not the guy at the top of the ticket is honest about his or her hatred of capitalism) just ensures that this will continue. Go and read my article - it doesn't matter if Tim Walz (or Josh Shapiro or John Fetterman or anyone else) is a moderate Democrat.
(And by the way, Jared Polis is not "moderate" by any stretch of the imagination; for instance he is on record saying that colleges should expel male students accused of rape even if they think "there is only a 20 or 30 percent chance that it happened.")
Shapiro -- hostile to infrastructure? Watching him ram through all the bureaucratic obstacles to fix that bridge on I-95 in Philadelphia, I think you've got him pegged all wrong. More likely, he'll be presenting himself as the candidate of the "abundance" agenda.
If that's true about Shapiro, then I would obviously prefer him as president over Warren or Sanders. My fear is simply that, no matter who is at its head, the Democratic coalition (which mostly wields power through the courts and civil service, not the White House) will be dominated by anti-industrial liberals, and the amount of delays + lawsuits involved in building stuff will not improve. (Not least because reducing the burden would put a lot of well-connected people out of work.)
"Moderate Democrat" is only important to me as an indicator of "not woke." I'm looking for smart, informed, and with enough backbone to recognize and oppose obvious stupidity. Vance's demonstrated low character rules him out against all but the worst Democrats. Ideally, a Republican who isn't a Trump toady, would be the nominee on that side.
The Polis statement from eight years ago does not raise him in my eyes, but he did retract it - just like someone who may at one time have been a racist troll can walk it back with intelligence and honesty.
You don't spend years subordinating your entire public persona towards performing unquestioning loyalty to a venal moron without damaging your psyche. Cognitive dissonance is too powerful a force. JD Vance thinks he's manipulating Trump, but I think his beliefs will have to have changed in the direction of Trump's in order to make his behaviour tolerable to himself.
To be honest, I would prefer Rand Paul over JD Vance as the 2028 nominee, but either of them is much better than any Democrat. Also, Donald Trump is not a moron - you may disapprove of his moral character, but he has shown himself to be very skilled at what is most important to him: show business.
No - Nikki Haley is pro-war, pro-censorship, and pro-child-castration. People like her are the reason that Donald Trump took over the Republican Party in the first place, and for all his faults, Trump is still an improvement.
I've got to say, that with Trump suspending nearly all the tarrifs about two hours after you posted this (and the stock market also recovering most of the value lost since last Wednesday) that the "Trump's Plan is North Korea" post has aged the worst out of anything you've written.
Seriously, you should go back to writing stuff like "Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV" that tries to give an even-handed account of the upsides and downsides of both parties. That's still worth going and rereading years later. But as for your more recent, hysterical lib-praising stuff? No way is any of that going to last.
How on Earth can we trust him to do the right thing on the economy after pulling a stunt like this at all? Not only does he still believe he's right, but he now knows that holding the economy hostage is the best way to secure power for himself, that internal opposition will approach non-existence, and external opposition barely registers for his anticapitalist behavior given that said external opponents have only grown in their anti-market sensibility since the '90s.
When bad people are rewarded for bad behavior, they always respond by behaving even worse.
In a way, Trump’s success mirrors the structure of a melodrama: the man rewrites the plot as it happens, then demands applause for sticking the landing. Everyone plays along because the alternative is stepping off the stage entirely and no one wants to be the first to break character.
Somewhat unrelated, but I think something you should address at some point is the dysgenic effects of fertility patterns in the US. Simply put, how do we get intelligent, conscientious Americans to have more kids relative to less intelligent, less conscientious ones? If political acceptability weren’t an issue, then I would say making most subsidies for having children exclusive to parents with college degrees, while offering totally free abortions and contraception to anyone below some income threshold.
In the long run, reversing the trend toward idiocracy means making more intelligent people and fewer unintelligent people. While I’m sympathetic to pronatalism, I think the latter goal is honestly more important right now. It’s more likely, I think, that a shrinking population with stable or increasing avg intelligence will find a way to solve its fertility problems than it is that a growing population with declining intelligence will find a way to solve its stupidity problem. Curious if you’ve thought about this.
Tax break that scales with the income (capped at maybe $300k/year inflation-adjusted) while your children are minors. 1-2 children means pay significantly less income tax for 18 years. 3 children means no income tax. 4 children means no income tax AND the goverment is paying you money proportional to your income!
Simple to administer and understand, no need for means testing or bureaucracy to determine who is "eugenic" or "sufficiently college educated".
To fund this you have to raise taxes or find a new source of funding (I hear great things about the land value tax). It's also effectively the same thing as a tax on childlessness but with much better marketing. People love tax breaks!
"There is no good way I see out of this other than Republicans being thoroughly defeated in the midterms, and ultimately the 2028 election." No LEGAL way. That's why the Trump Party wants to do whatever it can to make sure there won't be a free and fair election. For example, the SAVE Act.
$10 bet that by the time Nov 2026 and Nov 2028 comes along, Richard will manage to find some pronoun-laden woke SJW somewhere out there online, or some trans person existing somewhere out there, that annoys him so much that he will declare that Democrats have radicalized him so much that he will have no choice but to vote for the MAGA Republican again because something something transgender illegal immigrant athletes.
(A backlash against Newsom [re "trans"] is already afoot among the wokesters, so if Richard is looking for culprits [that Democrats thus hesitate to disavow], he won't have to look very far.)
A "Sista Souljah moment" on the part of any Democrat (or the party at large) would neutralize any problem Richard (or others) might have. You might also consider what Ruy Teixiera (or Yascha Mounk) has to say about this.
"If you can single-handedly wreck the global economy – meaning you just wake up one morning and decide to cause a covid-style crash of the stock market for no good reason – and only experience a historically “normal” decline in your approval ratings, that is quite a worrying sign. It makes me suspect that Trump’s floor might be high enough to make whatever he wants to do indefinitely sustainable."
I'm curious if you've become any less confident in American-style democracy?
• "Tyler Cowen says that when he hears people being pessimistic about the future of the United States, he likes to ask “are you long the market or short the market?” They never short the market. Far from revealing how fragile our system is, the events of January 6 showed how little even a president who wanted to stay in office can do to overthrow the system" (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama?r=odlci&selection=07700e35-1e22-47fe-a778-f91c32b8b69b)
Looking at your previous discussion of populism widens this further:
In Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism, you discussed issues arising from populism. In particular, you suggested that democracy requires voters to be reasonably grounded in reality, while the most successful Western populist movements rely on uneducated voters (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/kakistocracy-as-a-natural-result?r=odlci&selection=5f90b7b0-4adf-4730-8ed1-9402eaaadc24). You link back to The Reactionary Case for Democracy with the statement that "At its best, democracy works by providing feedback to leaders", noting that the uninformed voter base prevents this - however, in that article you specifically suggested that this process "doesn’t depend on people being smart", and that the need for democratic leaders to rely on the state of the economy outweighs this, nearly (though not entirely) contradicting the Kakistocracy article that linked there. Further, on the basis of approval ratings, you suggest here that "It makes me suspect that Trump’s floor might be high enough to make whatever he wants to do indefinitely sustainable" - again casting doubt on the idea that democracy is robust to a poor constituency.
In the aforementioned Kakistocracy article, you noted that "gatekeepers are usually right", presenting a pro-establishment argument. "Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes", etc. This sort of rhetoric seems bordering on anti-democratic to me - "the establishment" isn't a truly democratic system, it's arguably closer to an informally quasi-technocratic meta-system. The establishment isn't elected, it's nearly self-perpetuating. We can try to elect some to tear it down, as has been done, but in ordinary operation it doesn't seem to directly follow the whims of election, and Trump's first term was limited by this.
Back to the original question - have you become any less confident in American-style democracy? Not, per se, that you'd want to get rid of democracy as a whole, but together these make me wonder if you'd be interested in reforms similar to those proposed by Garett Jones in 10% Less Democracy (disempowering voters), or a more general weakening like Jason Brennan's epistocracy (e.g. removing universal suffrage), explicitly tilting away from the uninformed and/or toward the establishment.
So "Liberation Day(s)" are here and the whole pile of pro Trump economics, business & financial writers have disappeared as they can't defend or even model the chaos of the last 30 days..
this is GFC & Covid on crack.. its like a daily TARP vote..
We have a "Negative Gamma" sell into a declines which is blasting our global financial economics, economy, business environment. We are stuck in "Buy the truth and sell the news" is our real world facts.. stuck in recession all man made...
Everyone knows this is demolishing earnings projections for 20,000 public trading companies, top 10,000 private firms in the world. These 30,000 firms are earth..These firms are 90% of earnings, 90% corporate taxes, 85% of trade, 90% of private R&D, 90% CapX, 85% technology spending, 90% Industrial investment, 60% of employees..
As these 30,000 firms cut their earning projections, hiring, investment, trade, taxes.. this will smash $10 trillions out of the global economy.
Then the largest 1000 banks & 5000 financial firms in the world which drive $100s of trillions of financial flows across equities, credit, currency, trade, payments, swaps, financial products, pensions, funds, etc.. they are very sensitive to massive change and will reduce $10s of trillions of transactions which will blast their balance sheets
This is "man made" train wreck recession but the hard right & pro Trump wing are stuck as they have zero answers as team Trump is blowing up the global economy..
Outside of all of this everything is great.. can't wait to see the pro Trump & hard right defense of this in their economics & financial opinion pieces..
How would you persuade your October 2024-self (using October 2024-available information, not literal time travel) of this outcome? At the time your perspective was that Trump belonged in jail, but that given that he was the nominee, the risk to capitalism from the Democrats required his winning.
Trump was running on tariffs and mercantilism (literally, see below for example) for a DECADE and Hanania somehow convinced himself Kamala Harris of all people was a threat to capitalism. This despite Biden and Powell managing the best soft landing post-covid of any country on Earth. Truly a remarkable mind
https://x.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1630264006748393472
This was mostly a result of government staying out of the way. The Biden-Harris interventions — student-loan forgiveness, a firehouse of relief payments, DEI doubling down, a promise of price controls for the next term — were often bad.
Not nearly this bad, tho'. And we still have DJT's price controls to look forward to!
Yeah, that's the point. What super-high IQ decides that "a little bad" that is like a small tax on an engine of prosperity is somehow worse than wrecking the engine of prosperity?
All of the comments above miss the point : tariffs are not the issue, then or now. Nothing about the history of tariffs negative effect on a country’s economy suggest it to be a threat to democratic, constitutional rule of law - and this is the threat that Trump represents. Yes, they will likely do serious harm to our economy, but the harm is reversible. What is not reversible is Trump’s need to feel he is THE MAN, that no one can oppose him with impunity. The point of this article is that tariffs are one of the means of concentrating power in the executive - for the sake of Trump’s self-aggrandizement. The other means are DOGE, which challenges Congress control of government funds, and the imprisonment and deportation of immigrants without due process, which challenges the judiciary enforcement of laws. Hanania clearly misjudged, like many other not-crazy Trump supporters at the time, the toxic need for self-aggrandizing power that Trump represents, and judged the parties on the basis of policies and not by what the character of the candidates said about the nature authoritarian nature of the political parties involved. The fundamental reason to oppose the tariffs is that they are being used as part of a program to expand the power of the executive branch above the other branches of government with the aim of allowing Trump to act without regard to our laws and Constitution. This is the threat to our country.
For a different perspective, Scott Sumner writes:
>Overall, the goal seems to be to recreate the conditions of the 1930s, a global trade war and an aggressive nationalism where the strong prey upon the weak.
https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/bringing-back-the-1930s
Note that the 1930s did not end well.
Well put, right on target
Excellent comment
Probably nothing he could say other than that he should take his own fears/theory of MAGA intellectual and moral bankruptcy more seriously. This is what he’s said recently. Most people who were not Democrats didn’t take these tariff threats seriously.
I'm just glad RH is so honest. A prediction error is one thing, clinging to it in the face of so much contrary evidence is what Trump would do.
Had the same thought. I would love to read what Richard would say to his past self.
Almost nobody thought it would get this bad. If you were so confident Trump would be so terrible, you should have shorted the market and you'd be rich right now!
it's pretty funny that your original reason for supporting Trump was because economic freedom matters more than protecting democracy. Trump has arguably proven himself more dangerous to economic freedom than he is to democracy!
Trump was running on tariffs and mercantilism (literally, see below for example) for a DECADE and Hanania somehow convinced himself Kamala Harris of all people was a threat to capitalism. This despite Biden and Powell managing the best soft landing post-covid of any country on Earth. Truly a remarkable mind (copying and pasting from another comment I made)
https://x.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1630264006748393472
People like to say this but they forget he replaced NAFTA with…NAFTA. It was a totally reasonable view that he was content with leaving thing the way they are but putting his nominal imprint on them.
What I find worrying is Venezuela. There, another leader with a cult of personality wrecked the country, but he managed to hand over the dictatorship to someone else, the shenanigans didn't end with his death.
Will the Republicans return to sanity post-Trump?
Maybe? I don’t think Vance has the same juice. Plus by then America will likely be thoroughly exhausted with MAGA.
I remember 2004, when Dubya won and everyone predicted a permanent Republican majority. Then Obama won, and the vibe shift went leftward.
Nothing is forever in politics.
This is great stuff, thanks!!!
As a Democrat, I'm really angry at my party for getting so wrapped up in bizarre culture-war issues that it can't win an election even in such a consequential environment. I hope they can regain sanity soon.
Dems were wrecked by COVID causing supply-chain inflation all over the world, not because of culture war stuff. You should be madder at there being too many idiots in the US (and the rest of the world).
Inferring causality is always difficult, especially in politics. I agree that the Covid-related economic damage harmed Democrats in the 2022 election, but I think that fringe cultural attitudes have caused the Democrats more harm. Trump's most effective campaign ad was the one saying "...she's for them/they. I'm for YOU!"
I've noticed this; the President will say something objectively stupid. Like that tariffing the sh*t out of Pinguin Island is really important to protect our domestic industry of Pinguin photos. If you point out this is stupid to the point of comedy, the MAGA response is always short, emotional outbursts about the Left and pleas for Faith.
The point IS to constantly say ignorant, blatantly dumb things. That way you filter out the independent thinkers.
As this post very briefly notes, Trump's views on tariffs--whether they are wildly misguided or not--go back forty years, way before he went into politics. So there is clearly much more to his policy approach than just a personal power grab.
What about all of his other personal power grabs?
"if you imagine Trump as someone who wants to maximize his own personal power and the number of people paying him deference, then massive tariffs do not seem like a bad way to go about achieving his goals."
Yes, they do. If they cause conflict abroad and poverty at home (which is what opponents say) then this will dramatically and immediately reduce Trump's power. His recent power derives from his popularity among GOP and working class voters and a ruined economy would certainly affect that. American politicians still depend (to some extent) for popularity and political support for power.
If the tariffs don't cause conflict abroad and poverty at home... then perhaps they were a good policy choice.
I think it's important to emphasize that you have no idea what Trump's motivations are, and you have no idea what the short- and long-term effects of tariffs will be. Too many people are avoiding stating that caveat in this discussion.
There is no need for us to pretend ignorance. The short-term and long-term effects of tariffs are obvious: everything will get more expensive, and there will be a recession. You are trapped in the cult and denying the basic evidence of your eyes, but I will at least try to reduce your power in the future by pointing out you can make $5 from $2 on Kalshi if you are correct: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxrecssnber/recession
While I agree with much of what you've said here in regard to Trump's faults, I'm surprised that you ended your piece with a call for the Democrats to regain the White House in 2028?
Wasn't your opinion just a few months ago that the Democrats are so anti-industry and anti-markets that Trumpian corruption is the lesser evil by comparison? How will giving the White House back to the Dems in 2028 not lead to a continuation of the antibusiness policies that have deindustrialized the United States over the last fifty years?
For my part I am going to try the best I can to get either JD Vance or Rand Paul nominated in 2028. Both of these men seem to understand what's going on re the economy better than either Trump or the Warrenite progressives. Yes, they've had to put their light under a bushel, so to speak, to survive politically during the Trump years. But going all the way to the Dems and supporting the party that's been consistently anti-economic-freedom for our entire lifetimes seems like a much worse option by comparison.
(Back in August of last year I wrote a post entitled "Why it Doesn't Matter if Tim Walz is a Moderate Democrat." https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/why-it-doesnt-matter-if-tim-walz. My argument was that even a Democratic president who personally has some pro-business views will in practice empower the worst members of the Dem coalition in the bureaucracy, judiciary, etc. to keep strangling American business and infrastructure. If Mr. Hanania ends up voting Dem in 2028, he will just be reinstalling the kind of government that he was dreading a few months ago.)
Did you read this post? I don’t think any of us can say what JD Vance stands for in the end.
I think it's obvious, when you consider his entire public life from Hillbilly Elegy onward, that he has much more nuanced and rational economic views than Donald Trump does. The fact that he has spent the last few months channeling Trump instead of doing his own thinking is disappointing, but if in 2028 I have to choose between Vance and Elizabeth Warren (or any other Dem) then it will still be the easiest decision in the world.
Elizabeth Warren would make for a harder choice, but Josh Shapiro, Jared Polis, or John Fetterman would not. The way Vance jumped on Zelensky lowers him to nearly Trump-like stature in my view.
Do you think that there will be any difference between Warren-appointed judges and Shapiro-appointed judges in how hostile they are to new infrastructure, or how accommodating they are to unions? I don't.
The United States at present has the second-slowest mine development of any country in the S&P 500's list (only Zambia is worse.) Despite spending billions of dollars on various high-speed rail projects for well over a decade, we have laid 0 miles of track. Look at any other industry that involves lots of environmental reviews, and you'll see the same story - vetocracy and decades of private litigation make it practically impossible to do business profitably in the US... meanwhile not only China but also liberal democracies with less insane environmental laws, like Canada, Australia, and Japan, are surging ahead of us.
And all of this is happening with about an even mix of Republican and Democratic appointees to the judiciary and civil service! Tilting the balance more to the Dems (which will happen whether or not the guy at the top of the ticket is honest about his or her hatred of capitalism) just ensures that this will continue. Go and read my article - it doesn't matter if Tim Walz (or Josh Shapiro or John Fetterman or anyone else) is a moderate Democrat.
(And by the way, Jared Polis is not "moderate" by any stretch of the imagination; for instance he is on record saying that colleges should expel male students accused of rape even if they think "there is only a 20 or 30 percent chance that it happened.")
Shapiro -- hostile to infrastructure? Watching him ram through all the bureaucratic obstacles to fix that bridge on I-95 in Philadelphia, I think you've got him pegged all wrong. More likely, he'll be presenting himself as the candidate of the "abundance" agenda.
Shapiro has been incredibly good on cutting red tape in PA. There's a reason he's popular. He's also flogging Klein's new book "Abundance."
If that's true about Shapiro, then I would obviously prefer him as president over Warren or Sanders. My fear is simply that, no matter who is at its head, the Democratic coalition (which mostly wields power through the courts and civil service, not the White House) will be dominated by anti-industrial liberals, and the amount of delays + lawsuits involved in building stuff will not improve. (Not least because reducing the burden would put a lot of well-connected people out of work.)
"Moderate Democrat" is only important to me as an indicator of "not woke." I'm looking for smart, informed, and with enough backbone to recognize and oppose obvious stupidity. Vance's demonstrated low character rules him out against all but the worst Democrats. Ideally, a Republican who isn't a Trump toady, would be the nominee on that side.
The Polis statement from eight years ago does not raise him in my eyes, but he did retract it - just like someone who may at one time have been a racist troll can walk it back with intelligence and honesty.
If you do believe that character matters at least as much as policy, I would take Warren any day, even if on paper I might prefer Vance.
You don't spend years subordinating your entire public persona towards performing unquestioning loyalty to a venal moron without damaging your psyche. Cognitive dissonance is too powerful a force. JD Vance thinks he's manipulating Trump, but I think his beliefs will have to have changed in the direction of Trump's in order to make his behaviour tolerable to himself.
To be honest, I would prefer Rand Paul over JD Vance as the 2028 nominee, but either of them is much better than any Democrat. Also, Donald Trump is not a moron - you may disapprove of his moral character, but he has shown himself to be very skilled at what is most important to him: show business.
You'd be amazed how many people who loved Trump and hated Democrats in November are changing their minds.
let’s get nicky haley elected 👍🏻
No - Nikki Haley is pro-war, pro-censorship, and pro-child-castration. People like her are the reason that Donald Trump took over the Republican Party in the first place, and for all his faults, Trump is still an improvement.
I've got to say, that with Trump suspending nearly all the tarrifs about two hours after you posted this (and the stock market also recovering most of the value lost since last Wednesday) that the "Trump's Plan is North Korea" post has aged the worst out of anything you've written.
Seriously, you should go back to writing stuff like "Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV" that tries to give an even-handed account of the upsides and downsides of both parties. That's still worth going and rereading years later. But as for your more recent, hysterical lib-praising stuff? No way is any of that going to last.
How on Earth can we trust him to do the right thing on the economy after pulling a stunt like this at all? Not only does he still believe he's right, but he now knows that holding the economy hostage is the best way to secure power for himself, that internal opposition will approach non-existence, and external opposition barely registers for his anticapitalist behavior given that said external opponents have only grown in their anti-market sensibility since the '90s.
When bad people are rewarded for bad behavior, they always respond by behaving even worse.
Schizophrenic economic policy is bad, actually.
Stop giving Trump so much credit. You’re falling for the Trump Cycle:
1) create a crisis
2) tell people the crisis isn’t bad
3) when crisis gets untenable, and starts to affect his popularity, cave
4) but then argue this was the plan all along and that he struck a deal and “won”
5) repeat step 1
My theory is that Trump reads this substack. Score one more for Hanania!
Trump doesn't read.
In a way, Trump’s success mirrors the structure of a melodrama: the man rewrites the plot as it happens, then demands applause for sticking the landing. Everyone plays along because the alternative is stepping off the stage entirely and no one wants to be the first to break character.
Somewhat unrelated, but I think something you should address at some point is the dysgenic effects of fertility patterns in the US. Simply put, how do we get intelligent, conscientious Americans to have more kids relative to less intelligent, less conscientious ones? If political acceptability weren’t an issue, then I would say making most subsidies for having children exclusive to parents with college degrees, while offering totally free abortions and contraception to anyone below some income threshold.
In the long run, reversing the trend toward idiocracy means making more intelligent people and fewer unintelligent people. While I’m sympathetic to pronatalism, I think the latter goal is honestly more important right now. It’s more likely, I think, that a shrinking population with stable or increasing avg intelligence will find a way to solve its fertility problems than it is that a growing population with declining intelligence will find a way to solve its stupidity problem. Curious if you’ve thought about this.
Tax break that scales with the income (capped at maybe $300k/year inflation-adjusted) while your children are minors. 1-2 children means pay significantly less income tax for 18 years. 3 children means no income tax. 4 children means no income tax AND the goverment is paying you money proportional to your income!
Simple to administer and understand, no need for means testing or bureaucracy to determine who is "eugenic" or "sufficiently college educated".
To fund this you have to raise taxes or find a new source of funding (I hear great things about the land value tax). It's also effectively the same thing as a tax on childlessness but with much better marketing. People love tax breaks!
"There is no good way I see out of this other than Republicans being thoroughly defeated in the midterms, and ultimately the 2028 election." No LEGAL way. That's why the Trump Party wants to do whatever it can to make sure there won't be a free and fair election. For example, the SAVE Act.
$10 bet that by the time Nov 2026 and Nov 2028 comes along, Richard will manage to find some pronoun-laden woke SJW somewhere out there online, or some trans person existing somewhere out there, that annoys him so much that he will declare that Democrats have radicalized him so much that he will have no choice but to vote for the MAGA Republican again because something something transgender illegal immigrant athletes.
Is that a dare?
(A backlash against Newsom [re "trans"] is already afoot among the wokesters, so if Richard is looking for culprits [that Democrats thus hesitate to disavow], he won't have to look very far.)
A "Sista Souljah moment" on the part of any Democrat (or the party at large) would neutralize any problem Richard (or others) might have. You might also consider what Ruy Teixiera (or Yascha Mounk) has to say about this.
Godamnit. A blackpill if there ever was one. And a well reasoned one at that. I hope you're wrong.
"If you can single-handedly wreck the global economy – meaning you just wake up one morning and decide to cause a covid-style crash of the stock market for no good reason – and only experience a historically “normal” decline in your approval ratings, that is quite a worrying sign. It makes me suspect that Trump’s floor might be high enough to make whatever he wants to do indefinitely sustainable."
I'm curious if you've become any less confident in American-style democracy?
In The Reactionary Case for Democracy (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-reactionary-case-for-democracy), you discussed that you lost faith in China after they made a series of poor decisions (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-reactionary-case-for-democracy?r=odlci&selection=dff662c2-7c89-4954-9f1e-4ed461a3513e).
You gave more specific examples in The Year of Fukuyama (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama). One was "Chinese rhetoric and policy have become more hostile to free markets". You also noted:
• 2022 will be notable in that China and Russia, as threats to liberal democracy, had collapsed, and the difference in the ways they collapsed makes Western societies look particularly robust (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama?r=odlci&selection=e8e95d04-5b92-4b98-9cae-3b221e043be1)
• China increasingly demonstrated a hostility to free markets, and Xi seemed to not care much about economic growth and more about control over citizenry. From this, you suggested "If anything, it will make a better case for democracy and the protection of civil liberties than any Western country." (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama?r=odlci&selection=551b0d2a-8d6f-4cae-808c-edaa3f7a33ea)
• "Tyler Cowen says that when he hears people being pessimistic about the future of the United States, he likes to ask “are you long the market or short the market?” They never short the market. Far from revealing how fragile our system is, the events of January 6 showed how little even a president who wanted to stay in office can do to overthrow the system" (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-year-of-fukuyama?r=odlci&selection=07700e35-1e22-47fe-a778-f91c32b8b69b)
While the broad-trend analyses in favor of democracies still apply, direct comparisons with America particularly seem to start looking less compelling. (Among other things, you've suggested that Democrats threaten capitalism before (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/hating-conservatism-while-voting), but now you seem to concede that Trump isn't good on it either - https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1911113008627195974)
Looking at your previous discussion of populism widens this further:
In Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism, you discussed issues arising from populism. In particular, you suggested that democracy requires voters to be reasonably grounded in reality, while the most successful Western populist movements rely on uneducated voters (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/kakistocracy-as-a-natural-result?r=odlci&selection=5f90b7b0-4adf-4730-8ed1-9402eaaadc24). You link back to The Reactionary Case for Democracy with the statement that "At its best, democracy works by providing feedback to leaders", noting that the uninformed voter base prevents this - however, in that article you specifically suggested that this process "doesn’t depend on people being smart", and that the need for democratic leaders to rely on the state of the economy outweighs this, nearly (though not entirely) contradicting the Kakistocracy article that linked there. Further, on the basis of approval ratings, you suggest here that "It makes me suspect that Trump’s floor might be high enough to make whatever he wants to do indefinitely sustainable" - again casting doubt on the idea that democracy is robust to a poor constituency.
In the aforementioned Kakistocracy article, you noted that "gatekeepers are usually right", presenting a pro-establishment argument. "Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes", etc. This sort of rhetoric seems bordering on anti-democratic to me - "the establishment" isn't a truly democratic system, it's arguably closer to an informally quasi-technocratic meta-system. The establishment isn't elected, it's nearly self-perpetuating. We can try to elect some to tear it down, as has been done, but in ordinary operation it doesn't seem to directly follow the whims of election, and Trump's first term was limited by this.
In The Reactionary Case, you implicitly tie democracy to "government being limited, and leaving a wide space for individual choice" (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-reactionary-case-for-democracy?r=odlci&selection=54314c7f-737f-4631-b3f3-892aa5690dbb). The conception of these is surely tied. However, does democracy truly maintain this? It seems to me that democratic backsliding may suggest that over time an initially democratic system may eventually result in liberty making way for populism.
Back to the original question - have you become any less confident in American-style democracy? Not, per se, that you'd want to get rid of democracy as a whole, but together these make me wonder if you'd be interested in reforms similar to those proposed by Garett Jones in 10% Less Democracy (disempowering voters), or a more general weakening like Jason Brennan's epistocracy (e.g. removing universal suffrage), explicitly tilting away from the uninformed and/or toward the establishment.
So "Liberation Day(s)" are here and the whole pile of pro Trump economics, business & financial writers have disappeared as they can't defend or even model the chaos of the last 30 days..
this is GFC & Covid on crack.. its like a daily TARP vote..
We have a "Negative Gamma" sell into a declines which is blasting our global financial economics, economy, business environment. We are stuck in "Buy the truth and sell the news" is our real world facts.. stuck in recession all man made...
Everyone knows this is demolishing earnings projections for 20,000 public trading companies, top 10,000 private firms in the world. These 30,000 firms are earth..These firms are 90% of earnings, 90% corporate taxes, 85% of trade, 90% of private R&D, 90% CapX, 85% technology spending, 90% Industrial investment, 60% of employees..
As these 30,000 firms cut their earning projections, hiring, investment, trade, taxes.. this will smash $10 trillions out of the global economy.
Then the largest 1000 banks & 5000 financial firms in the world which drive $100s of trillions of financial flows across equities, credit, currency, trade, payments, swaps, financial products, pensions, funds, etc.. they are very sensitive to massive change and will reduce $10s of trillions of transactions which will blast their balance sheets
This is "man made" train wreck recession but the hard right & pro Trump wing are stuck as they have zero answers as team Trump is blowing up the global economy..
Outside of all of this everything is great.. can't wait to see the pro Trump & hard right defense of this in their economics & financial opinion pieces..