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| Octopus City, rendering of a plan by Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute, via Wired, May 2015, when the techie billionaires were giving up on their idea. Then Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. |
Found myself unexpectedly attracted by a conspiracy theory around the tariff mishegas, from a Substacker, Daniel Pinchbeck, with an excitingly transgressive headline: Paul Krugman is wrong.
Not that I was planning to go that far myself! I think Krugman's judgment of the White House at the moment is fundamentally right:
I'm not saying that the Trump team's thinking is unsound. I don't see any thinking at all...There can't be any secret agenda behind the Trump tariffs, because there's nobody around Trump with the knowledge or independence to devise such an agenda. This is all about Trump's gut feelings. A White House official told Politico that he likes the "shock and awe," and that "Each country needs to panic and call...Trump wants to hear you grovel and say you'll cut a deal."
But just because Trump and his immediate minions are incapable of running a functioning conspiracy (as he showed on the way to January 6, if you've read the indictments) doesn't mean there's no conspiracy; I see the concept Pinchbeck has come up with as a secret agenda that doesn't require any thinking on the part of anyone around Trump (that's different in a number of respects from the way he wrote it).
It's a plan that Howard Lutnick and Peter Navarro and the rest of them aren't even aware of, and that, far from being wrecked by their stupidity and servility, works because of those qualities—driven by people from outside the White House whose views we are pretty familiar with, under the leadership of the German-born multibillionaire Peter Thiel.
Krugman's error, if that's what you want to call it, is an understandable one: tariffs are economics, and international trade is his own field, and if they want to do something with tariffs, he ought to be able to recognize what it is. The possibilities aren't even very complicated: either they're trying to raise government revenue off the sale of imported goods (and maybe increase income inequality, since the burden of paying falls chiefly on people at lower income levels), or they're trying to discourage people from buying imported goods (typically to protect a local industry from foreign competition). You can't do both at the same time for a particular category of goods: if people stop buying them because the price is too high, then the government won't raise any money, and if they keep buying them in spite of the price, maybe because the quality is better than that of the local production, then the local production won't thrive. The craziness of Trump's approach is evidenced in the way he keeps insisting both will happen—all the lost factories will swim back in a tide of foreign investment (from Bangladesh and Vietnam?), and "trillions of dollars" from the tariffs will fill the Treasury at the same time. Uh, no. Didn't happen in 2019, and won't happen now.
In my rewriting of Pinchbeck's theory, on the other hand, it isn't meant as an economic program that will or won't "work" to solve a particular problem; it isn't really about tariffs at all, in fact, except to the extent that Trump is obsessed with them and regards himself as an expert on the subject, so that he's guaranteed to be uncontrollably and devastatingly wrong. The Thiel program is to create an economic problem, in fact to destroy the US economy—to turn it into something like the former Soviet republics in the 1990s, a total wreck, which Thiel and his friends will be able to pick up for pennies on the dollar:
For instance, Peter Thiel will get $4 billion tax free from his Roth IRA in two years, and if the U.S. has crashed, he will be able to buy anything he wants. Naomi Klein has articulated the concept of "disaster capitalism," where the transnational oligarchic elite use or create disasters so they can centralize wealth and control.
Actually, $5 billion, in April 2027.
Think about it: one of the classic problems with conspiracy theories is that they tend to presuppose an awful lot people people successfully keeping an awful lot of secrets, but this one has been unfolding in public, in Trump's hires of Thiel acolytes like JD Vance and Russell Vought, and in the Caesarist musings of the West Coast Straussians and the programmatic writings of the Heritage Foundation laying out the dissolution of the educational establishment, the healthcare system, the legal system, and the civil service (Curtis Yarvin's RAGE project, "Retire All Government Employees"), which are now being sort of systematically carried out through Stephen Miller's executive orders and Elon Musk's office raids:
Yarvin has written extensively about the need to dismantle something he calls "the Cathedral"—the alliance of universities, media, and the bureaucratic state that he believes props up a ruling ideology of progressivism and democratic stagnation. The professional managerial class (PMC) — a subset of the high-performing middle class — is the basis of this Cathedral. Its members are highly educated in law, ethics, social norms, history, science, and belong to legacy institutions. They work in fields such as medicine, law, tech, finance, the media, and the academy. In Thiel and Yarvin’s schema, this class must be sidelined and broken.
Yarvin himself is turning a little negative on the Trump administration because it's not authoritarian enough, according to Gil Duran at The Nerd Reich, with dark allusions to genocide and worse, but he also claims to be opposed to taking down the Department of Education, is disturbed by Musk's carelessness, and seems very grumpy about the tariff thing—I assume he's not filthy rich but has money in the stock market and was never enough of a revolutionary to risk that. He's just a troll like Fat Joe in Pickwick Papers—he wants to make your flesh creep.
Thiel's another matter; he has no reason to care what happens to the stock market. Maybe he'll get his Octopus City yet. The tariff thing works just fine for him, destabilizing the sectors of the economy where, as Pinchbeck says, the American middle class has traditionally built its generational wealth, in small-scale manufacturing and services and in agriculture—Trump's voting base, in fact, poor guys. They're already happy to accept dictatorship, maybe they'll take Vance after Trump flames out, or maybe Thiel's good friend Mark Zuckerberg, who's long identified himself with Caesars of one sort and another.
While Trump himself is on automatic pilot, carrying out the stuff he's been programmed to carry out (I'm convinced, you know, that he got the tariff bug as a teenager, from his far-right billionaire father—every once in a while he lets out his hope that he can use tariffs to eliminate the income tax). If the object is destruction, he doesn't really need to be given orders.
