I DON’T know about you but the biggest threat to my mental health, aside from policy-by-Netflix, is the expectation that I just go along with it when politicians and journalists change the meaning of words expediently and by fiat. They’re at it again, in their coordinated performative pearl-clutching at Donald Trump’s war on ‘free trade’.
Kathy mentioned the other day that Charles Moore has expressed his consternation at the whole ghastliness of it all. Educated people, Moore writes (he has a Second), tend to be in favour of free trade. Maybe there exist even better-educated people (modesty forbids) who could point out that nominative determinism doesn’t work, that to call something a thing doesn’t cause it to become that thing, and that what the President is going up against is not ‘global free trade’, but a distorted version of it.
Allow me to vent a bit. Charles Moore is a member of the ‘right-wing’ commentariat nomenklatura, writers who fear that a changing world might refuse to redeem those obligations of deference to which they are so clearly entitled. They make up a circle-jerk of mediocrity, one which has degraded the cause of conservative journalism by purging it of counter-Establishment chic and turning it instead into one of those dinner parties you dread being invited to. They will quote Scruton without really having read him. They certainly lack the mischievous elan necessary to live like him. Moore, Hannan, Gove etc . . . fungible units of tedium, controlled opposition on a mission to crowd out more interesting voices of dissent.
Turning to Trump’s tariffs, most commentators are missing the point. Some of them deliberately, I suspect. The argument for what Trump is doing is political, strategic and moral, rather than economic. I’ll make a couple of points.
Firstly, when countries hook up with other countries, they are entitled to dress how they please. The imposition of a tariff on a foreign import is an expression of political sovereignty. Until now this has been taken as a given. Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ was a reaction, not a provocation. These tariffs – if that’s even the right expression, ‘reciprocal trading alignments’ might be more accurate, since we’re fiddling with the meaning of words – were an entirely proportionate (‘generous’ was the adjective the President chose) response to those currently meted out to US exporters, which long pre-date the Trump ascendancy, and which are routinely exacerbated by what we might call sneaky habits of regulatory shadow-banning. Indeed, if there were a ‘most-wanted’ list of protectionist racketeers, you’d expect the EU to be pretty near the top, with the USA a very late entry.
Second, the real issue here is not just now and domestic but future and foreign. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (a former history professor so possibly an educated person) has pointed out that Lockdown supplied a data-set on supply-chain security, useful in the likely event of kinetic conflict between the US and China. That data is depressing. As currently constituted, the US manufacturing structures could not keep up with the demands of munitions, technology and general appliance provision in that scenario. America cannot be made great again until it is made secure again, and this requires it to go cold turkey on its addiction to cheap and convenient imports.
Trump’s tariffs are tough love, a necessary intervention; and if you want to get at his real motives here then just look East, which in recent years has swopped out opium for cheap goods as its exported narcotic of choice.
Yet again we are forced to sit through the homiletics of the ‘international rules’ evangelists. Their religion is fake. When it comes to international trade there is a hierarchy of self-interest, which is fair enough, conjoined with an assumption that it is always the blue-collar worker in Pennsylvania who must suck it up, which is very far from fair enough. The ‘depression’ comparison, now routinely trotted out, is otiose. The rise of the new technologies, the rapacious expansionism of artificial intelligence, and the increasing preference of the virtual over the real have caused successive US administrations to overlook that for a country to survive it cannot forget how to make things.
Time will tell if Trump has called this right, and what he’s trying is risky, possibly reckless. Which is why so many Americans, in whom the pioneer flame is yet to be extinguished, voted for it.
His ‘fair trade’ critics need to get a handle on what the deeper play is, while the rest of us must continue to remind ourselves that those same critics are the people who put safety ahead of all things, even to the extent of shutting us in our homes over another contagion of oriental origin.
I’m not sure that we should take it too seriously when people who are happy to sit through the cultural and historical razing of this country begin to rail against the ‘disruption’ caused by a politician who is doing what he promised to do.
Trump has faith that the people of blue-collar America will trade short-term pain for long-term security. This is genuinely adult politics in its recognition that politicians do indeed have obligations to the yet-to-be-born. This is about more than tariffs and ‘educated’ people really should get that.
