“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld magazine.
As an aside, and totally unrelated to why this is an important story (and especially so right now), this piece both explains and perfectly epitomizes why I love the stories I love, and what’s missing from those I don’t love, for whatever that is worth.
The Trump administration concedes that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who had lived in the United States since 2012, was illegally deported to his native country on March 15 due to an "administrative error." But it says there was good reason to expel him because he is a member of MS-13, an international criminal gang. That much is clear, President Donald Trump insisted in an interview with ABC News correspondent Terry Moran this week, because Abrego Garcia "had MS-13 tattooed" on "his knuckles."
Abrego Garcia did not have MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles. Rather, he had four tattoos on the fingers of his left hand—a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with X eyes, a cross, and a skull—that the government has controversially interpreted as evidence of his alleged MS-13 affiliation. In a picture that Trump posted on X last month, the president is holding a photo of those tattoos, captioned "Kilmar Abrego Garcia MS-13 Tattoo" and superimposed with labels that include the characters M, S, 1, and 3 across the fingers. "They said he is not a member of MS-13," Trump wrote, "even though he's got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles."
Although Trump clearly mistook those labels for ink that had been injected into Abrego Garcia's skin, he adamantly refused to acknowledge his embarrassing error when Moran pointed it out. That episode poses a puzzle that is apt to come up repeatedly during the next three and a half years: When Trump says something that is clearly not true, does it reflect his longstanding character traits, or does it reflect the sort of cognitive decline that forced Joe Biden to withdraw from last year's presidential race?
At 78, Trump is four years younger than Biden. But by the end of his term, Trump will be older than Biden was when his disastrous debate performance made it plain that his mental faculties were slipping. And you can be sure that if Biden had displayed the sort of stubborn obliviousness that was evident in Trump's conversation with Moran, Republicans would have cited it as clear evidence of his encroaching senility.
If you think I am exaggerating, watch the interview or read the transcript. The relevant exchange begins when Moran asks Trump about Abrego Garcia, whom he describes as "the Salvadoran man who crossed into this country illegally but who is under a protective order that he not be sent back to El Salvador." Moran notes that "your government sent him back to El Salvador and acknowledged in court that was a mistake." He adds that the Supreme Court has upheld an order requiring the government to "facilitate his return to the United States." Moran asks what the Trump administration is doing to comply with that order.
Abrego Garcia "is not an innocent, wonderful gentleman from Maryland," Trump says. He is an "MS-13 gang member" with a history of domestic violence who "came into our country illegally." How does Trump know that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13? Although "he said he wasn't a member of a gang," Trump explains, "they looked" and saw that "on his knuckles he had MS-13….He had MS-13 on his knuckles tattooed."
Moran corrects Trump, saying "he has some tattoos that are interpreted that way." No, Trump insists: "It says 'M-S-1-3.'" That label, Moran notes, was added by "Photoshop." Trump is incredulous: "That was Photoshop?" He thinks Moran is obviously wrong, because Abrego Garcia "had MS-13 tattooed" on his hand.
Moran wants to "move on," saying, "We'll agree to disagree." But Trump will not let go of the subject. "Do you want me to show the picture?" he says "Go look at his hand. He had MS-13." Moran allows that "he did have tattoos that can be interpreted that way." Trump can't believe how misleading Moran is being: "Terry, no, no. No, no. He had MS as clear as you can be. Not 'interpreted.' This is why people no longer believe the news, because it's fake news."
When Abrego Garcia "was photographed in El Salvador," Moran notes, he had no tattoos like the ones Trump is describing. "Oh, oh," Trump says. "They weren't there, but they're there now, right?" Wrong, Moran says: "They're in your picture."
Moran really wants to talk about Ukraine, but Trump still thinks it is important to set the record straight: "He's got MS-13 on his knuckles." He adds that "you do such a disservice" by denying that supposedly documented fact. "Why don't you just say, 'Yes, he does,' and, you know, go on to something else?" Because that point is "contested," Moran charitably says before finally getting Trump to talk about Ukraine instead.
Trump's manner, tone of voice, and persistence during this exchange suggest he sincerely believes what he is saying. He is not even willing to entertain the possibility that he might be wrong. In Trump's mind, it is Moran who is either mistaken or deceptive.
You could say that is what you would expect from a man who continues to insist, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, that he actually won reelection in 2020. Trump, after all, has never felt obliged to acknowledge reality when it conflicts with his agenda or self-image. But advancing age can only expand Trump's capacity for self-delusion, and in this tattoo discussion he comes across as a confused old man.
Consider another example: the special tariffs on Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese goods that Trump said were aimed at pressuring the leaders of those countries to help stop the flow of illicit fentanyl into the United States. Although that rationale never made much sense, it was at least comprehensible. The same cannot be said of the explanation that Trump offered on Truth Social last month: The aim of taxing imports from Canada, he said, was to "penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy."
As Reason's Brian Doherty notes, that description suggests "Trump's understanding of what he's even doing is deficient," since he seems to think "his tariffs will be taxing and thus raising the price of the illegal fentanyl he fantasizes is flooding the United States from the north." That misconception goes beyond Trump's intermittent insistence that the cost of tariffs is borne by foreign countries rather than U.S. businesses and consumers. If Trump thinks he is "tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy," he imagines that drug traffickers, whose entire business model is based on defying the law, nevertheless are keen to comply with his new taxes by declaring their imports at the border and forking over 25 percent of their value.
Like the highly incriminating but imaginary tattoos that Trump thinks Abrego Garcia has, his assertion that drug smugglers are paying tariffs seems like a fantasy rather than a lie. But given the power that Trump is either exercising (in the case of tariffs) or declining to exercise (in Abrego Garcia's case), these are potentially consequential fantasies. Maybe Trump is just being Trump, or maybe his already tenuous connection to reality is slipping with age. With Trump, it is hard to draw such distinctions.
Similarly, Trump's frequently puzzling rhetorical detours are not necessarily a sign of cognitive decline, since his style of speech has long been meandering and full of non sequiturs. I am not saying the president is senile. But if he were, how would we know?
In a headline-grabbing press conference on Monday, April 28, 2025, Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Washington Commanders’ billionaire owner Josh Harris announced an agreement—in principle—to build a new stadium for the team at the RFK site. The deal, which must be approved by the DC Council, depends on an eye-popping $1.14 billion dollars in public money.
That total includes $202 million in general infrastructure costs (for utilities, roads, etc.—the kinds of things necessary for a development, whether there’s a stadium involved or not) and $89 million for a long-planned neighborhood “SportsPlex” facility. But the lion’s share of taxpayer dollars, $856 million, are to subsidize the construction of a stadium ($500 million) and its associated parking garages ($356 million).
This is the second-highest construction subsidy in the history of US sports.
A $856 million subsidy of the Commanders’ construction costs would be the second-highest in US sports history, and much higher than the last decade’s average. Image by Bradbury and Coates.
$856 million is only the tip of the iceberg. There are additional costs the mayor and team are intentionally not sharing, lest District residents realize that they’re getting got.
With credit to stadium-financing expert Neil deMause, who dug through the term sheet, here’s what the boosters aren’t telling you.
The value of the land: $600 million
RFK is prime waterfront real estate, and whatever new housing and businesses are built there will generate revenue for whoever holds the development rights; for the majority of the developable portion of the site, it won’t be the District. Rather than keep the rights and collect rents or lease it at a fair market price, Bowser is giving Harris about 90 acres for $5 per year. Land values in the District average out to $6.6 million per acre, so we’re losing the approximately $600 million dollars that land could otherwise fetch.
Waived property taxes: $429 million
Unlike the home you live in, or the building you work in, Harris’ stadium and garages will be exempt from paying real-property taxes. Tax policy expert Geoffrey Propheter estimates the District will lose about $429 million as a result.
Redirected sales taxes: $300 million
Ostensibly, public investment in a stadium could come back to the municipality via sales taxes later levied on tickets, concessions and merchandise sold at events. But per Bowser’s term sheet, the District wouldn’t even collect that. Sales-tax revenue would instead be directed to a “RFK Campus Reinvestment Fund,” to pay for future stadium maintenance and upgrades in the future—so, back to the team again. The reinvestment fund would function similarly to the subsidy given to the Nationals last year to redirect public money to their own “Ballpark Maintenance Fund.” Based on similar sales tax rates at Nats games, the District could whiff on about $10 million per year, or $300 million total.
Bond interest: $623 million
The District will need to borrow money to pay for $500 million in immediate (2026–2029) stadium capital costs and $175 million to buy a parking garage back from the team in 2032. Those payments will likely take the form of 30-year municipal bonds. If we use present-day prices, the interest rate on those bonds would be about 4.75%. Depending on the structure of the bond—whether the District pays the principal back steadily or in a balloon payment at the end—that translates to $42 to $54 million in debt payments added to our balance sheet every year for the next 30 years, a total of $623 to $962 million in interest alone. We’ll be generous and assume the lower amount.
Opportunity cost of building a stadium instead of a neighborhood: $3.3 billion
As we wrote last week, without a stadium and parking hogging the site, the 100 developable acres at RFK could facilitate the construction of 15,000 homes, 4,500 of which would be income-restricted and subsidized. This could house about 30,000 residents. The mayor’s deal with the Commanders includes 5,000 units, for about 10,000 residents.
That’s a difference of 10,000 units, or 20,000 people. And the divergence in economic impact is massive. Between income, property, and sales taxes, we estimate those 20,000 extra people would generate a total of $110 million in annual tax revenue—or, $3.3 billion over 30 years.
All told, the final bill comes to:
There’s always a @dril tweet. Image by dril.
We’re getting fleeced. This is far from the “good deal” spin some commentators, and the NFL, are churning out. All told, Bowser’s deal would be the largest taxpayer subsidy in the history of the country, a shocking acceleration of public largesse so a man worth $10 billion doesn’t have to pay for his own toys. Even if District leaders think a stadium is the best path to redeveloping RFK, they’ll get played for the long-term if they acquiesce to this.
The deal is bad enough in its own right, but particularly so given the current context. The District is broke. House Republicans are holding hostage $1 billion of the city’s own money for this year simply because they can, and the larger Trump administration attack on the federal government has the Office of the Chief Financial Officer projecting an additional $1 billion gap in the District’s budgets over the next several years.
And, we’re overleveraged on payments to billionaire sports owners already. The District of Sports must soon pay its first installment of $515 million to Ted Leonsis to renovate Capital One Arena. Meanwhile, the Nationals have come calling for ballpark upgrades, and DC United is floating a 10,000-seat expansion and a new roof. Some elected officials may daydream of touchdown dances at Commandersopolis, but the District’s credit card is begging them for a time-out.
The District committed $515 million to renovate Capital One Arena last year. Image by NCPC.
Despite this, Bowser is framing her proposed handout as somehow necessary to future-proof the city: “‘[O]ur economy is shifting because of federal government decisions about people, headquarters and the like,’ Bowser said. ‘And so Deputy Mayor Albert and I, and our entire team, is very focused on how we prepare DC for a different economy. And a big, big bright spot in our economy is entertainment and sports. So we’re gonna be presenting to the council a very robust plan about how we change our economy to get ready for the future.’”
Federal sabotage is a real malady, but Bowser’s proffered remedy is snake oil. As we’ve shown, moving the Commanders’ house six miles into the District will generate no real new economic activity. A football stadium, empty over 330 days per year, is not going to bring enough visitors to inject real money into our local economy, and DC will see about the same number of tourists if the Commanders build a new stadium in Maryland instead.
Bowser’s $6 billion package is going to buy her little more than the world’s most expensive bragging rights.
We get it. Football is fun. You know what’s not fun? Head injuries. Cutting school budgets, or watching family members and friends move because they can’t find an affordable place to live.
The RFK site is a once-in-a-generation opportunity: 174 acres close enough to transit, along the Anacostia River, with guaranteed beautiful, usable, maintained park space. Nothing like this will magically appear in the District’s 69.3 square miles again. We can lock the majority of this site up with a financial albatross that will never come close to paying back or we can build for the actual future: more homes, more tax revenue, and a better District for all of us.
Top image: $6 billion of your money, and Josh Harris’ team goes here. Image by SchuminWeb licensed under Creative Commons.
I spent a lot of my early years as a blogger arguing against libertarianism. Here are some example posts that I reposted on Substack:
(Here are a few more on my old blog, in case you’re interested.)
My basic criticisms of libertarianism were:
Libertarians’ ideological opposition to public goods provision and state capacity not only makes us poorer, but it also makes us less free in the long run, because poorer societies are less able to resist foreign conquerors. For example, it’s hard to imagine a libertarian government winning World War 2.
By treating all of society as an interaction between a government and the individuals it governs, libertarians tend to ignore the threats to liberty from non-governmental institutions (“local bullies”), and from foreign governments. This led some libertarians to oppose the Civil Rights Act, and to underestimate the threats from illiberal powers like China. And these omissions led to some unsavory people grafting themselves and their oppressive ideas onto the libertarian movement.
Libertarians underrate the importance of non-market mechanisms, which are sometimes superior to markets when transaction costs are high. If friendship, sex, and the right to breathe air were allocated by markets, society would be worse.
Libertarians’ focus on deontological (principles-based) notions of freedom often contradicts humanity’s moral sentiments. For example, some libertarians argue that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery; the proper response to this is “Eww.”
For what it’s worth, I still think these criticisms are all valid and true. And I definitely don’t think libertarianism is the best political-economic philosophy possible, or the best one that exists in the world today. I have not become a libertarian, nor do I expect to.
But I feel like I owe libertarians an apology, for severely underrating their ideology. I was so focused on its theoretical flaws that I ignored its political importance. I concentrated only on the marginal benefits that might be achieved by building on our economic system’s libertarian foundation, ignoring the inframarginal losses that would happen were that foundation to crumble. I had only a hazy, poor understanding of the historical context in which libertarianism emerged, and of the limitations of libertarianism’s most prominent critics.
The most obvious thing that has prompted me to make this apology is Donald Trump’s disastrous tariff policy. While some progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders, Gretchen Whitmer, and Chris Deluzio have equivocated on tariffs — criticizing the implementation but not the basic idea — it has been the libertarian Rand Paul who has come out as one of the tariffs’ strongest rhetorical opponents in Congress:
Many Republican lawmakers lie low when they have differences with President Trump. Sen. Rand Paul has taken the opposite approach.
“Congress needs to grow a spine, and Congress needs to stand up for its prerogatives,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters…His comments came just days after he was one of only two GOP senators to vote against the party’s budget framework that is key to Trump’s tax cuts, saying it didn’t do enough to reduce the deficit…
[N]ow major parts of Trump’s agenda could hinge on whether the senator sticks to his guns or folds…The conflict over tariffs could come to a head soon. A measure Paul is co-sponsoring to end Trump’s tariffs is set to come to the floor when the Senate returns next week.
The spectacle of a libertarian Republican standing up to a President who holds near-absolute power within the GOP is inspiring, while it’s shameful to see some Democrats take only weak swipes at policies that threaten to do great harm to America’s middle class and working class.
In the short term, Paul is bound to lose his fight — he claims to have the votes in the Senate, but he doesn’t have the votes in the House. But in the long term, it’s possible that we’ll see a repeat of the backlashes to the Embargo of 1807 and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s. Free trade has won before in America, and there’s a chance it’ll win again — in which case Rand Paul and the libertarians will have the last laugh, even if it’s mostly Democratic votes that eventually strike down Trump’s insane policy.
The size and breadth of Trump’s tariffs came as a shock to me. I never imagined that a U.S. leader would have such a deeply broken view of how trade works, or would willfully inflict such harm on the American people. But I should have known it was possible. I should have studied the historical example of Juan Peron, whose Trump-style policies of protectionism and fiscal profligacy combined to knock Argentina out of the ranks of the rich nations. I should have studied the failure of “import substitution” policies in the 1950s and 1960s. I should have known more about the political context that produced Smoot-Hawley in the U.S.
I should also have realized that as right-leaning ideologies go, American libertarianism was always highly unusual. I had lived in Japan, where the political right is protectionist, industrialist, and sometimes crony-capitalist. I should have realized that this was the norm for right-leaning parties around the world, and that the American right’s Reaganite embrace of free markets and free trade was the anomaly. That, in turn, should have given me a warning of what would happen if libertarianism fell in America.
I did not understand the relevant pieces of history, nor did I think carefully enough about what I had observed overseas. And so when I was a graduate student writing about the ills of libertarianism, I imagined that the realistic alternatives to the American system of 2007 were either the gentle progressivism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, or the vigorous nation-building of FDR and Eisenhower, rather than the madness of a charismatic populist with zero understanding of economics.
Perhaps an analogy to a popular fantasy novel is in order. In Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Saga (Warning: spoilers), rebels fight to overthrow a repressive despot known as the Lord Ruler. But when they succeed, it turns out that the Lord Ruler’s presence was the only thing holding back a destructive force known as Ruin, which proceeds to destroy the world. Oops! Over the past eight years, I’ve often thought of Reaganite conservatism as the Lord Ruler, keeping a lid on the spirit of right-wing Ruin that was Patrick Buchanan and the John Birch Society. But it also seems likely that free-market ideology, for all its flaws, was keeping a lid on the right’s natural impulse toward Peronism.
To be sure, libertarianism proved inadequate to a number of important 21st-century tasks — preserving U.S. defense manufacturing capacity in the face of Chinese competition, speeding the adoption of green technologies, redistributing the gains from trade and technology, and driving forward technological progress in an age of exploding research costs. And yet who, at this moment, wouldn’t trade Trump’s tariff regime for the libertarian policies of Argentina’s Javier Milei, who has reduced his country’s inflation to manageable levels, while reducing poverty as well?
I’ve spent years criticizing the ideas of Milton Friedman. And yet right now, the people in the Trump administration desperately need a dose of Friedman’s ideas. They need to sit down and watch the famous pencil video, in which Friedman explains how international supply chains are crucial for giving us the conveniences of modern life:
I have spent years explaining why asset markets are not perfectly efficient. And yet capital flight and chaos in the bond market is the only thing so far that has demonstrated the ability to make Trump dial back his tariffs. This tweet by the progressive writer John Ganz really hits home:
I’ve spent years making fun of Ayn Rand novels, and yet doesn’t Trump’s cronyism, disdain for private business, and relentless instinct for government control make him the perfect Ayn Rand villain?
I’ve spent years criticizing Econ 101 for teaching overly simplistic models and ignoring empirics. And yet who now can deny that Trump, Peter Navarro, Howard Lutnick, and the rest of that crew could benefit from taking a remedial Econ 101 course?
If you would rather have a Trumpist right than a Reaganite right, I just don’t know what to tell you.
But I’d be lying if I said that Trump’s madness is the only thing that made me feel more sympathy for libertarianism. Over the past decade, I’ve seen the excesses of progressive economic ideology more clearly than I ever did as a graduate student.
On the crucial issue of housing, I’ve seen anti-market ideas weaponized to trick people into thinking that allowing new market housing raises rents via “gentrification”, when in fact it lowers rents, just as an Econ 101 textbook would predict. I’ve seen progressives pooh-pooh the idea of supply and demand as “trickle-down”, even as cities that build more supply have generally succeeded in reducing rents. I’ve seen them decry new housing construction because it puts money in the pockets of developers. And I’ve seen progressives push rent control as an alternative, even though it ultimately reduces supply and creates artificial scarcity.1
On macroeconomic policy, I’ve seen progressives push relentlessly for stimulative policies to push up labor demand, even as inflation brought down Joe Biden’s presidency and government infrastructure programs turned into make-work programs that built nothing.
Internationally, I’ve seen respected progressives like Joe Stiglitz rush to praise the economic policies of Hugo Chavez, and then fail to apologize after those policies drove Venezuela’s economy into one of the worst catastrophes in modern history.
On public goods provision, I’ve seen Democrats struggle to build high-speed rail, EV chargers, and rural broadband, despite throwing tens of billions of dollars at these things. I’ve seen progressives at the Roosevelt Institute go to the mat to defend NEPA and other procedural barriers to development, even though these barriers have dramatically slowed decarbonization and other progressive priorities.
Meanwhile, it’s libertarians who have proven to be smarter and more flexible on state capacity. Tyler Cowen articulated the idea of “state capacity libertarianism” in 2020, and think tanks like the Institute for Progress have done a lot of great work on building U.S. state capacity even as they also advocate for cutting regulation.
In other words, just as Trumpism represents the actually existing alternative to free-market ideas on the right, the actually existing alternatives to free markets on the left are very far from whatever I was imagining as a grad student snarking about public goods.
Libertarianism is far from perfect as a governing ideology, and has had plenty of failures. But it’s the proper foil for progressivism, which is also far from perfect and has also had its share of debacles. The answer is that we need both ideologies, and we need both to be the most reasonable incarnations of themselves. We should be debating opportunity versus equality, freedom versus redistribution, government provision versus market provision of public goods. We should not be scrambling to stave off the depredations of a Mad King who doesn’t understand the first thing about economics.
Perhaps we debated the libertarians too vigorously, and too well. Now I find myself wishing we had them back. In this world there are monsters far more terrifying than the market.
Note that Milei seems to have produced a housing boom in Argentina by scrapping rent control.
President Trump’s approval rating has fallen to near-historic lows. With economic disruption from the tariffs likely to hit next month, his numbers will probably get even worse; this administration could reach unprecedented levels of unpopularity. If I were a far-right populist, I would be thinking hard about a strategy to prevent the blowback from crippling the movement.
Such a strategy is easy to come by. Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor. If Trump’s base starts abandoning him, it will be because of the tariffs. But tariffs aren’t a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform. Other right-populist leaders like Orban, Bukele, and Modi show no interest in them. They seem an idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s, a cost that the rest of the movement pays to keep him around.
So, (our hypothetical populist strategist might start thinking after Trump’s approval hits the ocean trenches and starts drilling) - whatever. MAGA minus Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies can remain a viable platform. You don’t even have to exert any effort to make it happen. Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance. And although Vance supports tariffs now, that’s only because he’s a spineless toady. After Trump leaves the picture, Vance will gain thirty IQ points, make an eloquent speech about how tariffs were the right tool for the mid-2020s but no longer, and the problem will solve itself. Right?
Don’t let them get away with this. Although it’s true that tariffs owe as much to Trump’s idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology.
If one day Joe Biden had conceived a personal hatred for the nation of Ecuador and tried to sacrifice America’s interests on the altar of some anti-Ecuador crusade, his handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing. And maybe that particular metaphor owes more to Biden’s age than the inexorable logic of liberal institutionalism. But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever. Congressional Democrats would push back. State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would water down the orders. DNC operatives would say it doesn’t play well with [list of one million different activist groups who must be kept satisfied at all times]. Democrat-controlled media would attack the policy, and the base would rebel against it. In the end, Clinton/Obama/Harris would relent: partly to preserve political capital, partly because only the sort of person who would relent in these situations would have gotten the job in the first place. I think both liberals and conservatives agree that this story is directionally correct - otherwise you wouldn’t need the “unitary executive” doctrine or 3,000,000 pages of Moldbug prose. But why is it correct?
Organizations tend to accumulate bureaucracy. For at least the past few decades, the bureaucratic institutional middle layer has been occupied mostly by liberals, adding a liberal spin to whatever policies it executes. Progressive politicians have responded by outsourcing more and more tasks to it, while right-wing politicians have fumed against it.
Populism, especially far-right Trump-style populism, isn’t just a grab bag of opinions on immigration, crime, etc. On a deeper level, it’s a toolbox of strategies, justifications, and beneficial memes for circumventing the institutional middle layer. Some of this is unitary executive doctrine. Some of it is an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason. Some of it is hard-forged antibodies to believing the media or expert class about anything. Some of it is a principled refusal to ever listen to or care about corruption allegations. Liberals treat these as anomalous vices, but they’re all load-bearing parts of a social technology for letting leaders ignore the institutional middle layer and govern without their consent.
(the left also needs to cultivate certain vices to sustain its institutionalist strategy; Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality).
Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.
The obvious failure mode of the populist strategy is that they elect a moron or psychopath - or, more politely, a person with idiosyncrasies - and then their side’s commitments to ignoring experts, punishing disloyalty, circumventing checks and balances, and trusting the plan makes it impossible to push back. To defuse this critique, the populists veer hard into conflict theory - all problems are caused by the elites, and as long as we get someone on the right side, their good intentions (or at least anti-elite intentions) will more than compensate for their lack of restraint and expertise. Any given dictator could always turn out to be a benevolent dictator; you can always glance behind you at the institutions controlled by your enemies and say “I like my chances”.
But all of this depends on empirical parameters. How likely is it that your fellow populists will unite behind a good strongman rather than a bad one? How much damage will his inevitable idiosyncrasies cause, compared to the devil-you-know of the institutions? Once you’ve undermined the usual checks-and-balances, how much resistance will the vestigial checks-and-balances your side has left in place be able to mount against genuinely bad policies?
Trump and his tariffs are our first and strongest data point for determining these parameters in the American setting. Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy. The first and only time they got a chance to compare his damage to the damage of the institutions, the institutions came out looking at least more compatible with normal economic activity. And the first and only time they got a chance to see if the vestigial checks-and-balances left in place by his own party could restrain him, his subordinates proved to be spineless toadies who praised his genius and munificence even as he bankrupted the country.
As I wrote in my pre-election post last October:
[Hugo] Chavez provides a useful model [for thinking about Trump]. Chavez fired everyone competent or independent in government, because they sometimes talked back to him or disagreed with him; he replaced them with craven yes-men and toadies. His ideas weren’t all bad, but when he did have bad ideas, there was nobody to challenge or veto them. He frequently chose what was good for his ego (or his ability to short-term maintain power) over what was good for the country, and there was no system to punish him for those decisions. Since rule-of-law would block his whims, he kept undermining rule-of-law until it was no longer strong enough to protect things like property, investment, or a free economy.
I’m not a fan of either the ideological cults of the left or the personality cults of the right. In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way.
This administration has made me more confident that the left is the better starting point for this salvaging effort. Some of this new confidence is downstream of my personal moral commitments, which I don’t expect every American to share. But most people agree prosperity is better than poverty; if the tariffs cause economic devastation, it will provide a hard-to-ignore sign of the current administration’s incompetence. When that happens, the smarter elements of the populist right will try to disavow protectionism. I might believe them when they say they personally wouldn’t have instituted those exact tariffs. But they will still have to answer for them as a predictable consequence of their ideology.
Over the course of Trump’s tariff-paloozza, he has repeatedly raised the issue of non-tariff barriers to trade.
It’s a little bit hard to know what to say about this, in part because Trump and his team keep being very non-specific about what they think the relevant barriers are, and also because they keep wrongly insisting that all bilateral trade deficits are caused by non-tariff trade barriers. At the same time, it’s certainly true that such a thing as non-tariff trade barriers exist and that such barriers are an important aspect of the global economy.
But because he’s Trump, he rarely seems to actually understand anything about non-tariff barriers to trade or be interested in accurately describing why they exist or where.
And most of all, he never acknowledges that presidents of both parties spent a generation making hard won progress against non-tariff trade barriers, and that the proximate cause of that progress coming to a halt is, in fact, Donald Trump.
Which is just to say that the solution to non-tariff trade barriers is free trade agreements.
One of the big objectives of NAFTA, for example, was to open the Mexican market to American corn exports. Donald Trump has a long list of complaints about American companies’ access to the Japanese market, many of which were specifically addressed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal that the Obama administration negotiated and that died due to opposition in Congress and opposition from Donald Trump. The Obama administration also began the process of negotiating a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) with the European Union. This process hadn’t gotten very far before Trump’s election scuttled negotiations, but had it come together, T-TIP would have been the biggest reduction in non-tariff trade barriers in history.
Getting this kind of deal done is not easy. That’s partly for the standard Econ 101 reasons that protectionism always has some political appeal. But the deeper issue is that while a tariff is a tariff, what constitutes a non-tariff trade barriers is very much up for the debate.
We have free trade in goods between American states because most of the relevant regulatory functions are handled by the federal government. To have the same level of market integration between Michigan and Kanagawa as exists between Michigan and Kentucky would require governance to be as integrated — and that would compromise national sovereignty. Negotiating these deals is, as a result, difficult and controversial. But the potential upside is big. The Trumpian premise that different countries having different regulations is, per se, some kind of scam is not a useful starting point for dialogue. And there’s no reason to believe that Trump’s bullying-centric approach is a particularly useful way to get deals done.
Again, Obama already negotiated a market-access deal with Japan and other major Pacific countries, and Trump just tore it up. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton negotiated one with Canada and Mexico, Trump himself modified it somewhat, and then Trump tore up his own deal unilaterally.
There’s no reason to behave like this. The Trump administration needs to treat the process seriously.
The number two automaker in the world by volume is the Volkswagen Group, and their number two model is a tiny car called the Volkswagen Polo. As if often the case with rinky-dink cars, the Polo is not available for sale in the United States, because Volkswagen thinks the US market for such a small car wouldn’t be profitable.
We sort of take this for granted. If you go to Europe, you see a lot of vehicles on the road that are normally very small by American standards and aren’t sold here.
But isn’t this kind of weird? Stipulate that yes, the market for Polos in the United States would not be large. Volkswagen is still making the cars. And they have a dealership network in the United States. Shouldn’t they ship some non-zero quantity of Polos across the Atlantic to sell to eccentric Americans who want a small car? They have the factories, they have the boats, they have the dealerships — why not sell the car to someone who wants it? It turns out that unless they’re over 25 years old, European cars aren’t street-legal in the United States. When a model like the Volkswagen Tiguan is sold on both sides of the Atlantic, the North American Tiguans and the European Tiguans are not identical. So if Volkswagen were to decide to start selling Polos here in America, they couldn’t just put a dozen on a boat one day, they would have to create an entire production line to make a North American version of the car.
On its face, this is kind of dumb.
Americans who go to Europe may be a little befuddled by the relative paucity of automatic transmission cars, but nobody’s going to hop into an Irish Tiguan and be terrified of a car built to EU specs. And by the same token, if somehow a Polo snuck onto an American car dealership lot and somebody bought it and started driving it around, I don’t think anyone would in good faith regard this as menacing behavior. You could just let Americans drive European cars and vice versa.
Except, could you?
The notion that cars should have safety regulations is pretty uncontroversial. And to have safety regulations, you need laws and you need regulatory agencies that implement those laws. We have a United States Congress and a Federal Highway Safety Administration; they have the European Parliament and the Council of Europe and the European Commission’s General Vehicle Safety Regulation.
The concern is that even if right now, nobody really cares that much about the detailed differences between US and EU car safety rules, that might change in the future. Europe, for example, is a bit ahead of the United States in addressing the arms race toward ever-brighter headlights that is undermining road safety. If you could just drive American cars on European roads, then companies would go to Brussels and say, “Hey, if you adopt these new headlight rules, you’re just going to put EU-based factories at a disadvantage relative to North American ones and cost jobs.” European auto worker unions will say “Don’t fuck us over, guys!” Safety advocates would fear, not without reason, a regulatory race to the bottom, with transatlantic pressure to reduce safety in order to gain jobs
This is not an unsolvable problem. But to facilitate true integration of US and European car markets, we would need to negotiate a specific solution with a lot of detailed mechanisms about what happens if one regulator or the other wants to change something. And the same holds for things like energy efficiency rules for appliances and a million other things.
Steve Randy Waldman recently wrote a good explanation of Dani Rodrik’s trilemma of the world economy.
The basic idea is that you can have two out of the three of integrated markets, independent nation-states, and mass politics, but not all three. The United States of America has an integrated national market in goods and also mass democratic politics, but that’s because the individual states, despite playing a considerable role in governance, are fundamentally subordinate to the national government. In an area where the federal government steps away (like determining who’s allowed to cut hair), we end up with a fragmented market.
So you could just dissolve nation states and have globally integrated markets thanks to global federalism. But there are, obviously, a lot of problems with that.
An alternate approach is embodied in things like the World Trade Organization and regional trade deals. In this approach, you accept that there isn’t going to be a President of NAFTA or a NAFTA Parliament that conducts mass politics, but there will be common rules that are negotiated on an intergovernmental level as part of an elite negotiating process.
On one level, I think that this makes a lot of sense. It is genuinely bad for consumers that we don’t have an integrated transatlantic car market. I believe that if you got the relevant civil servants in a room with the executives from GM, Ford, Stellantis, Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes Benz, plus the leadership of UAW, IG Metall, and other relevant labor stakeholders, they could work something out. Whatever choices were made, though, they would not make 100 percent of people happy. And whoever is unhappy could claim that big decisions with major social and economic consequences were being made by elites in behind-closed-door bargains with minimal democratic scrutiny. That kind of big picture critique of the “trade deals” paradigm is, unfortunately, mostly accurate.
The problem is that if global federalism is unworkable, and elite-driven bargains are unacceptable, then we’re left with fragmented markets. This is not the end of the world. Americans are surviving without the Volkswagen Polo. But there are real issues here.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made waves back in 2023 by driving attention to the long-simmering question of why the FDA won’t let Americans buy superior European sunscreen. If you consider this just as a question of sunscreen, then it seems like it should be solvable by getting enough members of Congress to yell at the FDA until they feel like they need to move on this. But the general point — that it seems duplicative and unnecessary to have two separate approval processes — is a harder fix. Whether or not it’s true that these superior European sunscreens are unsafe, makers of inferior American sunscreen would obviously like the FDA to keep it banned. This becomes not a scientific question about sunscreen safety, but just another trade policy dispute pitting concentrated benefits to sunscreen-makers against diffuse costs to consumers.
At the same time, these issues do cut close to the heart of self-governance.
Americans negotiators are always trying to get the UK and/or European Union to accept the American farming practice of washing chickens with chlorine. Our perspective is that this is an arbitrary trade barrier. Across the Atlantic, they say it’s a bona fide public health regulation (there are disputes about the comparative food-borne illness statistics). Beyond the specifics of chlorine, lots of Americans say they believe there’s something more healthful about the European food environment. I’m always a bit skeptical of these claims, but their existence underscores that this is not all bad faith, even if the Europeans are wrong. It’s hard to talk countries out of abandoning key aspects of sovereignty for the sake of commerce.
Back to Trump. One example he cites of the kind of non-tariff barrier to trade that he wants to eliminate is Japan’s notorious “bowling ball test” for car safety. According to Trump, for a vehicle to be certified as safe to drive on Japanese roads, “they take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car. If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify. It’s horrible.” He thinks this helps explain why American car brands struggle so much in the Japanese market.
Japanese negotiators are apparently struggling with how to address this demand since there is no such test. On the one hand, they can easily agree to drop it as a concession. On the other hand, since it doesn’t exist, eliminating it isn’t going to alter the trade balance or be considered a big win by American automakers.
What is true is that Japan has many technical safety standards for automobiles that differ from both the US and the EU standards, and there are longstanding complaints by American auto companies that these are manipulated to keep their products off the road. This is why the Obama administration painstakingly negotiated extensive automobile market access provisions for Japan as part of the TPP. This did not include eliminating the fake bowling ball test, but did involve Japan agreeing to adopt a bunch of American technical standards and forcing much more transparency on the Japanese regulatory process.
But the concessions were much further reaching than that. To sell cars, you need car dealerships. And apparently Japanese zoning rules have been applied in ways that make it hard for American companies to open affiliated dealerships. TPP included provisions stating “that zoning rules maintained and applied by the central government will be applied in a transparent and non-discriminatory manner.”
These kinds of things are all very complicated and disputes can’t just be settled with a handshake, which is why TPP included formal dispute resolution mechanisms with penalties and snapbacks.
And these are all things that people objected to about TPP.
For these agreements to work, countries need to accept a fairly intrusive monitoring and dispute resolution regime. But it really is good to have access to foreign markets and a more integrated economy!
China is a lot larger than the United States, and geopolitical competition requires the free world to find ways to cooperate more deeply. And TPP was full of provisions like that. Countries were going to agree not to mandate an in-country physical presence in order to let American companies export goods or services to them. There were going to be common sanitary and phytosanitary rules to facilitate agricultural trade. They were addressing duplicative scientific and testing regimes.
Everything Trump says he’s trying to accomplish, in other words, was already on the table. He not only walked away from it, but his insistence on attacking the whole underlying concept of a rule-governed global trading system means we almost certainly can’t get any kind of durable or enforceable deal. The one trade breakthrough of his first term was that he got China to agree to buy more stuff from the United States, and then they just didn’t do it. Those kinds of informal arrangements are more sovereignty-respecting, but precisely because they have no enforcement mechanisms, they don’t actually work. If we want America to export more, we need to go back to the old formula of doing trade deals and making concessions — a project that is impossible as long as the president insists he has the right to personally order up new tariffs at any time, for any reason.
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