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Notes -
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
This makes it even worse. Running world super power on feels, making the fate of the world depend on how well the Imperator slept today, is unsatisfactory.
This shows once again that populism, meant as politics without theory is not a solution.
Answer to bad map is good map, not throwing away all maps and just running around in circles.
There is a theory, you just don't like it.
In fact I find this criticism unsettling because Trump's love of tariffs is about the only position of his that is purely ideological. The man is a mercantilist, campaigned on mercantilism, told everybody of his fondness for McKinley and his policies in multi hour podcasts, has openly held this opinion since long before his first presidential bid and somehow people still think he's a headless chicken running around without an agenda.
At some point I'm going to have to start assuming people just don't listen to him.
He's prone to lying (and unserious, unnecessary lying at that) and people feel they have to sort of piece together what they think he means this time.
The things Trump says are sufficiently horrible that SOP for his supporters ever since 2016 has been saying "Take him seriously, not literally" and calling out people who take him literally as TDS sufferers. And now he is in power his opponents who are not doomposters have been using the same approach as cope. The only people for whom "Trump is just as bad as he says he is" is a comfortable thing to believe is the minority of his supporters who are straightforwardly malignant, and professional Blue Tribe doomposters.
Trump said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His opponents said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His non-retarded supporters said "Lol TDS - of course he won't actually do that." He is now blowing up the global economy with tariffs, and his non-retarded supporters are split between the ones still claiming that he doesn't mean it and this is a madman strategy negotiating move (and repeating his lies about the tariffs other countries impose on the US in order to do so) and the ones trying to reverse ferret into "Actually blowing up the global economy is good."
The model "Trump is as bad as he claims to be, but the damage was limited in the first term because of GOPe moles in the administration" has an increasingly good track record of making correct predictions. But most people don't want to make correct predictions, they want to appeal to readers. And right now everyone who can read wants to believe that Trump is not as bad as he appears to be - so there is a lot of demand for theories where Trump does not mean what he says.
The fact that after decades of this being the most important issue for the Western proletariat, left wingers still have no ability to wrap their heads around the fact that yes, they do want to blow up the GLOBAL economy, and have wanted to so do ever since it threw their jobs away to China, is immensely frustrating.
Trump's first win was all on preventing NAFTA and building the Wall. And a decade was spent coping that it was about white rage, actually.
How many times do the proles have to vote for economic nationalism before you understand that they're not going to let themselves be replaced by foreign labor and would rather destroy everything because at least then their enemies also suffer?
As I said, a substantial minority of Trump supporters are straightforwardly malignant. "I don't care any more, I just want to watch the world burn so other people suffer as much as I did" is a perfectly comprehensible response to imagined (or even real) oppression, although not a creditable one, or a platform anyone could win an election on if they were clear about what they were doing.
I do not think "the Western proletariat" is a unitary actor, or that they support right-populist parties by supermajority. To the extent that the views of working-class Trump supporters are visible, they voted for Trump in 2024 to get cheaper eggs, not $20/hr non-union assembly line jobs.
In any case, tariffs are a tool and not a policy. The signals about what policy Trump is trying to achieve with tariffs are, to be polite, confused, but looking at the administration's policies in the round, I do not see any evidence at all for "bring back the type of union manufacturing jobs the 1950's economy was built on". I do not see much evidence for "bring back manufacturing" - we know what a manufacturing-focussed industrial policy looks like and how it uses tariffs because most countries have been pursuing one most of the time from the Age of Exploration through to the Bretton Woods Era. Critically, the tariffs vary by product type (with the highest tariffs on manufactured consumer goods) much more than by country of origin.
Nobody voted for Trump because of eggs, everybody voted for Trump because of 20 million foreigners (probably more), including 10 million let in with close to zero vetting in just the last administration.
Migration is the single most important issue in the US and Europe, and you can tell by watching the French and German election results, where the supposedly different parties reliably line up into anti-migration and everybody else.
Trump is anti-migration, which is what allowed him to bulldoze his way through establishment republicans in 2016, and I have no explanation but providence to explain that the chart that saved his life is the one charting the insane increase of entries during the Biden administration.
Very much agreed - the culture war is about culture, not economics. And immigration is the most important social issue in basically every rich country. But neither the narrative nor the teams has changed on immigration since it first became an issue, which was well before Trump came down the escalator to take advantage of it.
Conventional wisdom is that the reason why Trump got 49.8% of the vote in 2024 instead of the 46.7% he got in 2020 is something to do with economics, and if you ask the minority of voters who care about economics more than culture, they talked about prices and not jobs - unsurprisingly, given that the Biden economy was doing just fine on jobs and low-end wages.
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Then you're simply haven't paid attention to any significant political event in the West for the last two decades and I don't know what to tell you. Who do you think is voting for all those far right parties in Europe? Why do you think Brexit happened?
If your answer to those is thought terminating clichés about either racism, some nebulous social media influence or people being too dumb to figure out what's in their interest, you're actively choosing not to understand what's going on.
See this is exactly what I'm talking about. You are in a bubble so your only experience of those people's discourse is the memes you and they exchange against each other about eggs and the price of gas. But you see, proles don't actually make political decisions solely on the back "I did that" Biden stickers.
What they see is that they live in a country that largely sees them as superfluous non competitive relics and look for any politician that isn't an active enemy of theirs.
Donald Trump may be totally unable to implement his economic views correctly, but he's a friend, not an enemy. And that class of people can count their elite friends on one hand, so naturally they'll fall in behind him.
You're welcome to call that spite if you want, but the fact is you can't buy friendship with slightly cheaper eggs.
My friend, you are huffing WAY too much internet. Trump won because a bunch of normies were tired of everything being too expensive and the incumbent administration looked like a bunch of boobs. If he fucks the economy into the toilet in ways that affect a regular person the GOP will 100% get utterly brutalized in the midterms, and Trump will spend the rest of his presidency dodging impeachment attempts and accomplishing nothing.
You are drastically, drastically, DRASTICALLY overestimating the electoral relevance of based right-wing resentment-mongers. They exist, but they've never been anything but part of the GOP base and they ain't shit without the normies who just vote for the opposition whenever they feel bad about the economy.
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20-25% of the population in most countries - which is not enough votes to include a supermajority of the proletariat for any standard meaning of the term "proletariat".
The right-populist parties that are doing significantly better than that - most obviously PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary - aren't focussed on bringing back manufacturing jobs. PiS is talking about bringing back farm jobs in a country that was 20% agrarian within living memory. Fidesz is conventionally right-wing on economics (as is Reform in the UK and the AfD in Germany). And of course both parties, like other right-populist parties, focus on cultural issues over economic ones in their campaigning.
Because retired people voted 2:1 in favour of it. Age was a stronger predictor of how people voted in the referendum than social class. If we define "proletariat" in the orthodox Marxist sense of people who have to work for other people in order to eat, the proletariat voted 55-45 for remain.
Given your response to @sohois, we don't disagree that the culture war is primarily about culture, not economics. And we don't disagree that you can carve out a demographic that does show supermajority support for right-populist parties that is in some sense more "proletariat"-like than the demographic of Motteposters. But if you are using the word "proletariat" to exclude working-age women, which you need to do if you want to make "The proletariat supports right-populist parties" a useful generalisation, you are using the word in a non-standard way. But that is an argument about the meaning of words. Where we have a substantive disagreement is about the economic views of right-populist voters.
If you look at:
then the conclusion you come to is "bring back assembly line jobs" is only a major right-populist cause in the US, and probably only because Trump made it one. The best economic right-populist message in essentially every European country is "we will protect the welfare-state-for-the-old by cutting white-collar government employees and welfare for immigrants" - i.e. it isn't about jobs or the private sector economy at all. The second-best message is "enviro-loonies are destroying your lifestyle", which could be about manufacturing jobs, but in practice turns out to be about domestic energy consumption (including private car use). The main time "enviro-loonies are destroying jobs" was a winning election message was around the Dutch nitrogen crisis, and the jobs were farm jobs.
There are right-populists with libertarianish economic policies. There are right-populists with agrarian economic policies. There are right-populists with what used to be mainstream centre-left economic policies. The common thread is that they promise to preserve the welfare-state-for-the-old and that they blame immigration for the inability of the centre-right to do so - not that they want to bring back manufacturing jobs.
I have actually done the work of politics - if you are running for office, or doing field work for someone who is, you can't avoid speaking to the sort of older socially conservative voters who are the traditional core vote of right populist parties. (I am aware that some countries have an new right-populist constituency among male Zoomers, but the UK isn't one of them and I got out of active politics before the Zoomers were old enough to vote). These people also exist in my extended family. And guess what - if you let them talk about policy, they mostly talk about crime and immigration. And when you do hear something about economics, 2/3 of the time it is a variant of "how can we afford X when we can't afford Y" where X is something that is perceived as benefitting foreigners, and most of the other 1/3 is about how much more expensive things are than they used to be. You don't have to take my anecdotes on authority - the point I am making is that I have lived experience of doing politics, and it is consistent with the data.
"Friend" is what you call someone who is on your side based on shared values - i.e. it's about culture, not economics.
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People that don't like immigration.
Immigration.
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