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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   31244 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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The Rightful Caliph has blogged over at ACX that The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs.

He is arguing that while tariffs are an "idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s" which are not a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform, the fact that he can push through them is a consequence of his cult of personality and him being surrounded by yes-men who will not risk his anger by telling him an idea of his is terrible. So the tariffs in particular point to a broader failure mode of right-wing populism, which he contrasts with the ideological capture of institutions by the left.

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.

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.

He is then saying that he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left to Trump's approach of starting without institutional knowledge and just see how things go.

As usually, this is compellingly written. It did not make me update a lot on Scott's politics -- he had explicitly endorsed anyone-but-Trump for the presidential election, and extrapolating that he would not be a fan of the tariffs was not exactly hard. I like how Scott took this issue which has been discussed to the death on the object level, then took a step back and asked "but what is the deeper truth about that political system beyond the object level stupidity?"

As usual for Scott blogs about CW-adjacent topic, there is a lot of discussion going on at ACX.

Scott is a Democrat partisan now. He used to have useful insights, but then they got him, first by attacking his reputation, and then his Californian social circle has naturally limited the scope of acceptable opinions that he can hold. Of course he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left. All of his friends live there.

Scott has been a de facto Democratic partisan ever since Trump walked down the escalator - he thinks that the badness of the Orange Man is comfortably the most important issue out there right now. You don't need to be a leftie to think that - you just need to think that there is a character-based filter for high public office, and that Trump fails to meet it. He doesn't have TDS - he is able to distinguish between true and false negative statements about Trump (see You are Still Crying Wolf).

See my most-updooted post about Boris Johnson for a worked example of how character can derail an administration and harm the country in a way which doesn't depend on conventional partisan political views.

I enjoyed your Boris post and have no issue with having a character-based filter for high public office, in isolation. Where that breaks down is when one combines it with the ongoing effort to ruin anyone of good character (empathetic, intelligent) who tries to represent the populist anti-woke anti-immigration Right.

At the moment:

  1. A good chunk of the population (let's say at least 20%) is anti-immigration / wokeness to at least a Farage level and willing to vote accordingly.
  2. Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life. You will be debanked, nice people will desert events if you are invited, friends will not return your calls, and intelligent people on anonymous forums will call you Nazi collaborators who should have been discredited long ago. This means that anyone willing to represent the widespread serious anti-immigration sentiment in public must be either too impulsive to toe the line or too anti-social to care.

The voting support (1) is sticky for as long as immigration keeps up. The social response (2) is not.

If you aren't comfortable with politicians getting elected who don't meet your character bar (a sentiment I understand), the only viable thing to do is to rehabilitate anti-immigrationist, populist sentiment as an acceptable position for a gentleman of high character.

Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life

Farage has, fairly obviously, not had his life destroyed. He makes more money in his Saturday job as a TV talking head than the average professional makes in a 50-hour week.

He is persona non grata in polite society and in every household that does not contain a Reform voter. He was publicly debanked for having opinions that bank staff disagreed with. He will never be able to get a job outside the right wing grift circuit ever again. News outlets regularly hold a Daily Hate for him, as does my genteel and very conservative maiden aunt.

This is precisely my point! The social sanctions levied on people publicly representing populist and anti-immigration sentiment ensure that the only people who will represent those voters are people who will put up with social disrepute for the money, the power or the fame. If you don't like grifters getting elected, you have to prevent nice guys from being put off i.e. stop levying social sanctions.

You need to source politicians from separate social strata that don't care about secular social status; the US has successfully done this with evangelicals and conservative Catholics, for example. Of course this comes at a cost of having to serve those constituencies but it's doable.

That’s a possibility. The US is larger, of course, so you have more diversity of factions to draw from, but still potentially viable.

Why do you think it is that any right-populist politician with serious chances has these character problems? Like, I often read something like "Orban is just cynically using anti-immigration/wokeness so he can stay in power and crony it up", and I dont necessarily disagree... but why isnt there anyone using it for good or even neutral goals? Parties picking up issues and demographics for electability is pretty normal, except here anyone who does so is beyond the pale for claimed-independent issues. You can be an ultralefty and argue that borders are intrinsically anti-democratic or something, but what do the liberals making this claim actually believe?

I don't actually know if it is true that right-populism naturally throws up politicians of base character, or whether Trump and Johnson are just highly salient bad examples. Farage seems marginally more honest than the average politician (a low bar, but one Trump and Johnson profoundly fail to clear). Marine le Pen clears the even lower bar of being more honest than the average French politician. Meloni clears the lower still bar of being more honest than the average Italian politician.

My thinking is that the right-wing elite collapsed, due to and resulting in more rising right-wing populism, and populism basically selects for bad characters. It's the responsibility of the elites to not screw up so much that no one has faith in them anymore, and they failed to do that

At what point of his ideological history would you have expected him to go "actually, tariffs are great and Trump is great for trying to do tariffs"?

I wouldn't go that far, but I bet it the equivalent article would've been about something like political theory vs. enacted policies back in the Slatestarcodex days instead of Left vs. Right now. It might have even used many of the same examples and reached the same object-level conclusions.

Tariffs used to be a pretty standard left-liberal policy position, Paul Krugman literally got the (not)Nobel Prize for arguing for them. The only coherent objection to what Trump is doing from that perspective is "his goals are good, but he's doing it wrong", which a few principled left-wingers are doing.

He wasn’t a Paul krugman tier democrat hack, though.

Scott has never been a standard left-liberal, though. "Liberaltarian" would probably be closer.

What's "liberaltarian" if not the liberterian-ish wing of left-liberalism? If the minimum wage or basic income are good enough for him, why would he be ideologically opposed to tariffs?

It's the sort of an ideological position that you would expect to be committed to free trade in all conclusions. Minimum wage and basic income are separate questions, I'm not sure why they need to be mentioned here.

I've followed Scott's writing for over 20 years (before he started blogging, even!) and I'm not sure if there are any points where I would have expected him to support tariffs on the basis of his other ideological positions, is the point.

Minimum wage and basic income are separate questions, I'm not sure why they need to be mentioned here.

Like tariffs, they belong in the "economic policies that contradict libertarianism" bag, so they seem pretty relevant, and I'd expect the position on them to predict the position on tariffs. At least barring an explicitly stated theory that would justify supporting one, but not the others.

and I'm not sure if there are any points where I would have expected him to support tariffs on the basis of his other ideological positions, is the point.

If the point is "he's not ideological about economics in general", then my point is that he is pretty clearly leans left on economics, and as such he should not be expected to support free trade.

Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for the New Economic Geography, which includes an agglomeration model where industrial policy can have a long-term benefit even if markets are efficient. And that industrial policy could use targeted tariffs as a tool. But Krugman the political commentator has consistently said (ever since he became a Famous Economist whose political views are taken seriously - not just since Trump started supporting tariffs) that he doesn't think that countries at the technological frontier can make industrial policy work in practice. He supported NAFTA and the WTO when those were live political issues.

Krugman the economics populariser put a lot of effort into debunking the macroeconomic case for broad-based tariffs. About a third of his Slate columns were attacking the idea that imports destroy jobs. And he said things about current and capital account imbalances (the two are opposite sides of the same accounting identity) are broadly that bilateral imbalances are harmless, and that overall imbalances can be good or bad, are always dangerous, and that the right tool to control them is capital controls and not tariffs.

It is hard to distinguish between "the Trump tariffs are implementing a bad policy" and "the Trump tariffs implementing a questionable policy incompetently" because Trump is deliberately opaque about what the policy the tariffs are implementing actually is. (For the umpteenth time, tariffs are a tool, not a policy). My personal guess is that there isn't a policy at all, just vibes. But the arguments Navarro is making for the tariffs are macroeconomic, and the details of the tariffs we got are consistent with the goal being macroeconomic rather than industrial policy. So Krugman opposing these tariffs is entirely consistent with what he has been saying since the 1990's.

Paul Krugman, the famous economist whose views are taken seriously, is the guy writing academic papers. Paul Krugman, the economics popularizer whose political views are Taken Seriously, is possibly the biggest hack who ever existed in the history of punditry, so to the extent the distinction is worth making, it works against your argument.

It is hard to distinguish between "the Trump tariffs are implementing a bad policy" and "the Trump tariffs implementing a questionable policy incompetently" because Trump is deliberately opaque about what the policy the tariffs are implementing actually is. (For the umpteenth time, tariffs are a tool, not a policy).

If tariffs are a tool not a policy, then the absence of "Trump tariffs are implementing a good policy incompetently" as a possibility should show you that the argument is not being made in good faith. There are principled leftwingers who do make that argument, they point out why the trade policy done up to now was bad for America / the world, why you might want to change it, and why tariffs can be the right tool for the job, and then proceed to show why the way Trump is doing it is bad. But implying that tariffs are somehow ideologically incompatible with left liberalism is just historically wrong.

the claim that capital controls are ok for dealing with imbalances but tariffs are bad seems questionable. if they both end up making changes in trade to change the imbalance then it would seem both would have the same deadweight losses associated them. i can understand that maybe capital controls have some large side benefit that tariffs do not which would offset the deadweight loss from the change in trade. for example God could come down from heaven and because he supports capital controls he could dump container loads of semi-conductor chips into the US like mana from heaven. this would be a massive benefit that would not normally appear if you implemented tariffs. but i strongly suspect there are no special large benefits from capital controls that would offset the same deadweight loss tariffs also suffer from.

the classical argument against tariffs is the change in trade they produce is bad. so if you find some technique that produces the same change then it just seems like you have come up with some abstraction to try and hide that you are doing the bad thing. tariffs would be a great tax if they did not produce a change in trade.

the claim that capital controls are ok for dealing with imbalances but tariffs are bad seems questionable. if they both end up making changes in trade to change the imbalance then it would seem both would have the same deadweight losses associated them. i can understand that maybe capital controls have some large side benefit that tariffs do not which would offset the deadweight loss from the change in trade. for example God could come down from heaven and because he supports capital controls he could dump container loads of semi-conductor chips into the US like mana from heaven. this would be a massive benefit that would not normally appear if you implemented tariffs. but i strongly suspect there are no special large benefits from capital controls that would offset the same deadweight loss tariffs also suffer from.

I endorse Steve Waldman's argument on these points (split across multiple blog posts dated April 2025), which is broadly the same as Krugman's. The tl;dr is that tariffs discourage balanced trade as well as imbalanced trade - in a world where everyone agrees that the rules of the game are the deficit countries increase tariffs and surplus countries reduce them to restore balance, there are a bunch of tariffs and therefore less trade than there would be otherwise, making the world poorer for the usual Ricardian reasons*. Whereas achieving balance with capital controls allows balanced trade while discouraging balanced investment. And balanced foreign investment** is not obviously good in the way that balanced trade is - there is a reason why "absentee landlord" is a slur.

*Countries may be able to better than free trade with enforced balance if they adopt targetted tariffs as part of an effective industrial policy - this is an argument against broad-based tariffs as a macroeconomic policy.

** I disagree with Waldman on the desirability of foreign direct investment - I think a world where BMW opens car factories in America and Intel opens chip fabs in Germany is better for it because of the resulting knowledge-sharing. I am more sympathetic to the argument that it would be better if there was less foreign portfolio investment - if I buy Tesla stock from the UK and you buy
AstraZeneca stock from the US it arguably weakens both countries' asabbiyah for a trivial benefit to our portfolios' diversification.

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