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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21598 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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The UK and US have announced a trade deal.

Key terms (based on press releases - apparently the text hasn't been agreed yet):

  • US continues to charge a default 10% tariff on imports from the UK
  • Up to 100k cars per annum are exempt from the 27.5% tariff on cars, but still pay the flat 10%. Not clear whether car parts are included.
  • British steel, aluminium, and aeroplane parts (this mostly means Rolls-Royce jet engines) enter the US tariff-free. The US announcement implies that there is going to be some still-to-be negotiated quota arrangement on steel.
  • UK will be exempted from future pharma tariffs
  • Both sides cut tariffs on agricultural products, including beef and corn ethanol. The tariff cuts are reciprocal but benefit the US more than the UK because of the balance of farm trade. Scotch whisky is not included.
  • The US announcement says that the UK will cut non-tariff barriers on US agricultural exports, the UK announcement says that the UK is not going to relax food safety standards.
  • The US is trying to rhetorically link the deal to a $10 billion order for Boeing planes that "a British company" (presumably British Airways) is going to announce imminently.
  • Nothing on services - in particular the UK isn't going to cut our Digital Services Tax (which is mostly paid by US tech companies on their UK revenue).

Initial thoughts:

  • This is a thin deal. Both sides are drastically overegging it in their press releases.
  • This is worse for the UK than status quo ante (because of the 10% flat tariff), although given the current salience of steel in the UK Starmer has a good chance of spinning zero tariffs on steel as a big win. The US has aggressively protected its steel industry for a long time (under administrations of both parties) and US tariffs on British steel have been a long-running grievance.
  • This is probably the best deal the UK could have got. It is better than any deal we could have got quickly as an EU member, but not necessarily better than the deal the EU could have got after a protracted trade war with pain to both sides.
  • The benefits to the US are pretty trivial - the farm tariff cuts affect about $1 billion of US exports. The US's biggest ask in trade negotiations with European countries is on food safety standards, and they didn't get it.
  • The two sides are sufficiently confident that they can fill in the details that they announced the deal before the text was finalised. I find this surprising - there are a couple of major bear pits where the two sides announcements are not aligned. The obvious one is non-tariff barriers on food. The less obvious one is that the US announcement claims a $5 billion opportunity from changes to UK public procurement, but not what they are. This is an extremely politically difficult area in the UK because of NHSism.

Thoughts on the politics:

  • The US announcement explicitly calls out the US cutting tariffs on British aeroplane parts as a win for US manufacturing. I think this is the most public acknowledgement to date that tariffs are hurting American manufacturing by disrupting supply chains.
  • Trump admin spin (though not the official White House announcement) is that the big win for the US is that the 10% tariff stays in place, and this represents the US collecting $6 billion in taxes on British businesses. That is what you say if you are defending a thin deal.
  • Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has attacked the deal as worse than status quo ante. A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.
  • The Liberal Democrats are not attacking the substance of the deal - we are saying that Parliament must have a chance to approve the final text.
  • The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.
  • Farage hasn't spoken yet.

The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.

They shouldn't cry too hard, the recent India-UK trade agreement drastically slashed tariffs on British liquors, and given the ridiculous demand for those in India (so many people clamor to have me fill up my luggage with scotch for them)..

This is mostly a joke. I'm sure the US market is larger and obviously wealthier.

Overnight updates:

  • It looks like the NeverTrump line on the deal from the US side is that luxury car buyers and private jet makers get tariff relief and normal people don't. (Although the UK doesn't really export mass-market consumer goods - I don't think Scotch drinkers and Barbour wearers are that much poorer than Land Rover drivers). Given that the main manufactured goods covered are cars and jet engines this is being called (surprisingly accurately) the Rolls-Royce deal. (Although Rolls-Royce cars and Rolls-Royce jet engines are now entirely separate companies).
  • Conservativehome.com rather surprisingly does not have a rapid reaction piece up from a UK Tory perspective. That suggests that the Tories are split over whether to support or oppose the deal.
  • Taking time to think about it, there is an interesting pattern which matches the 1st Trump admin's negotiations with China. Trump launches a trade war saying that the aim is to revitalise US manufacturing, but when the time comes to negotiate manufacturing gets thrown under the bus and Trump negotiates benefits for US agriculture.

A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.

I am fairly uninformed about British politics but this seems like the smart play for Tories. The deal is what it is, probably fairly unremarkable for both sides, but the ability to lay claim to having done a lot better than EU members seems like pure gold.

The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.

Just looked it up, I've been on a Scotch kick lately and I'm not eager about more price increases- there's a 25% tariff Trump instated his first term, but was suspended for five years in 2021. Supposedly the industry lost 600 million pounds during the time they were in effect.

I think this one was always going to stick because Trump doesn't like booze. Annoying, but here we are.

Scotch is also the blue-coded whisky; Bourbon and Rye are the red tribe hard liquors of choice.

This strikes me as somewhere between a reach and imaginary. Scotch codes more old than red or blue, expensive bourbon and rye codes to me more hipster trendy than red tribe. Cheap liquor is just cheap liquor.

Most urban blue tribe hipster trends of 2010 have been picked up by red tribers recently anyway.

What's maximally red-coded? Probably Jack Daniels?

I feel like an upscale liquor shelf kind of supersedes the tribes. I would be equally unsurprised to see BTAC bottles at a car dealer's home in the suburbs as an academic's bungalow in the city.

American Whiskey, regardless of price- Red

Scotch- Blue, but maybe a conservative blue

Other expensive imported whiskey- Black

Nice non-craft beer(the stuff labeled ‘imports’ regardless of country of origin)- red

Craft beer- blue

Cheap beer(‘domestics’)- Hispanic

Vodka- pure alcoholic

I would say the maximally red coded alcohol is probably shiner, yuengling, or some other premium but domestic beer with a strong regional distribution pattern, narrowly followed by jack and coke(which in my dialect could be any American whiskey and any dark soda- budget brands, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, etc).

Other expensive imported whiskey- Black

I would be shocked to see a black dude drinking Red Spot or Yamazaki 12. Are you thinking cognac rather than whiskey?

I would say that any top-shelf alcohol* is weakly Blue-coded as part of the general pattern that allegedly refined taste = Blue, moar and bigger = Red.

I have never come across Bourbon - for whatever reason it doesn't get exported. The whisky market has this odd dynamic where most countries make whisky, many countries make expensive whisky (including Bourbon in the US), but about 95% of whisky consumed outside the country of origin is Scotch.

* Except Cognac, which is Black-coded in the US for reasons which are completely opaque to non-Americans.

There’s lots of expensive alcohol marketed to a solidly country-music-listening demographic- most high end American whiskey and American beers listed as imports would be two such examples.

The most Republican drink of choice, by the numbers, is shiner bock- a mass market beer sold at a premium due to higher quality.

Except Cognac, which is Black-coded in the US for reasons which are completely opaque to non-Americans.

Alright, I'll bite: this is the first I'm hearing of that, please do go on.

Cognac brands for reasons mostly unknown or lost to time were some of the first high end brands to advertise to African American customers back in the Jim Crow days. Some historians vaguely posit a further history in the world wars, or French companies willing to ignore American racial codes and advertise to an underserved demographic; but for the most part it's probably just a random event that black consumers saw black models advertising cognac in Ebony and Jet decades before Johnny Walker would think of advertising to the negro market, and developed a taste for the product.

From there it's just become a cultural meme, and high end cognac partakes of the general phenomenon of Nigger Rich, where flaunting displays of wealth and luxury are common status symbols. Of course that itself has roots in segregation: upwardly mobile 20th century American blacks couldn't buy a house in a rich neighborhood or send their kids to a ritzy private school or travel to a fancy resort, but they could buy a Cadillac or a bottle of Hennessy.

American whites largely ignored cognac prior as it seemed a little too effete and aristocratic for the Great Male Renunciation era; the only American white men I can remember drinking cognac in media are Frasier and Niles Crane. After the rise of Hennessy et al as hip hop icons, cognac became too black for most white men, as it drifted too close to wiggerdom to be a white guy drinking Henny, similar to how I inherited a Louis Vuitton monogram briefcase from an uncle and thought "Wow I'd look like a poseur carrying this stupid thing."

Rap culture, basically. Rappers love flaunting what they percieve to be classical signals of old money, like gold jewelry, fur coats, european designer brands. Cognac is another one of those that they picked up. It being relatively rare in the US market until rap culture made it popular means to a lot of americans their exposure to cognac is almost exclusively mentions in rap music, making it seem like a Black-coded thing.

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