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Notes -
I was recently going through the Archive of Astral Codex Ten content and reread Scott’s post “The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs”. Rereading this post I had a few thoughts: 1) this is the most nakedly partisan Scott-post I can remember, 2) this is the most unqualifiedly confident opinion about the outcome of a political policy I’ve seen Scott express, 3) “Tariffs” seem like an issue from a lifetime ago when it has been less than a year since they were the number one news story.
As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect. DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure. Despite closing the border and significant political capital expended on deporting illegal immigrants, sentiment on the economy is poor, and anecdotally the “Great Replacement” seems to be proceeding at the same pace it was before. The right-wing pundit sphere has largely turned on Trump and anti-Israel sentiment has entered the mainstream.
My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?
The 'weak' version of tariffs slightly increased inflation and the cost is almost entirely borne by American consumers and companies, as expected. Also, very predictably, SCOTUS struck down his use of 'emergency powers' which means that the government has to pay back hundreds of billions to companies.
The other problem with the tariffs is that they were retardly overbroad. This US tire plant had to shut down because Thai rubber was tariffed, even though rubber can't be grown in the US. The salutary effect of tariffs is supposed to be onshoring, but nothing much has happened; companies will just pinky promise Trump that they're totally planning to build more factories at home and quietly cancel once he's out of office. It's also worth bearing in mind that the US does have a strong manufacturing sector with extremely high productivity and value-add, like assembling airplanes.
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