Tariffs, Imperialism and Nepotism: The New MAGA Gospel

Much can be inferred of a person from who they try to emulate. Trump's recent fascination with William McKinley offers a glimpse into what is motivating the 47th president.

The victory of Donald Trump in November signalled the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. This new age will likely be defined by the rise of techno-feudalism, a retreat to protectionism, heightened global tensions and, most curiously of all, the return of undisguised imperialism. Out went the performative activism and morality-policing of the Biden-Obama years, in came a new belligerent, untamed fanaticism that continues to evolve with each passing day.

After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain to understand what the president hopes to achieve in his second term. It is a necessary trip given the president’s history of ideological schizophrenia. So, we climb under his ego, which makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — a history textbook, gathering dust, bookmarked with greasy stains on a page for the 1890s.

Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. The immortal Trump cited instead was William McKinley, a name most Americans may have considered lost to the annals of history.

You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. Some yearn for the days of Calvin Coolidge, when the federal government took a more laissez-faire attitude to regulations and taxation, fostering an environment where the entrepreneur was firmly in the driver’s seat and the government nothing more than a background actor. Others get nostalgic for the 1980s, when the Cold War was in its twilight years and the US was firmly ahead of all its geopolitical rivals, when Regan was president, balancing aggressive military spending with tough-on-crime measures while embellishing it all with an outwardly spiritual context.

For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. It’s easy to see the appeal. America was a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were only 3,000 miles of railroad track across the entire country. By 1900, that had exploded to roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book “The American Mind,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of his 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” In essence: Trumpian.

It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its lack of interest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus master P.T. Barnum more than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James. It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was also an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Much like the Israelis, many Americans believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen people, to complete history and to bring a new heaven down to earth.

It’s not hard to see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump. There’s something romantically nostalgic there, a time when the frontier was not yet defined, where the individual was solely his own master. The grievances Trump offers appeals to those left behind, the losers of the information age - the working-class, the unemployed, the incels. And the age of McKinely was a nationalism filled with aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness.

Maybe the century’s key appeal for Trump is that in those days America was firmly anti-establishment. You can draw a straight line from this (semi-mythical) image of America to the movement Trump leads today. He too leads a band of arrivistes, establishment-haters, money-seekers and unreconstructed nationalists. Trump is drawing on themes that have been deep in the American psyche at least since Andrew Jackson became president in 1829. Populist movements, like most movements that represent the dispossessed, tend to be led by men who radiate power, masculinity and wealth. They harness Americans’ natural distaste for rules, regulations and bureaucratic moralists.

The age we are now living through is no different, with the only change being the victims and their oppressors. Today’s populist ire is directed not at the European establishments living across an ocean nor the robber barons, but at the American social-liberal class on the east and west coasts. This is a war not defined by economic status but a cultural schism, for it is culture which offers the fault lines. It is a debate between an open or closed society, globalism or isolationism, bureaucrats or mavericks, reformers or disrupters.

Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the coastal, cosmopolitian elites and the masses, their fate is predetermined.

The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn’t work. Between 1825 and 1901 America had 20 presidencies, with most of them only surviving for one-term as voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not content with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country. The light-footprint government was unable to cope with the burgeoning process of industrialization.

Many populists were ill equipped to even understand what was happening. In his classic book “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter writes, “Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms.” In other words, they thought they could solve the disruptions of industrialization if only they could find the evil conspirators who were responsible for every ill. Their diagnoses were simple-minded, their rhetoric over the top; their proposals, Hofstadter noted, wandered “over the border between reality and impossibility.”

Here’s how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — leading to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, intellectually rigorous and disgusted by corruption did not have that problem.

The United States had to build a stronger central government and a leadership class if it was going to take responsibility — responsibility for the people who were marginalized and oppressed and, as the century wore on, responsibility to establish a peaceful and secure world order. Americans have a perpetual problem with authority, but for a time — from say 1901 to 1965 — Americans built authority structures that voters trusted.

Now we live amid another crisis of authority. Institutions have not managed to keep up with the savage inequalities produced by the information age — especially between the college educated and the less educated. Populists are again indignant and on the march. But, as before, they have no compelling theory of change.

The colorful menagerie of people who make up the proposed Trump cabinet all have one thing in common: They are self-identified disrupters, rewarded for their loyalty, not their experience. They aim to burn the system down, dismantling each institution methodically and absolutely. That might be cathartic in a conceptual sense, one where the actions have little consequence but that doesn’t translate to the real world.

The history of the world since the French Revolution has proven that rapid disruption makes governments cataclysmically worse. Trump, the anti-institutionalist, is creating an electoral monarchy, a system in which all power is personalized and concentrated in his hands. That’s a recipe for distorted information flows, corruption, instability and administrative impotence. As we’ve seen over and over again down the centuries, there’s a big difference between people who operate in the spirit of disruption and those who operate in the spirit of reform.

If the Democratic Party had any sense, they would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.