I was talking with a friend the other day and he said the problem with democracies is that policy can swing 180 degrees with each election.
And in some ways that’s true: Trump’s switch on Ukraine is a good example.
But it’s not true when it comes to the core goals of western government since 1979 or so.
The ur-rule of neoliberalism is that the rich must always get richer.
Trump’s budget cuts 600 million from Medicaid and other health care in order to give tax cuts to the rich.
Trudeau’s big change from previous Prime Ministers was to massively increase immigration. The effect was to depress wages and increase rent and real-estate prices.
When European countries talk about increasing military spending there is the inevitable comment that this will require slashing social spending. Somehow the idea of taxing the rich and corporations more is never raised, even though that would easily cover the cost.
DOGE’s civil service cuts will lead to massive outsourcing of whatever the government really has to do, which will cost more than doing it in house and profit the rich.
Starmer’s extate taxes on family farmers will force them to sell their farms to agri-business or developers (and, overall, make the UK even less able to feed itself.)
Trump’s proposal to cut the military budget massively in concert with China and Russia would open up more room for tax cuts. The savings won’t be used to help poor and middle class Americans, you can be sure of that. (It also isn’t going to happen that way, because China can easily afford its military budget. More on that in a later article probably.)
This isn’t to say there are never exceptions, but they are exceptions.
This is quite different, by the way, from China.
China used to be willing to mint billionaires, but they figured out it was harming the majority of the population, so they are dealing with it. This is one of the reasons why China has won, and the US has lost. (Another part is that China doesn’t talk about free markets, but actually has them, while the West talks about them but makes sure they never happen.)
Neoliberalism is in the process of ending, but until the ur-rule of always making the rich richer by screwing everyone else ends, the most important part of the oligarchical state will continue. What’s really happening under Trump is the tech-oligarchs taking lead trace away from the banking oligarchs. It’s an internal shuffle of power, while the looting continues.
Since a board prosperous population combined with massive industry is what actually makes post-industrial revolution societies powerful, American and Western decline will continue as long as the determination to fuck over ordinary people remains.
Feral Finster
The arc of history does not bend towards justice. It bends towards power.
For power is to sociopaths, what catnip is to cats. Power inevitably ends up in the hands of sociopaths, because sociopaths are the humans who will do Whatever It Takes to get power. This is the kernel of The Iron Law Of Oligarchy.
Of course, whatever else sociopaths are good at, they are not good at building lasting coalitions, because they continually betray one another, and given a choice between their own interests and those of the institutions they ostensibly serve, they will choose their own interests, every single time. “Put not your trust, in princes and saons of men, for when his breath departs, on that very day his plans perish….” This is the kernel of The Iron Law Of Institutions.
At the same time, power is What Gets Stuff Done. Not only that, but unlike Tolkien’s hobbits, humans cannot toss The One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom and be done with it. Power will not go away, and if you do not use it, there are others who surely will, and you may not like what they do with that power. Good luck getting them to give it up.
Anyway, what we are seeing with Trump is the dropping of any remaining pretense that the United States is anything other than an empire, that the old norms and pious facades were anything other than so much happy horseshit, lies told to the children about how Fluffy went to live on a big farm where he can run around all he wants.
Anyway, let’s see whether Trump can actually accomplish anything in Ukraine before taking a victory lap.
Yves Smith really does not like me, but I agree with her in this, at least:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/trump-will-end-his-option-of-walking-away-from-project-ukraine-with-his-minerals-deal.html
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/col-douglas-macgregor-why-is-trump-arming-ukraine.html
Oakchair
Even when so called anti-establishment parties enter government they often don’t make any substantial structure changes. See: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Sweden. Though this is more a characteristic of rich Western nations.
Feral Finster
@Oakchair: If the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining who can be co-opted, who can be bought off, who can be neutralized, who can be ignored.
Curt Kastens
The last few podcasts by Brian Berlitic have made the claim that all of this public hostility between the Trump led USA and its historical European and Canadian collaborators is just a smoke screen to more effectively continue the western policy of weakening and subverting Russia, China and Iran. If he is right and I think it is more likely than not that he is right then using Ukraine as an example of a change in policy because of an election is not a very good example.
Below is a link with an view that differs from that of Brian Berlitic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuP6DPyqqtU
The link is from the Grey Zone.
bruce wilder
a broadly prosperous population combined with massive industry is what actually makes post-industrial-revolution societies powerful
just a side-note: the productivity of humans in agriculture and later in manufacturing has been rising steadily for many decades. output and consumption per capita continues to rise more or less steadily but (this is the big “but”), the inputs (how many workers are needed) per unit of output also declines.
When demand growth is sufficient to push output growth into territory where more resources are needed to produce, that’s a pretty easy economic problem for a society to solve happily for everyone.
When potential productivity growth outstrips output and demand growth in a sector, then resources and workers have to somehow be withdrawn from that sector even as that sector is investing in technology and new ways of doing things. That can become the source of a lot of social and political stress.
The U.S. had a huge problem in agriculture from the late 19th century as advances in farm productivity (in at least some farms and farming communities) drove declining commodity prices. Huge swathes of the country descended into poverty, people were stuck on farms that could not pay to improve or recover. This was one of the major problems underlying the economic crises of the 1920’s and the Great Depression and a problem that the New Deal was hugely successful in solving along multiple dimensions.
The New Deal solutions were corrupted in the 1970s, which is a major reason why American food is poisoning us and making us fat and unhealthy, but that is a much later part of the story.
Much the same evolution of productivity has happened in manufacturing. The auto assembly plant was a huge advance when it was introduced in 1909. The rapid development of “process” manufacturing at scale was a big part of what made American manufacturing so dominant in the 1930’s through the 1960’s. At first, “Fordism” required a lot of hands and created opportunities to make a living for many people. But gains in productivity have been steady and continuous. An automobile might have required 50 or 60 man-hours to assemble at one-time; now it might be a dozen or less. A smart phone replaces a dozen gadgets and it might still be priced at a $1000, but the cost is sinking below $200. The infrastructure behind a cellphone is a fraction of what AT&T required back in the day.
China faces this problem now. They built a huge manufacturing economy, but still not enough to employ the available workforce and though output continues to grow, albeit more slowly than a few years ago, employment opportunities are shrinking. Even with declining population, a matching of working-age population to manufacturing won’t happen for a decade more, even in favorable circumstances.
For the same reasons, the U.S. cannot leverage a return to manufacturing to increase “working class” employment or incomes. For the U.S., the inflated price structure makes the problem more acute. China can make plenty, cheap and thus give many people a good life, even if many lose substantial savings in failed housing developments and the like. The U.S. is run by people who would never consider the possibility. For Americans are so accustomed to neoliberal corruption, their concepts of ambition and accomplishment are confused with parasitic and predatory schemes. Even people who have turned to health care sector for good-paying jobs will oppose reform that would reduce costs and employment in health care. People in banking and finance would be worse even though objectively halving the FIRE sector would be great for the country — it just wouldn’t feel great to the people who had to move on.
It is a conundrum. Things will have to get worse to get better and no one wants to take the hit.
The billionaire putsch at least has the math right: reduce number of useless eaters and the consumption of the greediest few can continue to increase.