The Hermit King
The Trump Administration's retreat from the world is driven by the ordeal of change
No-one is woke in North Korea.
This may be an ridiculous – or obvious – thing to say. But within it lies a series of ideas that may explain why the Trump Administration is behaving the way it is.
First it should be acknowledged that Trump is not exactly an ideas man himself. He functions purely on instinct, and these instincts are driven by his insatiable ego and rapacious need for dominance.
However, there are now people around Trump who have sought to furnish these impulses with a worldview, and funnel this into policy (or at least executive orders). And this worldview is being guided by an extreme reaction to the last 60 years of economic and social change in the West.
Several years ago I wrote an essay for Quillette seeking to explain why political parties who called themselves “conservative” had instead become agents of instability. My idea was that that the ideology of “fusionism” – which became fully internalised in parties like the Republican Party and the Conservative Party in the UK in the late-1970s – was an ideology at war with itself. Advocating for the permanent revolution of ever freer markets, while simultaneously running a counter-revolution against their effects.
I argued that this created a wholesale discombobulation. In particular within those of a “conservative disposition” – who struggled with change. This emotional disorder was now filtering up into the aggressive and chaotic behaviour of these parties.
What I sought to explain was that economic and social change are siamese twins, albeit with the former taking the first stride forward. Or, to put it another way, the freer humans are to exchange with one another, the greater the change that is created.
Change, of course, is values neutral. Some changes to our societies are positive, others are negative. Change is a constant in the world. However, change accelerates change. This is not just the technological “creative destruction” identified by Joseph Schumpeter, but also a “social creative destruction”. As I wrote:
New technologies facilitate a greater movement and interaction of different peoples, and greater exposure to non-traditional concepts. As societies industrialise and then post-industrialise, people move to cities where the economic advantages of these new industries are greatest. Here, there is an ever-increasing closeness and overlap of groups and individuals exchanging, embracing, and learning from different kinds of behaviour. This creates more diverse, plural societies, and people establish identities that are not simply determined by village, family, religion, or tribe.
This has proved incredibly confronting to us as human beings – even to those who embody these social changes.1 Of course, the human brain is highly adaptable in ways other animals are not, however, while we may have transcended much of our primal environment, we are still tied to – and limited by – certain animal instincts. No matter how much we innovate, we still crave surety and stability. And this is something our monkey brains currently feel like we don’t have.
This is not to denigrate free trade. Most people in the West live lives of the most extraordinary luxury compared to our ancestors. Australia’s GDP per capita of around USD 65,000 affords a lifestyle far superior to that of kings of the past. Even those of us who earn less than that still live in great comfort. This is the magic of markets and how trade – for the most part – raises all boats. It is why there has been a dramatic decrease in global poverty over the past 40 years.
But luxury, or a lack of poverty, are not the same as certainty. As our material comfort introduces a whole new array of complex social forces. Something the world is currently struggling with. Which, again, is not a yearning for a more simple, less prosperous, time. Just a recognition of our current reality.
Often in the pursuit of certainty humans can be highly irrational. Willing to overreact and upend whole political and social structures. In his book The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer argued that revolutions are responses to change, not the drivers of it. What revolutionary movements are actually doing is trying to cope with change by seeking to control it. This is clearly what the Trump Administration is currently doing.
Trump himself may be economically illiterate – and see trade solely through his zero-sum need for personal dominance – but people like Peter Navarro who are driving his regime of wholesale tariffs do have a sense of the world they wish to create. And how to create it.
Their equation is quite simple – to arrest change we need to inhibit trade.
This, of course, is correct. It understands the connection between trade, technological and social creative destruction. It also understands the inherent cosmopolitanism of trade – something I wrote about in Adam Smith vs the Ultra-Nationalists. To fear the world, to shrink from it, and to obsessively control what you can, requires preventing people from exchanging with one another.
But this also happens to be sheer lunacy.
No-one is woke in North Korea because it is a society effectively frozen in the 1950s. By sealing itself off from global trade and human interaction it halted the forces of both economic and social change. But with this has also come a crippling poverty, a brutal totalitarianism, and a people who live inside an insane reality entirely constructed by the country’s overlords.
The United States is unlikely to become North Korea – even as Trump attempts to mimic the patrimonialism on the Kim family, and the Republican Party obsequiously praises of him as their Dear Leader. The U.S is far too integrated into the global economy and is far too instinctively liberal2 to be changed in the way the administration may wish. But they will do a lot of damage to both people’s livelihoods and make the world a far more dangerous place. Trade, after all, is a relief value for global tensions.
With this they may not care. With the fervour of revolutionaries, the administration is driven by their absolutism. And through this absolutism the superficial calculation they have made is that if freer trade created a world they find difficult to handle, then trade must be inhibited to achieve mental relief. They’re unlikely to be swayed from this perspective.
The deep emotional immaturity of these people cannot be overstated.
Because both politics – and being human – is not about absolutes. It’s about understanding the complex web of ideas, interests, incentives, traditions and evolving cultural forces that comprise humanity and seeking to find some workable way to produce decent outcomes. Of finding ways to balance the advantages of trade with our dispositional requirements for surety and stability.
And this requires maturity. There is no perfect, bad stuff happens, terrible ideas occasionally gain prominence, we learn from these and try to improve instead. All change isn’t positive, there are good and tested reasons why culture and traditions become embedded, and there are good reasons why we should exercise individual and political restraint. There are also good reasons why change is sometimes necessary.
It’s our responsibility to make assessments about these things – on both a personal level and through the collective of our polities. As adults we are afforded the duty to think about our societies, think about our personal behaviour, and demonstrate character in the face of things not always being to our liking. We should be capable of navigating a plural world, and hold competing thoughts in our heads simultaneously.
Upheavals like Trumpism occur when we abandon these critical faculties. When we think that we can make the Earth stop spinning – when we think there’s a single figure who can produce a perfect future. When our overcorrections are so unhinged and so incontinent that they don’t alleviate the ordeal of change, but accelerate it instead.
There’s an bigger argument here about how what is sold as social progress is also often highly reactionary. Some of which I wrote about in Problematic Progressivism.
Actual liberalism. Not the ridiculous American definition.