Happy liberation day or economic independence day or whatever piece of focus group tested rhetoric the Trump administration is currently attaching to its announcement of economic policies likely to implode the economy. I am not an economist. I didn’t even take economics in college as I had no interest in being a business major but even I know that a tariff is and who pays them and how and why. I also did take American history and did not sleep through the lecture on the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and what they did to the economy during the great depression. (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?) I thoroughly expect all of our retirement savings, bound up as they are these days in the world of IRAs, 401Ks, and 403Bs, to tank this week. It should line up just about right with the Social Security program missing its first payments in 90 years due to deliberate destruction of its data systems. Be prepared for a world where many cannot pay their basic bills and store shelves are empty. Be prepared to band together and figure out more cooperative ways of living. I found today’s tariff list interesting for two reasons. First, the placement of tariff’s on uninhabited territories like the Heard and McDonald Islands (showing that those in charge really don’t know what they’re doing – either that or the penguins are cryptocurrency geniuses). Second, there are two countries with no tariffs placed – Russia and North Korea. I find that particular tidbit fascinating.
Also in the news this week, RFK Jr. and his reformers at Health and Human Services have pretty much completely gutted the CDC and the FDA and defunded the vast majority of public health programs.. They may try to reform them elsewhere in HHS but with whom and what expertise? Given the fascination with pseudoscience over actual science among those riding roughshod in that department, whatever emerges is not likely to keep us safe from unscrupulous manufacturers and I expect cases of food borne illness to skyrocket and the chance of a zoonotic virus developing and then leaping to human populations has just gone up about a gazillion times.
I have a feeling we’re about to enter a new golden age of patent medicine where pretty much anything will be allowed to be sold under the guise of ‘wellness’ or ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ or any of the other buzzwords that make people think that it’s got to be healthier for you than chemicals from a lab. Nutriceuticals have been relatively unregulated for decades and allowed to exist as long as they don’t claim to treat or cure any specific disease process (that would then make them a pharmaceutical and subject to intense FDA regulation – whoops I forgot we just more or less got rid of the FDA). As they are mildly regulated at best, they are very much caveat emptor and there’s been little oversight to make sure what’s in the bottle matches what’s on the label. Expect government to actively encourage these products over traditional pharmaceuticals. I’m still going to trust in amlodipine to lower my blood pressure over some mix of ground up roots that may or may not be what it purports to be. I can pick you an all natural salad from a local meadow that will ensure you die in agony within a week. Antibiotics are manufactured in labs.
There have been a few bright spots. The results of the special elections in Florida and the judicial election in Wisconsin which all swung about 20 points away from previous Republican totals suggesting that the current administration has lost the middle that they need to retain a majority. If that same swing were to happen at the 2026 midterms, we’d end up with a House that’s about 320 Democrats to 115 Republicans. Then there was Cory Booker’s record breaking filibuster. It struck me as being a bit performance art but a lot of things were said that needed to be said and it does show that Democratic leadership is not completely asleep at the wheel.
I cannot help but wonder what the end game is here. The most obvious one is an autocratic takeover in such a way that democracy is formally ended through one mechanism or another. Careful planning has gone into this. (It’s not Trump – he’s not bright enough). There have been lightening fast move against the societal institutions most adept at curtailing such a power grab exploiting their greatest vulnerabilities. Judiciary – banking on the slow speed of the judicial process, purposely ignoring court rulings they don’t agree with, and using the bully pulpit to discredit the judiciary as an enemy of progress and the people. Universities – slashing their funding and then targeting additional penalties against elite institutions to make sure their voices and faculties remain on the sidelines. Legal entities such as law firms and legal aid societies – using DOJ and lawfare to threaten them with financial annihilation unless they withdraw from the field. Media – now that media are pretty much consolidated in six major corporate entities, threats to their access to information or to their ability to use public utilities and resources that they need to operate. There are no white knights coming to the rescue. The only thing that can and will change the way this country goes is participatory democracy, assuming we will be allowed to participate going forward.
There seem to be three major forces acting behind the scenes, all of which need an authoritarian outcome to advance their goals, but which strike me as being incompatible with each other in the long run. If authoritarianism continues, there is going to be quite the power struggle to determine which of these competing worldviews comes out on top and it’s going to be ugly. The first is what I call Fortress America. It’s those who want to withdraw the US from the globalized society and economy we’ve been building for the last eighty years. The US is large, rich, and has a powerful military so it has a prayer of succeeding as a lone wolf separated from the rest of the world politically, economically and militarily. To do this. we have to get rid of immigration, the melting pot, and decades of societal progress which have allowed us to have a non-homogenous society where in turn, women, minorities, and other nonconforming groups have been allowed to grow into flourishing cultures of other. The idea is the conformity of the 1950s but not as it really was, rather as it was portrayed in the media. The second is the New Apostolic Reformation and Dominionism. This is the evangelical Christian ideal of a biblical based society where everything is ordered on some sort of biblical model. Just whose model is not explained. There are vast differences between the various conservative Christian sects and there’s no war like a religious war. (The religious wars in Europe were fresh in the minds of the founding fathers when they decreed the separation of church and state – they knew). This is the America of The Handmaid’s Tale. The third is the rise of the technocrats who view a nation state as some sort of corporation where only the CEO class using business decisions should have any sort of societal weight. It’s epitomized by Elon and the Muskrats and what’s happening with Doge. It has some twisted eugenics mixed in. Which is why Elon keeps have IVF sons with different women and felt so betrayed when one of his sons turned out to be trans. I have no idea which of these general philosophies would prevail. I just know I have no real interest in living under any of them.
What comes next? I imagine the country club Republicans will check their portfolios tomorrow and start screaming at congress to do something before things get worse. The problem is Musk and Thiel and their ilk can outspend them ten to one so they may not find their voices as loud as they once were. We’ll see an acceleration of deportations and eventually some American born citizens who happen to be the wrong color will end up in a gulag in El Salvador or elsewhere. I’m expecting some prominent critical voices to be silenced or disappeared. All of Heather Cox Richardson‘s posts to Facebook since March 25th have mysteriously disappeared. Get on her Substack list. I won’t be surprised if some of my writings start vanishing, but I’m small potatoes. If they need to deflect and distract there will be some new nonsense they can feed the news cycle – something to provoke maximum outrage which makes minimal difference in life. Trump to paint White House gold or the like.
I can’t do anything about any of this. You can’t do anything about any of this. Well, that’s not strictly true. You can get out and volunteer for civic organizations which are having their funds cut, start doing the boring precinct work for the opposing party, register to run for office yourself. I’m getting too old for most of this but there’s a huge generation of younger people who will have to live in this world for some decades. Don’t like it? Change it.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 