I’m glad to see that cover was given an award. It says it all. Dark, very dark. And creepy.
For a deep dive into what brought us here, this piece from a while back by Zack Beauchamp at Vox is well worth reading.
The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?
One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.
That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.
Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.
Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.
And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century.
The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster.
[…]
Though “Trump was elected in fair elections,” his subsequent policy agenda amounted to “revolutionary change of the relation between the state and society” — one that attempts to replace the rules and norms that define democratic politics with something very different. Understanding America in this more textured sense, as a country under a new and confusing regime that is both democratic and not, helps us make better sense out of the Trump tariff debacle.
On the one hand, an electorate that picked Trump is getting one of Trump’s signature policies. Sometimes, in democracies, demagogues win elections — a problem so old that you can find a discussion of it in Plato’s Republic.
On the other hand, democracies rely on legal rules constraining the executive to prevent any such demagogue from becoming a dictator. In the American system, that means a complex system of constitutional checks and balances — one of which is the Constitution granting taxation powers to Congress and Congress alone. Yet instead of asking for statutory authorization to raise tariffs, Trump is exploiting broadly worded emergency legislation to do an end-run around the legislative branch.
This is what a hybrid political system looks like in practice. The United States still has free and fair elections at all levels of government, and is in that sense democratic. But elections don’t matter in the way that they’re supposed to, because the people’s representatives in Congress are not playing their constitutionally assigned policymaking role. This is the autocratic component of the current American system, one that enables the president to sabotage the global economy if he so wishes.
He looks closely at the feckless congress of course. And has this to say about the judiciary:
The judicial branch deserves some blame too. While the Supreme Court has occasionally stepped in to address presidential overreach, it has done so in a haphazard and partisan way. Moreover, it has long deferred to the president on key issues like immigration, trade, and war.
There were the internal checks like the reliance on Office of Legal Counsel, quasi independence of the Justice Department and plain old personal integrity on the part of the president and his men. But they were all voluntary norms and the reliance on them was clearly a mistake since we’ve now see what can be done by a president who doesn’t understand or care about them.
Beauchamp points out that this “hybrid” system of ours has tremendous weaknesses which Trump and his henchmen have learned how to exploit:
One of the key reasons for democracy’s success has been its formalized policymaking process. Because laws are changed through legal and transparent processes, ones subject to public debate and legal oversight, they are more likely to both be well-informed by the best available evidence and corrected if something goes badly.
Authoritarian and hybrid regimes ditch these constraints, which allows them to make policy changes a lot faster. But it also enables one person, or a small group of people, to make radical decisions on a whim with disastrous consequences.
Think about Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, a direct product of the leader’s adherence to a Communist ideology that was out of touch with reality. While Trump’s tariffs are nowhere near as evil — the Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 18 and 32 million people — the same formal problem contributed to both mistakes.
For a more recent example, look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The disaster began with Putin’s personal obsession with the idea that Ukrainian nationhood was fake and that the territory was rightfully Russian. This notion went from Putin’s personal obsession to actual war because no one could stop him.
Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes. The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin.
Like I said… dark. But it’s best to know what we’re dealing with and as I’ve pointed out so many times, and as that cover above illustrates so perfectly, we are dealing with an authoritarian who is also a circus performer and a con man. I don’t know if that combination makes him better or worse than any other autocrat but it does make him different and, I think, weaker than those others. So much depends upon people loving his act. Will they love it so much if he falls off the high wire and goes splat or gets gobbled up by a hungry lion (he forgot to feed?) We’ll see.