Review the track record of the credentialled class before buying into their tariff hysteria

Are Trump's tariffs the end of the world? Maybe, but let's pause for a moment to consider the past performance of the Bad Orange Man's self-assured critics

Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.
Variously attributed

Our leaders chose globalisation, which they wanted to be a happy thing. It has turned out to be a horrible thing.
Marine Le Pen, 2017

If you’re poor, and things seem harsh, it makes perfectly reasonable sense that you have lost out because others have become wealthy. Zero-sum thinking is not mainly a partisan issue, either, with Democrats and Republicans supporting ‘zero-sum in different domains’. Democrats ‘tend to believe the gains of the rich come at the expense of the poor’, while Republicans ‘tend to believe the gains of immigrants come at the expense of non-immigrants’. Of course, some things are zero-sum, group prestige being the obvious case, which is why that desire drives so much of our current turbulence.
Ed West, Wrong Side of History, 8/4/25

When leaders of elite institutions take their responsibilities seriously, market democracies function well. But, perhaps inevitably over time, and as Plato predicted they would, elites come to see their power as earned and themselves as entitled to wield it however they might wish. Political leaders see themselves as elected to do what they want to do. Deans transform their campuses into reeducation camps. News editors take it upon themselves to decide which narratives will shape public opinion as they wish, while Hollywood studios try to tell audiences what movies with what actors they should want to watch. Public health officials contort science to promote their conception of social justice.
Oren Cass, Understanding America, 7/4/25

My view is that American strength was the product of a producer society, and American weakness is the product of a consumer society. We were healthier when we made things, when we endured hardship in the interest of making things, and when we had a sizable middle class that lived on the work of production.
Chris Bray, Tell Me How This Ends, 7/4/25

Is the current system sustainable, fiscally or societally? Trump's political success is, in many respects, the clearest manifestation of what happens in a system that pushes the gains to the globalized top while buying off the localized masses with cheap trinkets.
Ben Thompson, Stratechery, 7/4/25

There’s a respectable intellectual case to be made for tariffs. Rather more to the point, there’s a compelling practical one to be made. Those Asian tigers that achieved spectacular growth in the post-war period made widespread use of – the horror! – both industrial policy and tariffs.

But I’m not interested in churning out yet another hot take on the usefulness or otherwise of Trump’s tariffs. Not least because I suspect many of them will soon be adjusted or abandoned once the relevant players have demonstrated the required obeisance to the “Mad King”.

What struck me this week was the unhinged hysteria Trump’s tariffs generated among elite actors. It’s almost like they’ve abruptly realised that Trump and his band of long-aggrieved supporters are serious about shaking up the status quo. A status quo that has proven so agreeable to those located in the top quintile of the income distribution, if not to those relegated to the bottom four quintiles.

Perhaps the uniparty politicians, the oh-so-sophisticated cosmopolitan globalists, the unrepentant neoliberals, the pearl-clutching economists, the shameless billionaires and the even more shameless Goldman Sachs bigwigs are right.

Maybe Trump’s tariffs will usher in a second Great Depression, and in a few months, all those MAGA-hat-wearing rubes will be surviving on rat meat. Perhaps ‘free’ market economics is too complicated and counter-intuitive for the little people to comprehend.

But…

Checking the scoreboard
Before believing something, sensible people make a judgement about how believable it is. This usually involves reviewing the past performance of the individual or group making the claim.

Let’s take a moment to consider the track record of Anglosphere elites over the last four decades.

Brilliant idea one: Embracing mass migration and multiculturalism
Even though Anglosphere and Western European voters didn’t want open borders and never voted for them – indeed, constantly voted against them – Anglosphere and Western European elites reached the conclusion they had to overrule the clearly stated wishes of the unenlightened peasants and flood their nations with migrants, ideally ones from very different cultures.

I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether the sunny vision of harmonious co-existence the ‘Diversity is our strength’ crowd was so enchanted by has subsequently come to pass.

Brilliant idea two: Underwriting China’s rise to global hegemon
China was always going to rise once it abandoned strict adherence to an ideology previously much beloved by progressive intellectuals. But its economy grew much more quickly and dramatically than anyone expected, not least because it had ready access to Western capital and intellectual property.

Of course, all the clever people assured us we didn’t have to worry about China becoming vastly more economically, and hence militarily, powerful. That was because China was destined to simply become a slightly more oriental version of the US – a peaceable capitalist democracy content to embrace consumerism and revel in its growing prosperity.

Once again, I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether the rosy forecasts of the end-of-history free traders have come to pass. Or if the US just sold the Middle Kingdom the rope it will use to hang it.

Brilliant idea three: The war on terror
Where do I start? Maybe with a bunch of neocon politicians and intellectuals deciding to cynically misdirect the American public’s legitimate rage against Iraq, which had sweet fuck-all to do with 9/11? Or the plan to grow liberal democracies in the arid soils of the Middle East? Or the attempts to educate Afghani villagers about the correct neo-pronouns to use?

Brilliant idea four: The financialisation of economies
The details soon become eye-glazing, but the tl;dr version of the GFC is that the finance sector got in the ear of politicians and convinced them that there was no need for all that yucky, outmoded regulation. After all, it’s not like financial institutions would ever behave recklessly. Or assume they could always rely on a taxpayer-funded rescue package if their luck ever ran out.

While we’re on the financial sector, it’s perhaps worth considering the wisdom of the financialisation of many Anglosphere economies. Interestingly, the Chinese have strongly resisted financialisation. That’s primarily because they’ve been old-fashioned enough – what fools! – to prioritise manufacturing, infrastructure investment and exports over speculation.

The upside of financialisation is that it has provided lots of well-paying jobs for bright professional-managerial class types. The downsides are many, but let’s concentrate on the two big ones – increased economic instability and the concentration of wealth (and hence political influence) in the hands of asset holders and financial institutions.

The flip side of profits increasingly flowing to shareholders and C-suiters is that they’ve decreasingly, dare I say, trickled down to Joe and Joanne Sixpack.

Financialisation also shifts resources away from useful economic activities, such as *checks notes* manufacturing.

I could go on at length about the storied history of elite failure throughout what will presumably come to be known as the neoliberal era. The EU 2015 migrant crisis, America’s opioid disaster, the disingenuous response to Covid, and the gender/trans craziness all spring to mind.

But I hope I’ve now made the point that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers. And that you should question the agenda of those arguing everything is working just fine and that radical reform is unnecessary and unwise.