Import-Export Redistribution Day
Discussing the ways that "Liberation Day" has revealed the leftism of the MAGA populist movement.
Something that I’ve been on the record multiple times about is discussing the ways that MAGA populism has entered into the right-wing lexicon the rhetoric, the goals, and the policies that traditionally would be considered leftist and even Marxist. Nothing demonstrates this more than last Wednesday’s tariff announcements, what President Donald Trump called “Liberation Day.”
Let’s begin with a quote from the Communist Manifesto:
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
This is the core of the Marxist victim mentality, the belief that capitalism and bourgeoisie (or middle class) values have stripped us of human dignity. The victims, the proletariat (lower class), are the exploited workers and laborers who create the wealth of the middle class through the work of their hands but do not share in the fruits of their labor.
And the Marxist solution is a dramatic centering of political economic power into a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” All old traditions and forms of government, all sense of norms and values from the old regime, all of it is merely calculated to maintain the exploitation of the lower classes and must all be torn away and thrown into the fires of revolution, to be replaced by an unrestrained form of government operating on a mandate from the lower class to seize full control of the means of production.
The victims seize power, take revenge upon their oppressors, and wield centralized state power to establish equity in society.
Now, let us consider the realities of nationalist populism under the leadership of Donald Trump and the creation of the tariff regime that the President has put in place on this week’s “day of liberation.”
From the National Conservatism Statement of Principles:
“Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits.”
And in announcing the across-the-board tariff regime on Wednesday, President Trump said the following:
“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. American steelworkers, auto workers, farmers, and skilled craftsmen – we have a lot of them here with us today – they really suffered gravely. They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.
Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than fifty years, but it is not going to happen anymore.
For years, hardworking American citizens were forced to sit on the sidelines as other nations got rich and powerful, much of it at our expense.”
The parallels are stunning. Pres. Trump justifies his tariff regime by citing a mass victimization of the laborer. He is arguing that other nations are growing rich on the exploitation of the laborer. And the statement from the National Conservatives cites similar concerns to the Communist Manifesto with human dignity, with the stripping away of traditional values by the naked pursuit of money at the expense of the common man.
And even the solution, though not quite as revolutionary, nevertheless holds additional striking parallels. The President is taking advantage of the mass accumulation of legislative power into the executive to announce what amounts to the largest peacetime tax hike in American history without a single vote in Congress. And he claims the right to do it because he is a tribune of the people, he was elected by the American people, and that is all the mandate he feels he needs. Does that not sound eerily like a “dictatorship of the proletariat?”
And look at the policy itself. The various forms of socialism mostly deal with the lack of equity between individuals within society and enact government regimes to force equity between individuals upon society. What is protectionism but the tenets of socialism applied to nations instead of individuals? Having identified a perceived lack of equity in the relationship of nations, the centralized state thwarts free enterprise and attempts to use the hammer of government control to force its ideal of equity into existence. Is that not exactly what President Trump is himself declaring the purpose of his tariff regime to be?
Again, from President Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement:
“Today, we’re standing up for the American worker, and we are finally putting America first….To any company that objects to our common sense reciprocal tariffs…My answer is very simple. If they complain, if you want your tariff rate to be zero, then you build your product right here in America because there is no tariff if you build your plant, your product in America….Tariffs give our country protection against those that would do us economic harm…These tariffs are going to give us growth like you haven’t seen before….We’re going to be an entirely different country, and it’s going to be fantastic for the workers. It’s going to be fantastic for everyone. There will never have been a transformation of a country like the transformation that’s already happening in the United States of America.”
This great transformation, a word not altogether different from revolution, will be the product, not of free enterprise, but of a top-down micromanaging of the economy, with centralized economic planning unfolding “by the will of the people” through their elected tribune. Free enterprise, the free flow of goods across nations, is the enemy. It has taken advantage of the American worker and stripped them of dignity, of value, of worth. Free enterprise is exploiting the workers of America, according to President Trump, and the government is here to help.
Free markets, free enterprise, free trade…these are things that President Trump is attempting to liberate us from through the arbitrary exercise of the power of taxation. And like Marx, he justifies this assault upon the true foundations of American prosperity by citing the victimization of the people. And he builds the solution for this victimization upon a claim to arbitrary, unchecked power to be wielded to establish the equity that only the long arm of the government can provide.
Thus, we have a “Liberation Day” that we might as well call “Import-Export Redistribution Day.” Because that is the actual core of President Trump’s economic thinking. Just as Marx looked at capitalism as a zero-sum reality, where the proletariat loses and the bourgeoisie wins, Donald Trump looks at free trade as a zero-sum reality, where trade deficits mean America loses and the other nations of the world win. And just as Marx wanted to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat” to bring equity to society, Donald Trump has now had his “dictatorship for a day” moment in order to bring equity to international trade.
The Marxist thought that has infected right-wing thought processes since the rise of nationalist populism is stunning, thorough, and obvious. But the nature of the political distortion field we live in and the anxieties and fears that animate so many who still think of themselves as conservatives have kept a true reckoning from occurring in regard to the tremendous political drift that has occurred in the era of Trump.
I know for a fact that the majority of Republicans and those who still call themselves conservative do not like socialism in any of its forms. They don’t like big government. They love free enterprise. And they view the US Constitution as a sacred and wise document. I pray that in the coming days and weeks, more people really begin to take stock of what’s happening in the halls of our government, and the fact that the nature of such policies as this tariff regime betray the principles of free enterprise, makes a mockery of the principles of limited governance, and subverts the established process of the US Constitution under which we are supposed to be governed.
The reality is that President Donald Trump has now enacted, through executive fiat, one of the most socialistic approaches to policy this nation has ever had to endure.
I partially agree with the premise. There is lots of Trump that, for me, mirrors what I know about the rise of Mao in China, and several of the policies seem similar, esp. vis a vis the destruction of the existing system, the targeting of academia/cultural/institutional expertise, and the ideological form of communication.
I also agree that the tariffs are harmful.
I don’t really agree with attempts to thread this through leftism or rightism or to hold Marx responsible or whatever. Marx (especially as it grows into certain branches of modern academia) is treated as a lens, a way to think about society in terms of material production. Many of our habits and lifestyles are attributable to the products and advertising around us rather than anything innately human or American or purely philosophical… This kind of ‘Marxist’ analysis, which I think is the most common, doesn’t rely on the victim mentality you posit and it doesn’t view history as some teleological struggle of the proletariat. It simply recognizes that class and money shape our selves, cultures, and nations. And this approach is largely descriptive and interpretive, rather than dictating outcomes or requiring this kind of revolution or that kind of government.
I would say the kind of thinking you are identifying is restricted to activist circles, proper leftists hanging out and talking about anarchism et al.; I.e. a very small subset of people. And I don’t think the ideas you are describing are PARTICULARLY accurate to them but that might require splitting hairs. What you point out is kind of a right-wing caricature of what certain activists might believe.
I think some of the consistency between Trump’s ideas and lefty-authoritarianism arise because he wants to and intends to be authoritarian; the left this right that populist the other is not a methodical policy decision or direction. He’s just saying and doing anything that helps him hold power the way he wants.