Passing Thoughts On One Man’s Fantasy Life
Surprisingly, Donald Trump’s latest sociopathic fantasy lunge at becoming the most influential and beloved human who ever lived — namely his utterly illegal, immoral, and anti-American attempt to assume single-handed control over the entire world’s economy by way of a near-universal and whimsical imposition of wealth-killing tariffs — has had one, and only one, unequivocally positive effect. It has blessed us all with the return to public life of ninety-four-year-old Thomas Sowell, one of the very rare “popular intellectuals” who actually deserves to be popular and whose ideas are the product of an actual intellect. So good to see him again, under any circumstances.
Here is the teaser clip from a new interview of Sowell by Peter Robinson on his Hoover Institution podcast “Uncommon Knowledge.”
The key point from this clip, in my opinion, and truly the crux of the matter from a political and historical point of view:
Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president in the 1930s, said that you have to try things, and if they don’t work, then you admit it, you abandon that, and you go on to something else and you try that until you come across something that does work. Now, that’s not a bad approach if you are operating within a known system of rules. But if you are the one who is making the rules, then all the other people have no idea what you’re going to do next.
In other words, if one man is writing and rewriting the rules of the game at his own whim, day by day, then “trying things” can become a recipe for disaster, since this sort of power exerted unilaterally by one man (let alone an emotionally infantile man) over something as incalculable and uncontrollable as the global economy — which is to say over the operating conditions governing the collective calculations and deliberative processes of billions of individuals — engenders an irrational instability comparable to the condition of a child living with violent or drug-addicted parents, or of one locked in a maze of mirrors and trap doors. Or to state the matter more plainly, in political terms, this is the condition of people under tyranny. And this, of course, is why no sane and stable nation would ever allow, within its laws, for such control over economic policy to be in the hands of any one man. For a sane and stable nation forges its laws, as the American founders did, with the express purpose of preventing anyone with a tyrannical turn of mind from gaining access to such despotic authority over the lives of the nation’s citizenry, let alone over the lives of the world’s citizenry.
Trump has simply declared himself above the rule of the American founding, with the near-universal consent of his party, not to mention the slavish devotion of his cult. On the self-evidently fraudulent premise that trade deficits constitute a national emergency, he is exploiting an emergency powers law from the nineteen seventies that Republicans used to regard as dangerous and illegitimate on its face, and certainly would have rejected outright had a Democratic president dared to employ its powers for reasons far less absurd than the Trump-manufactured “emergency” of trade deficits, to place the material fate of the entire world, from the poorest nations and individuals to the richest, at the mercy of his sensitive ego, his spiteful outburts, and his craven lust for attention and “gratitude.”
Fortunately for the world, Trump’s great powerplays tend to be ninety percent rhetorical, aka bluffs. The key difference between Trump’s hero Vladimir Putin and Trump himself, is that when Putin plays chicken with the world, he does not flinch. Trump always does, for although he is a sociopath and a megalomaniac, he is also, as I have argued many times over the years, a coward. His chief motive is fear. Fear makes him lash out. Fear makes him demand deference. Fear makes him revel in reducing others to ring-kissing sycophants. But fear also makes him obsess about whether he is loved, and therefore causes him to relent when he senses that he may have overplayed his hand with his followers or met his match with a perceived rival — although he always relents from behind a mask of bravado, blustering that what might look to you like giving in to the other side is in fact the very victory he wanted. Such is the case with his sudden about-face on his tariff tough talk, announcing a (supposed) ninety day “pause” on most of these new taxes as though he were giving everyone yet another wonderful Christmas gift rather than caving to their collective will. He even prefaced his abrupt change of policy with the ultimate insider trading tip, writing on social media just hours before his tariff “pause” that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
Trump played chicken with the world on his “Liberation Day” tariffs — “Liberation Day” being a typically euphemistic way of representing his despotic aims, much as he uses “Make America Great Again” to promote his efforts to demolish the American republic as founded. When the world, and most importantly many of his own followers, appeared to be rejecting his will and his economic ignorance, he flinched. He was the chicken in this game, as he always will be when anyone has the independent mind to stand up to him. For he is above all a frightened animal. Ignorance is the source of fear, and there has never been a man so ignorant in a position of such power. This combination of his extreme ignorance and his vainglorious sense of personal authority has reached a fever pitch in the first months of his new (and ever-evolving) administration, and appears to be driving him to levels of instability and irrationality that transcend even his own perpetually high levels of both.
But his extreme folly and smallness brought Thomas Sowell back into the public discourse for a happy moment, for which I suppose we must show Trump our proper gratitude. That ought to please him.
