Category: Political Science

The Trump administration has issued a blizzard of Executive Orders, and set many other potential changes in the works.  They might rename Dulles Airport (can you guess to what?).  A bill has been introduced to add you-know-who to Mount Rushmore.  There is DOGE, and the ongoing attempt to reshape federal employment.

At the same time, many people have been asking me why Trump chose Canada and Mexico to threaten with tariffs — are they not our neighbors, major trading partners, and closest allies?

I have a theory that tries to explain all these and other facts, though many other factors matter too.  I think of Trumpian policy, first and foremost, as elevating cultural policy above all else.

Imagine you hold a vision where the (partial) decline of America largely is about culture.  After all, we have more people and more natural resources than ever before.  Our top achievements remain impressive.  But is the overall culture of the people in such great shape?  The culture of government and public service?  Interest in our religious organizations?  The quality of local government in many states?  You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some serious reservations on such questions.

We also see countries, such as China, that have screwed-up policies but have grown a lot, in large part because of a pro-business, pro-learning, pro-work culture.  Latin America, in contrast, did lots of policy reforms but still is somewhat stagnant.

OK, so how might you fix the culture of America?  You want to tell everyone that America comes first.  That America should be more masculine and less soft.  That we need to build.  That we should “own the libs.”  I could go on with more examples and details, but this part of it you already get.

So imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question “does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?”  Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it.  Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import.

Simply pass or announce or promise such policies.  Do not worry about any other constraints.

You don’t even have to do them!

They don’t even all have to be legal!  (Illegal might provoke more discussion.)

They don’t all have to persist!

You create a debate over the issues knowing that, because of polarization, at least one-third of the American public is going to take your side, sometimes much more than that.  These are your investments in changing the culture.  And do it with as many issues as possible, as quickly as possible (reread Ezra on this).  Think of it as akin to the early Jordan Peterson cranking out all those videos.  Flood the zone.  That is how you have an impact in an internet-intensive, attention-at-a-premium world.

You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda (I hesitate to call it an “intellectual” agenda, but it is).  Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganized, and yes that does describe the Democrats today.  Then just keep on going.  In the long run, you may end up “owning” far more of the culture than you suspected was possible.

Yes policy will be a mess, but as they say “man kann nicht alles haben.”  The culture is worth a lot, both for its own sake and as a predictor of the future course of policy.

Now let’s turn to some details.

In the first week, Trump makes a huge point of striking down DEI and affirmative action (in some of its forms) as the very beginnings of his administration.  The WSJ described it as the centerpiece of his program.  Take origins seriously!

Early on, we also see so many efforts to make statements about the culture wars.  Trans issues, for instance trans out of the military.  No more “Black History Month” for the Department of Defense.  There are more of these than I can keep track of, use Perplexity if you must.

It is no accident that these are priorities.  And keep in mind the main point is not to eliminate Black History Month, though I do not doubt that is a favored policy.  The main point is to get people talking about how you are eliminating Black History Month.  Just as I am covering the topic right now.

How is that war against US AID going?  Will it be abolished?  Cut off from the Treasury payments system?  Simply rolled up into the State Department?  Presidential “impoundment” invoked?  I do not know.  Perhaps nobody knows, not yet.  The point however is to delegitimatize what US AID stands for, which the Trumpers perceive as “other countries first” and a certain kind of altruism, and a certain kind of NGO left-leaning mindset and lifestyle.

The core message is simply “we do not consider this legitimate.”  Have that be the topic of discussion for months, and do not worry about converting each and every debate into an immediate tangible victory.

What about those ridiculous nominations, starting with RFK, Jr.?  As a result of the nomination, people start questioning whether the medical and public health establishments are legitimate after all.  And once such a question starts being debated, the answer simply cannot come out fully positive, whatever the details of your worldview may be.  People end up in a more negative mental position, and of course then some negative contagion reinforces this further.

JFK and UAP dislcosure?  The point is to get people questioning the previous regime, why they kept secrets from us, what really was going on with many other issues, and so on.  It will work.  The good news, if you can call it that, is that we can expect some of the juicier secrets to be made public.

I think by now you can see how the various attempts to restructure federal employment fit into this picture.  And Trump’s “war against universities” has barely begun, but stay tuned.  Don’t even get me going on “Gaza real estate,” the very latest.

Finally, let’s return to those tariffs (non-tariffs?) on Canada and Mexico.  We already know Trump believes in tariffs, and yes that is a big factor, but why choose those countries in particular?  Well, first it is a symbol of strength and Trump’s apparent ability to ignore and contradict mainstream opinion.  But also those are two countries most Americans have heard of.  If Trump announced high tariffs on say Burundi, most people would have no idea what it means.  They would not know how to debate it, and they would not know if America was debasing itself or thumbing its nose at somebody, or whatever.

Canada and Mexico gets the cultural point across.  Canada, all the more so, and thus the Canadian tariffs might be harder to truly reverse.  At least to many Yankee outsiders, Canada comes across as exactly the kind of “wuss” country we need to distance ourselves from.

To be clear, this hypothesis does not not not require any kind of cohesive elite planning the whole strategy (though there are elites planning significant parts of what Trump is doing).  It suffices to have a) conflicting interest groups, b) competition for Trump’s attention, and c) Trump believing cultural issues are super-important, as he seems to.  There then results a spontaneous order, in which the visible strategy looks just like someone intended exactly this as a concrete plan.

In a future post I may consider the pluses and minuses of this kind of political/cultural strategy.

I said that to Ezra Klein about the current rightward vibes shift.  What are some of the scenarios I had in mind?:

1. If the Republicans regulate social media companies to discriminate less against “the Right,” those regulations may someday be used against them.

2. Personal presidential issuance of crypto assets is not always (ever?) a good thing or lead to the right incentives.  In the meantime, it might serve as a daily referendum on how much of a lame duck presidency we are having, a mixed blessing.

3. The conspiracy theorizing promoted by Trump and various minions could someday come back to bite them, or to sink Vance, or…I guess we will see.  Don’t think you can keep this genie in the bottle, or use it only for preferred ends.

4. DOGE successes might centralize power in the executive branch in a manner that the Republicans later regret.  That centralization can be more easily be used to expand government regulatory power than to contract it.

5. If there is a pandemic under Trump’s term, the cultivated anti-vaccine sentiment could make it much worse.

6. Rhetoric on taxes and central bank independence could (further) raise real interest rates, damaging the economy and also Republican electoral prospects.

7. The dwindling of various “safeguards” on rhetoric, as the Woke are dismantled, could end up harming later Republican or right-leaning targets of harmful rhetoric, including from other right-wingers.  Some of you may feel this is absurd, but just wait.

8. I don’t think we really know what it would mean (will mean?) to put feminization seriously in reverse.  I would note I see myself as a significant beneficiary of our more feminized society.  I am pleased if more women decide to become “trad wives,” but it is not the circle I will hang around in either.  This one really needs much further thought from its advocates, it is not enough to be fed up with the recent excesses.  A lot of the people who claim to want more “trad wives” actually want more super talented women who can do that and be very successful in a career at the same time.  I am all for that, but I also recognize when I am asking for a free lunch of sorts.  I am not sure how elastic the supply is there.  Nor am I sure how much such a change might boost birth rates — Iran anybody?

9. To the extent Trump succeeds, American politics will become all the more personality-driven.  I see that as a mixed blessing, most likely more negative than positive in the longer run.

10. If Trump does something good for a foreign country you like or favor, he may ask for his pound of flesh in return.

Those are only a few options, the list is really pretty long.  I am not panicked about the status quo, but I see it as fraught and unstable.  And we haven’t even touched upon AGI advances.

More generally, I would stress that even the most optimistic person should not relinquish his or her sense of the tragic.  A lot of Democrats were pretty ecstatic when Obama won a second term, but how happy are they now?  Is that just them, or could it be you too?

I’ll say it again — be careful what you wish for, you might get it.  The celebratory perspective can be important for getting things done, or for maintaining ideological coherence, but accuracy matters too, and the more accurate perspective should take all this into account.

In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”

I was skeptical of Cowen’s post when I first read it, as it described a shift much larger than anything I saw reflected in the polls. I may have been right about the polls. But Cowen was right about the culture.

And the end bit:

Cowen may have correctly called the shift in vibes, but he isn’t particularly comfortable with it. If 2024 was partly a backlash to the Democratic Party and culture of the last four years, what might a backlash to this more culturally confident and overwhelming form of Trumpism look like?

“I’ve taken to insisting to my friends on the right: ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ ” Cowen told me. “You might get it.”

Here is the full NYT column.