Trumponomics

In my previous post, I mentioned that the success of Trump's economic message among the white middle class will be crucial to his long term success or failure. What makes that dynamic particularly interesting is that there doesn't seem to be any significant agreement among media or commentators about what that message means or how he intends to translate it into policy. I hear conservatives saying he's too liberal. I hear the Left saying he's revealing the true face of dastardly Republicanism - a cipher owned by the wealthy interests of the country. If we insist on employing the familiar liberal-conservative labels, he seems to defy description. Yet, his own words and the backgrounds of his closest advisers reveal a surprisingly consistent economic philosophy that must be understood if we are to understand Trump.

Trump and both of his top policy advisers, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, have described themselves as "nationalists." They view the world as a place in which one is either taking advantage of others or being taken advantage of by them. Trump's campaign theme - we are governed by dithering incompetents who, instead of using our immense power and wealth to acquire further riches and authority, have allowed others to bamboozle them, infiltrate our national community, and take what is rightfully ours - is steeped in that basic belief. In his inaugural address, he said:

For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we've defended other nation's borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.

And again:

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.

These are the words of a person who believes that the central choice for the American economy is not "regulate or deregulate", "tax hike or tax cut", or even "market or government". For him, it is "us or them."

There is a part of Trump's economic plan that fits into both his nationalist framework and more traditional conservatism - tax cuts, budget cuts, and deregulation. Unlike the traditional right, in his case it is not primarily motivated by market piety and an implicit defense of economic privilege. He observes the regulatory laxity of developing nations and sees opponents who play by a different set of rules. He is determined to ensure that American industry is unhampered in that competition by regulation. The benefit of any regulation is immaterial to him, because for him the only economic question of importance is "are we winning?" The individual, except as an abstraction, is absent from this line of thought.

On a point that is much more central to his economic theme, Trump disagrees vehemently with conservative orthodoxy; trade. He has spent several years castigating free trade agreements as "bad deals," and he has inherited this point - even if he has added a personal spin to it - from generations of Democrats and the Left more generally. The Democrats have opposed trade agreements because they craved the support of white union workers, particularly in the Midwest, and those are the workers who have been most affected by the economic trends of the last fifty years. The Left has done so because it blames global trade for the enrichment of wealthy elites. While the political reasons for Trump to adopt his anti-trade line are clear, he fails to speak in particularly personal terms about the destructive aspects of rapid change. To him, it is about other countries "stealing" industry from the nation. For him, the products belong to us to sell, the job belongs to the nation, and relocating it is indistinguishable from robbery.*

The regulation and trade-related aspects of his economic program have been well covered, if poorly understood, by the national press. What has not been adequately reported is how the other pillar of Trump's platform - immigration - fits into his overall economic scheme. To Trump and his advisors, immigrants are unnecessary competitors driving down wages for unskilled native workers.** They also see adjusting low income immigrants, and in particular the education of their children, as a drain on national resources with little return. Again, it will be noticed, concern for the individual does not have a part to play here. The idea of "the nation," which explicitly excludes the non-native born, is supreme.

If my description of this philosophy seems cold, even crass, I maintain that is because it is a cold and crass philosophy. Moreover it is one that flies in the face of the evidence, which asserts that the effect of immigration on even unskilled wages is minimal, that immigrants are net contributors to society, and that their children are significantly more productive as adults than the children of the native born.*** Yet the things I have described are believed, explicitly, by the people closest to the president in forming national policy.

The future of Trump's policy with regard to documented as well as undocumented immigrants is largely motivated by his economic worldview, and his attitude toward immigration as a whole has been lost in the media firestorm over his travel and refugee orders. The crackdown on immigration which is already beginning will not end with the undocumented. There will be a push to significantly reduce legal immigration, and the justification will be economic in nature.

While Trump's ideology has seemed porous because it transcends the liberal-conservative dichotomies to which we have become accustomed, it is surprisingly and disturbingly coherent in principle. It represents a pessimistic, scared view of the world that reduces in its entirety to "eat or be eaten." He has made it clear where he draws the line between us and them. If we reduce him to a dupe of the ruling class, or an idiot, or a loudmouth with no idea what he's saying, we will fail to understand him, and we will be unprepared when he does precisely what he's been telling us he will do all along.

* The actual effect of trade and trade agreements on the economy is complicated. Experts now agree that NAFTA has not been a significant event in changing long term economic trends, while the emergence of China has. Some of the changes have been as expected, others have not. Why that is the case is an area of active research, and there are no easy answers. I recommend this summary of the issues surrounding trade and globalization.

** This article from Vox is a good primer on the attitudes of Bannon and Miller, I refer the intrigued reader to Google.

*** Two prominent surveys in recent times have come from the pro-immigration Center for Immigration Studies and the libertarian Cato Institute.