A RUPTURE IN SPACETIME propagates at the speed of light over distances of years.

Blink and you’ll miss it.

Throttle the jugular of Hormuz and a ripple of necrotizing tissue radiates outwards from the source. In just a month, fuel shortages have spread throughout Asia and Oceania, sparing neither rich nor poor, in rolling blackouts, gas queues, and forced holidays from Australia to Sri Lanka.

No doubt the situation will resolve itself in due time. Unlike the recent COVID pandemic, the Hormuz crisis is not an exogeneous shock but an elaborate consensual/non-consensual sadomasochistic ritual of auto-asphyxiation.

In a week or two, the world finishes tapping whatever reserves remain afloat on the high seas or hidden away in salt caverns. After that will be true global economic catastrophe.

Which is why there is nothing to worry about. As soon as the danger is too much, the pressure on the jugular will perceptibly lighten. A finger will be lifted, a thumb dug in less deeply, to let a tiny breath through. The date of calamity can always be postponed minutes longer until the upcoming, dramatic ground operation has its time to finish.

Ignore the clamor of commodity whisperers. They advise but are not in control of the tempo of events. Time will—must—dilate as we hurtle into the unknown at light-speed, as long as it needs to.

The tears have not yet dried from Davos, and we are called again to mourn the unipolar moment of American primacy.

I have heard some avowed believers in multipolarity express that, given the unthinkability of global recession, a coalition of self-interested utility-maximizing sovereign actors will spontaneously assemble to, say, bomb the problematic topography of Hormuz into submission and restore freedom of navigation.

I am sorry, can you hear yourself through the incoherence?

We can choose to exist in an actually-existing multipolar reality or an ahistorical caricature of 19th-century Concert of Europe, where great powers are infinitely free to follow the dictates of their own interests, ignore international humanitarian law, European Union regulations, and say the r-word.

In a multipolar word, Zelenskyy gets to tour the Middle East to flog interceptors to the Gulf states. Some bilateral defense deals will be inked (to be perhaps broken later) and that will be the end of it.

Maybe the Americans can feed some Lithuanians into the jaws of the Strait to unclench them. Any other nation of greater strategic autonomy and weaker trans-Atlantic loyalty would find an excuse to stay far away from the Gulf.

Modern wars are complicated affairs. There is no option to throw down some florins to pad out the ranks at the last minute with Genoese crossbowmen. Even in the past, a non-trivial level of preparations would have had to be made for enterprising knights to sign on to a chevauchée along the southern Iranian coastline.

If there is no existing supra-European or supra-Asian military command structure—a sore point raised by the Russo-Ukrainian War—there will not emerge one in the one, two, or however many weeks the crisis drags on. International forces would have to rely on an American command to assign roles and timetables, one whose capacity for additional contingency planning appears to be exhausted by the rush to execute an overly optimistic plan.

The clock for a regional war began in January, when the Islamic Republic trained its guns on tens of thousands of innocent citizens. The race between the arrival of American naval power and the end of the Iranian uprising shaped the timing and improvisational dynamic of the encounter.

There will be no meaningful direct military involvement coming from nations other than the United States, Israel, and perhaps the Gulf States. Nations will protect their personnel and offer to shoot down missiles, but otherwise wait for the results of upcoming US ground operations (or their absence).

In a world where international coordinating mechanisms are no longer trusted, solitary actors cannot and will not insert themselves into other people’s wars on other people’s timelines. The decision to intervene, even to avert certain disaster, must weigh the direct costs of action against the likely marginal outcome of that action and the benefit of free-riding on others’ action.

It was one thing to verbally commit to terms of investment and trade under a mercurial American administration, it is a different matter to throw oneself into an irreversible military entanglement without international or domestic approval.

Trade wars are easy to lose, no problem. War-wars are not.

Blink and you’ll miss it.

Stare too deeply into the Strait and you’ll miss it.

Listen too deeply to the “market” and you’ll miss it.

Where once had flourished the free movement of capital, trade, and elites, now even hydrocarbons and rare earths must carry passports.

A FAMILY TREE CAN BE A TRICKY THING for a child to navigate. Parents become a familiar reference frame from which new coordinates are placed, be they uncles, aunts, or cousins. The relentless procession of faces at weddings and funerals triggers a plea for help.

I often looked over my shoulder at my mom or my dad before mumbling a greeting to a relative, hoping that I chose the correct maternal or paternal variant. It was a 50-50 gamble for the most part. Fortunately, adults are gracious with children.

For the adult, much of politics remains similarly illegible, a series of rules about what can or cannot be said or done, honored in the breach as much as in observance. Reference frames insofar as they exist are fleetingly, frustratingly contextual.

It is a disorientation from which analytical sense cannot escape—the encounter with a relational universe not designed around logical comprehension but ecological experience.

As a lay observer who scribbles about the rise and fall of political fortunes, I gravitate to situations where the strategic logic is so overwhelming as to drown out subtler aspects of social and institutional history I no doubt miss. I develop affinities toward political figures who are forced by circumstance to compress local complexity into simple visions. Big ideas are the entry points from which I can work backwards to fill in historical origins. It affords me the strategic empathy to understand individuals who are otherwise distant from me.

But much of the world has little patience for big ideas, and I have no idea what to make of all these human black-boxes that dot that light the named political universe.

I have read the Trump Administration’s national security strategy and skimmed its national defense strategy. I am by now quite familiar with the opportunistic, improvisational quality of American policy. If I hear the Administration correctly, the recent arc of grand strategy is structured around ever more convoluted ways to counter China. Dismantle its influence in the Western Hemisphere first, cutting it off from flows of Venezuelan oil, and then disrupt a key hub of the sanctioned global economy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The plan is to leverage hard power where soft power has frustrated. Weaponizing economic interdependence directly against China has been difficult: the tariff tool carries questionable constitutionality. War reduces open-ended strategic problems to technical questions amenable to military implementation. Even if all of it is purely a diversionary war, combat operations in Iran maintain an aesthetic coherence. So the road to Al-Quds once ran through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the Silk Road to the Middle Kingdom now runs through Persia.

Whatever the President’s inclinations were when he approved this deployment, he has a professional team of civilian and military officials to lawyer his instincts into coherent plans and we should treat them as such.

Nevertheless, I have a whole lot of questions.

If the lesson of the 2016 election was about the long shadow of the Iraq war and the lesson of the recent Venezuela operation about the benefit of time-limited strikes, what are we to make of an expansive regime-change operation? The only rational view is to say that it isn’t, at least not in the traditional sense. Unknown to you or I, someone has been selected to take over the carcass of the Islamic Republic and negotiate a quick settlement on its behalf. If they cannot be found, the Iranians better start looking harder.

In Venezuela, the US tapped Delcy Rodriguez as a partner who could muster the Bolivarian political apparatus to deliver its heavy, sour oil. Her transition to power was smooth. The geographic fact of the United States’ proximity to Latin America left her with no choice. So long as the Administration could always threaten another quarantine of the Venezuelan economy, there was no room for internal dissension against Rodriguez either. Had she refused, someone else would have to take her place.

Finding a hidden imam during the regime’s end of days is far less straightforward. Their résumé would need to demonstrate a proven capability to corral the various repressive institutions that comprise the Islamic Republic, suppress popular unrest opposing the Islamic Republic, and be willing to engage with President Trump, who plans to pull away at any moment when the situation gets difficult.

They would also need to be alive.

Somewhere, an analyst is thumbing through the genealogy of the IRGC branches, the guardianship council, the remaining civilian political leadership, and the conventional armed forces. Each day the names of the dead are crossed out in red marker. An ongoing exercise in futility that offers more questions than answers.

If there is a big idea surrounding the war, it is the simple concept of victory, whichever way it can be most conveniently extracted. Operation Epic Fury is fundamentally ambivalent about outcomes insofar as the Iran does not become Iraq. So long as American ground forces do not participate, the Iraq scenario is definitively off the table, leaving enough room for any other prediction to choose from.

If we cannot predict the tumult of the coming days and weeks, let us tell the story at its end.

All wars must draw to a close, if only because finite stockpiles of American munitions drain like the proverbial sand in the hourglass. Carriers must return to shore and soldiers itch to return to their usual postings.

Whether one month or one year from now, the new IRGC (or whatever organization takes its place) will be dominated by young, living members that were 5-6 layers deep into the org chart, too diminutive to be eliminated or to have embezzled from the lucrative enterprises their dead superiors latched onto. They would resent the old Islamic Republic as much as anyone. The ancien régime was corrupt and incompetent: severely mismanaging water and energy resources with criminal misallocation of contracts and subsidies. Before the situation spiraled into generalized revolt, the January crisis began first as a financial crisis. It had staying power because it originated in the bazaars, Iran’s shadow banks that kept the sanctioned economy’s credit afloat. The regime had abandoned the bazaaris through an extreme devaluation of the rial.

The subsequent US-Israeli intervention will become the formative experience of this surviving generation. Born too late for 1979, this will be their revolution, an apocalyptic confrontation against both the Great and Lesser Satans. Instead of hating the regime (and themselves by extension), they will identify with it more strongly than before. If there were any failures, there are too many to blame.

The Supreme Leader was always nattering on about strategic patience. We appreciate his martyrdom at the very last moment, but where did his hesitation take him in the end? An in-person meeting with Israeli bombs.

All of these reformist politicians and diplomats, when have their deals ever been worth more than the paper they were printed on?

These TikToks from the Iraqi militias we fund may play well for our information operations but can they actually hit anything?

Amid widespread disappointment, there will be some areas in which the regime could declare that it acquitted itself well.

Even in the depths of the January crisis, the regime easily cracked down and massacred tens of thousands—on the scale of the Hama massacre in Syria under the elder Hafez al-Assad, albeit distributed throughout the vast country.

The investments in drones and missiles paid off, wreaking havoc across the region. After all, why else were the Americans, Israelis, and Gulf Arabs so keen on dismantling the program?

The coming Iranian retrenchment is likely to converge on a familiar cocktail of nationalism, economic reform in service of defense investment, and a pervasive, total belief in the power of violence. A slimmed-down, hungrier Iran would not look so different from the poorer Axis of Resistance forces it used to patronize.

This future carries a new risk, distinct from the non-specific line items of regional instability and terrorism that are always mentioned when dealing with Iran.

It is the risk of an actual regime change, when a decapitation campaign turns into a re-alignment campaign—a culling of the flock—that brings forth a different creature to power. It is a re-alignment that cannot be undone because the Administration has no desire to follow through beyond the initial operation.

The historical role of poorly thought-out American interventions in the Middle East has been to anneal its targets. To subject them to intense pressure that modernizes their military and governance capacities before releasing them on captive populations, e.g. the Taliban 2.0.

“Make Iran Great Again” is a powerful idea and we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal. Trump gets credit for introducing the vision but only one faction has the state capacity and determination to see it through.

There is no rapprochement with a Iran 2.0 who will take advantage of any negotiation to extract economic benefits for funding its military investment. Any move to isolate the regime will be taken as cause for deeper paranoia and greater arms production. Old financial burdens of supporting the Axis of Resistance will be swapped with new ones for reconstructing the post-war defense-industrial base with more efficient financial extraction.

The majority of Iranians will be horrified at this exacting destiny for their country, but they cannot change this trajectory short of civil war and insurrection. The IRGC and its Basij emerged during the Iran-Iraq War as the counter to the previously-royal army. These institutions thrive off of apocalypse.

We are still less than two days into the fighting. The Gulf states have yet to enter the fray in retaliation to Iranian strikes. There are great technological advances in precision-guided munitions and intelligence gathering. The Iranian people are activated. Anything can happen.

There is still time.

IN REGULAR TIMES, Scott Bessent’s pedigree would be a perfect fit for Treasury Secretary. Under the current Administration, he is certainly overqualified for the job.

At the spry age of 62, the codenamed Swamp Fox was the President’s first pair of boots in Ukraine, securing mineral rights in exchange for military support. After staging a successful currency intervention in Argentina, his vulpine sights have turned back to the grandest of prizes, installing a friendly monetary regime within the half-renovated halls of the Eccles Building. Only Little Marco—already overemployed as Secretary of State, acting national security adviser, and acting archivist—manages a portfolio of greater breadth.

To his credit, Bessent is unbothered. Nothing is over or beneath him, just as he prefers. For an ambitious Master of the Universe, the Department of the Treasury serves as the ideal perch to observe the workings of the world.

In the modern American political system, governance happens at the nexus of the Treasury and the nominally independent Federal Reserve Banking system. Much as the New Deal birthed an alphabet soup of federal agencies, this bureaucratic union spawned the multiplicity of lending facilities that backstopped the COVID economy (PDCF, CPFF, MMLF, TALF, PMCCF, SMCCF, PPPLF, MLF, MSNLF, MSPLF, MSELF, NONLF, NOELF), a reprisal of its emergency role during the Global Financial Crisis when it resuscitated the international banking system with swap lines. Its political ambit is wide: the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control is responsible for sanctioning the nation’s adversaries, waging the economic war against Russia on behalf of Ukraine. In contrast with vestigial branches of government such as Congress, this nexus is the last remnant of state capacity that the majority of Americans, as weighted by wealth and political influence, can still rely on to be competent.

For the typical business reader of Bloomberg’s Big Take, the essence of Bessent’s big break is his role as a soothing voice that softens the harsh notes of Trump’s economic agenda. He plies the craft of jawboning, already practiced as “forward guidance” in modern central banking parlance, to dampen policy uncertainty through communication.

But the motivations of a man who readily presents himself as an accessory to other mens’ ambitions should carry higher scrutiny. When the President originally asked Bessent if he wished to be appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve, Bessent insisted, “No, there’s another job I’d like.”

WHEN THE FRESHLY CONFIRMED TREASURY SECRETARY introduced himself to the masses as “the United States’ leading bond salesman,” he freely accepted that his new post was some mix of storyteller and bureaucrat.

In early interviews, including one with Tucker Carlson hosted at the Treasury Department, Bessent dances with a thoughtfulness that can almost be mistaken for humility. His defenses of the President’s policies du jour on trade padded a narrative of Main Street populism with selective references to his Wall Street career.

So, like, if I were to analyze this in my old hat—and this is the only time I’m going to talk about my old hat—what’s happening with the market? I’d say it’s more of a “Mag Seven” problem, not a “MAGA” problem, right?

Interview with Tucker Carlson hosted at the Treasury Department (transcript)

Like Tucker, Scott possesses a rhetorical finesse that is usually wasted on his audience. As recent media appearances have shown, he has no difficulty in matching the mediocrity of his economic colleagues either. Scott’s knack for punchy characterizations is visual as much as verbal, able to paint his enemy in Technicolor.

They’re [China] in a deflationary recession—slash depression—right now. They’re trying to export their way out of it. And we can’t let them do that. But when you think about it, the Chinese manufacturing system is like that old Disney movie with the brooms carrying the buckets. There’s nothing you can do—it just keeps going.

This one scene from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice nails the sentiment of so much American commentary on Chinese overcapacity. The army of brooms with buckets is timeless—a warning about a rising manufacturing power in the Indo-Pacific or even a pre-AI dream of unaligned AI run amok.

That’s their business model. It’s not going to stop. Now, what could happen—if you were to say, “Scott, what’s the dream scenario?”—it’s that somehow there could be a deal where the U.S. and China… We want more manufacturing, which would mean a smaller part of the economy is consumption. The Chinese have this imbalanced economy with too much manufacturing. And actually, Chinese consumers really get the short end of the stick. Chinese households—they’re caught in what’s called the middle-income trap. Could we do something together where they rebalance—consume more, manufacture less? We consume less, manufacture more? We’ll still be military rivals. There’ll still be economic rivalry. But we’d level the playing field by a lot. Now, that’s not going to happen tomorrow. That’s not going to happen in a month. But over the next few years, they may have to come around. Because I think their business model is broken. I think President Trump has broken their business model with these tariffs.

Setting aside the feigned concern for Chinese households, Bessent’s moments of public lucidity (before the customary cable-news CNBC lobotomy) reveal much about his true beliefs and by extension, those of the like-mindedly contrarian Wall Streeter constituency he represents in government. They outline a respectable case for economic nationalism that grants some indiscretions by the financier class as responsible for the current mess while remaining confident in a renewal of American supremacy that will pay out dividends to the American people and Big Business. The smart-money version of “America First” takes the once-fringe economic thought of Stephen Miran seriously, if not always literally, and embraces the actually-existing MAGA coalition as the unwieldy but pliable vessel for its ideals. Miran’s core grievance with the rest of the world (not just China)—his hatred of the US dollar’s reserve currency status and lust for punitive, transformative tariffs—can be rationalized into a somewhat weaker dollar and higher tariff regime that reasonable trade ministers across the world can nod along to. Every American is granted their own interpretation of American exceptionalism: for Bessent, he believes that the United States can always design a deal that the other side cannot refuse.

Nine months past Liberation Day, Bessent has managed to keep the bond market together and averted economic catastrophe. Yet so has the export-driven Chinese business model, which remains intact despite the intellectual merits of the Bessent Corollary to the Miran Doctrine.

Perhaps it will all work out in due time. After all, China’s current five-year plan (2026-2030) flags a pivot to domestic consumption as a priority.

THERE ARE GOOD REASONS to gamble on the base case of American supremacy. Every time the United States faced a major challenge to the world-system from other great powers, it came out on top. Like all empires, it was occasionally bogged down in far-flung conflicts that eroded its legitimacy, but the economic impact of those indiscretions were fleeting in light of raw GDP growth. The rhetoric of Liberation Day and trade war are designed to invoke the fighting spirit of an undefeated American people that triumphed repeatedly against the combined heft of Germany and Japan.

In the days of Grandpa Homer Gaston Bessent, American aircraft rolled off the factory floor to hunt Messerschmitts and Mitsubishi Zeros in European and Pacific skies.

When Scott Kenneth Homer Bessent came of age, the Germans and Japanese were back at it with invasions of Volkswagens and Sony TVs. The Americans were able to beat them back but these post-war wars of trade waged against nominally friendly allies turned out to be close-run affairs, not the decisive victories in the Second World War that were won by raw industrial might.

At the Plaza Accord of 1985, the West Germans and the Japanese, having diligently rebuilt their economies, were buffaloed into agreeing to new terms of surrender. No longer could they recklessly export their way to prosperity at the expense of American jobs. Along with the vassalized France and United Kingdom, they all agreed to let the US dollar depreciate against their currencies.

In Germany, any memory of the Accord is overshadowed by the chaos and joy of East-West reunification five years later. In Japan, the event foreruns the beginning of the Lost Decade of the 1990s, and tastes especially bitter against the heights of the bubble years.

Japan’s progress played out over the New York skyline. Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center; the Japanese construction firm Aoki became a co-owner of the iconic Plaza Hotel; and a Japanese tycoon, Hideki Yokoi, acquired the Empire State Building.

Daniel Immerwahr, “Why Donald Trump Is Obsessed with William McKinley,” The New Yorker

This was not a satisfying resolution for the United States either. It was only a matter of time before some manufacturing power, having observed how Japan was stuck in a Lost Decade every ten years, refused to bend the knee when it came time to sign the accord.

In any case, the Plaza Accord merely slowed the inevitable. The rest of the world never stopped exporting and the manufacturing share of employment in the United States continued to decline. The decline became terminal when the Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker held interest rates sky-high throughout the 1980s, strangling inflation along with any hope of industrial renewal.

Today’s America First movement inherits its haughty, apocalyptic triumphalism from the ferment of the early 80’s—not the cautious interwar isolationism of “America First” with which it shares the name. To be truly isolationist would be to abort America’s exceptionalist narrative right before the baptism of the Second World War. Then as now, the confrontation with faceless, impersonal forces of de-industrialization renewed hope for heroic intervention.

Would the Japanese, like the Muppets, take Manhattan? Nationalists pinned their hopes on a flamboyant local investor with a taste for tall buildings: Donald Trump. He bought the Plaza (“my ‘Mona Lisa’ ”) from Aoki and gained a share in Yokoi’s Empire State Building. The journalist J. Taylor Buckley imagined a final showdown between the “pride of the USA” and Japanese investors: “Trump buys the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; Japan buys St. Peter’s Basilica; Trump buys the Moscow Circus; Japan buys the Kennedy Center.”

ON THE SUMMER NIGHT of June 19, 1982, Vincent was celebrating his bachelor party at a strip club. Times in Michigan were tough: the effective federal funds rate was 14%, down from a peak of 19% the year prior. Nevertheless, Vincent was able to keep down his job as an industrial draftsman for an automotive supplier in Detroit while waiting tables in nearby Ferndale on the weekends for extra cash.

The party was interrupted when a recently laid-off Chrysler worker named Ronald confronted Vincent for giving a generous tip to a dancer.

“It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.”

Vincent responded by punching him in the face. The club kicked them out for fighting and left them to brawl in the parking lot. By the time Ronald came back from his car to grab a baseball bat, Vincent had already left with his friends. Unsatisfied, Ronald drove around the neighborhood with his stepson Michael, also recently laid off from Chrysler. When the pair couldn’t find Vincent anywhere, Ronald paid another man to join the search.

Finally, they spotted him in a McDonalds parking lot.

Michael held Vincent down as Ronald beat him with his baseball bat.

Vincent died four days later from his injuries. Ronald and Michael were fined and sentenced to probation.

“We’re talking about a man here who’s held down a responsible job with the same company for 17 or 18 years and his son, who is employed and a part-time student,” Judge Charles Kaufman told reporters. “These men are not going to go out and harm somebody else.”

As the judge explained, “[Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz] aren’t the kind of men you send to jail.”

Vincent’s family disagreed.

She heard rumors of motorists getting shot at on the freeway for driving Japanese-made cars. A local radio D.J. offered frustrated Detroiters the chance to take their aggressions out on a Toyota with a sledgehammer. It wasn’t unusual for politicians or business leaders to reference Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima when talking about trade tensions with Japan. Foreign cars were prohibited from entering the parking lot of the United Auto Workers’ headquarters.

Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, “The Many Afterlives of Vincent Chin”

FOUR DECADES INTO THE AFTERLIFE OF VINCENT CHIN—the identity of the enemy, once Japanese, is now Chinese. Much as sedentary farming societies lived in terror of the Eurasian steppe, with its inexhaustible reserve of marauding nomadic tribes, the United States cannot sleep, knowing the infinite manufacturing potential nourished by Pacific waters. The geopolitical moat offered by the Pacific Ocean? A 19th century illusion.

The “China Shock” hit hard enough to shake the foundations of mainstream economics, forcing the discipline to ask tougher, empirical questions about the labor impacts of free trade. Outside of the academe, politicians redeployed the rhetoric about bilateral trade deficits previously levied against Japan, mutatis mutandis, against the new emerging Asian power. One notable election was won in 2016 on the basis of having fair not free trade.

American policymakers are treading familiar ground—with familiar protectionist dilemmas.

Imagine the typical industry in dire need of government intervention to spare it from the onslaught of foreign imports. Perhaps the image which entered your mind is that of an antique industrial throwback languishing somewhere in the Rust Belt. Probably your last thought would be of the gleaming clean-rooms of Silicon Valley, the stronghold of the American semiconductor industry. Yet it is precisely that sector, often touted as America’s high-tech hope for prosperity into the next century, which has become the latest recipient of government protection from foreign competition.

Dorinda G. Dallmeyer, Maryland Journal of International Law (1989) “The United States-Japan Semiconductor Accord of 1986: the Shortcomings of High-Tech Protectionism”

One year after the Plaza Accord, Japan signed the 1986 U.S.–Japan semiconductor trade agreement. Japan was to end the alleged “dumping” of semiconductors in global markets, not just the United States. In an unprecedented move, Japan was forced to guarantee foreign firms a 20% share of the Japanese domestic semiconductor market within five years. By 1992, foreign producers made up 20.2% of the Japanese market. Whatever the agreement’s immediate impact, the trajectory of American semiconductor manufacturing, as was true of all manufacturing, continued to decline over the long run.

The heated debates over semiconductor export controls that began in the Biden Administration, arguing over which model of Nvidia GPU can or cannot be sold, are minuscule relative to the sweeping 1986 agreement, with an even lower likelihood of any long-term impact.

In any case, the debates are irrelevant. While there may be an interesting theoretical question about when to keep a competitor reliant on your goods and when to lock them out—incentivizing them to pursue indigenous production instead—the matter has been settled empirically. Biden’s formula of a “small yard and high fence”—of keeping advanced semiconductor technology among close allies—could not fence in Jensen Huang’s desire to sell as many GPUs as possible while he still can under Trump’s blessing.

The wonders of a free market system is that the government need not think about the future except in vague terms. But when that future becomes politically unpalatable—a threat to national security—the government is suddenly thrust into a web of decisions about where and how to direct fiscal-political attention, of balancing evolving situations in global supply and demand, encompassed by the once-dirty word “industrial policy.”

ALTHOUGH INDUSTRIAL POLICY conjures up images of building factories and large machinery with gears, it is really a game of elite mobilization. Grandpa Bessent’s “Greatest Generation” cohort were the cogs that built the war machine that smashed the Axis, but it was the post-Civil War generation before them, an “Eastern Establishment” of industrialists, engineers, and financiers who wielded their political power and imaginations to enrich themselves and make an industrial age possible.

The Eastern Establishment still exists.

In East Asia.

The Chinese state bureaucracy and connected enterprises are the modern-day equivalent of Vestal Virgins, diligently tending the hearth of industrialization so its fire never blows out. They worship a symbolic flame over its useful attributes like light or warmth because the priority of maintaining the process knowledge needed to make things is more important than the demand for the things made. It necessarily creates overcapacity, a burden for Chinese workers to sustain and for non-Chinese workers to compete with. But that is a tradeoff those elites are happy to make.

By comparison, popular American discourse on industrial policy sounds like the ravings of a cargo cult. They gnash their teeth and pray for the gods of industry to return to their rusting, empty shrines in the Midwest. They desire the goodies produced by an industrial economy, have no curiosity about the details of how things are made and only contempt toward the workers who make them.

When their prayers fail, they hope to summon a new god, the cult of AGI.

THE ADMINISTRATION OFTEN gestures at re-industrialization—the Liberation Day tariffs being one of them—and the existential need to do so. However, each action has been abandoned once it conflicted with a domestic political priority.

Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America is the largest economic development project in Georgia state history. It is planned to produce up to 500,000 electric and hybrid vehicles annually. It is very much an emblem of high technology. Yet its setup was marred by a massive immigration raid that detained 475 workers, including over 300 South Koreans. The footage of Korean engineers clapped in shackles, openly released by ICE, was perceived as a national humiliation in South Korean media. The White House never intervened.

The United States does retain its advantage over China in several critical areas: software, biotech, and AI, as well as in its university-driven innovation ecosystem. But these institutions face an uncertain future. Since returning to office, Trump has set about defunding scientific research and depriving the country of skilled labor. Government agencies are now scrutinizing top universities, including Harvard and Columbia, and yanking government grants and threatening to revoke universities’ tax-exempt status over exaggerated charges of anti-Semitism. The White House has slashed funding for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Meanwhile, Trump’s hostility toward immigrants has driven researchers who would come to the United States to look for positions at companies and universities elsewhere. Aggressive deportations are hurting America’s construction industry. The country simply has not set up its innovation ecosystem well for the years ahead.

Dan Wang and Arthur Kroeber, Foreign Affairs, “The Real China Model”

From a foreigner’s perspective, there are only two possibilities:

• The United States is not serious about the issues it claims to care about.

• The United States is not a serious country.

IN THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE, the titular apprentice (Mickey Mouse) gets tangled in a version of the halting problem: he knows enough magic to outsource his water-fetching duties to enchanted automation, but not enough to stop it. Unable to deal with the resulting overcapacity (which floods the building with liquidity) he is helpless until the old sorcerer returns to bail him out. In the original version of the story told by Goethe, the young trainee begs in German:

Bessent chose wisely when he selected Der Zauberlehrling as a parable for US-China relations.

America is not so much competing with China as it is, to paraphrase Wang Huning, a country at war with itself. She is a teenager who rebels against the economic order built by her parents to stabilize a war-torn world. China, on the other hand, sees American power as a real, concrete fact.

WHEN I THINK BACK TO April 2, 2025, it all feels like a fever dream.

Did that really happen?

Supporters of the Liberation Day tariffs can retroactively defend their position by pointing to the various substantive trade agreements achieved afterward.

It was a great negotiating tactic!

As for China, I do wonder when they will act on Bessent’s suggestion to pivot to domestic consumption. I suspect that Americans are not ready for the cultural impact of an unleashed Chinese middle class.

While I hesitate to assign victory or defeat to any particular country, I do see one clear outcome from the trade war. It unambiguously revealed the nature of the international system we now live in. For the first time, I know what it feels like to live in an economically interdependent world of great power competition dominated by the US-China rivalry.

“I think it was a big mistake, this Chinese escalation, because they’re playing with a pair of twos. What do we lose by the Chinese raising tariffs on us? We export one-fifth to them of what they export to us, so that is a losing hand for them.”

Scott Bessent, Interview on CNBC Squawk Box

Yes, China may hold a pair of twos. Yes, they may import far less from the US than what the US imports from them. But they’re not playing poker, they’re playing 大老二.

Or in English, Big Two.

In this emerging bipolar world, American policymakers like Bessent can choose to play with China for real—or they can continue to play themselves.

The Mamdanid Moment

I WATCHED LIVE as Zohran Mamdani faced the Washington press corps—hands clasped in front of him, President seated beside him, and head sweeping side-to-side to hide the thoughts inside him. Trump was about to begin the White House press conference.

Revisiting the scene brings me back to the day of my thesis defense. I was also on my laptop at the time, delivering my presentation via Zoom. After I had addressed each question from the thesis committee, I waited quietly in my room as they deliberated amongst themselves.

When I rejoined the call, they looked at me and I looked back at them, scanning their micro-expressions for a revelation. The mood of the group was sunny but hushed, as if I had walked in on an idle lunch-hour conversation midway through an anecdote. My advisor remained quiet and it was the most senior of the faculty who broke the silence.

“Thank you very much, we’ve just had a great meeting, a very productive meeting.”

Congratulations, Mamdani. You passed!

In retrospect, there may have been little to worry over. Mamdani was never going to lecture the President—as Putin did with the history of the Kyivan Rus’—or litigate long-standing political claims. There was much else to discuss and bond over. The two men shared interests in New York (both have institutional ties in Queens), many of the same enemies among Manhattan elites, and a hyper-fixation on groceries.

Minor notes of disagreement surfaced as Trump spoke further that were quickly subsumed in the collective warmth of the two men. The media, having positioned themselves in front-row seats for a demolition derby, settled for the flirtatious tones of bromantasy.

Ultimately, Mamdani had come to the capital to flatter its authority, not to conquer it. So had Charlemagne visited the Papacy in Rome and left a freshly anointed Christian Emperor. In wishing Mamdani well, Trump crowned the democratic socialist, eager to legitimate his hard-fought gains at the ballot box, as the rightful ruler of all-under-New-York, liberal and conservative. In an era that bemoans the nationalization of local politics, it was a rare instance of the municipalization of national politics.

The contradictions of the Mamdani-Trump meeting, when the mayor established his dual identity as being for all New Yorkers and an unapologetic democratic socialist and highlighted the possibility that municipal politics could serve a model for national politics, form the central themes of the Mamdanid Dynasty.

The Mamdate of Heaven

Mamdani’s declaration of a new era comes at a time of maximum flexibility for policy experimentation: a national decline in violent crime and inflation. Less crime provides a free hand and attention to focus on a primarily socioeconomic agenda. The trend of inflation will likely be volatile due to sensitivity to macro-economic factors, but the outlook remains stable. The Trump tariffs will decline as trade talks continue, with the renegotiation of the US-Mexico-Canada agreement in the offing. While we should expect tariff flareups in select sectors such as steel, semiconductors, and other advanced manufacturing goods, the overall tariff impact for a city like New York are likely to come down. The major costs of life remain in the non-tradeable sectors of housing, education, and care of various kinds (health-, child-, elder-), where Mamdani has policy levers to address.

I should note that inflation is distinct from affordability, the watchword of the campaign. While it is good when prices rise relatively less, consumers still grumble when prices remain absolutely high. It is difficult for prices to drop outright, short of unpalatable correctives like population decline and recession, especially when suppliers have far better algorithmic tools to secure pricing power against the consumer.

There is the possibility that the promise of affordability that won the campaign will break him once in office. The electoral defeat of various incumbents under cost-of-living pressures serves as a warning. The Biden regime failed to secure re-election even after passing the Inflation Reduction Act and other major social spending and industrial investments (CHIPS act) to support the economy.

One can imagine Mamdani-skeptics diligently tracking the prices of common New York commodities—the cost of halal, a cup of coffee—and declaring the failure of new reforms. But these bean-counting skeptics will, for the next two years at least, be wasting their time.

As the timing of Trump’s regime change in Venezuela reveals, bookended by the initial release of the Epstein and the upcoming midterm elections, the news flow will overwhelm the fine discussions of local policies in the popular imagination. We are entering a political environment that will be highly favorable to Mamdani’s popularity.

When the South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law to remain in power, the opposition leader (subsequently President), Lee Jae Myung livestreamed himself hopping over a fence and rallying the people to defend their democracy at the National Assembly. Mamdani has the same lyrical range of the protestor and policy ‘splainer. His populist persona, amplified by the first-class aesthetics of his social media and videographics team, will dominate the media landscape in turmoil.

Popularity is a fungible commodity. Polls show that voters perceive their economic outlook with a strong partisan bias. I don’t believe that they are purely irrational to do so: they are also pricing in the expected returns of (partisan) policies they happen to believe in. Politics is always future-oriented. During the election, we ask if we are better off now than we were four years ago. But when Americans are asked to dream, we can only think of tomorrow.

As such, New Yorkers are likely to ascribe all sorts of positive qualities to a popular, young, and handsome executive for essentially vibes-based reasons. One recalls the now outdated term Cuomosexual, which emerged when the once-governor projected a source of calm and principled opposition to the President amid generalized COVID chaos.

The Mamdani coalition is supported by the perfect mix of diehard supporters and haters. The faithful are drawn from expanding demographics. The Satmar askan Rabbi Moishe Indig, who controversially endorsed the anti-Israel mayor, observed the following:

“Rich developers called me to complain that Mamdani is going to ruin their business. Oddly, they’re more responsible for his election than I am. For years, major builders — a large percentage of them Jewish — have been constructing high-rise luxury apartment buildings in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope, and many similar areas. Families are priced out of these developments, and they are populated with hundreds of thousands of young, single, liberal hipsters — Mamdani voters.”

Mishpacha, The Kingmaker from Williamsburg

Even without dramatic change, a simple continuation of pro-housing policy under the previous Eric Adams administration (The City of Yes), has a positive flywheel effect for churning out new Mamdani volunteers. Supporters who, under the expectations of universal child care, may even consider having children to cement demographic gains.

Mamdani’s ability to turn out the most fanatical of haters with gratuitous references to Nelson Mandela and overwrought prose (“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”) will drown out legitimate, nuanced criticisms. As during the campaign, the adjective-laden Indian-Ugandan Muslim democratic socialist will be a lightning rod for various forms for race-, Islam-, and red-baiting along with hysterical forecasts of the financial collapse and authoritarian repression.

The political geography of New York, as the nexus of the global financial system and federal judicial system, among other things, ensures that Mamdani has the optionality (or burden) to choose what national issues to attach to. Two days after the inauguration, Maduro was airdropped into Brooklyn. Mamdani responded by phoning the President to oppose regime change in Venezuela, stepping into a spotlight that timid Democratic leadership would rather avoid. The attention will grow the network of Mamdani supporters nationally, as each discontented liberal ponders if anything, any small tweak of municipal governance, could be a spark for national renewal.

None of these factors ensures the success of Mamdani’s reforms, which will depend on their merits and the administration’s competence in execution. Popularity alone can be a double-edged sword. But he will at least not be blocked in trying things out.

Non-Binary

In our interviews, the mayor-elect conspicuously avoided acknowledging the kinds of basic trade-offs that are the DNA of the office he is about to assume. Does Mamdani want more affordable housing, or does he want affordable housing that is more expensive to build because it’s built with union labor? Does he want free infant–to–5-year-old child care, or does he want those child-care workers to be paid the $30 living wage he has proposed for the city? The answer is he wants both, he wants everything, he wants it all at once.

New York Magazine, The Making of Mayor Mamdani

The lion does not concern himself with the basic questions of sheep. Do you want A or B presupposes we are at a Pareto frontier where the marginal increase in A-ness necessitates a marginal decrease in B-ness. The question of the exact composition of union labor to non-union labor involved in home construction is the kind of messy, empirical, quantitative question to be hashed out in the real world and not set by the yes/no answer to a reporter’s question in a magazine. The lion’s strategic ambiguity of having it all gives his subordinates freedom to construct a future where a Pareto frontier is possible (to approach the scale of construction broached requires a degree of permitting reform that has yet to exist) and questions about fundamental trade-offs are relevant.

And if we don’t get there—if we do reach a point where the buses end up either fast or free rather than fast and free. Well, that partial victory invites continued dedication to do more rather than wholesale abandonment of the dream of a livable New York altogether.

In Dan Wang’s Breakneck, he explains modern China to the American reader in another basic dichotomy: the US as a lawyerly society and China as an engineering society. There is a literal sense in which this is true when one tallies the law degrees among American politicians and STEM degrees for their Chinese counterparts. In interviews, Wang localizes the distinction with American figures, contrasting the careful, socially-conscious, mixed-use urbanism of Jane Jacobs (or the protective environmental regime inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) to the brutish City Skylines juggernaut of Robert Moses. It should be no surprise that Mamdani places nowhere along this axis of elite classification. Where, in the accounting of educational credentials, does one pin a degree in Africana studies?

There is not much ideological consistency in Mamdani’s transition team and early Administration hires. There simply aren’t enough socialist officials to staff the entire government. Socialists remain a minority, dwarfed even by the number of non-socialist Progressives. Cognizant of the legacy of Milwaukee sewer socialism and having certainly read Walter Lippman’s correspondence On Municipal Socialism, he can draw on the tradition of socialism in governance, which is distinct from the experience of socialism in the legislature.

1. That votes cast for a candidate alone represent no strength for the

   movement.

2. That elections won on issues like graft, anti-Tammany, etc., etc., are mandates from the voters to clean out graft, not to strike at respectable

   privilege.

3. That the disgusted progressive vote represents no strength because

   it does not intend to stay with us on any essential issue.

4. That Socialists ought not, even if they could, go beyond the actual will of the constituency; that administrations elected by non-Socialists do owe allegiance to non-Socialist voters. …

   —Walter Lippmann, On Municipal Socialism: An Analysis of Problems and Strategies (1913)

A Mamdani society is a mobilization society. One of his first executive orders establishes the Office of Mass Engagement under the command of erstwhile field-marshal Tascha Van Auken. The continued mobilization of the young, aspirational, and asset-poor collected over the course of two punishing campaigns represents a vision of participatory democracy outside the imagination of an arthritic lawyerly society, where community boards have long ossified into obstacles of obstruction.

Presiding over left-wing technocracy with populist characteristics requires a delicate balance at the top. For all the accusations of Mamdani being a Third-Worldist, his core identity is fundamentally Binitarian, as proclaimed at his coronation and re-emphasized at his inauguration on New Year’s day.

“And while only action can change minds, I promise you this: If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.”

…

“We will govern without shame and insecurity, making no apology for what we believe. I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist.”

Zohran Mamdani, Inauguration ceremony speech

Mamdani exists in two persons, co-equally a democratic socialist and co-equally a mayor for all New Yorkers. He is a radical while his municipal agenda is not. As a young executive he will be uncompromising on his ambitions while seeking out the dissent of citizens older than him.

That is everything you need to understand about the Mamdanid Era.

Coda

There was a brief moment at the end of the general mayoral election when Mamdani finally responded to the ridiculous levels of 9/11 terrorism hysteria thrown his way. Looking to Obama’s speech on race as a guide, he recorded an address for Muslim New Yorkers that was very much directed at himself:

“There are twelve days remaining until Election Day.

I will be a Muslim man in New York City each of those twelve days, and every day that follows after that.

I will not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith that I am proud to call my own.

But there is one thing that I will change. I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light.”

My Message to Muslim New Yorkers— and Everyone Who Calls This City Home

For Mamdani-skeptics, the risk is that the young mayor will govern the city poorly and bankrupt it as a logical necessity of his ideology. But the real risk is when Mamdani governs well in any capacity. Because that would inject a new strain of optimism within municipal politics: an understanding that the streets of a city, where the people work and play, are open as a domain of political competition. This is not a theatre in which policy memos or concentrated money play well. Moreover, if Mamdani found himself in the light, who will stop the other Mamdanis from stepping into theirs? The bell cannot be unrung.

“In writing this address, I have been told that this is the occasion to reset expectations, that I should use this opportunity to encourage the people of New York to ask for little and expect even less. I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations.

Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.

To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this: No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.”

Happy New Year! Long live the Mamdanid Dynasty!

As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!

KPOP DEMON HUNTERS is the story of a holy war against the devil, embodied by a talking flame named Gwi-ma. The devil's servants, which take the likenesses of traditional Korean monsters, cross the border between the human and demon realms with impunity in order to harvest souls for their master. It is all-out spiritual warfare in the Korean folk tradition with a Christian resonance.

The demons are kept at bay by three female demon hunters—the film’s protagonists Rumi, Mira, and Zoey—who fight as the generations of women hunters before them did, by singing and wielding edged weapons. The trio expect to be the last to carry out this legacy once the construction of the Golden Honmoon is complete. This barrier, the supernatural analogue of American’s planned Golden Dome, would permanently wall off the demon realm. It is left unclear whether the Honmoon’s coverage extends beyond the demilitarized zone into the northern half of the Korean peninsula, which remains unpenetrated by K-pop outside of propagandistic broadcasts by the South Korean military across the 38th parallel.

As its title would suggest, the film is both a musical and action movie. Music is absolutely central to the plot. The Honmoon is not built from concrete and steel but sung into place by the voices of the film's protagonists, who form the idol group HUNTR/X (pronounced Huntrix). The structural integrity of the spiritual barrier is woven from the collective strength of the HUNTR/X's global devotees, the young and the old who attend the group’s concerts, keep up with their variety show appearances, and post about them on social media. The more the shinier. As it were, the movie’s entire plot is encoded within the lyrics of the main song “Golden,” which appears, innocuously enough, early on in the narrative when the group releases the single as their newest smash hit.

Just as The Lego Movie rendered the amateur stop-motion YouTube videos I watched as a kid (and aspired to make with my own kit) into a professionalized art, the delightful animated visuals of KPop Demon Hunters are an equally smart realization of K-pop’s aesthetics. Its choices of character design, choreography, and editing are so in tune with the source material. So well that it covers up the conspicuous absence of what is perhaps the most salient element of the genre.

The lives of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey are untouched by that unavoidable feature of idol culture, the hyper-sexualization of young women. Although they do tend more girl-pretty than boy-pretty, the protagonists aren’t unsexy. Rumi is pretty, Mira is cool, and Zoey is cute—each in ways that are fully in line with conventional Korean standards of beauty. But the nature of their animation is such that the manner in which the girls shapeshift and carry themselves across the screen is vastly more interesting than how we might rank them on attractiveness as actual people. The issue of raw sexual appeal never really shows up in the story, except in the brief appearances of Abby, a rival boy-band member named so for his buttered, corn-cob abs (Fig. 1), as a fun gag about the female gaze.

Equally absent is any direct mention of the seamier side of K-pop stardom, such as the lobotomization and self-censorship required to maintain a devout following, along with flagrant child abuse. This is hinted at when HUNTR/X’s guardian, a retired ex-demon hunter named Celine, counsels them about “hiding faults and fears,” a veiled reference about maintaining the perception of perfection above all. But Mira and Zoey never take her seriously. Only Rumi does, which precipitates the major crisis of the plot, when HUNTR/X disintegrates right as the demons gain the upper hand after deploying the Saja Boys, a rival demonic K-pop boy-band. Rumi is herself half-demon, the offspring of the union between a demon hunter and demon that is never explained. Celine knows and forces Rumi to hide this fact from from her groupmates. This is a stupid idea because the tell-tale signs of a demon are fairly obvious, an outbreak of geometric patterns all over the skin. When Mira and Zoey inevitably see the pattern on her body, interpreting it as a symbol of betrayal and resulting in the untimely breakup of HUNTR/X, the careworn Celine suggests that Rumi psy-op her friends by blaming the apparent pattern on demons playing tricks with their minds. Rumi snaps back at Celine’s lack of credibility and embarks on a more sensible path to get the band back together again.

Just as the psychologically shattered Mira and Zoey march to their doom—drawn by the croons of the Saja Boys towards humanity’s last concert, a final harvest of souls hosted by the now-unopposed Gwi-ma at Namsan Tower—Rumi rides to their rescue.

She sings their hit single “Golden,” reminding her friends of the importance of redemption as a universalist value. It is an uplifting hymn to individualism—freedom from the arbitrary expectation of the outside world—and a call to collective action based on that universal insight. In short, every other hit pop song.

These utterances reconstitute the trinity of HUNTR/X, and the exorcism of Legion commences as all demons are put to the sword. The sole exception is the lead member of the Saja Boys, a handsome demon named Jinoo who served as Rumi’s fleeting love interest. In the final battle, he is released from his pitiable 400-year existence of sin when he sacrifices himself to protect Rumi from Gwi-ma’s fiery blast, another reminder about personal redemption.

As a work of fiction, KPop Demon Hunters is a fairly typical feel-good story, with some added cultural significance as a high watermark of South Korea’s intergenerational struggle to attain soft power abroad.

But it is a rarity in modern media in that it is also a utopian fantasy.

Instead of exposing the grittiness of K-pop in a Netflix documentary format, tearing into the “problematic” elements that all fans of the genre are aware of to some extent, KPop Demon Hunters became Netflix’s most watched movie in history by daring to describe an aspirational vision.

The girls ultimately win the day by focusing on doing their job and ignoring everything else. They save Korea by writing lyrics well, singing well, and dancing well. They are punished when they stray from these imperatives. Their enemies, the Saja Boys, fight them on the same grounds: concocting their own bops in order to erode the Honmoon by converting HUNTR/X devotees into Saja cultists. In this universe, the industry politics of sex and self factor very little. It is a universe in which an unalienated existence dedicated to the craft of music is both possible and rewarded as the highest of ends. It is a universe where even in its worst catastrophe, Korea overrun by demons, pop music is about pop music.

It’s a message best carried by the vocalists who sing for the characters—Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami—lesser-known talents at the periphery of the K-pop industrial complex who are now catapulted to its core. As they navigate newfound fame, they will undoubtedly look to the lives of the as-of-yet fictional characters who carried them as a blueprint for the world to come.

Eric Adams, a man who never encountered a bribe too small to take, racked up scandals like they were in-game achievements. While his supporters could look the other way as he leveled up in municipal politics, the Department of Justice could not. With only about a year left in his first mayoral term, Adams was indicted on federal criminal charges in September 2024.

The mayor of New York City has always been a popular punching bag, but the now-indicted Adams was a proper piñata. With doubts as to whether he could simultaneously juggle a political and a legal campaign, the race to replace Gotham’s chief executive soon became crowded as every official rushed to get their blows in.

The highest-profile of these opportunists was former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a man who never saw an opportunity he didn’t want to grab with his Italian-sausage fingers. Cuomo’s entry into the Democratic mayoral primary left little choice but for Adams to withdraw from that race. Given the overlap in their voter bases, Adams was better off competing as an independent in the melee of a multi-way general election later in November.

It was a wise choice.

Cuomo ended up badly mauled by a state assemblyman whose unfamiliar surname, Mamdani, was one he initially struggled to pronounce.

Mamdani handily won Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, and took a hungry bite out of his opponent’s margin in Staten Island. Some of his best precincts lay in the so-called Commie Corridor of Western Queens and North Brooklyn. East Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Ridgewood put up Ba’athist numbers, showering Mamdani with 80%-90% of the vote. The Bangladeshi community did not disappoint, forming another corridor along Hillside Avenue. Asian communities as a whole tightly embraced Mamdani, as did Latinos to a lesser extent. Irregular voters who had opted for Trump over Harris switched allegiances again. The youth—to also include what passes as “young” when it comes to voting in off-year primary elections—mobilized in droves for Mamdani across all demographics. As more analysis comes out, we are likely to see that they managed to drag some of their elders along as well.

Despite the campaign’s relatively simple message on affordability, the breadth of Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory has come to represent a referendum on the Democratic party establishment as a whole, rather than the comparably petty drama between big men.

And the party has no one to thank but Cuomo for being dragged reluctantly into this proxy war.

In a sense, Cuomo was an anti-establishment candidate. Like Mamdani, his intention was to subordinate incumbent political forces to his will in service of a new political vision. It was also a straightforward program, the normalization of relations between Cuomo and the Democratic party.

Four years ago, Cuomo had resigned in universal disgrace. Like Adams, he had attracted the wrong type of federal and state attention, most viscerally by sexually harassing 13 women and understating nursing home deaths during the pandemic.

Yet many of the voices who had called on him to resign then also backed him for mayor now—comprising over 40% of his top endorsements. They played along with his redemption tour, as Cuomo trod the customary itinerary of union halls and churches with all the enthusiasm of a remote worker badging in to the office. They continued to do so even when the mayoral debates revealed no sense of contrition or humility at returning to public service. #MeToo turned me first.

They were trapped, caught in the sub-optimal outcome of the same version of coordination game that blew up in the Biden succession crisis. Had there been a shadowy cabal of party bosses to intervene, Cuomo could have been cajoled or coerced to step aside for someone else who wanted the job as more than a reputation laundry service.

The tortured predicament for city Democratic elites was best summarized by the editorial board of the New York Times. Having vowed to no longer endorse in local elections, they instead offered “Our Advice to Voters in a Vexing Race for New York Mayor.”

Given those polls, however, the crucial choice may end up being where, if at all, voters decide to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Mamdani. We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.

I certainly know of one person who took the editorial board’s advice to heart. He wrote in his own name 5 times on his ranked-choice ballot:

1. Eric Adams

2. Eric Adams

3. Eric Adams

4. Eric Adams

5. Eric Adams

So when Mamdani won, even Cuomo had very little hesitation in conceding reality (while still leaving open his shot at trying again in the general election melee in November).

Congratulations rolled in from all corners, local, national, and international.

Congratulations to Zohran Mamdani on a big victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, and to all of the Democrats across the ballot who prevailed tonight.

Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee

One also wonders if the editorial board of the New York Times was secretly relieved at the result. I hope they find peace.

Psaki: “Both Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, obviously two Democratic leaders, have had some, I guess, nice things to say, I could describe them as, about you, but didn't endorse you and still haven't endorsed you almost 24 hours after Andrew Cuomo called you to concede. Why do you think that is?”

Mamdani: “Well, I appreciated both of their remarks, both their acknowledging of the focus of this campaign on affordability and also with Senator Schumer having worked with him closely to deliver close to half of $1 billion in debt relief for thousands of working class taxi drivers, as well as successfully defeat a proposal to build a fracked gas power plant in my district of Astoria in Western Queens. And I think what we are seeing in this moment is an understanding of the mandate that New Yorkers have given us to deliver on this affordability, and also the fact that we will wait a few more days to see the actual final results of this. Although we know that we have won this race even without the assistance of ranked choice voting.”

Psaki: “I don’t think endorsements win elections necessarily. There’s not a lot of proof of that in history. But do you want their support? Do you not care if they come out and forcefully endorse you?”

Mamdani: “I want their support and I want the support of any leader across this city and this state and this country, because ultimately, what we are looking to show New Yorkers is the fact that this is an ever expanding coalition. It’s not one that is trying to keep tabs of when people join this fight…”

Jen Psaki interview with Zohran Mamdani, MSNBC

Prodded by Psaki, the presumptive Democratic nominee retained his grace without renouncing his pugilism. It was Cuomo who dragged the party into what was meant to be an Adams-Mamdani matchup. Now Mamdani was not going to let them go without normalizing relations between him and the party.

It is a delicate balance, as the practical benefits of party affiliation are to be in it but not of it.

On the eve of the election, the veteran city journalist Errol Louis wrote:

But whose fault is it that this talented young man, like so many other newcomers, ended up affiliated with far-left organizations? Did any of the people and institutions now howling for Mamdani’s disqualification consider taking seriously the calls from disaffected liberals to help lower the cost of living for working families? Did their army of consultants and lobbyists consider building relationships with the firebrands we all knew were destined to seek higher office some day?

The Queens Democratic organization, long closed to new blood, got toppled by Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 defeat of the party’s chairman, Representative Joe Crowley, but has continued to discourage young upstarts like Tiffany Cabán, who in 2019 came within 60 votes of winning the primary for district attorney but has settled in as a productive, progressive member of the City Council.

Errol Louis, New York Magazine, The Political Class Is Responsible for the Man They’re Trying to Stop

Asking whose fault it is for fumbling Mamdani implies that the man could have had an easier time on a more traditional career path. It implies a certain separation between the ideological journey he followed and the quest for power to satiate it.

As a rule, generational political talent does not come from typical places and faces different selection pressures.

Across several vast stretches of Brooklyn, one could literally walk for miles without passing a single precinct with less than a dozen contributors to Zohran Mamdani.

Michael Lange, Zo-mentum

Mamdani was the first candidate to hit the fundraising cap of $8 million. He recruited an army of volunteers 50,000-strong to knock on 1.5 million doors in a race with a turnout of around 1 million votes. This would be impossible without access to the networks he had built up with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), especially in the geographic core of the Commie Corridor. His media and message were crafted with political operatives drawn from the ecosystem of the “competent left” who he won over with his personality.

“I left thinking, I love this man. And I am supposed to be skeptical. What is going to happen when the rest of New York gets to know him?” (Morris Katz of Fight Agency)

David Freedlander, New York Magazine, How Zohran Wins

In the era of job-hopping and polyworking, non-traditional career paths are the norm for impatient people. Winning the primary on expert mode, as a Twelver Shia Muslim democratic socialist with strong views on Palestine running in New York City, suggests that for those talented enough, the world really is a meritocracy.

One cannot help but draw parallels to another generational political talent who transcended his politically-untouchable ideological affiliation by focusing relentlessly on rebuilding state capacity to improve the livelihood of normal people.

Eventually, the person that you are can always shine through the person they expect you to be.

I DON’T BELIEVE IN KARMA as a useful framework for analysis. The concept of cosmic justice is as fleeting as the constellations of the night sky. The Three Sisters that formed Orion’s Belt were once a string of pearls (Al Niṭhām). The universe is as beautifully ambivalent to human names as it is to human suffering.

Nevertheless, Nature has certain preferences.

It abhors vacuums.

Most reliably of all, it punishes overreach.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and a shortage of bricks. Humanitarian interventions where aspirations are unmatched by means leave a long and bitter aftertaste. Conversely, the road to a less awful world can sometimes be paved by evil intentions, when the lucre of drug smuggling distracts from the core project of bricklaying.

I am, of course, describing the now-collapsing edifice that formed a key part of Islamic Republic of Iran’s national security strategy: the constellation orbiting Iran known as the Axis of Resistance (Mihwar al-Muqawama).

The concept of an AoR is sound—even clever—offering benefits to both Iran and its partners (which others refer to as proxies because only Americans have partners).

Modern Iran has suffered a succession of foreign adversaries. There was the Anglo-American coup that overturned the nascent parliamentary system to return to a purer form of autocracy. The newly empowered Pahlavi dynasty was as disgustingly out of touch as its descendants are today, who thrive on the cursed social media cesspit of contemporary Iranian monarchism.

Then there was the Iraqi invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was flush with Soviet kit and did not hesitate to deploy chemical weapons manufactured with the help of the French. Iran survived the initial onslaught by stocking the majority of their arsenal from Israel and fought the Iraqis to a stalemate.

Israel would shift from arms supplier to nemesis, as the Jewish state and Islamic republic locked horns in a multi-generational struggle into the present day.

Iran was always outgunned in these exchanges. Prior to the Iranian-Saudi détente mediated by China, it also had to worry about the near-infinite capacity of the Gulf States to procure American matériel. Naturally, the Islamic republic sought out creative strategies to distill military capability from the heft of its diverse population and geography. And to do so without the attritional trade of Iranian life that characterized the brutal eight years of the Iran-Iraq War seared in collective memory.

Other than diplomacy, there were three relatively cheap ways to get around using Iranian life and Iranian treasure.

First, it would invest heavily in indigenous production of missiles and drones, leveraging its population and industrial base to achieve deterrence and gain hard currency for export to buy what else was missing. North Korean technical knowhow helped with developing this supply chain.

Second, it would export its revolutionary ideology abroad. While demand for an Iranian-style guardianship system of Wilayat al-Faqih fell after the heady years of 1978 to 1979, respect for Iranian leadership persisted. (Despite the historical percolation of Persian innovations in the region, somehow no one quite saw the idea of grafting a council of austere Islamic jurists onto a mix of normal and revolutionary government institutions in an ersatz version of checks-and-balances.) It was one of the rare Shi’a powers to survived, a consequence of the Safavid dynasty’s zeal for forced conversion following Shah Ismail I’s decision in 1501. Iran holds many of the key shrines and centers of Shi’a learning, despite the foundational importance of Iraq as the site of the battle of Karbala.

In a region where minority sects (Shi’a or otherwise) were dominated numerically and often brutally, Iran seemed a welcoming patron. (One can draw a parallel with the mix of secular and religious Jewish yearning for Israel.) In exchange, Iran could tap into a large pool of non-Iranian life to outfit with its newly-manufactured missiles and drones. Under the management of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (one of those weird constructions in Iran’s strange game of checks-and-balances to coup-proof the regime), mostly notably by Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s elite Quds force, this strategy would blossom into the Axis of Resistance.

The span of the AoR was genuinely impressive, winning Soleimani splashy covers on Time magazine. During the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, Iraqi insurgents killed hundreds of US soldiers with Iranian-made EFPs. In 2019, the Yemeni movement Ansar Allah (known better as the Houthis) torched Saudi oil fields in Abqaiq with Iranian-made drones, culminating in a Iranian-Saudi détente that ended concern over Gulf state military spending for good. The AoR was diverse, including an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood based in Palestine, the Sunni organization Hamas, as well as a multiplicity of smaller militias (distinctly identifiable by variations of a hand holding up the same Kalashnikov rifle in their flag).

I will note one particular group, the Afghan Hazara Shia militia Liwa Fatemiyoun. The Hazara are heavily persecuted in Afghanistan at the hands of all its other ethnic groups for being Shi’a in a staunchly Sunni country They suffered horribly under Taliban rule, and there is something particularly sad when I spot Hazara fighters in some forlorn corner of the Axis of Resistance frontier far from home.

Finally, Iran appeared* to be developing* a nuclear weapon* (Many asterisks apply to each word in this sentence). Whether or not one believes that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei stands by his fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons, the careful cleric never clarified whether the development of a such a weapon is haram. A minimal nuclear deterrent, halal or not, serves as a shortcut to military parity for a heavily sanctioned and sputtering economy.

The three prongs of Iranian security strategy are thoughtful, careful, and importantly, rational. If ideology appears, it is as an organizing principle to rally the diverse members of the AoR. Even then, members deal with each other out of similarly sober realpolitik, faced by hostile domestic rivals or outgunned by conventional adversaries.

The problem lies when a rational idea is driven too far.

When Soleimani died, he was assassinated by the hand of a gauche American president who had no patience for the delicate displays of calibrated hostility that the IRGC commander was fond of. Until then, the US and Iran had both traded off the lives of AoR foot soldiers like pawns. Iran could prod a militia to hit an American base to signal its displeasure at some development. The US would reply by hitting back with some rough formula for proportionality. If one zooms out wide enough, there is a beautiful rationality there, a pure form of political violence. In perfect play, no Americans or Iranians die.

Soleimani’s death was a grim warning that this strategically elegant consensus might not hold indefinitely. A warning that ultimately went unheeded.

The jewel of the AoR is (or was) Hezbollah, which had grown out of the various Shi’a parties and parties, notably the Amal movement, who had opposed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. At Iran’s request, it backed Bashar al-Assad in the decades-long Syrian Civil War. Hezbollah hemorrhaged its own personnel to murder and torture Syrians. The intervention heavily weakened the militia while exposing itself to penetration by Israeli intelligence.

When the time came to fight Israel again, Hezbollah trusted Iran to orchestrate the tempo of its military response with delicate diplomacy. The Israelis, who were even less patient than Trump and thoroughly annoyed with Biden, showed no such restraint and opted to dismantle the organization.

The only thing more funny than Hezbollah’s subsequent failure has been that of Bashar al-Assad who—during the entire war since October 7th up to the collapse of the Ba’athist carcass of a state that was the late Syrian Arab Republic—failed to lift a finger to provide any tangible benefit to the AoR. Syria simply existed as a road to ferry the production of Iranian factories into Lebanese hands and occasionally eat Israeli munitions.

At the end of its life, Assadist Syria was a narcostate that mobilized its pharmaceutical industry to spread captagon across the Middle East. Similarly, Hezbollah’s crowning international achievement was its role in the Latin America drug trade.

The only AoR partners that understood the original assignment, the R in AoR, has been the Houthi movement in Yemen, who after scrapping with the Saudis in 2019 gleefully antagonizes American carrier groups in 2025, and Hamas.

The failure of the AoR has little to do with them being “bad guys.” Had they stuck together as a rag-tag band of rogue-ish entities exchanging arms and personnel, they would have been fine.

They erred when they thought that flesh could purchase empire, that they could afford regime change in Syria and maintain an asymmetric footing with the US. The elites of the failed AoR partners, who fully understood the bargain and cashed in on the Iranian largesse from delivering warm non-Iranian bodies, are the ones who imagined they could indefinitely milk resistance cachet and access to arms for alternate entrepreneurial pursuits.

It is a familiar story of ambitions reaching far beyond means, the failure of imperialism falling under its own weight. Overreach is always tested, and here by the hand of the Israeli military.

The hardline military leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, likely understood the problems of this arrangement better than most. By launching the Oct 7th attack and provoking their common adversary of Israel, Sinwar inverted the bargain and yoked the survival of the Iranian state to the possibility of a Palestinian homeland.

As Iranian power wanes, what is the legacy of the AoR, having managed to sow bitterness everywhere it has ransacked? It delivered one gift, the proliferation of drones and missile development and manufacturing as a cost-effective means of catching up in a heavily militarized region. This is the enduring consequence of Iranian dominance for which residents of the Axis partners can be grateful for.

How they use that is up to them now.

Corollary and Addendum:
If you pick a multi-generational fight to deny millions of people basic political autonomy, you really should be prepare to be tested at some point. That goes for non-AoR powers as well.

APPALACHIA is as much a geographic region as it is a cultural region of America. As one observer put it:

If ethnicity is one side of the coin, then geography is the other. When the first wave of Scots-Irish immigrants landed in the New World in the eighteenth century, they were deeply attracted to the Appalachian Mountains. This region is admittedly huge—stretching from Alabama to Georgia in the South to Ohio to parts of New York in the North—but the culture of Greater Appalachia is remarkably cohesive. My family, from the hills of eastern Kentucky, describe themselves as hillbillies, but Hank Williams, Jr.—born in Louisiana and an Alabama resident—also identified himself as one in his rural white anthem “A Country Boy Can Survive.” It was Greater Appalachia’s political reorientation from Democrat to Republican that redefined American politics after Nixon. And it is in Greater Appalachia where the fortunes of working-class whites seem dimmest. From low social mobility to poverty to divorce and drug addiction, my home is a hub of misery.

James David Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

Whereas other geographic regions of America have been reconstituted as cultural symbols, Appalachia remains firmly rooted in its sense of place. The American West was long won; the Atlantic and Pacific Seaboards consolidated into coastal elites; and the Midwest cemented as the vague moral center of the American universe. But the sound of Appalachia, with the lach pronounced like latch, still feels real.

Blessed by coal and kissed by despair, Appalachia is the Donbas of America. Their parallel histories bear the scars of exploitation over centuries, with the resentment of metropolitan DC and Kyiv a common motif. And their mutual fortunes have always been yoked to the global flow of commodities: Appalachia struck its coal boom before the Donbas did, while the latter drew the ill fortune of experiencing the opioid crisis first.

Meteliuk: Ukraine’s high rate of HIV is mostly driven by injection drug use. We had a huge epidemic of opioid drug use in Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Ukraine was in the middle of drug trafficking routes from Afghanistan to European countries, but lots of drugs stayed in the country, leading to a dramatic increase in opioids and injection drug use.

Before the 2014 conflict, the Donbas area—which is the Donetsk and Luhansk regions—and Crimea were responsible for almost one-third of all patients taking opioid agonist therapies in Ukraine. Those are highly drug-using regions because they border Russia, and at that time, most of the drugs we had in the country were coming from Russia. So those areas were responsible for a large share of opioid treatment patients in general.

Interview with Anna Meteliuk and Danielle Ompad, How War Worsened the Opioid Crisis in Ukraine

In Ukraine, drug addiction fades into the background amid so many wartime crises facing the country. While in the United States, the issue of opioid deaths has maintained its relevance in part by serving as a visceral justification for new politics of immigration and foreign policy.

Although overdoses have declined from their peak, the matter remains shameful. In a supposedly rich nation—the richest of them all—it is a bitter pill to swallow, when walking past a listless body lain about some Main Street downtown or driving by a decrepit house in the holler, to know that these belong to fellow human beings.

The toll of addicts strain the families and communities that still love them, and their loss tests the fierce independent values of Appalachia with its mistrust of outside intervention in a most macabre fashion.

We can no longer suffer gradualist approaches to the issue. There is no guarantee that economic or social developments can heal the situation in time, not when the scars become generational. It is a rolling catastrophe of which current measures of public assistance are unable to reverse.

Who is left to help?

Any industrialist, foreign or domestic, who might otherwise salivate at the prospect of hiring a ripe cohort of non-college-educated youth, is kept away by the self-fulfilling expectation that them young’uns can’t hold down a steady job. The returns on investing in such a blighted area seem even worse when the existing infrastructure throughout the region remains abysmal.

This leaves only the state. The history of major federal interventions in Appalachia has long been intertwined with national security interests. A dam along the Tennessee River was first authorized under the National Defense Act of 1916 signed by Woodrow Wilson. FDR then expanded the dam network under the New Deal with the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which drafted the mighty waters of the Tennessee to feed the ravenous appetite for electricity required to process strategic elements of aluminum and uranium (into plutonium).

Yet even the state may be leery of taking on this economic transformation. The current mood is to reduce federal deficits, not expand them. The uncertain returns seem even less palatable when there are far more remunerative projects with existing political coalitions in support of them: re-armament, re-shoring semiconductor manufacturing, and renewable energy. Even strumming the heartstrings of the liberal international rules-based order fails to resonate nowadays. Ukraine is coerced to pawn its mineral rights so that it may continue in its existential war in support of American and European security interests.

Where the transactional eye of big business and the state have glazed over, I still retain the faith in egalitarianism inherited from our founding. I believe the young Appalachian is no lesser than any of their counterparts elsewhere in the nation. Their resourcefulness has kept them alive for generations while them jaspers (outsiders) looked down from on high.

There is only one way to force incumbent business and political interests to see the same value I see in my fellow Americans. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), the Appalachian Region supported a population of 26.4 million in 2022. (For reference, Ukraine’s population was 41 million in 2022.) In crude dollar terms, should we value one human life at a meager $27,878.79, the Appalachian people would be an asset worth $1 trillion! This would be worth far more than any realistic assessment of the total mineral rights in Greenland and Ukraine combined!

The most expedient path to realizing this value is to look back to that peculiar institution of our history. Thus, I propose that we task ARC with re-introducing chattel slavery in the Appalachian region. The financial structure will be as follows. Initially, the newly enslaved will be owned by the state. However, the slaves will be auctioned competitively to private interests, who can more efficiently allocate their labor. This will avoid the main flaw of Southern slavery, the entrenchment of a sclerotic agrarian economy, as opposed to the North’s advanced industrial model.

1. At the outset, capitalizing the human reserve onto the Treasury’s balance sheet will reduce the need to issue bonds to fund the initiative, avoiding disruptions to the bond and currency markets.

2. As the auctions proceed, the government may even stand to gain from any price appreciation.

Amid an ongoing labor shortage, the timely reintroduction of slavery will supply the labor needed for aforementioned projects of re-armament, re-shoring semiconductor manufacturing, and renewable energy.

1. This will show to the world that our can-do Appalachian slaves are any less capable than their international counterparts, rekindling American greatness.

2. Appalachian slaves can also be transported out of the region, if need be, to address labor shortages elsewhere, such as in seasonal agricultural labor. This obviates the need for immigrant labor to fill these niches, a sore point of contention in domestic politics.

3. Appalachia is strategically located near key sources of hydroelectricity, natural resources, transport nodes, and vital cities, making it attractive to businesses seeking slaves.

There are myriad benefits to enslaved communities.

1. Slaves are liberated from a precarious life revolving around substance abuse and public assistance to enjoy the solid education and dignity of work.

2. To prevent the abuse of minors, the offspring of slaves must report to public or private education institutions, until they reach working age (15 or older, as varies by state law) and may then appreciate the dignified fruits of labor.

3. Tourism has been one of the few economic bright spots in the region, driving a boom in the short-term rental market that has persisted after Covid. Slavery would provide a vital workforce to develop real estate and reinvest these gains into local communities.

While this may sound to some like a radical proposal, the reintroduction of slavery is the most direct, expedient, and humane proposal to address the issue of economic blight and deaths of despair in the very heart of our country. No other alternative is feasible in our current political and economic climate. For example, some have suggested raising taxes on tax-dodging multinationals to fund regional economic development and healthcare, along with a more robust tax enforcement regime. No sane Administration would ever consider this if they wished to remain in office. In regards to labor and trade, the most sensible-sounding measures involve immigration reform and coordinating with allies to enact a nuanced industrial policy, one that address the United States’ strategic deficits in manufacturing while maintaining its international alliances in a stable regime of subsidies and tariffs. While such policies would theoretically promote overall economic growth, lending the government a free hand for social spending, there is no institutional capacity left in the state to enact any measure more sophisticated than a Hallmark card. The slavery proposal only requires the cooperation of the Treasury (and the potentially the Fed), which remain the only functioning agencies of our current government, and places the rest of the burden on the ever-efficient private sector to allocate slave labor.

The only significant challenge is the Thirteenth Amendment, which explicitly states:

The simplest remedy would be to enact draconian laws on drug possession. With the advent of sophisticated surveillance technology, it should not be difficult to incriminate family members who refuse to turn in their loved ones as abetting drug felonies. Conceptually, this circumvents the major constitutional obstacle posed by the Thirteenth Amendment by reducing it to many small criminal cases against individuals. This may turn out to be difficult to scale, if opponents abuse the due process protections in the court system.

The more certain remedy is to abolish the Thirteenth Amendment entirely by amending the Constitution. Business interests can be relied upon to press Republican legislators to vote for abolition. Democratic legislators can also be enticed by ensuring that Appalachian slaves, which vote by large margins for Republicans, will be disenfranchised. This ensures survival of a weak Democratic party that may still hobble on in relevance as it solidifies its electoral control of the key swing state of Pennsylvania. The red state of West Virginia is also taken off the map entirely, along with small red chunks of Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. To sweeten the deal, Appalachian slaves can be counted as 60% of a person when apportioning House seats during redistricting.

Should the above remedies fail, procedures may be developed to systematically strip the citizenship of Appalachians. A coup may even be plotted to stage the secession of Appalachia, which would be governed by private interests after its reconquest by federal authorities. By the Alien and Sedition Acts, non-citizens may legally be detained to work as slaves. Since if they refuse to work, they would constitute a threat to national security by worsening the labor shortage required in America’s strategic manufacturing sector.

DISCLOSURE: I PROFESS IN THE SINCERITY OF MY HEART, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no Appalachian relative or friend, by which I can propose to get a single penny; or trade to advance in a career of public service.

THE PREFERENCE OF TIME is said to vary among peoples. This is one of those nuggets of sociology, like the collectivism/individualism distinction, where the facial truth of it seems obvious but any attempts to extract usefulness from it seem dubious. In its current form, time-preference is akin to the “Protestant work ethic,” a concept more likely to be passed on as historiography rather than scientific study.

Studies based on survey data show that the use of futureless [weak future time reference (weak-FTR)] languages, which grammatically associate the future and the present, tends to correlate with more future-oriented behavior on the part of people and organizations. Thus, for example, across and within countries, speakers of such languages save more, retire with more accumulated wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, are less obese, and care more about the environment.

Ian Ayres, Tamar Kricheli, and Tali Regev. “Languages and future-oriented economic behavior—Experimental evidence for causal effects,” PNAS 120 (7)

So if I may offer my own unscientific theory of time and culture, without any pretense at a serious analytical framework.

Success at business requires all three.

To grow a business, one requires consistent compounding in exponential time.

To survive, one never forgets the boom and bust cycle.

To raise capital from venture capitalists, one becomes fluent in the millenarian terms of network effects and platform dominance that are realized once t = ∞.

Winners fixate on exponential time. Losers find solace in cyclic time. Both relish the moral clarity of end times.

Riding high, the Republican establishment imagines that they have a mandate to axe Pax Americana. To hew an international order that is rigged in favor of American interests to instead serve parochial grievances. All of the adherents of MAGA placed in various policy domains, Bessent in Treasury, Hegseth and Waltz in national security, and RFK Jr. in health and human services, were confirmed in party-line votes , putting to bed any notion of a separation between establishment and insurgent.

In the opposite corner, the Democratic establishment expects to reap gains in the upcoming midterm elections. They, along with prestige political media, are fond of the word “shellacking,” the insight that the consequence of taking any substantive action is always electoral loss.

They are both correct—within their respective dimensions of time

Even if they are quickly reversed, the massive disruptions to the federal government under DOGE, from as pettifogging a move to shutter call centers for social security, are perfectly tailored to antagonize old people, federal employees, and all the demographics that turn out in midterm elections.

But perhaps, it will play out differently this time. So thinks every challenger candidate in a low-turnout election who has found themselves wishing for a groundswell of supporters to materialize at the eleventh-hour on election day. It is almost always a losing bet. Such is the beauty of voting. That what seems like the whims of the rabble are actually, in aggregate, a very exquisite sorting machine. The type of rabble who show up in off-cycle and midterm elections are an oddly consistent bunch.

But the picture shifts when zooming outside of cyclic time. It would be unwise to read midterm victory for the Democratic party as anything substantive. At the federal layer, Democrats are genuinely unpopular. In the last election cycle, pragmatic down-ballot candidates, both progressive or moderate, kept up the yeoman’s work of bailing out the deeply-despised party leadership. This is a recipe for failure and opens the path for more people to just give up and run as independents, Republicans, or leave politics altogether. You can only let down people so many times before they also are forced to give up on you.

Why the pessimism? Because the American centre-left’s dilemma is a well-documented one, replicating across the pond in the United Kingdom. In many ways, the United States is a remarkably stable polity. It has been relatively untouched by war. The death toll of 60,000-odd Americans accumulated from its various forever wars stack up to less than one year of Russian war dead in Ukraine. Without a conventional war, famine, and civil strife, the American economy has mostly grown unchecked. The main exception, financial collapse, has become itself a recurring facet of creative destruction, where bailouts ensure that the full voting citizens of the American enterprise, its asset holders, always notch a new all-time high.

This concentration of wealth has not been a politically neutral development. Like tax-cheats shopping for tax havens, they have dealt transactionally with political parties. They enjoy a cozy relationship with both parties, especially the Democratic one, with the implicit but actionable threat that should the party turn against them, they could easily yank their capital for green pastures. Thus, corporate profits grow as the regulatory attention on banking, anti-trust, and the basics of life wane. Even some capitalists, short-sellers at the margins of Wall Streets, have griped that the game of capital allocation should be a bit more difficult than this.

At this point, it’s not necessarily even that parties are corrupt—although they certainly are—but that parties genuinely believe in being good stewards of the public interest, where the common prosperity that underpins political stability can only be cultivated by pro-business thinking. In Democratic circles, moderating on policy has often meant cycling between vagueness or hyper-focus on policy specifics that no normal human being bothers with, but always in ways that either consciously or consciously defer to the self-important instincts of asset managers and CEOs.

It has been a giant ratchet operating in exponential time, where everyone except the rich have seen their political influence dwindle. Unions are a shadow of what they were. All other blocs, the evangelical bloc, the pro-Israel bloc, have all made their alliances with business interests. The rise of Musk as a co-president is not anomalous. It’s just that Bezos and the others would have preferred to be subtler.

If the Democrats feel outmatched by Republicans in the culture war, the solution is not to search for centrist podcasters to wage a diet version of red-meat rhetoric. It should be to open a new front by engaging in materialist politics. However, that would involve antagonizing entrenched economic interests, a sore point historically. When the liberal hero Gorbachev tried to go against the various state-owned enterprises of his day, the collective farms, the military-industrial complex and the like, the restructuring of the Soviet economy went about as well as you’d expect…

There are scars, decades deep, planted within American society. Both parties have overseen massive economic gains—not inherently a bad thing at all!—that broadly failed to trickle into living standards if not for the enforced benevolence of Chinese factory workers deferring their own happiness to give Americans whatever they wanted. Massive waves of de-regulation and offshoring unambiguously increased GDP while also rewiring the economy so that less of that GDP share went to normal people. There was nothing natural, inevitable, or irreversible about this process. This aligned with other cultural trends since the post-war era. Onwards from the 60s, as the Democrats became more professional, college-educated, and urban, they were more comfortable negotiating with corporate interests they distrusted over the messy, anachronistic politics of populism and local interests.

The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. This is not what the Watergate Babies intended when they dethroned Patman as chairman of the Banking Committee. But it helped lead them down that path. The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump.

Matt Stoller, “How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul,” The Atlantic

Beyond those “Watergate Babies,” American history includes various strands of materialist politics, socialism being a major one. But it is strange to be entertaining the debate about socialism within the United States when the unionization rate of waged employees have consistently stayed just shy of 10%. Thus, much of modern socialist discourse is a negotiation between emphasizing material versus cultural politics rather than a stable fusion of the two.

As a result, the coalition of what we can broadly call “the Left” is hemorrhaging voters without college degrees after going all-in on the hope-and-change slogan of the last charismatic Democratic candidate. The opposite coalition, spreads beyond the so-called white working class to really any demographic except for the en-diploma’ed.

One of my favorite stats on this is something that Nate Cohn put out a couple years ago: Working-class white voters who’ve read a book in the last year are much more Democratic than working-class white voters who haven’t.

Eric Levitz, “This is why Kamala Harris really lost: TikTok is making young voters more Republican?,” Vox.

Unless Democrats confront their history, they will only win in cyclical time. They will be the uncharismatic rebound that voters relapse to when the other side inevitably burns their hand on the stove. And every time the cycle resets, it resets at a level that shifts the electorate rightward, away from a centre-left mired in circular firing squad debates about “messaging.”

Collectively, we need to start thinking about end-times and ask where does the ratchet take us. Because currently, American democracy is a contest between two factions who don’t care about it. If the establishment right is actively dismantling the small-r republican values of the founding, the establishment left is, by refusing to defend those values, corroding the almost 250-year-old enterprise by its passive faithlessness. The question of democracy will no longer be a discussion about institutions but a narrow obsession about the integrity of the ballot-counting process and quibbling about which classes of people can be snatched off the street. Things that American political scientists have traditionally chastised other regimes for.

I don’t think a third party or a strong independent faction necessarily helps things, but we could stand to benefit from third spaces where sane people who believe in basic values of freedom can gather along their own lines, with message discipline naturally looser in positive ways. Gambling that a single political party—one that has repeatedly failed—will spin up a national messaging apparatus that is also broadly popular seems suicidal.

Winning takes work.

So much work that you may even become sick of winning when the time comes.

Further reading on what the privatization/looting of the state (part of the big ratchet) looks like: Trump’s Antisocial State

WITH NOTHING LEFT to fear but fear itself, the essence of contemporary life is to desire nothing but desire itself. How else can one begin to explain away the addictive drudgery of industrial civilization? With the equally powerful instinct to lie flat and bed-rot in rebellion. In Prisoner of the Mountains, a Soviet film adaptation of Tolstoy’s short story, A Prisoner in the Caucasus, a character makes a modest toast.1

“Let's drink to our ambitions being matched by our means!”

A happy dream, no doubt, that sends shudders down the halls of governments and C-suites. Because the greater the drudgery needed to sustain civilization, the grander the narrative must be drafted to justify it. The transmission of culture, in this context, is the inheritance of elite anxieties.

Even those of us who, by reasons of restraint or poverty, do not go out to buy Rolexes and Louis Vuitton’s, are loath to part with the other cultural accoutrements that define our identity. Accessories that demand a heftier price tag, in time and blood, than mere wristwatches and handbags.

We all have them and it is not my place to quibble about the authenticity or rightness of what you or I think we want. I am simply here to note that the question of desire, of ambition, has clear political implications when taken in the aggregate.

Consider the stranglehold exerted by the so-called Eternal City, sacked by the Visigoths almost two millennia ago, over our political imaginations. Ancient Rome was no doubt impressive among its contemporaries. Yet like a dead artist, its value only skyrocketed once others could market pieces of it for their own use, long after their creator had become silenced by time.

“The truth is that Roman history offers very few direct lessons for us, and no simple list of dos and don’ts.”

“But even more importantly, we have inherited from Rome many of the fundamental principles and symbols with which we define and debate politics and political action.”

“Our own world would be immeasurably the poorer, and immeasurably less comprehensible to us, if we did not continue to interact with the Roman past.”

Mary Beard, why ancient Rome matters to the modern world

*As a historian who devoted most of her life studying that town on the Tiber, and an author who profited off the glistening carcass of Rome herself, it is grimly fitting that Mary Beard has made it her mission to chide others for admiring Rome.

Politics only begins to make sense when you realize that it is all invented by people who are obsessed by Rome by creating institutions that pretend to be Roman. Our establishment’s rhetoric about defending the Republic against dictatorship directly casts the clash for modern representative democracy in Latin terms. When we worry about our enervation by the luxuries of digital empire, while barbarians infiltrate through the frontiers with their Xiaohongshu (RedNote) and TikTok, we are channeling an all-too Roman concern. The many parallels, even in the origins of words, res publica and dictator, go on and on.

The architecture of our political order is so thoroughly Romanesque that we can only imagine its demise in equally Roman ways.

Before I go on, let me clarify one thing.

I have so far been using we quite liberally.

Not the royal we, but the Roman we, which in these days refers to the American we of the liberal international rules-based order. It is a pronoun increasingly gauche to use earnestly in polite company.

Because haven’t you heard? We are in decline.

IT IS IN VOGUE again to speak of a broad-based decline in state capacity. The intellectual project of Weberian nation-state, with its legitimate monopoly on violence, is no longer a concept that citizens swear fealty to. Many sources of blame for exist, the Internet being a common one. As the Mandate of Heaven slides from centralization to decentralization, disoriented trans-Atlantic elites are searching for new mixed political metaphors.

I do wonder, what swims in the mind of a declinist?

Are they following the sharp drops in state capacity following coups and insurgencies in the Western Sahel? The civil war in Sudan? Does the effective cartelization of vast swathes of Mexico keep them up at night?

Or is their theory built around the acute ennui of living in a middle-class existence? The frustration of seeing a favored construction project being held up by environmental impact assessments? Of a certain timidity in institutions that belies their country’s substantial economic primacy?

When they speak about global decline, they are more often than not grieving the decline of Pax Americana. Once you understand that, it renders the despairs and hopes of declinism clear in their cultural context.

One current of modern declinism is the prediction that the collapsing American order will usher in a new medieval era. Neomedievalism (a term coined since at least 1977, which should reveal how dated this concern is) is the natural endpoint of an imagination in which it is easier to imagine a new Dark Ages than to contemplate an alternate future without Rome.

A neomedieval era is equipped with its own non-national, transnational, nobility, a role which will be held, in some retellings, by restless software engineers.

Tech culture—for lack of a better word for a set of beliefs and shared touchstones that transcend the professions and locations that spawned it—has a strong sense of shared mission and purpose. It is aspirational, optimistic, pluralistic, and transnational. While the typical western government won't let you open an ice cream stand without a license, tech culture will give you a couple million dollars for a good pitch deck, just in case you can succeed.

alice maz, neomedievalism and transnational nobility

And if we were to take the historical analogy too seriously, we would do well to remember that the Dark Ages were what gave the Latin West, and thus the present day, its character.

But even to take it loosely on its own terms reveals a kind of blindness.

Imagine a gathering of British civil engineers in Liverpool in the late nineteenth century. Having come back from their missions of railroad and wastewater projects across the Empire, they are sipping their tea amid a spirited discussion of Britain’s infrastructure culture.

Infrastructure culture is a most wondrous set of aspirational, international beliefs about the salutary effects of British public works in all corners of the globe. While the typical barbaric French, German, or Belgian colony could never stand up such an ambitious infrastructure program, the British empire will provide for your civilizing mission, backed by the honor and prestige of the Crown.”

I am not questioning about the authenticity of what the adherents of tech culture, or any such subculture want. However, I would ask they be a bit more honest in understanding the underpinnings of what they are really asking for.2 Especially because it can quickly go to a dark place. One does not have to look far for the neo-reactionary instincts. Decades earlier, Curtis Yarvin had wished to remodel the nation-state with the form of governance best suited for his neomonarchist taste, the joint-stock company.

Tech culture, like technocracy, has the allure of a universalizing mission. Yet, the speed with which tech CEOs kissed the ring of Trump, immediately scheduling one-on-ones upon the end of his interregnum and swearing off their DEI programs in fealty, should provide some skeptical. Is it really a coincidence that the co-president of the most powerful nation-state on Earth is the archetypal tech billionaire Elon Musk? So unless the second A in MAGA is somehow silent, this all seems to suggest that tech folk are not rootless cosmopolitans. Tech culture is American culture, softly cloaked extensions of American soft power, just garnished with more San Francisco than New York and DC.

This would be in line with history. When Joseph Conrad, author of the serialized novella Heart of Darkness, and Edmund Dene Morel were viciously criticizing the atrocities of colonialism in the Belgian Congo, they had little to say about British colonialism at large. Not even the white-on-white crimes of British concentration camps interning Afrikaner settlers in the Boer War caught their eye. Then as now, the universal appeal of empire bedazzles and blinds.

I AM INCLINED to agree with the objective assessment that state capacity is on the decline. Although I am skeptical that this trend is as irreversible and terminal as declinists wish to sell. And the objective analysis is saddled with a cultural analysis that is far too pessimistic about incumbent ideologies and too rosy about alternatives.

If you really wanted to predict what abstract concepts will command loyalty in the future, you only need look around you.

What are the ideas that people are fighting and dying for?

What are the beliefs that people are being tortured for?

What are the political projects that their families being killed for?

It is not a contradiction or coincidence that, as much as states are in decline, the main civil wars and insurgencies of today, as they were yesterday, are primarily nationalist struggles being fought to defend or secure a state.

TODAY, Syrians, Ukrainians, and Palestinians all fight for the same thing. Something admittedly quite outré in our supposedly multipolar, globalized-deglobalizing world.

The nation-state we all pretend to hate while relying on its institutions for food, healthcare, education, internet, and power (with legitimate complaints about the decline in quality).

My core belief is that if you want to investigate the emergence of drastically new political possibilities, this geographic triangle is the first place to look.

One can dismiss this analysis as another presentism, that there is nothing linking these causes except as causes célèbres adopted by right-minding humanitarians who will soon move on other things to donate to and call congresspeople about.

I would not be so sure.

They have been the crossroads of many strands of global history, a graveyard and garden for various ideologies. Unsurprisingly, all have harbored everything from leftist to rightist to Islamist movements, some to the present day.

They harbor complicated nationalisms that are able to co-opt transnational trends in solidarity with non-nationalists.

They all appear in Herodotus’ Histories, with Ukraine as Scythia and Palestine as Palaistinê, a district of Syria. In his time, they were part of the fantastical frontier that formed the periphery of the Greek (and Phoenician) maritime world. If I may compare myself with the Father of History, this triangle of nations also inscribes for me a new political frontier. And much like Herodotus, I have heard and written much about these places despite visiting exactly none of them.

Though, eventually, I do plan to go, as they are freed one by one.

Part 2: Ukraine

“Come, and you will see,” wrote the anonymous author of History of the Rus’, one of the founding texts of modern Ukrainian historiography, at the end of his foreword. I cannot conclude mine with a better invitation.”

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

2

I am being a bit harsh on alice maz for effect here. I do enjoy her writing, which is refreshing and thoughtful. A notable example here, which is unsurprisingly on China’s own ages of dynastic decline in the Warring States era.

alice maz

toward a system of neo-xunism

It is my firm belief that we're living through our own Spring and Autumn…

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3 years ago · 37 likes · 1 comment · alice maz

“When I worked at National Review and on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, some of my New York neighbors would give me the Hitler salute when I got on the elevator. It used to make me want to join the John Birch Society just to spite them.”

David Brooks: Can We Please Stop Calling These People Populists?

*I know that this is played for sympathy, but it’s honestly pretty funny.

Questioning the authenticity of populism has rarely yielded any analytical or practical impact. The whole exercise mirrors the intense game of credentialism within elite circles, and accusations of hypocrisy fail to resonate when the accusers seem blissfully oblivious to their own. When liberal institutional parties fail to defend democratic and institutional norms they rely on to govern, they don’t start identifying as illiberal anti-establishment parties.

Populism and institutionalism are better understood as types of appeals, in the same way Aristotle identified logos, pathos, ethos as three strategies for persuasion. It is more powerful when the form matches the content, when populist rhetoric matches populist policies, but they do not have to align. Politics, after all, is rarely consistent because people are not.

This definition is also more useful from a practitioner’s perspective. Populism is a type of energy that can come in flavors of left, right, neither, both. To analyze the level of populism within a political movement or coalition is to comment on the nature of the political fuel that the populist consumes in pursuit of their political objectives, to sustain it and grow it.

What is this appeal then?

In every era and iteration, populism is the negative belief that the people are treated unfairly by a system that is rigged against them and the positive belief that a collective movement can fundamentally restructure that system so the rigging goes away.

It is not only that the system is unresponsive, but that it is functionally incapable of responding.

Different populist movements have different definitions of the people, often by class, race, ethnicity, or nationality.

They also identify different sources of rigging. It can be malicious elites, faceless forces such as free trade and automation, or immigrants. The only commonality is that these are structural factors that will not go away naturally on their own.

Populists are often partisan, but the most interesting examples are skeptical of buying too much into existing political fault lines. Partisans are often locked in gaining more ground within the confines of a game, bending rather than upending the system of rules that enables the game in the first place. The game tends to swallow movements rather than the other way around.

So yes, Trump and Vance are no Gracchi. Nevertheless, to deny them their populist credentials is to out oneself as an elitist. Why should populists care about what non-populists think what populism should be? Why should the people believe that David Brooks knows who the people actually are, and what they actually want?

IF POPULISM as a term is morally neutral, what does a successful principled populist movement look like today? I’d like to start with an emerging voice, Gary Stevenson, known for his YouTube Channel Gary’s Economics, which blends a working-class cachet with fairly conventional elite credentials of an economics degree, which he wields to attack the very economics he was taught, and the wealth of a former Citibank trading career.

His message, delivered in a measured repetition, is quite simple.

1. Living standards are decreasing because…

2. the rise of wealth inequality means the rich can use paper wealth to win the allocation of more real resources…

3. which can only be reversed by taxing the rich heavily…

4. which we will achieve with advocacy in a long generational fight like our post-war forebears were able to fight for themselves.

This core message is amplified by drawing the battle lines of what the two sides are and are not:

1. The normal people Gary stands for are fundamentally separate from the elites that stand to gain from wealth inequality. They are doing better while you are doing worse. They think differently than you, and speak differently than you. They have no qualms about lying, not as a moral issue, because words are entirely instrumental to them, a language game in the purest sense.

2. People stand to gain more when they unite across the political spectrum, in opposition to political, cultural, and media forces that split them apart.

3. The problem is decidedly not immigrants, whom anti-immigrant populists rely on, once in power, to sustain wealth inequality.

It is no surprise that the financial meritocracy (and to a lesser degree, including medium-small enterprise entrepreneurs) is a hotbed for populism. Reading financial history and actually trading assets are deeply corrosive to orthodox economic belief. And in a heavily financialized world, even a basic understanding of investment lends an aura of authority. The poorly-named democratization of finance has greatly expanded attention to the importance of fiscal and monetary policy, without necessarily educating the masses on the basics of its mechanism. The average person has about as hazy an understanding of the workings of quantitative easing as they do of electricity, both extremely vital things plagued by plenty of misconceptions.

Gary has a bit of the vibe of a small-time criminal or stockpicker influencer. After all, his pitch is essentially the same. Follow me for my smarts, and we can get rich together. It is a gamble, but a collective one where we will definitely win if we stay strong together.

Appropriate, when the covid and post-covid world has been a Gilded Age of gambling.

As commentators noted at the time, the bubbles in cannabis and meme stocks were expressions of desperation rather than hope. As one who participated enthusiastically, they were also quite fun. I quipped at a leftist who joined the apes holding , aiming for a target price of $15, that this was another “fight for $15” (for a $15 minimum wage). As they quickly became cargo cults, you could also see the influencers pivot to MAGA-dom. Whether or not they were Trumpers all along, you could see a natural progression. Even before Trump was a coin, Trump was just another gamble to get rich. The ballot was a free lottery ticket to escape.

Cryptocurrencies retain a mystical bipartisan appeal among normal people, despite the many rugpulls.

This is the zeitgeist. We imagine ourselves, not as Steinbeck thought, a temporarily embarrassed millionaire capitalist, but as participants in other people’s games. And as much as we might like to theorize, we first want to win.

WHY INVEST IN POPULISM? Because populism wins. And that is the core of why populism is so attractive to financial professionals. Because it wins, and when it wins, it wins bigly. Fundamentally, in democracies, whether it is two-party first past the post or some mixed-member proportional representation parliamentary system, there comes a time when there are problems. The immediate instinct to blame another party works, but it stops working after a while when parties switch so many times and nothing seems to happen.

The only critiques that remain credible are populist critiques that emerge from outside the system.

Whether one embraces Gary’s project, it’s worth evaluating one of the central foundations of his message.

Living standards are decreasing

This one is obviously true for the UK, but it’s hard for me to say in the US, as Gary broadly claims.

At a very basic-level, it’s tricky to determine whether real wages are rising, or as some prefer calling it, inflation-adjusted wages (since there is nothing particularly real about taking an actually real number, nominal wages, and applying some corrections to it). The consensus, which I am inclined to agree with, is yes.

“Average wage growth since the pandemic has outpaced inflation, though cumulatively real wages are likely a bit below where one would expect in the absence of COVID-19.”

Apricitas Economics

Are Real Wages Rising?

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3 years ago · 77 likes · 12 comments · Joseph Politano

But even if real wages are real, many economic but non-wage economic factors matter. As examples, Joseph Politano, cites decisions by employers to offer health benefits and the expiration of Medicaid benefits for millions of people.

In many ways, the Biden era was a Obama staffer’s reflection on what wrong in the Obama era. One of those reflections was to go big on stimulus in response to economic disasters because of the asymmetric cost/reward. It is hard to argue that dumping a bunch of money into the economy, including creating a lot of government jobs does not matter.

Hence, there is a strong tendency to dismiss any perceived decline in living standards as either hyper localized or a “vibes-cession.” After all, one can point to a chart about how Democrat vs Republican perceptions of the economy immediately switched sides once the election happened.

I don’t know! Are electoral outcomes a better indicator of socioeconomics versus top-line aggregated macro-economic indicators? They both seem pretty awful proxies. When I think about my own subjective economic experience, it does seem pretty positive but also difficult to entangle from a lot of factors like job satisfaction which does not show up in any economic indicator. Youth unemployment in South Korea has not been great and has created a lot of discontent. But I’m not sure if the number of “Hell Joseon” memes would decrease if youth unemployment were any better. There’s something deeply depressing about running a rat race under dreadful working conditions, while being fully aware that the economy is doing exponentially great. No doubt, glitzy reality TV, music videos, and social media both numb and sharpen this wound.

If one looks at the stark gap between the college and non-college educated, a large part of it is probably a compositional effect. Those unable to attain degrees, are unlikely to do so for the same reasons they are poorer. However, as Marx noted, material categories once formed, generate their own consciousness. Being poor and non-college educated in a large pool of non-college educated is one thing. Being painfully aware you are part of dwindling pool of increasingly poor, non-college educated economic category, is wholly another. While the absolute conditions remain the same, compositional effects being an artifact and all that, can’t an argument be that at an individual psychological level, such relative conditions generate a real cocktail of economic anxiety? Perceived class shifts the range of expected outcomes for your children, even if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When we put metrics to things and give them names, we take them seriously. Inflation expectations, business confidence. For the record, inflation expectations might matter, but they seem to have a very bad track record of predicting actual inflation.

When the same concepts appear, but expressed by people rather than by businesses, we call them vibes and are inclined to dismiss them.

The aggregated expectations of capital owners is real. The aggregated expectations of people are debatable. Maybe one or the other is wrong.

If you believe the economy’s objective is to maximize the economy, to take economic inputs to make more economic outputs, I think the economy is indisputably, objectively doing well.

The other side-quests of the economy, to build military goods to secure the state, to deliver common prosperity to provide stability to society and the state, I’m open to the possibility that it could be underperforming there.

Coda

Ultimately, as populist messaging, it’s not quite important whether the crux of the argument is strictly correct. Even if the core claim “living standards are going down” is wrong for developed economies that are not the UK, it is close enough to “expectations for future economic opportunity are going down” to be politically sound without bending the truth so much.

Am I a populist?

I’ve asked myself that a lot. Being a populist means you have a deep respect for the collective power of people, rather than an instinctive fear when large groups of people assemble together. Being a populist means you have a healthy disrespect for the collective stupidity of people and of being variably disappointed and inspired by people. Being populist means being patient with all these problems, without the comfort of prevailing institutions or revolutionary vanguard philosophies to lean back on.

Because you have no choice.

Because all those comforts of elite politics have never been worn comfortably by you.