Trump the Whig

 As Molly Ball was pointing out in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Trump's recent *ahem* "interventionist" approach to the U.S. economy has given rise to some rather bizarre ideological mésalliances. Most recently, Bernie Sanders felt obliged to praise Trump for acquiring a 10% stake in Intel for the U.S. government—an unprecedented arrangement that amounts in effect to partially nationalizing a publicly-traded company. Is the Left now supposed to like this, just because it's vaguely "socialist"?

Trump's tariffs have similarly split the left-wing coalition in the U.S. Organized labor and many pro-labor Democrats have spent the last several decades railing against NAFTA for allegedly displacing American workers. And now here comes a Republican president spouting the magic protectionist formulae—"tariffs," "bring back manufacturing jobs"—and they feel that in the interests of consistency they can't object to his plans (even if their constituents will actually suffer greatly from the tariffs, due to increased consumer prices and the costs of component parts that will actually harm manufacturing).

 I don't think anyone on the Left actually relishes having to agree with Trump on anything. I suspect they are just proceeding by reflex action. Someone says "tariffs," or "nationalizing industry," and they think—well, free market libertarians like Rand Paul are against that, so I must be for it. They have spent so long assuming that the twin poles of American politics are laissez-faire capitalism vs. government interventionism, that if Trump appears to be for the latter, they must now agree with him. 

But surely the American Left would not be so confused on this point if we were more rooted in our own country's political traditions—rather than always looking to European collectivist ideologies for the sources of our liberal or social democratic tendencies. After all—as V.L. Parrington exhaustively chronicles in his Main Currents in American Thought—the left and the right in America have seldom split neatly between a "pro-market" right and a "pro-government" left.

Parrington sees the story of American politics rather as dividing between a Hamiltonian right and a Jeffersonian left. One side—the Hamiltonian right—has indeed always been allied to the forces of capitalism. But this same faction called for robust government intervention to support American industry. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was therefore largely the right that favored protectionism—i.e., tariffs and subsidies—with a handful of exceptions on the left that prove the rule (Horace Greeley and Peter Cooper loom large in Parrington's account). 

Laissez-faire, therefore, was—for most of our country's early history—not a doctrine of the right at all; nor was it the watchword of industrial capitalism. Quite to the contrary, it was mostly the Jeffersonian left who espoused this doctrine as a means to preserve an agrarian economy of small freehold farmers that was slowly being strangled and displaced by an expanding industrialism. Tariffs raised costs of imported equipment and manufactured goods for farmers—while often inviting retaliatory duties against American agricultural exports. They were therefore great for American industrial capitalism—but devastating for the country's small farmers. 

The right-wing Hamiltonians—who later developed into the Federalists, then the Whigs, then the later pro-business version of the Republican Party—often defended the protectionist policy frankly on the grounds that it was good for property interests and for big manufacturers. It is evident they saw no conflict between government intervention and the interests of industrial capitalism. To be sure—as the nineteenth century developed—the American right also began to make increasing use of laissez-faire arguments—but seldom with any consistency; and only when they served the interests of big business. 

(Parrington traces the evolution of this doublethink in the case of Charles A. Dana, e.g.—"a laissez-faire Democrat only when a free field favored business, but when business desired government assistance he made no scruple to turn Whig.")

Thus Parrington writes of the "combination of paternalism and laissez faire that marked the Whiggery of the time" (i.e., the Gilded Age of the 19th century). "It had lost all pretense of fairness in the distribution of governmental favor," he adds, " and withheld or granted aid with the single objective of furthering the interests of powerful groups. It sanctioned the use of the state by business interests for purposes of exploitation, and declined to exercise its power in the interests of the consumer. It granted tariffs and subsidies, yet refused to regulate the monopoly power it had created." 

There was, Parrington notes, a left-wing argument for protection emerging around the same time—from the like of Horace Greeley and Peter Cooper—which saw in tariffs a means to protect American workers from unfair competition. This is the origin of the pro-labor case for protectionism that we still see on the Left today—and which issues in such bizarre spectacles as UAW president Shawn Fain praising Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, even as they are almost certain to eliminate jobs for American auto workers—and even after Fain publicly endorsed Kamala Harris at the last Democratic National Convention. 

But as Parrington notes elsewhere, "there is a fly in the Whiggish honey"—a problem for any "left-wing" scheme of protectionism—namely, that: "In a competitive order, government is forced to make its choices. It cannot serve both Peter and Paul. If it gives with one hand it must take with the other. And so the persuasive ideal of paternalism in the common interest degenerates in practice into legalized favoritism. Government gifts to the largest investments." 

Does that not perfectly describe Trump's version of "protectionism"? Pro-labor socialists like Bernie Sanders may believe that they have to support his policies because they are a form of government interventionism—but they should ask themselves: interventionism to what end? And it seems perfectly clear it is not to the end of serving the public interest—but rather of showing "government favoritism"—picking winners and losers based on Trump's sole litmus test—namely, that of personal ideological fealty to himself as a would-be autocrat. 

All of Trump's interventions in the economy can be explained either as a mechanism for rewarding loyalists or punishing potential dissidents—in short, as a means to acquire personal power and ensure ideological conformity. Indeed—Molly Ball notes—his administration reportedly even maintains a list of publicly-traded companies—in which each corporation is assigned a ranking based on its degree of ideological fealty and alignment with Trump. 

Trump's "protectionist" version of Republicanism is really just old-fashioned Whiggery, then. It is "Big government"—except, government for the rich. It is state intervention—except designed, not to regulate business in the interests of the public, but to entrench the power of the already powerful—Trump himself, above all, and his plutocratic cronies. (Something that Sanders, with his talk of Trump's "oligarchy"—has generally had no trouble perceiving in other circumstances.)

We should therefore not be deceived for an instant into believing that Trump is somehow borrowing from the populist Left. To the contrary, he is being more loyal to the American right-wing tradition than today's "libertarian" conservatives ever were. Trump is simply practicing old-fashioned plutocratic Federalism, Hamiltonianism, and Whiggery. 

And indeed—Trump appears to understand this fact perfectly well. No student of history, he has nonetheless sensed in some inchoate way his kinship with his Whiggish forbears. After all, does he not often cite William McKinley as his favorite president—who, like Trump, managed to combine a love of tariffs with a plutocratic support for big business and an imperialistic desire to steal the territory of our weaker neighbors. 

McKinley's imperialist aggression in Cuba or the Philippines, for instance, appears to have served as a template for Trump's often-stated desire to illegally annex territory from allied nations, such as Canada, Panama, and Denmark. (Just this week, Denmark public protested against reported covert U.S. influence operations in Greenland—apparently designed to stoke discontent in the island and prepare the way for U.S. annexation. Trump is plainly taking a leaf from the old McKinley-era imperialist playbook of filibustering and provocation and pretext-hunting.)

Of course—just because Trump uses government interventionism to pursue his imperialistic and plutocratic ambitions—that doesn't mean that therefore the Left needs to swap positions and conclude that all government interventionism is bad. Parrington himself was well aware that the old Jeffersonian/Physiocratic agrarian doctrine of laissez-faire was an inadequate response to the entrenched interests of big business in his era. 

The American Left held on to those ideals longer than we tend to remember, however. As late as the Populist and William Jennings Bryan era—for instance—the Democratic Left in America was still trying to use Jeffersonian weapons to take on the plutocratic beast. They still believed in a limited role for the state in the economy. As late as 1896, the Left was still the party of "small government" in America. They traced all the distortions and injustices of the capitalist economy of the time to an overly restrictive monetary policy (hence their calls for "free silver"), as well as to a Whiggish interventionist plutocratic state that sought to create special favors for the rich. 

If they could just get rid of all the "special privileges" created by monopolies, patents, tariffs, and subsidies—the Bryan-era Democrats believed—then they could save the relatively egalitarian economy of small farmers that still made up most of the Western frontier. 

By the time Parrington wrote—in the late 1920s—it was clear this answer would no longer suffice. As Herbert Croly had argued about twenty years earlier, the left needed to grow comfortable with the idea of government intervention—because the federal state had become the only force left that was powerful enough to confront the entrenched interests of Big Business. The Left therefore shed its Bryan-era Physiocratic holdovers and shifted toward a belief in government regulation—a turn that gave rise to the Progressive era—and which would eventually issue in the New Deal Democratic coalition as we still know it today. 

I therefore certainly don't think that our answer to Trump today should be a simple retreat to Jeffersonian agrarianism. There is no economy of small yeoman farmers left to save. The few lingering family farms were gobbled up through debt and consolidation in the late twentieth century—just as the homesteads of the nineteenth century had been in the Bryan era. It's too late in the day now to be Physiocrats.

But I am saying we should not be surprised that Trump is using the tools of the state to advance plutocratic interests. Doing so is no novel innovation on his part—it is consistent with the long history of the American right from its Hamiltonian origins to the present. 

I should acknowledge that—in reading Parrington—there are passages that could give a partisan of Trump (a J.D. Vance, perhaps)—grounds for pressing the specious argument—if they were inclined to make it—that Trump is the true inheritor of the Jeffersonian tradition. After all—the Jeffersonians became the Jacksonians—and in the latter's long war with the banks and in their belief in a spoils system of patronage to staff government jobs—they sound rather like MAGA apologists today. 

The Jacksonians' fundamental objection to both the national bank and to an educated, independent civil service chosen by merit—was that these were "undemocratic" institutions—they took financial and administrative powers out of the direct control of the majority and placed them in the hands of unelected bureaucrats.

One hears these same arguments today by people trying to retcon sympathetic explanations for Trump's constant attacks on the independence of the judiciary, the federal bureaucracy, and the Federal Reserve. He is doing so—the MAGA apologists claim—because he is trying to restore "democratic" control to these institutions. He won a national election—they argue—and so he should have every right to set policy, without interference from "unelected" district court judges, central bankers, or civil service bureaucrats.

So far, so Jacksonian: Trump, on this theory, is merely trying to take us back to a nineteenth century Jacksonian tradition: patronage and spoils instead of merit-based hiring for federal civil service jobs; an erosion of the independence of the judiciary rather than living under "government by injunction" (which the Jacksonian and Bryan-era Democrats also denounced, in Parrington's telling), etc. 

What the MAGA apologists rather conveniently ignore is that the American people's democratically-elected officials in Congress set up the Federal Reserve and established for-cause removal restrictions for a number of administrative roles that they wanted to be shielded from political interference. Trump's autocratic disregard of these laws—his refusal to spend money as appropriated and directed by the legislature; his firing of civil servants without cause; his removal of independent heads of administrative bodies; his interference with Federal Reserve independence, etc.—is of course a direct denial of the democratic will of the majority reflected in the Congressional statutes he is defying. 

Moreover, Trump only resists the specter of "rule by judges" when it is convenient for him to do so. When the conservative majority on the Supreme Court helps him to nullify the will of Congress—such as by permitting him to impound appropriated funds or dismiss the heads of administrative bodies without cause—Trump is suddenly an enthusiast for the ideas of judicial supremacy. 

Here, we see that Trump—so soon as it serves his interests to do so—believes fully in the theory of "judicial sovereignty" that Parrington is forever warning against as a threat to the democratic project. (Parrington had in mind, after all, the Supreme Court's ignoble history of striking down popularly-enacted measures such as the income tax and federal civil rights laws in the nineteenth century. I think he would not look kindly on today's Supreme Court permitting Trump to ignore Congress's spending directives.)

What is really behind Trump's attacks on the Federal Reserve, district judges who rule against him, and the civil service is of course not actually some kind of principled theory of majoritarianism—but simply the fact that these institutions are independent centers of power in society that are not subject to his direct personal rule. His policy is frankly autocratic; it is the antithesis of any democracy, therefore—Jacksonian or otherwise. 

Trump's real affinities from our political past are not actually with Bryan-era Populism, Jacksonianism, or Jeffersonianism, then. Rather, he is a product of the tradition that all these movements were fighting against: the stream of statist conservatism that leads in a straight line from Hamilton to the Whigs to the McKinley-era Republicans. 

I submit that the appropriate response to him from the Left—therefore—is not to make tactical alliances with MAGA to support protectionism or government intervention, as Sanders appears to be doing. Trump's goals in interfering in the economy are antithetical to our own. Rather, we should revive some of the Jefferson-era and Bryan-era suspicion of "Big Government"—seeing it as quite as likely to be a tool of Big Business as of the public interest. Big Government wasn't always arrayed on the opposite side of capitalism in our nation's history, after all—more often, it was its handmaiden. 

Of course, I'm not saying we should retreat to laissez faire either. Parrington also charts how—as Big Business consolidated its interests—it increasingly came to adopt the language of limited government as a means to preserve its winnings. Having used the state to climb to power, it then had no problem kicking the ladder of state intervention away, before it could be used by the victims of industrialism—the workers, the farmers, the small business owners—to try to create a more fair economy. 

All I am saying is that—if we held true to our roots as a political coalition in Jefferson and Bryan—we would have no trouble seeing Trump's project for what it is. We wouldn't be so confused as to whether we ought to be applauding his corrupt use of tariffs to create special privileges for his cronies and punish those he sees as disloyal. We would be able to see him as the Tory, Federalist, Whig, McKinleyite he's always been. 

And so our task is the same it has been throughout American history—to resist the Whigs and the Big Business/Big Government statist Republicans. It's the same task Bryan undertook in the Populist era: namely, to "scourge the elephant plutocrats," as Vachel Lindsay once put it—in his great poem reflecting back—from a distance of decades—on the excitement of the 1896 Democratic campaign. 

Of course, Trump has been able to exploit the language of populism. But we must not be deceived. All of his actions are designed to entrench the interest and preserve the winnings of the already-rich: like him and his friends. All of his attacks on "unelected" branches of government cease as soon as these branches can be bought off or intimidated into serving his interests—and he rejects the results of majority elections whenever they impose limits on his power (such as his rejection of the 2020 election and his refusal to follow the laws of the people's elected representatives in Congress). 

And so, let us not be fooled by the Jacksonian pleading by the MAGA apologists. In calling Trump a democrat they are calling white red and red white. In short, it's a ruse. We should not be so easily conned. Just because Trump speaks the language of Populism doesn't mean he himself forgets for an instant which side his bread is actually buttered on. And we shouldn't forget either. 

As Carl Sandburg wrote: 

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.