The Folly of Despotism

 My post the other day about Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests ended with something of a cliffhanger, so I wanted to swing back around to revisit it now. 

As Hirschman documents extensively in that book, early modern political thinkers were fundamentally concerned with the question of how to curb more effectively the human propensity to violence and despotism—given that mere "moralistic exhortation" had at best proved ineffective (and at worst had itself inflamed the tendency to persecution and war). 

I wrote in the previous post that this same intellectual agenda seems very relevant to us today, since we are on the hunt once again for a "more effective restraint" on the despotism of our rulers. The informal norms and mutually understood "rules of the game" that once governed U.S. politics have dissolved under the pressure of having one perfect narcissist and sociopath get twice elected to the White House. 

Many of the other traditional checks and balances of our constitutional order have also come under enormous strain, even if they have not yet collapsed entirely. 

We too, like the early modern thinkers, have been asking ourselves ever since Trump came to office a second time—exactly what would restrain him from effectively declaring himself dictator and assuming authoritarian powers? 

If the only thing that cabins his actions is not international law, but "my own morality," as he famously put it—heaven help us all! 

"A feeling arose" in the early modern era, as Hirschman puts it "[...] that moralizing philosophy and religious precept could no longer be trusted with restraining the destructive passions of men." And we very much share that feeling today. 

And so, this has set off in our time, as in the early modern period, a hunt for the "more effective restraint." 

Early in Trump's second term, many people said: it's not going to be the Supreme Court. They have always performed their judicial task under the specter of potential non-compliance; and besides, many of them are either ideologically aligned with Trump, or else so committed to an abstract belief in the unitary executive theory that it effectively amounts to the same thing. 

Since the Court's opinion in Slaughter, many of these prophecies have all but been fulfilled. Plainly, the Court will not impose a check on Trump's will to politicize and corrupt independent agencies, for instance. 

Congress, meanwhile, has swiftly been reduced to something of the status of the senate under the Roman emperors. Our legislature is increasingly like the one Percy Bysshe Shelley described: "Time's worst statute, unrepealed."

If these will not check Trump's excesses, then, what can? 

Many observers have long argued that, if all else fails, the financial system can at least be trusted to curb Trump's worst behavior. 

Interestingly, this was also one of the theories the early modern political thinkers entertained. Hirschman quotes the Scottish Enlightenment economist James Steuart, for instance, as arguing that, as capitalism and modern industry develop, they would eventually "come to resemble the delicacy of the watch," and thereby any ruler who wished not to disturb the prosperity of his country would be deterred from laying "any but the gentlest hand" upon it. 

"[A] modern oeconomy, therefore"—according to Steuart, as cited by Hirschman, "is the most effective bridle ever was invented against the folly of despotism..."

So what do we think? Could the "modern economy" itself pose a check on Trump's authoritarian impulses?

In the weeks leading up to his second term, multiple people argued that this is precisely one of the most potent checks on Trump's power we can still count on. A news analysis from December 2024 in the New York Times put the "stock market" at the top of the list of only two external forces that Trump still regarded as imposing some external limit of his power (the other being "TV"). 

Since coming back into power, of course, Trump has sought to subvert the independence of both of these external "guardrails" as well. His FTC—which the Supreme Court has allowed him to politicize in their Slaughter decision—has sent strong signals favoring the consolidation of most major cable and broadcast news outlets into the hands of the Trump-aligned Ellison dynasty, for instance. 

So much for independent TV journalism as a check on Trump's power. 

And Trump has of course sought to limit the extent to which the economy as a whole can function without his say-so. He has repeatedly pressured the Federal Reserve—including with criminal investigations and attempted terminations—to lower interest rates and thereby juice the growth statistics (even in the face of persistently high inflation). 

And he has actively intervened in the economy by buying sovereign stakes in multiple companies, introducing what has been called a new form of "state capitalism" into American life. 

And when Trump cannot control what the economy is actually doing, he can nonetheless put his thumb on the scale when it comes to what the American people ever see or know about that economy's performance. Back in the summer of 2025, after Trump received some employment figures he didn't like from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, he simply fired the messenger who brought him the bad news. 

One is reminded here of Stalin's quite similar approach to the problem of economic truth. "In 1930 the Statistical Bureaux were purged," Arthur Koestler writes, in his account of Stalinist excesses in The Yogi and the Commissar; "it was announced that 'Statistics were a weapon in the fight for Communism.'"

And yet, there is some reason to think the "stock market," and the modern economy as a whole, really has played some role in governing and cabining the worst "follies of despotism" under Trump. A severe reaction on the bond market is credited with forcing Trump to abandon his "liberation day" tariffs in their original form, after all. 

And brief stock market dips have since motivated Trump to abandon or change policies that threatened to derail the positive growth story he wants to tell about his administration—a phenomenon that has become so common it has earned its own nickname: "TACO." 

I have no doubt, for instance, that the reason even more Americans and Iranians have not already died in Trump's pointless, egregiously unnecessary, and unlawful war in the Middle East right now is because he is spooked by the specter of triggering an even more severe supply shock in the oil markets. 

Meanwhile, the one area in which the Supreme Court has shown itself willing to stand up to Trump is that of economic policy—particularly when the Court seems to feel that Trump's impulses might really damage the core functioning of the whole financial system. 

The most conspicuous cases in which the Court ruled against Trump this term (apart from birthright citizenship, in which they merely upheld longstanding constitutional law), were when they struck down some of his foreign tariffs and blocked him from immediately firing Lisa Cook, one of the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. 

These events go some distance to prove that Steuart was basically right: the delicacy of the "modern economy" and its complex web of interrelationships does indeed impose some outer limit to just how much despotic "folly" the system can tolerate. 

Yet, there are obvious limits to how much this check should reassure us. As Hirschman observes, "deterrence may fail and the prince may decide to have his fling or grand coup d'autorité anyway." Certainly, Trump's pattern so far has been that for every five times he "TACOs," that is—chickens out at the last minute—he will sometimes also just go ahead and press the big red button and see what happens. 

He may have dropped his threat to invade Greenland for a while—but then, weeks later, he did go ahead and invade Venezuela, and then Iran. 

And who is really to say Greenland won't be back on the menu in the two and a half years we have with him still in office? Or that we might not imminently be back to full-scale war with Iran, because Trump has gotten bored with the peace talks (indeed, the headlines this morning suggest such a development might be occurring as we speak). 

Hirschman points out that, for Steuart, "the overall complexity and vulnerability of the 'modern oeconomy'" might "make arbitrary decisions and interferences unthinkable—that is, exorbitantly costly and disruptive"—but that doesn't make them impossible. Just because something has become a very, very bad idea, that doesn't mean someone won't try it.

More fundamentally still, there is something profoundly empty and hollow about a constitutional republic that checks its rulers' despotism not when they threaten their subject's life and limb—but only when they threaten their pocketbooks. It is a sad commentary on our times that the Supreme Court will not stop Trump from deporting torture survivors to secret prisons in South Sudan or Eswatini, say, or blocking asylum seekers at the border—but they will stop him from interfering with their own retirement accounts by messing with the Fed. 

Many other observers have noted the bizarre split-screen between Brett Kavanaugh's eloquent pleas for the importance of independence of some agency action in his opinion in the Lisa Cook case—and his willingness to sign onto another opinion on the same day, in Slaughter, that effectively eliminated this same insulation from political interference when it comes to the FTC, FCC, NLRB, etc. (Indeed, the liberals' dissent in Slaughter even quotes some of Kavanaugh's language in the Cook opinion back at him.)

"For-cause" removal restrictions in agencies like the FTC were meant to impose one of those other "guardrails" and "more effective restraints" on the potential "follies of despotism" or "grands coups d'autorité." Without these limits on who Trump can fire at will at these agencies, they will almost certainly be corrupted from their original purpose in order to serve as vehicles to advance the interests of Trump's business allies and punish those who criticize him. 

Indeed, businesses across the country are reportedly already preparing themselves for a new, less certain and stable regulatory environment, where instead of trying to ensure their compliance with federal law, they will have to focus above all on the extent to which they have managed to please and flatter one man who now holds all the keys of power. 

The "modern oeconomy" may indeed remain as delicate and interlocking a mechanism as ever. But I'm not sure—to Hirschman's point—that that fact alone can or will save us from the "follies of despotism."