Much of the world seems to be made up of systems in which the pieces fit together in complex ways which are usually not well understood. That's how ecosystems work, it's how climate works, and it's how our economy works.
It's possible to reason about small subsets of these systems effectively without understanding the larger dynamic, so long as the system as a whole is stable. Someone might have a great deal of insight into a particular industry, like tech, construction, or finance, and they might have great success. But if the economic environment in which they've been able to achieve that success changes in substantial ways, that might come to an end.
That's fairly abstract, so an example might be helpful. For a long time the US economy has been growing, and the fruits of that growth have been fairly broadly distributed to many (but not all) Americans via the stock market. As a consequence, for decades it's been possible to make good money by buying index funds and holding on to them. You don't have to know about how specific companies actually work, how to read a balance sheet, or any of that sort of thing. And you don't have to worry about whether a major brokerage firm is honest. Since the market has been going up for a long time, you can adopt the simple stratgegy of not selling into a bear market. As long as you can afford to hold your shares of the index fund until things get better, you'll be OK.
But none of that is part of the natural order of things. It's mostly come from systems that were built. In particular, it comes from the America's legal and regulatory systems and from the American led international order we've built since WW2.
By attacking things like the rule of law, fair elections, and especially our alliances and the system of global trade, Trump and his MAGA movement are dismantling the foundations of our success and power in a way that looks systematic from the outside. I am not claiming that it is systematic. I don't know why they're doing it or why so many people support them. I'm just pointing out that if someone wanted to destroy the foundational sources of American power and propserity from the inside, they could hardly do a better job than Trump is doing.
At the same time, almost no one is trying to look at the big picture, at how the pieces fit together, how American prosperity actually works.
I don't know a single person who thinks that the American led international order benefits them. Leftists identify the very real problems with the system and the immense suffering the system causes in some contexts, but they tend to talk as if the benefits of the system accrue to about a dozen billionaires. No one seems to think that the benefits might accrue in their own 401k accounts, that their own wages might be higher thanks to the international system, that the company they work for might have a leg up because of the American led international system.
On the right, people tend to think that so many of the top businesses in the world are American because we're smarter and we work harder, because we're awesome at business in the same way that Michael Jordan and Kobe were awesome at basketball. Oligarchs think they did it all themselves.
There isn't any political constituency for the old order. We all benefit from it, no one understands it or how it works, and everyone's relationship to it is based mainly on grievances. So it's coming down, faster and harder than anyone thought possible.
The damage Trump is doing is largely irreversible. The whole system was big and complicated, built over the past 80 years, with roots that go deeper into America's past. American power was projected largely through economic means, which depended in large part on the good will of our allies, which has been lost and will not be regained.
Published: 2025-04-11
Tagged: blog