Unfortunately For Us All, A Lot Of Trump Voters Do Actually Want This.
Trump and Musk are specifically pandering to the very online anarcho-capitalist Right, and it's probably not going to end well!
Right now, it’s easy to focus on the Trump voters who “didn’t know what they were voting for.” There are a decent number of them, here and there — and, after all, the schadenfreude feels pretty good sometimes. There are those who didn’t pay a lot of attention and heard that he was going to lower the price of eggs and deport undocumented immigrants with criminal records. There are those who maybe just heard him talk about how much he loves working class America, who saw Teamsters President Sean O’Brien speaking at the RNC and assumed he was going to do things to benefit them economically. Those who thought only minorities and Democrats would be fired from their federal jobs.
But where we also need to direct our attention is to the people who absolutely did vote for everything he is doing right now, because they are the ones both Trump and Musk have been pandering to — and who you’d think comprise the majority of the Right if you spent all of your time on social media.
There is a reason why Trump put it out there that he wants to bring things back to the way they were during the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age isn’t an era people tend to look back upon wistfully — given its hallmarks of extreme wealth inequality, child labor, robber barons, monopolies, and corruption. Even the term itself is a criticism, deriving from a satirical novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner about greed and political corruption in the post-Civil War era.
However, it’s also something of a dog-whistle to a large, vocal and very online portion of the political right. The Gilded Age — being, along with Pinochet-era Chile, one of the few examples of near-total laissez-faire capitalism — is their ideal, at least from a moral and ethical standpoint. There were no federal taxes, the currency was tied to gold, there was no social safety net, and no safety regulations. Paradise! (If you’re a little bit of a sociopath.)
So What Is It That They Believe?
Their views are informed by a hodge-podge of right-libertarian economic ideas — the Austrian School of Economics, the Chicago School of Economics, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, anarcho-capitalism, and the work of Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Thomas Sowell — all of which hold, as a central truth, the idea that “taxation is theft.”
Taxes, they believe, are pretty much the greatest moral wrong in the universe, especially when they go to things other than defense, the police (though many also vehemently believe in privatizing the police as well), and paying off the national debt.
They cheer when Elon Musk and DOGE tear through federal agencies, firing people at random, because what they want is to abolish all federal agencies and the entire social safety net, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They want to end all regulations so that businesses and corporations can pretty much do whatever they want. They want to end the concept of positive rights (that people deserve food, shelter, medical care, education, etc.) altogether. They want to abolish the minimum wage, unions and other labor reforms, and perhaps most of all, they want the chance to prove themselves in an environment of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism.
For the most part, when we discuss economics, we talk about outcomes. But because this is also part of their moral philosophy, outcomes mostly do not matter. Sure, they’ll make some claims that we’ll all be more prosperous without the burden of taxes, that companies will be able to pay more employees more money, but even they know that’s mostly bullshit. Ultimately, they believe that those who flourish in such an environment will deserve it, and those who suffer will deserve that, too.
But here’s the thing!
For all the screaming the Right does about Marxism, you’d think they’d be at least a little familiar with the concept of historical materialism. Not so much! This is why it does not occur to them that their dream of complete laissez-faire capitalism will ultimately result in the mode of production they fear most — socialism.
Human beings do not have an infinite capacity for misery, and as both the Gilded Age and Pinochet’s Chile demonstrated, while laissez-faire capitalism produces an incredible amount of wealth for some people, it also results in a lot of misery for everyone else. Without a social safety net, without regulations, without funding for schools, without everything else that taxes provide, there will be extreme income inequality and extreme poverty, and people will only tolerate that for so long until revolution starts to look really good. This is exactly why socialism, communism, anarchism and other radical left-wing philosophies became so popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s (nota bene: Trump’s favorite president, William McKinley, was assassinated by an anarchist); it’s why those philosophies became popular in Europe after the first World War and so popular in the United States after the Great Depression and leading up to the implementation of the New Deal.
Similarly, there is less demand for a full-on economic revolution when people are basically comfortable and have most of their needs met. This is why modern economies are neither fully capitalist nor fully socialist, but are instead mixed economies that take elements of both.
By pandering to this crowd, both Trump and Musk are getting the online accolades they crave, but they are also on the verge of creating a precarious and miserable situation for pretty much everyone else.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Robyn breaks this shit down so clearly.
OT nice times: Ciaobella Jr was just awarded a Woodrow Wilson fellowship at Johns Hopkins! Probably their most prestigious undergraduate research fellowship, with only a handful granted each year. He's studying small-cell lung cancer at Johns Hopkins Medicine (in an NIH-funded lab, BTW).