I liked this essay by Mr. Olsen very much. It also provides an interesting perspective from which to consider the Democratic Party’s course ahead as well.
This piece assumes the "new" right/MAGA cares about actual public policy. They don't. It's a movement built on grievance, anger, and whatever else Don instructs them to care about. Henry may wish the movement's founder "sold" an economic agenda, but that's not what animates him or the tribe. Don talks about what he cares about-hatred of brown people, retribution for his perceived political enemies, and plastering his name on things.
His taco tariffs charade is merely a tool of personal enrichment, similar to his crypto corruption. If he cared, he'd make tariffs permanent via legislation as required by the Constitution, so they couldn't be easily undone. Instead, he uses them to shake down Vietnam for a golf resort. Or to punish Brazil for prosecuting his fellow coup plotter, Mr. Bolsonaro.
I would focus a lot less on the common good, and a lot more on the "commons problems" that disconnecting trade from national defense, mutual defense, and shared values over protecting our environment and our workers have created. Particularly we need a lot more focus on how this has created a poverty trap, not only for America but for our most dependable allies as well.
We can't defend the sea lanes if we don't have a profitable ship building industry that is big enough through building commercial shipping to have the extra compacity to surge production when needed. Add in that those ship builders need to stay innovative rather then becoming fat and lazy by relying on government contracts.
That reverberates through every industry, you can't let other nations use their lack of protections for workers and the environment undercut our manufacturing or we will keep losing one ability after another.
The same goes for making our allies compete against non-allies then expecting them to be able to spend enough money and resources to maintain their militaries. We can't keep demanding that the Canadians compete with Mexico for access to our markets then ignore how Mexico is free riding off America and Canada to protect the global supply chains feeding the Mexican factories.
There is plenty of common good to be had by reconnecting trade to mutual defense and shared values. That might be a way to crack through the hold "globalization" has on the left. On the right, you need to hammer in the truth, which is that free trade is nothing more then welfare for a bunch of corrupt, irresponsible and even adversarial foreigners.
Dan, maybe our tragedy isn't the commons, but having an aging, angry, incoherent imbecile in the Oval Office erratically babbling about MAGA's Middle East war, vaccine denial and threatening our olympians with prosecution over fake allegations that even the corrupt Judge Jeanine admits are fabricated. All while pocketing billions in corrupt crypto loot...just sayin.
I've been following the far left primaries more than on the right. The characters seem more outrageous and therefore entertaining. One thing I did notice is that the extremists who did win, lost the working class and often the black and Hispanic vote. Those voters are trending more Republican, and the Republican party will need to adapt to nail down those voters.
Trump "secured" the borders in the first 15 minutes. Republicans need to pass legislation such that an executive order from a Presidential election loss doesn't lead to another few million workers. Maybe Mitch McConnell has some ideas on who we should deport. An inflection point where the Republican Party comes to accept that the common good includes the livelihoods of their newfound election winning working class constituents.
I've no idea how we will ever handle the debt when over the last week the twitter wars were about whether a $20 dollar burrito is cheaper than cooking. I've lost hope of staid midwestern businessmen insisting on a vast reduction of debt, and it can never come about just by taxing billionaires.
If you step back you'll notice a couple of things. The first is that America regularly flirts with socialism. Most recently it was government run housing projects and the WIC stores. The horrors of the "Projects" along with seeing life in the Soviet Union and Communist China on their television screens meant that most of the Boomers and Gen Xers relearned the lesson that trying to overuse socialism is a bad idea.
Since we've torn down, sold off, put the public housing under private management or forced it to compete against tax credit and section 8 housing vouchers, the Millennials and Zommers have no personal experience with these types of socialism. Making things worse is that we still call China communist even though it's mostly a dictatorial capitalist economy. Then it's easy to blame "American Sanctions" for the failures in Cuba and Venezuela. So the Millennials and Zoomers are falling for the siren song of socialism.
But it doesn't have much room to spread. In large part because unlike the depression era generation that was dealing with the fall out of our failure to regulate capitalism back in those days, the problems today are about how disconnecting trade from mutual defense and shared values, along with mass immigration has created a lot of corruption.
You can't exactly nationalize a factory that has been moved to China. You can't unionize in a labor market saturated with poor and desperate souls that have been effectively segregated because of their immigration status. So Socialism has nothing to offer the younger generations accept higher taxes and shortages in the government grocery stores.
In the meantime, mainstream Democrats, along with the never Trumpers refuse to push back on the wealthy that want to keep the free trade and mass immigration going. This means, for the Democrats in particular, that they have no vision to offer. In the general elections they can run against Trump and those nasty Republicans, but what about the primaries. With no new policy changes to offer, and unable to attack the "socialists" without alienating the fringe voters they need to win the general, they pissing into the wind for the most part.
It will mostly just accelerate the negative feedback loop that was already hollowing out the bluest cities and bluest states.
We will handle the debt with a Liz Truss style bond market failure. The result will be hard but we're not going to become Zimbabwe or Venezuela. A sudden devaluation of 20-30% followed by a loss of our reserve currency status and a generation-long slide in the value of the dollar is most likely.
The British pound has lost 75% of its value since the UK lost its empire and reserve currency status in the 1950's. England is hardly a 3rd world country, but its standard of living has dropped (relative to the US) considerably over that time. Expect similar here.
Our current debt isn't really that catastrophic. Imagine if your family made $100K a year and you had $120K in credit card debt. You could pay that off: lots of Dave Ramsey and beans and rice but it's doable within 4-5 years. That's where we are as a country. However... we're not listening to Dave Ramsey and eating beans and rice; we're still running up the credit card at Benihana's. The longer we do that, the harder the fall will be. When? I have no idea.
Biden secured the borders in 2024…the construction business cycle came to an end which made it easy. Now if Trump can start another construction business cycle and keep the border secure then that is an accomplishment!
Illegals don't just work in construction. In fact, the vast majority don't work in construction.
We've had no recession. There's no major unemployment spike. Yet illegals were so struggling to find work in 2024 that fewer of them wanted to come? And jobs became so scarce (still w/o any spike in unemployment) by Jan 2025 that they stopped coming all together. Give me a break.
Occham's razor, man. Lots of illegals for 3.5 years under Biden. Fewer illegals when he's running for re-election. No illegals after he loses the election. Not hard to figure out what got the border under control.
But sure, I guess it could be your magical construction business cycle.
Biden solved the illegal immigration spike that started in 2019 as Trump failed to secure the border in his first term. You probably voted for Bush who failed to secure the border and then didn’t vote for Obama who did a much better job on the border than Bush and Trump in his first term. So you are just a tribal Republican and pick and choose issues in order to rationalize your voting record.
They didn't support ending slavery back in the day, hence why the Whig party got wiped out and replaced by the Republican party. Same guys weren't up for taking on segregation, so the Republicans, with some of the northern Democrats did the heavy lifting.
If you really want to see the changes, just look at how things have played out in Texas over the last decade or so. We went from Governor Rick Perry bragging about giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrants, to Governor Greg Abbot using the states own money to bus loads of illegals and asylum seekers out of the state. As well as Abbot using the states money to build border security in the form of barbed wire barricades. Then battling the Federal government to stop Biden from removing them.
All this to avoid the fate of Eric Cantor, who lost his primary election to some crank in Virginia. If immigration takes out the second highest ranked House Republican, it can surely take out a wanna-be governor in a state where the majority, including plenty of Hispanics, are sick and tired of excuses.
You're starting to see the same thing on trade. This rich folks are facing some lousy options. If they keep trying to block all attempts to pull back from free trade, they are going to watch all those overseas assets stolen by pirates and terrorists, since we're fed up with spending so much money defending what is nothing but a bunch of foreign supply chains feeding foreign factories. Then there is the growth of socialist ideologies that will strip those same rich guys down to their shorts. Or give in and find ways to innovate so you can make money manufacturing stuff in America. You might have to take a temporary pay cut, but that's better then any of the alternatives if you keep trying to screw over the average American.
I liked this essay by Mr. Olsen very much. It also provides an interesting perspective from which to consider the Democratic Party’s course ahead as well.
This piece assumes the "new" right/MAGA cares about actual public policy. They don't. It's a movement built on grievance, anger, and whatever else Don instructs them to care about. Henry may wish the movement's founder "sold" an economic agenda, but that's not what animates him or the tribe. Don talks about what he cares about-hatred of brown people, retribution for his perceived political enemies, and plastering his name on things.
His taco tariffs charade is merely a tool of personal enrichment, similar to his crypto corruption. If he cared, he'd make tariffs permanent via legislation as required by the Constitution, so they couldn't be easily undone. Instead, he uses them to shake down Vietnam for a golf resort. Or to punish Brazil for prosecuting his fellow coup plotter, Mr. Bolsonaro.
Hang in there Henry, one can always dream...
Senators Dominici and Laxalt kept secret the fact Dominici impregnated Laxalt’s 23 year old daughter….the good ol’ days. 😉
I would focus a lot less on the common good, and a lot more on the "commons problems" that disconnecting trade from national defense, mutual defense, and shared values over protecting our environment and our workers have created. Particularly we need a lot more focus on how this has created a poverty trap, not only for America but for our most dependable allies as well.
We can't defend the sea lanes if we don't have a profitable ship building industry that is big enough through building commercial shipping to have the extra compacity to surge production when needed. Add in that those ship builders need to stay innovative rather then becoming fat and lazy by relying on government contracts.
That reverberates through every industry, you can't let other nations use their lack of protections for workers and the environment undercut our manufacturing or we will keep losing one ability after another.
The same goes for making our allies compete against non-allies then expecting them to be able to spend enough money and resources to maintain their militaries. We can't keep demanding that the Canadians compete with Mexico for access to our markets then ignore how Mexico is free riding off America and Canada to protect the global supply chains feeding the Mexican factories.
There is plenty of common good to be had by reconnecting trade to mutual defense and shared values. That might be a way to crack through the hold "globalization" has on the left. On the right, you need to hammer in the truth, which is that free trade is nothing more then welfare for a bunch of corrupt, irresponsible and even adversarial foreigners.
Dan, maybe our tragedy isn't the commons, but having an aging, angry, incoherent imbecile in the Oval Office erratically babbling about MAGA's Middle East war, vaccine denial and threatening our olympians with prosecution over fake allegations that even the corrupt Judge Jeanine admits are fabricated. All while pocketing billions in corrupt crypto loot...just sayin.
I've been following the far left primaries more than on the right. The characters seem more outrageous and therefore entertaining. One thing I did notice is that the extremists who did win, lost the working class and often the black and Hispanic vote. Those voters are trending more Republican, and the Republican party will need to adapt to nail down those voters.
Trump "secured" the borders in the first 15 minutes. Republicans need to pass legislation such that an executive order from a Presidential election loss doesn't lead to another few million workers. Maybe Mitch McConnell has some ideas on who we should deport. An inflection point where the Republican Party comes to accept that the common good includes the livelihoods of their newfound election winning working class constituents.
I've no idea how we will ever handle the debt when over the last week the twitter wars were about whether a $20 dollar burrito is cheaper than cooking. I've lost hope of staid midwestern businessmen insisting on a vast reduction of debt, and it can never come about just by taxing billionaires.
If you step back you'll notice a couple of things. The first is that America regularly flirts with socialism. Most recently it was government run housing projects and the WIC stores. The horrors of the "Projects" along with seeing life in the Soviet Union and Communist China on their television screens meant that most of the Boomers and Gen Xers relearned the lesson that trying to overuse socialism is a bad idea.
Since we've torn down, sold off, put the public housing under private management or forced it to compete against tax credit and section 8 housing vouchers, the Millennials and Zommers have no personal experience with these types of socialism. Making things worse is that we still call China communist even though it's mostly a dictatorial capitalist economy. Then it's easy to blame "American Sanctions" for the failures in Cuba and Venezuela. So the Millennials and Zoomers are falling for the siren song of socialism.
But it doesn't have much room to spread. In large part because unlike the depression era generation that was dealing with the fall out of our failure to regulate capitalism back in those days, the problems today are about how disconnecting trade from mutual defense and shared values, along with mass immigration has created a lot of corruption.
You can't exactly nationalize a factory that has been moved to China. You can't unionize in a labor market saturated with poor and desperate souls that have been effectively segregated because of their immigration status. So Socialism has nothing to offer the younger generations accept higher taxes and shortages in the government grocery stores.
In the meantime, mainstream Democrats, along with the never Trumpers refuse to push back on the wealthy that want to keep the free trade and mass immigration going. This means, for the Democrats in particular, that they have no vision to offer. In the general elections they can run against Trump and those nasty Republicans, but what about the primaries. With no new policy changes to offer, and unable to attack the "socialists" without alienating the fringe voters they need to win the general, they pissing into the wind for the most part.
It will mostly just accelerate the negative feedback loop that was already hollowing out the bluest cities and bluest states.
We will handle the debt with a Liz Truss style bond market failure. The result will be hard but we're not going to become Zimbabwe or Venezuela. A sudden devaluation of 20-30% followed by a loss of our reserve currency status and a generation-long slide in the value of the dollar is most likely.
The British pound has lost 75% of its value since the UK lost its empire and reserve currency status in the 1950's. England is hardly a 3rd world country, but its standard of living has dropped (relative to the US) considerably over that time. Expect similar here.
Our current debt isn't really that catastrophic. Imagine if your family made $100K a year and you had $120K in credit card debt. You could pay that off: lots of Dave Ramsey and beans and rice but it's doable within 4-5 years. That's where we are as a country. However... we're not listening to Dave Ramsey and eating beans and rice; we're still running up the credit card at Benihana's. The longer we do that, the harder the fall will be. When? I have no idea.
Biden secured the borders in 2024…the construction business cycle came to an end which made it easy. Now if Trump can start another construction business cycle and keep the border secure then that is an accomplishment!
Illegals don't just work in construction. In fact, the vast majority don't work in construction.
We've had no recession. There's no major unemployment spike. Yet illegals were so struggling to find work in 2024 that fewer of them wanted to come? And jobs became so scarce (still w/o any spike in unemployment) by Jan 2025 that they stopped coming all together. Give me a break.
Occham's razor, man. Lots of illegals for 3.5 years under Biden. Fewer illegals when he's running for re-election. No illegals after he loses the election. Not hard to figure out what got the border under control.
But sure, I guess it could be your magical construction business cycle.
Biden solved the illegal immigration spike that started in 2019 as Trump failed to secure the border in his first term. You probably voted for Bush who failed to secure the border and then didn’t vote for Obama who did a much better job on the border than Bush and Trump in his first term. So you are just a tribal Republican and pick and choose issues in order to rationalize your voting record.
Trump is doing good stuff but he is a unicorn. The movement needs to sustain itself after he leaves the stage. JD is the one who can do this
Really Mr. Olsen ? Wall street and the oligarchy will never support anything that helps out working class people .
They didn't support ending slavery back in the day, hence why the Whig party got wiped out and replaced by the Republican party. Same guys weren't up for taking on segregation, so the Republicans, with some of the northern Democrats did the heavy lifting.
If you really want to see the changes, just look at how things have played out in Texas over the last decade or so. We went from Governor Rick Perry bragging about giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrants, to Governor Greg Abbot using the states own money to bus loads of illegals and asylum seekers out of the state. As well as Abbot using the states money to build border security in the form of barbed wire barricades. Then battling the Federal government to stop Biden from removing them.
All this to avoid the fate of Eric Cantor, who lost his primary election to some crank in Virginia. If immigration takes out the second highest ranked House Republican, it can surely take out a wanna-be governor in a state where the majority, including plenty of Hispanics, are sick and tired of excuses.
You're starting to see the same thing on trade. This rich folks are facing some lousy options. If they keep trying to block all attempts to pull back from free trade, they are going to watch all those overseas assets stolen by pirates and terrorists, since we're fed up with spending so much money defending what is nothing but a bunch of foreign supply chains feeding foreign factories. Then there is the growth of socialist ideologies that will strip those same rich guys down to their shorts. Or give in and find ways to innovate so you can make money manufacturing stuff in America. You might have to take a temporary pay cut, but that's better then any of the alternatives if you keep trying to screw over the average American.